Chapter III

_The Blatant Beast_ appeared in December 1742, according to _The London Magazine_; its authorship remains unknown. Pope had published _The New Dunciad_ in March 1742, and Cibber had published his famous _A Letter From Mr. Cibber, To Mr. Pope_ in July. Five other pamphlets attacking Pope appeared in August, obviously capitalizing on the Cibber attack.

_The Blatant Beast_ is pro-Cibber, of course, but it criticizes specifically only a few lines from _The New Dunciad_. The writer's chief interest is in a general attack. The criticisms of the Shakespeare, of _Three Hours_ and the _Epistle to Burlington_, and of Pope's plagiarism are perfectly conventional. More interesting is the accusation (p. 6) that Pope wrote (as, of course, he did) his Homer on the backs of personal letters. Also interesting is the reference to Pope's inscription on the Shakespeare monument in Westminster Abbey (p. 5). Pope was, with several others, responsible for the Latin inscription; it does not seem that he had anything to do with the lines from _The Tempest_ IV. i. 152-156, which were added several months later. These lines are given in the first note to _The Dunciad B_ I. and, in slightly different form, in _The Gentleman's Magazine_, XI, 276. The last line reads, "Leave not a wreck behind." Pope's version of the lines in both his 1725 and 1728 editions of Shakespeare (Griffith 149 and 210) does not commit the errors of the inscription and prints, "Leave not a rack behind!"[23] The bantering note about the monument which begins _The Dunciad B_ may have been prompted by this passage in _The Blatant Beast_ as well as by the comment of Theobald which Sutherland refers to.

But it is the shrill personal abuse of Pope's deformity and moral obliquity,

The Morals blacken'd when the Writings scape;
The libel'd Person, and the pictur'd Shape

(_Epistle to Arbuthnot_, ll. 353-353)

which is most impressive. The writer shows a talent for invective, but there is a good deal of evidence that he was well-read in other Pope attacks. The phrase, Pope's "Mountain Shoulders," (p. 5) recalls Pope's "Mountain Back" in _The Difference Between Verbal and Practical Virtue_, p. 5, published in August 1742. The image of the wasp (pp. 6, 10) had appeared in Hervey's and Lady Mary's _Verses Address'd to the Imitator Of ... Horace_ (1733), p. 7,[24] as had the metaphor of Pope as Satan (pp. 5-6) with which _The Blatant Beast_ opens.[25]

Pope had already been pictured as a mad dog (p. 7) in _The Metamorphosis_ (1728), attributed by Pope to Smedley and one of the least pleasant of the pamphlets. Pope as Aesop's toad bursting with spleen (p. 12) had been used in _Codrus_ (1728), p. 12, attributed by Pope to Curll and Mrs. Thomas. Cibber's prevention of Pope from peopling the isle with Calibans (p. 9) is a reference, of course, to Cibber's famous anecdote about rescuing Pope in the bawdy-house; but in _Mr. Taste, The Poetical Fop_ (1732) where Pope figures as the monkey-like poetaster Taste, the servant-maid who was to have married him is delighted the marriage is broken off, "for fear our children should have resembled Baboons, Ha, ha, ha!" (p. 73). Stern anti-sentimentalists sometimes point out that we react too squeamishly to the abuse of Pope's deformity. I doubt it myself. The eighteenth century was probably a coarser and more outspoken age than ours, but scurrilous attacks on the physical appearance of distinguished poets do not otherwise seem to have been a prominent feature of the Augustan literary scene.

It is hoped that both these pamphlets will prove useful to those who have little first-hand knowledge of what his enemies said of Pope and will help to warn the novice of the fatal ease with which we can read "with but a Lust to mis-apply,/ Make Satire a Lampoon, and Fiction, Lye" (_Epistle to Arbuthnot_, ll. 301-302).

_One Epistle_ was reprinted by John Nichols in his edition of _The Works in Verse and Prose of Leonard Welsted_ (London, 1787). Nichols normalizes the text, spells out several names in full, and adds several unimportant notes. It is here reproduced from the copy in the Sterling Library, Yale University. _The Blatant Beast_ has never been reprinted and is reproduced from the copy in the Huntington Library.

_Hunter College_

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. Pope to Bethel, 9 June 1730, _The Correspondence of Alexander Pope_, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), III, 114.

2. Robert W. Rogers, _The Major Satires of Alexander Pope_ (Urbana, 1955), p. 139. The two epistles of the title are Edward Young's _Two Epistles To Mr. Pope_ which had appeared in January 1730 and which praised Pope warmly. See _One Epistle_, p. 22.

3. _The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope_, General Editor, John Butt, 6 vols. (London, 1939-1961), W, 211-212. Citations from Pope's poetry in my text are from this edition.

