The resolution of P. T. to proclaim his own disgrace was less extraordinary than his manner of doing it. It was announced on the 24th of May, that "the clergyman concerned with P. T. and Edmund Curll to publish Mr. Pope's letters hath discovered the whole transaction, and a narrative of the same will be speedily printed."[78] Hence it appears that Smythe had made a full confession to the author of the "Narrative," and P. T. must be presumed to have been a party to it, since he transmitted the originals of the communications he had addressed to Curll, together with Curll's replies. This "Narrative" was the work of Pope. He alone could have furnished several of the particulars, together with the letter which Curll wrote to him in March, 1735; and the statements, the misrepresentations,[79] the reflections, and sometimes the words, are the same which he employed in the preface to the quarto of 1737. Hitherto, P. T. had been so fearful of detection by the poet, that in the language of Smythe, he suspected his own shadow. He now unmasked himself without a motive, and without reserve, to the man he had injured. He had nothing to tell of Curll but what Curll had insisted upon relating before the House of Lords, and the only novel information he could give was the details of his own thefts and frauds. This, indeed, was what Pope would chiefly have cared to learn. He would have been eager to ascertain who the person could be that had got access to his letters, and the means by which they were copied and printed; and he certainly would not have called anything "a discovery of the _whole_ transaction," which contained no revelation upon the only points of the least importance. But it is extremely improbable that the wary P. T. should have wantonly turned self-accuser. To the last this fabulous personage continued to act in the manner which was most convenient to Pope, and the true explanation of the pretended confession is, that it was a fiction of the poet to account for his possession of the correspondence with Curll.
More inexplicable than all was the forbearance of Pope to produce the facts in his "Narrative." He might feel bound to suppress the names of culprits who had volunteered a confession of their crime; but he might have told the manner of the theft, and specified the printer employed by P. T. He refrained, on the contrary, from revealing the particulars which would have absolved him from an odious imputation. He kept back every tittle of evidence which would have acquitted him if he was innocent, and have implicated him if he was guilty. His story has none of the circumstantiality of an actual occurrence; his statements are as indefinite as the agents were shadowy. He disclosed the dealings of P. T. with Curll, which Curll had noised abroad, and was about to publish, but he does not bestow a thought upon the far more essential question of the mode in which the correspondence was purloined, and seems to be satisfied himself, and wishes that the world should be satisfied likewise, with learning that a person, whose only designation was a couple of initials, sent the letters ready printed to the bookseller. Obliged to abandon his original story of the means by which they found their way to the press, Pope had now some powerful reason for diverting attention from the subject, and leaving the mystery unexplained.