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Title: Two Poems Against Pope

Author: Mr. Welsted

Anonymous

Editor: J. V. Guerinot

Release date: January 9, 2008 [eBook #24199]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Louise Hope, David Starner, Suzanne Lybarger
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Page numbers in brackets or parentheses may have been added by the editor. Footnotes to “One Epistle” are shown in the side margin; notes to “The Blatant-Beast” have been renumbered and grouped at the end of the poem. Other notes are labeled and formatted as in the original. All brackets are in the original.

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

PUBLICATION NUMBER 114
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles

1965

CONTENTS (added by transcriber)

Editor’s Introduction

One Epistle
Preface
Text
Notes

Blatant Beast
Text
Notes

Augustan Reprint Society

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 familiar19 (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.

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.

ONE

EPISTLE

TO

Mr.  A.  POPE,

Occasion’d By

Two Lately Publiſh’d.

[To be Continued.]

ONE

EPISTLE

TO

Mr.  A.  POPE,

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.

LONDON:
Printed for J. Roberts, in Warwick-Lane.
[Price One Shilling.]

THE

PREFACE.

T(The)

THE indecent Images, and the frequent and bad Imitations of the Classics in the Dunciad, have occasioned several just Observations upon so new and coarse a Manner of Writing: I shall wave this Topic at present, and only regard the most plausible Insinuation in Favour of this Author; which is, that he never begun an Attack upon any Person, who had not before, either in Print or private Conversation, endeavour’d something to his Disadvantage.

This Assertion is by no means true, as I shall immediately shew; if it were true, it might indeed bear some Weight, but however with this Distinction, that the Reports of private Conversation, brought to him by such Emissaries, as belong to him, are not always to be believed, and that no Attack in Print upon a Man’s Poetical Character, ought to be repaid by Lampoon and Virulence upon the Moral Character of his Antagonist: Every Person has a Right to determine upon the Talents of Writers, particularly of one, who appears in Publick only to gratify the two worst Appetites, that disgrace Human Nature, I mean Malice and Avarice; and sure no Man deserves a violent Injury to his Reputation, as a Gentleman, because perhaps at a Distance of several Years since he might have said, that Mr. Pope had nothing in him Original as a Writer, that Mr. Tickel greatly excelled him in his Translation of Homer, and many of his Contemporaries in other Branches of Writing, and that he is infinitely inferior to Mr. Phillips in Pastoral: And yet such Arguments or Apologies as these have been used by himself, or his Tea-Table Cabals, for calling Gentlemen Scoundrels, Blockheads, Gareteers, and Beggars,: If he can transmit them to Posterity under such Imputations, he is a bad Man; if he cannot, he is a bad Writer: I believe, that he would rather suffer under the first Character, than the last: But before I have done with him, I will make a very strict Inquiry into both.

In the mean time I shall shew the Reader, in general, the Falshood of his main Pretence, that he has meddled with no one, that had not before hurt him, and in this View, tho’ I should be ashamed of being too serious in a Controversy of this Sort, I think it proper to acquaint the Town with the original Design of the Dunciad, and the real Reasons of its Production. This Piece, which has been honour’d by Booksellers of Quality, contains only the Poetical Part of Dulness, extracted from a Libel, call’d, The Progress of it, and which included several other Branches of Science, and perhaps some of those Gentlemen, who have in the warmest Manner asserted the Cause of the Dunciad, might have seen a Publication of a Work, upon the Death of this Writer, in which no past Friendship could have screen’d them from Lampoon for any Pretences to excel in any Science whatever: It appears, therefore, that he was teaz’d into a Publication of these Cantos, which regarded the Writers of the Age, by some Attacks, that were made upon him about that Time: We must refer to a Miscellany of Poems published by Him and Swift, to which is prefix’d, An Essay on the Profund, to consider if those Attacks were justifiable; Mr. Dean Swift never saw the Profund, till made publick, and Dr. Arburthnot, who originally sketch’d the Design of it, desired that the Initial Letters of Names of the Gentlemen abused might not be inserted, that they might be A or B, or Do or Ro, or any thing of that Nature, which would make this Satire a general one upon any dull Writers in any Age: This was refused by Pope, and he chose rather to treat a Set of Gentlemen as Vermin, Reptiles, &c. at a Time when he had no Provocation to do so, when he had closed his Labours, finish’d his great Subscriptions, and was in a fashionable Degree of Reputation: Several Gentlemen, who are there ranked with the dullest Men, or dullest Beasts, never did appear in Print against him, or say any thing in Conversation which might affect his Character: Some Replies, which were made to the Profund, occasioned the Publication of the Dunciad, which was first of all begun with a general Malice to all Mankind, and now appears under an Excuse of Provocations, which he had received, after he himself had struck the first Blow in the above-mentioned Miscellanies.

