How transient is Curll’s work? He has preserved a measure of fame in book history: but some of that is due to extracurricular activities, such as his battles in the courts and the House of Lords. Many of his productions were confessedly ephemera, and he cannot have imagined that titles like The Bath Toasts for the Year 1715 would ensure his immortality. He did think about his reputation, as when he wrote in the preface to The Case of Seduction (1726) that his friends were worried ‘lest this Factum for the Abbée [sic)] des Rues, and the Revival of Marvell’s Works, should heap more Coals of Fire upon my Head, if so, some future Fox must enrol me in the List of those Martyrs, whom Quevedo has doomed to suffer for the Sins of other Men’.1 The references are to John Foxe’s celebrated Book of Martyrs (1563) and the works of Francisco de Quevedo, most obviously Sueños (1627). He manages to advertise his own recent edition of Marvell, one of a number of halfway decent revivals of earlier English writers such as the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Browne. As noted at the start of this book, his antiquarian list varies in quality, but it does contain significant contributions by Richard Rawlinson, John Aubrey, Elias Ashmole, and others, while his volumes on devotional topics included some by highly esteemed authors such as John Tillotson, Robert South, and Thomas Burnet.