4. Savage in _An Author To Be Lett_ (1729), which appeared nine days after _The Dunciad A_, says, "I have extracted curious Hints to assist _Welsted_ in his new Satire against _Pope_, which was once (he told me) to have been christen'd _Labeo_. 'Tis yet an Embrio, and there are divers Opinions about the Birth of it" (pp. 5-6). He seems clearly to have been Pope's informant about the unpublished _Labeo_. See Richard Savage, _An Author To be Lett_, ed. James Sutherland, The Augustan Reprint Society, Number 84 (Los Angeles, 1960), p. ii. For Labeo see Persious 1. 4.

5. Daniel Fineman, _Leonard Welsted, Gentleman Poet of the Augustan Age_ (Philadelphia, 1950), p. 190.

6. _Correspondence_, III, 59-60 and n.

7. _Ibid._, III, 106, 114. Dr. Arbuthnot, for the abuse he received in the poem, is reported to have flogged Moore Smythe (_ibid._, III, 106, n. 2, and 114, n. 1)

8. For a convenient summary of these references from 14 May to 23 July 1730 see James T. Hillhouse, _The Grub-Street Journal_ (Durham, N.C., 1928), pp. 58-63. On 14 May 1730 it printed a letter supposedly by Moore Smythe in which he says of himself and his collaborators in _One Epistle_, "we ... call our selves _Gentlemen_ which sure no body will deny, because one of is the Son of an _Alehouse-keeper_ Thoms Cooke?, one the Son of a _Foot-man_, and one the Son of a ____."

9. Fineman, p. 192.

10. Hillhouse, p. 64, n. 19.

11. David Mallet, _Of Verbal Criticism_ (1733), p. 14. He added the note: "See a Poem published some time ago under that title, said to be the production of several ingenious and prolific heads; One contributing a simile, Another a character, and a certain Gentleman four shrewd lines wholly made up of Asterisks."

12. See also Pope's quotation from the "Dissertation" in _The Dunciad A_, p. 26.

13. For the Duke's protestation against Welsted's attack see George Sherburn, "'Timon's Villa' and Cannons," _The Huntington Library Bulletin_, VIII (1935), 140.

14. See, for example, Giles Jacob's _The Mirrour_ (1733), p. 6, although oddly enough Jacob (like Welsted) had begun the quarrel with his _The Rape of the Smock_ (1717).

15. _Twickenham_, V. xvi. For _The Progress of Dulness_ (pp. vi-vii) see _ibid._ xvii., n. 2; xxi-xxii.

16. See the full discussion in George Sherburn, _The Early Career of Alexander Pope_ (Oxford, 1934), pp. 105-106.

17. See _Twickenham_, II. 90, n. 1.

18. See, _inter alia_, _A Letter from Sir J____ B____ to Mr. P_____ (1716), p. 1; _The Female Dunciad_ (1728), p. 4; and the careful discussion in Norman Ault, _New Light on Pope_ (London, 1949), pp. 156-162.

19. See _Cythereia_ (1723), pp. 92-93; _Characters of The Times_ (1728), p. 29.

20. See Eliza Haywood, _Memoirs Of The Court of Lilliput_ (1727), p. 17; _A Collection Of Several Curious Pieces_ (1728), pp. 4, 6; James Ralph, _Sawney_ (1728), pp. 5-8.

21. See _Twickenham_, V. 440-441.

22. See Daniel A. Fineman, "The Case of the Lady 'Killed' by Alexander Pope," _MLO_, XII (1951), 137-149. Sutherland in his continuation of Pope's note confuses the two charges.

23. For the debate over the Latin inscription see _Twickenham_, VI. 395-396, and _The Gentleman's Magazine_, XI, 105.

24. See Pope's note to l. 319 of the _Epistle to Arbuthnot_.

25. Dennis, as far back as 1716, in _A True Character of Mr. Pope_, pp. 10-11, had used the metaphor. So had _An Epistle To the Egregious Mr. Pope_ (1734), pp. 15-16.

* * * * *
* * * *

[Transcriber's Note:

The consecutive title pages are as in the original, as are the lines of closely spaced asterisks in the poem.

Format of notes reproduces the original as closely as possible. Long notes, marked with lower-case letters (a-l), were collected at the end of the text. Footnotes are here shown between stanzas. The original markers have been replaced with bracketed numerals.]

ONE

E P I S T L E

TO

Mr. _A. P O P E_,

Occasion'd By

Two Lately Publish'd.

[To be Continued.]

ONE

E P I S T L E

TO

Mr. _A. P O P E_,

Occasion'd By

Two Epistles Lately Published.

_Spiteful he is not, tho' he writ a Satire,
For still there goes some Thinking to Ill-Nature._
DRYDEN.

_L O N D O N_:

Printed for J. ROBERTS, in _Warwick-Lane_.

[Price One Shilling.]

[Decoration]

THE