Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/60

42 endeavoured to play a shrewd trick upon one of them; he sent a copy of Lord Rochester's Poems (certainly not the most innocent book he published) to Dr. Robinson, Bishop of London, with a tender of his duty, and a request that his lordship would please to revise the interleaved volume as he thought fit; but the bishop, not to be caught, "smiled" and said, "I am told that Mr. Curll is a shrewd man, and should I revise the book you have brought me, he would publish it as approved by me."

Public dissatisfaction seems to have been expressed more forcibly against Curll than heretofore, and to have taken the form of a remonstrance to government, for he published The Humble Representation of Edmund Curll, Bookseller and Citizen of London, containing Five Books complained of to the Secretary. As the books were eminently of a nature requiring an apology, we cannot do more than give their titles: I. The Translation of Meibomius and Tractatus de Hermaphroditis; 2. Venus in the Cloister; 3. Ebrietatis Encomium; 4. ''Three New Poems, viz. Family Duty, The Curious Wife, and Buckingham House;'' and 5. De Secretis Mulierum. At last the government did interfere, as we learn from a notice in Boyer's Political State, Nov. 1725:—

"On Nov. 30, 1725, Curll, a bookseller in the Strand, was tried at the King's Bench Bar, Westminster, and convicted of printing and publishing several obscene and immodest books, greatly tending to the corruption and depravation of manners, particularly one translated from a Latin treatise entitled De Usu Flagrorum in Re Venereâ; and another from a French