I cannot indeed say much in Praise of some Performances, which appear’d against him, and am sorry that Voluntiers enter’d into the War, whom I could wish to have been only Spectators: But the Cause became so general, that some Gentlemen, who never aim’d at the Laurel, grew Poets merely upon their being angry: A Militia, in Case of publick Invasion, may perhaps be thought necessary, but yet one could always wish for an Army of regular Troops: I should not have touched upon this Circumstance, but to obviate some Imputations, which he had suggested, of my Writing several Pieces, which I never heard of, till I saw them with the rest of the Town: But these Suggestions shall be considered in the Preface to the next Epistle, in which, among other Things, I intend to state several Matters of Fact, in Contradiction to the Notes of the Dunciad, particularly as they concern the Writers of the following Poem.

ONE

EPISTLE

TO

Mr.  A.  POPE,

Occasion’d By

Two Lately Publiſh’d.

I(If)

IF noble B——m, a in Metre known,

With Strains has grac’d thee, humble as thy own;

Who b G—l—n’s Dullness did for thine discard,

A better Critick, for as bad a Bard!

Not unregarded let this Tribute be,

Tho’ humble, just; well-bred, tho’ paid to Thee.

Parnassian Groves, and Twick’nam Fountains, say,

What Homage to the Bard shall Britain pay!

The Bard! that first, from Dryden’s thrice-glean’d Page,

Cull’d his low Efforts to Poetic Rage;

Nor pillag’d only that unrival’d Strain,

* A Translator of Homer.

But rak’d for Couplets * Chapman and Duck-Lane,

Has sweat each Cent’ry’s Rubbish to explore,

And plunder’d every Dunce that writ before,

Catching half Lines, till the tun’d Verse went round,

Complete, in smooth dull c Unity of Sound;

Who, stealing Human, scorn’d Celestial Fire,

† Burlesque of the first Psalm, more profest than Sternbold’s.

And strung to Smithfield Airs the † Hebrew Lyre;

Who taught declining d Wycherley to doze

O’er wire-drawn Sense, that tinkled in the Close,

To lovely F——r impious and obscene,

To mud-born Naiads faithfully unclean;

Whose raptur’d Nonsense, with Prophetick Skill,

First taught that Ombre, which fore-ran Quadrille;

Who from the Skies, propitious to the Fair,

** See Verses, in P—pe’s Poems, to the Memory of an unfortunate young Lady.

Brought down Cæcilia, and sent ** Cloris there,

Censur’d by W—ke, by A———ry blest,

Prais’d Sw——t in Earnest, and sung Heav’n in Jest,

Here, mov’d by Whim, and there by Envy stung,

‡ Sir W. Y.

Would flatter Ch——s, or would libel ‡ Y——ge,

By F——n left, by Reverend Linguists hated,

Now learns to read the Greek he once translated.

Oh say, to him what Trophies shall be rais’d,

That unprovok’d will strike, and fawn unprais’d!

Each fav’rite Toast who marks, or rising Wit,

To sketch a Satire, that in Time may fit;

Still hopes your Sun-set, while he views your Noon,

And still broods o’er the closely-kept Lampoon;

The lurking Presents o’er the Tomb he paid,

And thus atton’d our British Virgil’s Shade,

* Libel on Mr. Addison in P—pe and Sw—t’s Miscellanies.

A Mushroom * Satire in his Life conceal’d,

Since chang’d to Libel, and in Print reveal’d;

† Lady M. W. M.

Who lets not † Beauty base Detraction ’scape,

And mocks Deformity with Æsop’s Shape;

Who Cato’s Muse with faithless Sneers belied,

The Prologue father’d, and the Play decried,

‡ Lord B——p of Salisbury.

On ‡ H——y’s learned Page, dull-sporting trod,

Betray’d his Patrons, and lampoon’d his God;

Translator, Editor, could far out-go

In Homer Ogleby, in Shakespeare R——

O! how burlesqu’d, great Dryden, is thy Strain,

When little Alexander ‖ slays the Slain!

‖ See Dryden’s Ode on St. Cæcilia’s Day.

———Fought all his Battles o’er again;

———And thrice he slew the Slain.

