Chapter 1

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The Augustan Reprint Society

TWO POEMS AGAINST POPE:

_ONE EPISTLE_ _TO MR. A. POPE_

Leonard Welsted (1730)

_THE BLATANT BEAST_

Anonymous (1740)

_INTRODUCTION_ by JOSEPH V. GUERINOT

[Decoration]

Publication Number 114 William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California, Los Angeles 1965

GENERAL EDITORS

Earl R. Miner, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Maximillian E. Novak, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Lawrence Clark Powell, _Wm. Andrews Clark Memorial Library_

ADVISORY EDITORS

Richard C. Boys, _University of Michigan_ John Butt, _University of Edinburgh_ James L. Clifford, _Columbia University_ Ralph Cohen, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Vinton A. Dearing, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Arthur Friedman, _University of Chicago_ Louis A. Landa, _Princeton University_ Samuel H. Monk, _University of Minnesota_ Everett T. Moore, _University of California, Los Angeles_ James Sutherland, _University College, London_ H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., _University of California, Los Angeles_

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Edna C. Davis, _Clark Memorial Library_

INTRODUCTION

I.

_One Epistle To Mr. Pope_, complained Pope to Bethel, "contains as many Lyes as Lines." But just for that reason it is not, as Pope also says in the same letter, "below all notice."[1] _The Blatant Beast_, published twelve years later, is another attack on Pope almost as compendious and quite as virulent. They are here presented to the modern student of Pope as good examples of their kind. The importance of the pamphlet attacks on Pope for a full understanding of his satiric art is universally admitted, but the pamphlets themselves were cheap and ephemeral, and copies are now rare and not easily come by. Both in the comprehensiveness of their charges and in the slashing hatred which informs them (however feeble the verse), _One Epistle_ and _The Blatant Beast_ offer as fair a sample as any two such pamphlets can of the calumny, detraction, and critical misunderstanding Pope endured, for the most part patiently, from the publication of his _Essay on Criticism_ to the year of his death. "Welcome for thee, fair Virtue! all the past," (_Epistle to Arbuthnot_, l. 358) he exclaimed in his role as Satirist.

It was this public proclamation of Virtue that confused and enraged the Dunces. We have again learned to read satire as something quite other than an expression of personal malice and misanthropy. What the present pamphlets amply testify to is that most of the Dunces were no more able to read satire properly than were Pope's nineteenth-century critics. They were, as Pope quite properly kept pointing out, very bad writers and very dull men. The _ethos_ of the satiric _persona_ was something they could not understand. Although some of the Dunces knew their classics well and although all of them, we may presume, read the Roman satirists, one did not, typically, in Grub Street consult one's Horace with diurnal hand; one consulted the public. Literature to them was sold. They were not deeply concerned about absolute standards of right and wrong, about works of imagination which justify an entire civilization, about the problem of tradition and the individual talent. Accordingly, they explained satire, with the only vocabulary they had, as the expression of ingratitude, purely personal malice, and demonic pride, the product of a diseased heart and a misshapen body.

It would be misleading to suggest a narrow definition of Pope's Dunces. Some were critics of worth, such as Dennis and Gildon; some were not despicable minor poets, such as Welsted and Cooke. But if we leave these aside, as well as his aristocratic enemies, Lady Mary and Lord Hervey, some valid generalizations emerge. The very persistency of the Dunces' attacks on Pope (I have located over one hundred and fifty published during Pope's lifetime) and the large number of anonymous pamphlets that we cannot definitely ascribe to anyone Pope ever mentioned suggest that the Battle of the Dunces is best seen economically and sociologically. They were, for the most part, hack-writers, who were attempting the commercialization of literature that Pope recognized and deplored. Since they were authors to be let, they were neither fastidious about standards of taste nor filled with reverence for the Word. Yet Pope had succeeded in doing what they could not do--he had made himself a moderately rich man entirely by writing poetry. No theme recurs more insistently and suggestively in Popiana than Pope's wealth. Faced with the nasty fact that if one wrote well enough, there was a public to support one, they could only accuse Pope monotonously of venality and avarice.

In all of this there is a strong element of class antagonism. The Dunces were middle-class and Whiggish, their spirit capitalist. Pope, though middle-class by birth, was aristocratic in his sympathies, Tory in a loose sense, and firmly anti-Walpole. Perhaps verse satire is essentially aristocratic. Perhaps wit is, too. Certainly they never seem at home in a middle-class society. Wit comes to savor of indecency and blasphemy; satire in its incessant defence of moral value and centers of order comes to seem the expression of an arrogant disdain and a disquieting unease. His poise and verbal brilliance and hieratic commitment to the venerable tradition of classical and Christian ethical thought set the Satirist coolly apart from the _profanum vulgus_. Had Pope never mentioned one of the Dunces, although they would have done so less frequently, they would still have cried out against him.

II.

