Every incident which arose in the progress of the controversy strengthened the case against Pope. At the same time that Smythe, on the behalf of P. T., exhorted Curll to give false evidence before the House of Lords, he informed the bookseller of the method by which a portion of the correspondence had been acquired. P. T. had been engaged with a noble friend of Mr. Pope in preparing for the press the letters of Wycherley, and had caused some extra copies to be struck off. These, he said, "put into his head the thought of collecting more," and when he printed the materials he had since accumulated he imitated as closely as possible the type and paper of the stored up sheets.[60] P. T. made a merit of the revelation, and wished that Curll should see in it a proof of the openness and confidence with which he was treated. In reality it was an endeavour to explain the awkward circumstance that the prose part of Pope's Wycherley had been done up with the letters of 1735. The publication of 1729 was entitled the second volume of Wycherley's "Posthumous Works," and contained a couple of notes referring to poems which were inserted or omitted in what was called "the present edition." But as Pope's letters were not an edition of Wycherley's Works, the absurdity of the reference might have led at any moment to the exposure of the fact that the sheets of the old book had been transferred to the new, and it was better at once, by an air of candid confession, to account for the importation than to run the risk of discovery. Curll had soon a rival version to give of the manner in which these sheets were procured. He announced that Gilliver, who published the Wycherley volume of 1729, had declared that Pope bought of him the remainder of the impression, consisting of six hundred copies, and directed the other letters comprised in the volume of 1735 to be printed to match them.[61] There can be no difficulty in deciding between these opposite statements. The assertion of P. T. we know to be a falsehood, for Pope himself, and not the noble friend, prepared the letters of Wycherley for the press. None of the inferior agents could have carried off any large number of books, without detection, nor could have stowed them away from 1729 to 1735. The motive to thieve what was already published could only have been lucre, and yet thirty pounds were taken for three hundred octavos of 470[62] pages each, when but 50 of these pages were derived from the sheets that cost nothing. If, too, there was any truth in P. T.'s story, he was encumbered with the pile of stolen goods when he opened the correspondence with Curll in 1733, whereas it is clear from his communications at that time that the idea of supplying printed books had not then occurred to him. The trick which had been practised was known to Pope when he put forth his "Narrative," and he might have obtained a clue to the culprit by an investigation at the printing-office. He nevertheless made no comments on the subject, nor, loudly as he exclaimed against the abstraction of his letters, did he breathe a whisper against the abstraction of the sheets of the Wycherley. Not a single specimen, again, of the work of 1729 is now known to exist, which is in some degree explained by its absorption into the volume of 1735; but, on the supposition that the sheets transferred to that volume were merely extra copies, struck off secretly for P. T., there is no reason why the Wycherley of 1729 should have disappeared. The conflicting statement of Curll is not embarrassed by any of these difficulties, and was never denied by either Gilliver or Pope, which is of itself sufficient to establish its truth, when we bear in mind that, instead of confronting calumny with silence, the poet denounced every charge he could repel.