On, mighty Rhimer, haste new Palms to seize,

Thy little, envious, angry Genius teize;

Let thy weak wilful Head, unrein’d by Art,

Obey the Dictates of thy flatt’ring Heart;

Divide a busy, fretful Life between

Smut, Libel, Sing-song, Vanity, and Spleen;

With long-brew’d Malice warm thy languid Page,

And urge delirious Nonsense into Rage;

Let bawdy Emblems, now, thy Hours beguile;

Now, Fustian Epic, aping Virgil’s Stile;

To Virgil like, to Indian Clay as Delf,

Or Pulteney, drawn by Jervase, to Herself:

Rheams heap’d on Rheams, incessant, mayst thou blot,

A lively, trifling, pert, one knows not what!

Form thy light Measures, nimbler than the Wind,

Whilst heavy lingring Sense is left behind;

With all thy Might pursue, and all thy Will,

That unabating Thirst, to scribble still,

Giv’n at thy Birth! the Poetaster’s Gust,

False and unsated as the Eunuch’s Lust!

Illustrious Fops, mean time, o’er-rate thy Lays,

And blooming Critics, as they spell thee, praise:

Blest Coupleteer! by blooming Critics read,

At Toilets ogled, and with Sweetmeats fed:

See, lisping Toilers grace thy Dunciad’s Cause,

And scream their witty Scavenger’s Applause,

While powder’d Wits, and lac’d Cabals rehearse

Thy bawdy Cento, and thy Bead-roll Verse;

Gay, bugled Statesmen on thy Side debate,

And libel’d Blockheads court thee, tho’ they hate.

*******

*******

Fools of all Kinds their Suffrages impart,

The Fools of Nature, and the Fools of Art.

These in thy threadbare Farce shall Beauties show,

* Temple of Fame by P—— ‡ P——pe’s Pastorals. † See the Original Preface to the Dunciad.

Shall praise thy ribald Mirth, and maudlin Woe;

Praise ev’n thy imitating Chaucer’s Tales,

And call that merry * Temple, Fame’s Versailles:

Thy ‡ Shepherd-Song with Rapture they shall see,

Which rivals Philips, as Banks rivals Lee;

Thy † Guernsey and Barbados Wreath shall own,

Where Durfey ne’er was read, nor Settle known;

That Wreath, that Name, which thro’ both Worlds is gone,

Which Doctor e Y—— applauds, and Prestor John.

Lo! as Anchises, to the Goddess-born,

So I the Worthies, that thy Page adorn,

‖ The Characters left out here may perhaps be inserted in some future Edition of this Poem.

Point out to Thee.——See ‖ here ****

*******

*******

*******

The Prelate! next, exil’d by cruel Fates,

Who plagues all Churches, and confounds all States;

With Treasons past perplex’d, and present Cares;

A Fop in Rhime, and Bungler in Affairs.

*******

*******

And here! a Groupe of Brother Quill-men see,

Co-witlings all, and Demi-bards like Thee;

Such whom the Muse shall pass with just Disdain,

Nor add one Trophy to thy mottly Train:

But Quack Arb——t shall Oblivion blot,

That puzzling, plodding, prating, pedant Scot!

The grating Scribler! whose untun’d Essays

Mix the Scotch Thistle with the English Bays,

By either Phœbus pre-ordain’d to Ill,

The Hand prescribing, or the flattering Quill,

Who doubly plagues, and boasts two Arts to kill!

’Midst this vain Tribe, that aid thy setting Ray,

The Muse shall view, but spare ill-faced G—y:

Poor f G—y, who loses most when most he wins.

And gives his Foes his Fame, and bears their Sins;

Who more by Fortune than by Nature curst,

Yields his best Pieces, and must own Thy worst.

Thus prop’d, thy Head with Grub-street Zephyrs tainted,

By g Rich recorded, and by J—— painted;

J——! who so refin’d a Rake is reckon’d,

He breaks all h Sinai’s Laws, except the Second:

Thus prais’d, thus drawn, t’extend thy Projects try,

* The Phrases distinguished here in Italics, are truly quoted from P——pe; and the others in Company with them, ought to be in no other Company.

Leave the Blue * Languish, and the Crimson Sigh;

Leave the gay Epithets that Beauty crown,

** See Dunciad. Nigrina Black.

White ** Whitylinda, and Brownissa Brown;

Forget awhile i Belinda and the Sun;

Forget the Fights of Stand, and Flights of Run:

No more let Ombre’s Play inspire thy Vein,

† Here a Card Table; in P—pe, a Field of Grass.