_One Epistle To Mr. A. Pope, Occasion'd By Two Epistles Lately Published_ appeared, according to the _Daily Journal_, on 28 April 1730.[2] Pope's mention of it in Appendix II to _The Dunciad A_, his "List of Books, Papers, and Verses, in which our Author was abused" which is our best guide to Popiana, is somewhat confusing and made more difficult because the first part dates from 1729, the second from 1735: "_Labeo_, A Paper of Verses written by Leonard Welsted. [1729 a-d], which after came into One Epistle, and was publish'd by James Moore. 4to. 1730. Another part of it came out in Welsted's own name in 1731, under the just Title of _Dulness and Scandal_, fol. [1735a]."[3]

The _Labeo_ reference is mysterious. Pope in his note on Welsted to _The Dunciad A_ II.293 had said in a sentence omitted in all editions from 1735a, "The strength of the metaphors in this passage is to express the great scurrility and fury of this writer, which may be seen, One day, in a Piece of his, call'd (as I think) _Labeo_."[4] Since no _Labeo_ has ever turned up, it seems reasonable to conclude with Fineman that, though Welsted may have toyed with the idea of writing one, "he either never did enough with it to warrant its publication, or discarded it entirely in favor of writing the collaborative _One Epistle to Mr. Pope_ that appeared in 1730. Naturally, he would not broadcast his plans, and as a result the enemy camp continued to believe--or at any rate, to say--that Welsted would retaliate with a _Labeo_."[5] This was in 1729; by 1735 Pope had realized no _Labeo_ would appear and deciding, apparently on no evidence, that it had been incorporated into Welsted's _One Epistle_ and _Of Dulness and Scandal_ (1732), made the appropriate changes in _The Dunciad_.

Pope did not at first realize that _One Epistle_ was by Welsted. It had been announced as early as 1 Feb. 1729 in _The Universal Spectator_ "as the due Chastisement of Mr. Pope for his _Dunciad_, by James Moore Smythe, Esq; and Mr. Welsted." The poem must have been circulated privately before publication at least by October, 1729 at which time Pope believed it to be Lady Mary's, since we find Lady Mary writing to Dr. Arbuthnot twice in October 1729 denying Pope's accusation that she had written it.[6] There is no evidence that she was not telling the truth, but on 21 May 1730 _The Grub-Street Journal_ reported that Lady Mary had "some hand in the piece."

Like most Pope attacks, the poem was published anonymously. The preface, a defence of the Dunces, is, with probably intentional ambiguity, written in the first person singular but ends by referring to "the Writers of the following Poem" (p. viii). One hand seems responsible for the preface, but we can only conclude that a Dunce collaborating with other Dunces produced the poem. Four days after its publication Pope wrote to Broome that it was "by James Moore and others," and a few weeks later wrote to Bethel that "James Moore own'd it but was made by three others, and he will disown it whenever any man takes him for it."[7] It was Moore Smythe who was attacked in _The Grub-Street Journal_ for several months as the poem's chief author.[8]

A letter from Welsted to Dodington, however, shows that though the poem was a collaborative effort and though others may have made suggestions and additions, Welsted felt himself responsible for the poem.[9] In 1735 Pope attributed _One Epistle_ finally to Welsted, with Moore Smythe as publisher, and in 1737 _The Memoirs of Grub-Street_ said of Moore Smythe that he "reported himself author" of _One Epistle_, "but was only a publisher; it being written by Mr. Welsted and others."[10]

As to the "others" we should remember Mallet's caution that it would be vain,

To guess, ere _One Epistle_ saw the light, How many brother-dunces club'd their mite.[11]

Welsted himself had begun his quarrel with Pope with an attack on _Three Hours after Marriage_, that amusing and much-abused play, in _Palaemon To Caelia at Bath; Or, The Triumvirate_ (1717). Pope is said to have collaborated with Gay not only in _Three Hours_, a play "so lewd,/ Ev'n Bullies blush'd, and Beaux astonish'd stood" (Second Edition, p. 11), but in _The Wife of Bath_ and _The What D'Ye Call It_. Welsted also hits at _God's Revenge Against Punning_, the _First Psalm_, praises Tickell, and finds Pope's versification flat. All of these charges (except the one that Pope collaborated in _The Wife of Bath_) had appeared in print before, but Pope was to remember _Palaemon To Caelia_ and include it in a note to _The Dunciad A_ II.293, where it is neatly described as "meant for a Satire on Mr. P. and some of his friends."

In 1721 Welsted's name appears in the title of a pamphlet containing an attack on Pope's Homer, _An Epistle To Mr. Welsted; And A Satyre on the English Translations of Homer_, by that engagingly inept Dunce, Bezaleel Morrice. In 1724 in the "Dissertation concerning the Perfection of the English Language" prefixed to his _Epistles, Odes, &c._, Welsted quoted (not quite correctly) and criticized Pope's "And such as _Chaucer_ is, shall _Dryden_ be" (p. x). The anonymous author of _Characters of The Times_ (1728) thought that Welsted would have been spared Pope's abuse if he had not in his "Dissertation" "happen'd to cite a low and false line from Mr. P[o]pe for the meer Purpose of refuting it, without seeming to know, or care who was the Author of it" (p. 24).[12]

In the _Peri Bathous_ Pope included Welsted as a didapper and an eel. Pope then put him into _The Dunciad_ in II.293-300 and, more memorably, in III.163-166:

Flow Welsted, Flow! like thine inspirer, Beer, Tho' stale, not ripe; tho' thin, yet never clear; So sweetly mawkish, and so smoothly dull; Heady, not strong, and foaming tho' not full.

