A coincidence remains which more than all the rest proclaims Pope to be the author of the address "to the reader." Nothing would have served better his purpose in the prosecution than to prevail upon Curll to confess that the letters were of his own procuring and printing. Upon the seizure of the books Smythe wrote to him in the name of P. T., promising that he should have the work upon easier terms, and holding out the prospect of a second and more important volume of correspondence if he would keep secret the whole transaction, would assert that he had the letters from different hands, and avow that he had printed them, as he did Cromwell's before.[56] The preface, which had never been seen by Curll, and which was appended, as if in anticipation of the event, to all the copies carried off to the House of Lords, contained the same tale he was instructed to tell. "The collection," it said, "hath been owing to several cabinets, some drawn from thence by accidents, and others, even of those to ladies, voluntarily given. It is to one of that sex we are beholden for the whole correspondence with H. C[romwell] Esq., which letters being lent her by that gentleman she took the liberty to print." On the 12th of May, the day the work was published, Pope gave a similar account to Caryll of the mode by which the contents were procured. "What," he said, "makes me sick of writing is the shameless industry of such fellows as Curll, and the idle ostentation, or weak partiality of many of my correspondents, who have shown about my letters (which I never writ but in haste, and generally against the grain, in mere civility; for almost all letters are impertinent further than _Si vales, bene est; ego valeo_) to such a degree that a volume of two hundred or more are printed by that rascal. But he could never have injured me this way, had not my friends furnished him with the occasion, by keeping such wretched papers as they ought to have burned." The whole of this passage is an egregious specimen of misrepresentation and hypocrisy. A glance at the work must have revealed to Pope that the new letters it contained were those which had been returned to him,--the letters to Gay, Digby, Blount, and Caryll; that it comprised letters _to_ as well as _from_ him,[57]--letters of which he was the sole depositary; that the text was not taken from the originals, but from the copy he had amended and re-cast; and that it was, therefore, impossible that his acquaintances should have furnished materials which could only have been derived from one source,--the bound book in the Oxford library. His pretence that his letters were hasty and insignificant expressions of civility, when he had spared no pains in collecting and editing them; his affected indignation at his friends "for keeping such wretched papers as they ought to have burned," when he himself had preserved them in duplicate, and designed them for publication; his transparent fiction that almost the entire circle of his correspondents,--Addison, Steele, Congreve, Gay, Walsh, Trumbull, Craggs, Digby, Blount, and others,--had been guilty of "idle ostentation or weak partiality," in showing these "wretched papers" to somebody who transcribed them for the press,--are all so many additional arguments to show the conscious guilt of Pope, and the gross and clumsy inventions by which he endeavoured to divert suspicion. The fable he concocted is, in its essential circumstance, identical with the fabulous story of P. T. While P. T. on his part is telling a falsehood to the public in the preface, and begging the bookseller to tell it in the House of Lords, Pope on his own behalf is telling the same falsehood in private to Caryll. This concurrence of misrepresentation between the letter of the poet, and P. T.'s address "to the reader" and instructions to Curll, could not have proceeded from independent and hostile persons.