Nor strow with Captive Kings the † Velvet Plain;

Omit awhile the Silver Peal to ring,

Nor talk dulcissant, nor mellifluous sing,

Nor hang suspended, nor adherent cling.

But haste to mount Immortal Envy’s Throne,

To crush all Merit, that disputes thy own;

For thou wert born to damp each rising Name,

And hang, like Mildews, on the Growth of Fame;

Fame’s fairest Blossoms let thy Rancour blast,

Bane of the modern Laurel, like the past;

While stupid Riot stands in Humour’s Place,

And bestial Filth, Humanity’s Disgrace,

†† Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.

Low Lewdness, unexcited by Desire,

And all great †† Wilmot’s Vice, without his Fire.

At length, when banish’d Pallas shall withdraw,

And Wit’s made Treason by the Popian Law;

When minor Dunces cease, at length, their Strife,

And own thy Patent to be dull for Life;

By Tricks sustain’d, in Poet-craft compleat,

Retire triumphant to thy Twick’nam Seat;

That Seat! the Work of k half-paid drudging Br——me,

And call’d by joking Tritons, Homer’s Tomb:

There to stale, stol’n, stum Crambo bid adieu,

And sneer the Fops, that thought thy Crambo new;

There, like the Grecian Chief, on whom thy Song

Has well reveng’d unhappy Priam’s Wrong;

Waste, in thy hidden Cave, the Festive Day,

With mock Machaon, and Patroclus G——

Sleep, l Sleep in Peace the Works, for Wapping born!

No more thy Cuckoo Note shall wake the Morn;

In Ease, and Avarice, and aukward State,

The Fool of Fortune, shalt thou hail thy Fate;

Slumbring in Quiet o’er Lampoons half writ,

Which, ripe in Malice, only wait for Wit.

So when Vanessa yielded up her Charms,

The blest Cadenus languish’d in her Arms;

High, on a Peg, his unbrush’d Beaver hung,

His Vest unbutton’d, and his God unsung;

Raptur’d he lies; Deans, Authors are forgot,

Wood’s Copper Pence, and Atterbury’s Plot;

For her he quits the Tythes of Patrick’s Fields,

And all the Levite to the Lover yields.

NOTES

On the Foregoing

POEM.

(a) If Noble B———m,

T(The)

THE late Duke of Buckingham! who made that fine Alteration of the Tragedy of Julius Cæsar from Shakespeare, and who is said by Mr. Pope to have bestow’d the finest Praise upon Homer that he ever received, in the following Lines;

Read Homer once, and you need read no more;

For all Things else will be so mean and poor,

Verse will seem Prose: Yet often on him look,

And you will never need another Book.

D—— of B——’s Essay on Poetry.

He has also printed a Copy of Verses in Praise of Pope, which were returned by another in Praise of his Grace. There is so great a Similitude in the Stile of these Writers, that the Reader, I think, need not doubt their Sincerity in admiring each other.

’Tis great Delight to laugh at some Mens Ways;

But ’tis much greater to give Merit Praise.

D—— of B——.

Sheffield approves, consenting Phœbus bends,

And I and Malice from this Hour, am Friends.

Pope.

(b) Who G———n’s Dulness———

Charles Gildon, dismiss’d from the D——’s Pension and Favour, on Account of his Obstinacy in refusing to take the Oaths to P—pe’s Supremacy.

(c) Smooth dull Unity of Sound.

P—pe’s Reputation for versifying is a vulgar Error, founded only on discreet Theft: Half a Line from Mr. Dryden’s Conquest of Mexico, and another from his Translation of Virgil, have seemingly made tolerable Music, when join’d in his Works; but Music of the Morocco Kind, which has but one Note.

(d) Who taught declining Wycherley———

Mr. Wycherley subscribed to a Compliment (some say, before his Death) upon P—pe’s Pastorals, in which he says, his Arcadia speaks the Language of the Mall, but does not explain, whether he means at Noon or Night. I do not agree with what Mr. Wycherley is supposed to have writ of him, but I do with what he certainly said of him, viz. That he was not able to make a Suit of Cloaths, but could perhaps turn an old Coat.

(e) Which Doctor Y———

The Reverend Doctor Edward Young, who, in this Quarrel of the great contending Powers in Poesy, has been courted by all Sides: But some late Incidents give a Suspicion, that he has privately acceded to the Treaty of Twickenham.