Unable to leave well enough alone, Welsted continued his attack on Pope with _One Epistle_ and then again in January 1732 with _Of Dulness and Scandal_, which ran to three editions. The half-title of _One Epistle_ had promised that it was to be continued, and the writer of the preface had said that he intended "in the preface to the next Epistle ... to state several Matters of Fact, in Contradiction to the Notes of the _Dunciad_" (p. viii). _Of Dulness and Scandal_, however, has no preface and is an independent attack. Its main charge is Pope's ingratitude to the Duke of Chandos as shown in the _Epistle to Burlington_, a famous charge frequently to be repeated,[13] but it claims as well that a lady named Victoria died as a result of reading Pope's Homer and attacks once more _The Rape of the Lock_ and the _First Psalm_.

In February 1732 Welsted published his last attack on Pope, _Of False Fame_, in which he attacks _Windsor Forest_, _The Rape of the Lock_, Pope's edition of Shakespeare, _The Dunciad_, and the _Epistle to Burlington_. Pope then mentioned him in the _Epistle to Arbuthnot_, at first in l. 49, although he altered this to "Pitholeon," and then in l. 375, where most twentieth-century college students first meet his name.

The charges in _One Epistle_ are unusually comprehensive, but almost none of them is original. To help the reader to evaluate the more important, the following notes may be helpful. The denial in the preface of Pope's statement that no one is attacked in _The Dunciad_ "who had not before, either in Print or private Conversation, endeavour'd something to his Disadvantage" (p. v) is a reference to _The Dunciad_, p. 203, where, however, conversation is not mentioned. This sentence of Pope's annoyed many of the Dunces.[14] What the preface says about Swift and Arbuthnot and the _Peri Bathous_ (p. vii) may well be true.[15] Welsted's charge that Pope wrote the Prologue to _Cato_ and then "the Play decried" (p. 12) is simply Dennis's old charge first made in _A True Character of Mr. Pope (1716)_ and repeated in _Remarks Upon ... the Dunciad_ (1729) that Pope had teased Lintot into publishing Dennis's attack on _Cato_. The charge rests only on Dennis's authority.[16] The obscenity of _The Rape of the Lock_ was an old story.[17] So was the notorious _First Psalm_.[18] Welsted's attacks on the _Pastorals_, the Homer, the _Peri Bathous_, and _The Dunciad_ are simply the commonplaces of Popiana. The charge that he libeled Addison only after the great man's death is also familiar[19] (Welsted seems to have been the first, though, to mention the libel on Lady Mary) and long since disproved by Sherburn and Ault. That Pope was a plagiarist is an idea that turns up constantly.[20]

Welsted's other charges are more interesting. He seems to be the only Dunce who objected (p. 12) to Pope's mentioning Bishop Hoadly in _The Dunciad A_ II.368. It may just possibly be true that Gildon was dismissed by Buckingham because of Gildon's dislike of Pope (p. 22).[21]

The most curious of the charges is that Pope,

... from the Skies, propitious to the Fair, Brought down _Caecilia_, and sent _Cloris_ there. (p. 11)

Welsted apparently means that Pope debased St. Cecilia in his _Ode for Musick on St. Cecilia's Day_ and glorified a suicide in his _Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady_. He is not saying, as did _The Life of the late Celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn_ (1721), that the heroine of the _Elegy_ died of her unrequited love for Pope. Pope's note to l. 375 of the _Epistle to Arbuthnot_ accusing Welsted of having "had the Impudence to tell in print, that Mr. _P._ had occasion'd a Lady's death, and to _name_ a person he never heard of" refers not to Cloris but to Victoria in Welsted's _Of Dulness and Scandal_ who died from reading Pope's _Illiad_.[22]

The _Grub-Street Journal_ for 21 May 1730 invited "any Person of Credit and Character to stand forth and attest any of the following Facts...."

That the late Duke of Buckingham paid any Pension to Charles Gildon, which he took from him since his acquaintance with Mr. P.

That the present Archbishop of Canterbury hath past any Censure on Mr. P.

That Mr. F[ento]n and he ever were at distance on variance with each other.

That the Rev. Mr. Br[oo]me ever asserted or complain'd, he was not gratify'd with a competent Sum for his Share in the Odyssey; nay did not own that he thought himself highly paid.

That Mr. Addison or any other but Mr. P. writ, or alter'd, one line of the Prologue to Cato.

Who will name any young Writer, allow'd to have Merit, that hath been personally discourag'd by him; or who hath not received either actual Services, or amicable Treatment from him?

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.