Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/58

40 same quantity of an emetic powder; but no threatenings past. Mr. Pope, indeed, said that no satire should be printed (tho' he has now changed his mind). I answered that they should not be wrote, for if they were they would be printed." Curll, on entering the tavern, declared he had been poisoned, and for months the town was amused with broadsides and pamphlets relative to the affair. Pope afterwards published his version of the story in his Miscellanies; the "Full and True Account" is, however, as gross and unquotable as Curll's own worst publication.

Later on in the same year the bookseller fell into a fresh scrape. A Latin discourse had been pronounced at the funeral of Robert South by the captain of Westminster School, and Curll, thinking it would be readily purchased by the public, "did th' oration print, Imperfect, with false Latin in't,"

and thereby aroused the anger of the Westminster scholars, who enticed him into Dean's Yard on the pretence of giving him a more perfect copy; there, he met with a college salutation, for he was first presented with the ceremony of the blanket, in which, "when the skeleton had been well shook, he was carried in triumph to the school, and, after receiving a mathematical construction for his false concords, he was re-conducted to Dean's Yard, and on his knees asking pardon of the aforesaid Mr. Barber (the captain whose Latin he had murdered) for his offence, he was kicked out of the yard, and left to the huzzas of the rabble."

No sooner was Curll out of one scrape than he fell into another; for, still in this same year, he was