(f) Poor G——, who loses most——

Mr. Gay, not thought to be the entire Author of the Beggar’s Opera, and ordered to own Three Hours after Marriage.

(g) By Rich recorded———

Gilbert Pickering Rich. A great Admirer of P—pe, eminent for his Translation of Horace, which can be equall’d by nothing but P—pe’s translating of Homer. He concludes the first Ode by giving (sublimi feriam sidera vertice) in these Words;

I’ll bound, I’ll spring, I’ll strike the weaken’d Pole,

I’ll knock so hard, I’ll knock thro’ it a Hole.

(h) ———Breaks all Sinai’s Laws except the Second.

Second Commandment: “Thou shalt not make the Likeness of any Thing in Heaven above, or on the Earth beneath, or the Waters under the Earth.”

(i) Forget awhile Belinda and the Sun.

In the Rape of the Lock, Belinda and the Sun are very often said to be very much alike, which occasion’d two Lines in Praise of that Poem, written by a Friend of Mr. Pope;

Here, like the Sun, Belinda strikes the Swain,

In the same Page like the same Sun again.

Monsieur Boileau, speaking of the Poetasters of his Nation, in a Poem to the King, makes this Comparison the Consummation of Dulness;

Et enfin te compare au Solœil.

And in the End he compares your Majesty to the Sun.

(k) ———Half-paid drudging B——me.

The Reverend Mr. B——me, who translated a great Part of Homer, and construed the Rest: N.B. A half-paid Poet is oftentimes the Occasion of an unpaid Taylor.

(l) Sleep, Sleep in Peace———

These Lines are a Parody of a famous Passage in the Tragedy of Phædra and Hyppolitus.

Sleep, Sleep in Peace, ye Monsters of the Wood:

No more my early Horn shall wake———

So when bright Venus yielded up her Charms,

The blest Adonis languish’d in her Arms;

His idle Horn on flagrant Myrtle hung,

His Arrows scatter’d, and his Bow unstrung;

Obscure in Covert lay his dreaming Hounds,

And bay’d the fancy’d Boar with feeble Sounds:

For nobler Sports he quits the savage Fields,

And all the Hero to the Lover yields.

FINIS.

THE

BLATANT-BEAST.

A

POEM.

What is that Blatant-Beast? Then he reply’d.

It is a Monster bred of hellish Race,

Then answered he, which often hath annoy’d

Good Knights and Ladies true, and many else destroy’d.

Spencer’s Fairy Queen, Book VI. Canto I.

No Might, no Greatness in Mortality

Can Censure ’scape: Back-wounding Calumny

The whitest Virtue strikes. What King so strong,

Can tye the Gall up in sland’rous Tongue?

Shakespear.

LONDON:

Printed for J. Robinson, at the Golden Lyon in Ludgate-street.
MDCCXLII.

THE

BLATANT-BEAST

A

POEM.

B(Beauty)

BEAUTY, the fondling Mother’s earliest Pray’r,

Nature’s kind Gift to sweeten worldly Care.

Beauty the greatest Extasy imparts,

Steals thro’ our Eyes, and revels in our Hearts;

Adds Lustre to a Crown, gives Weight to Sense,

The Orator assists in Truth’s Defence.

The very Fool our Hearts resistless warms,

And while we curse the Tongue, the Figure charms.

If Beauty be the Subject of our Praise,

A rude, mishapen Lump Contempt must raise.

When Lucifer with Angels held first Place,

Seraphic Beauty sparkled in his Face.

By Pride and Malice tempted to rebel,

Vengeance pursu’d him to the lowest Hell:

Not sulph’rous Lakes suffic’d, nor dreary Plains;

Deformity was join’d t’ improve his Pains.

Paint then the Person, and expose the Mind,

Who rails at others, to his own Faults blind.

Sly Sancho’s Paunch, meagre Don Quixot’s Love,

The Satyr and the Ridicule improve.

So when fam’d Butler wou’d Rebellion paint,

He lasht the Traitor and the Mimic Saint.

Sir Hudibras he sung; the crumpled Wight,

Contempt and Laughter ever will excite.

The Blatant-Beast once more has broke his Chains,

Disperses Falshoods, and remorseless reigns.

Scornful of all thy Verses dare design,

(Where useless Epithets crowd ev’ry Line,)

The Blatant-Beast shall be afresh pursu’d,

Nor cease my Labours till again subdu’d.

