P. T. and Smythe put forth a counter-advertisement on the 23rd of May, in which they declared that they would retaliate by committing to the press the letters of Curll.[75] The ostensible motive of the mock clergyman and his employer was to cover the bookseller with infamy. The effect, they said, will be, "to open a scene of baseness and foul-dealing that will sufficiently show to mankind his character and conduct." The correspondence does not bear out this description. The documents show that the lying and trickery rested with P. T., while the bookseller was veracious in his assertions and straight-forward in his proceedings. "That Curll," says Johnson, "gave a true account of the transaction it is reasonable to believe, because no falsehood was ever detected."[76] It was his boast that falsehood had been his abhorrence throughout the discussion, and he drew vaunting comparisons between Pope's addiction to the vice, and his own detestation of it.[77] His very failings in one direction had helped to sustain his virtue in another. He had too much effrontery to care to descend to duplicity, and it is impossible to read his many controversial manifestoes without perceiving that he was in general as truthful as he was impudent. In the instance of Pope's letters, there is the original blot, that he saw no discredit in publishing papers which he supposed to be purloined; but he had already avowed the fact before the House of Lords, and the crime was more than shared by P. T. In everything else the acts and language of the bookseller contrast favourably with the meanness and falsehoods of his correspondent, who would not have assisted to disseminate the record of his own misdeeds. But it was different with the poet. He must have seen that the inevitable tendency of the "Initial Correspondence" would be to convict him of the offences he had tried to fasten upon Curll. His single chance of diminishing its disastrous effect was to promulgate it as evidence upon his own side, and not to allow it to come forth solely as the hostile statement of an opponent. The proceeding in P. T. would have been to aid in propagating the proofs of P. T.'s "baseness and foul-dealing." In Pope it was an effort to throw upon the initials the stigma which would otherwise have fallen upon Pope himself.