Distorted Elf! to Nature a Disgrace,

Thy Mind envenom’d pictur’d in thy Face;

Malice with Envy in thy Breast combines,

And in thy Visage grav’d those ghastly Lines.

Like Plagues, like Death thy ranc’rous Arrows fly,

At Good and Bad, at Friend and Enemy.

To thy own Breast recoils the erring Dart,

Corrupts thy Blood, and rankles in thy Heart.

There swell the Poisons which thy Breast distend,

And with the Load thy Mountain Shoulders bend.

Horrid to view! retire from human Sight,

Nor with thy Figure pregnant Dames affright.

Crawl thro’ thy childish Grot, growl round thy Grove,

A Foe to Man, an Antidote to Love.

In Curses waste thy Time instead of Pray’r,

a And with thy Breath pollute the fragrant Air.

There doze o’er Shakespear; then thy Blunders fell

b At mighty Price; this Truth let Tonson tell.

Then frontless intimate, (oh perjur’d Bard!)

Thy Labours were bestow’d without Reward.

On that immortal Author wreak thy Spite,

c And on his Monument thy Nonsense write.

Should Theobald thy presumptuous Errors shew,

Be thou to Theobald an invet’rate Foe.

Cibber shall foremost in thy Satyrs stand;

His Plays succeed, and thine was justly damn’d.

But Colley call him, when thou would’st declame;

Great is the Jest that lies in Colley’s Name.

Beware all ye, whom he as Friends carest,

How ye entrust your Secrets to his Breast.

d On Backs of Letters was his Homer wrote,

All your Affairs disclos’d to save a Groat.

He valu’d not to whom he gave Offence;

He sav’d his Paper, tho’ at your Expence.

But shall a low-born Wretch the best traduce,

And call it Poetry, because Abuse?

The Heav’n-born Muse, by Truth and Justice sway’d,

To false Aspersions ne’er vouchsafes her Aid.

When unprovok’d, not vengeful Wasps molest,

Nor dart their Stings, when undisturb’d their Nest.

Thy Muse, by Virgil’s Harpies taught to write,

Scatters her Ordure in her screaming Flight;

Sacred Religion and her Priests defames,

And against Monarchs saucily exclames.

e The Fathers, of our Church the surest Guides,

As a poor Pack of Punsters she derides.

But chief O Cam! and Isis! dread her Frown,

f Chain’d to the Footstool of the Goddess’ Throne.

No Order, no Degree escapes her Rage,

And dull, and dull, and dull swells ev’ry Page.

Thirsty, she Poison draws from ev’ry Flow’r,

Like Satan, seeks whom next she may devour.

So have I seen a Dog distracted roam;

He bites, he snaps at all, disgorging Foam.

The frighten’d Passenger the Danger flies,

And sees the Poison flashing from his Eyes.

Till some stout Dray-man dashes out his Brains,

And his corrupted Blood the Kennel stains.

Thy Notes pedantic shall no more engage;

Arbuthnot’s Wit enlivens not the Page.

Thy Muse, that Prostitute abandon’d Jade,

Now flounders in the Mire without Swift’s Aid.

Thy base Invectives Men no more regard;

With just Disdain thy Scare-Crow Muse is heard.

So when the latent Seeds their Fruits display,

And gain fresh Vigour from a genial Ray:

The careful Hind a monst’rous Figure frames;

From various Rags unwonted Terror streams.

The feather’d Choristers in Flocks retreat,

And at a Distance view the tempting Bait.

At length grown bold, they perch upon his Head,

And with their Meute bedawb what late they fled.

B-ns-n abuse for raising Milton’s Bust,

And impiously molest learn’d Johnston’s Dust.

Religious, he the Psalms in Latin sung,

From hence the Malice of the Deist sprung.

While with a just Derision we survey,

Thy wretched Epitaph on poor John Gay.

Had Peter, Charters thee with Gold supply’d,

Peter and Charters had been deify’d.

But ev’ry Lord, each gen’rous Friend implore,

And by Subscriptions meanly swell thy Store.

When to the Town by sordid Int’rest led,

Mump for a Dinner, flatter for a Bed.

Then to thy Grot retire, indulge thy Spite,

And rail at those who for Subsistence write.

Summon thy Rags, invoke thy scurril Muse,

With keenest Malice Addison abuse.

Sculking, the Scandal privately disperse,

g Then own in Prose the Baseness of thy Verse.

So e’re Arachne to her Cell repairs,

Insidiously she weaves her glewy Snares.

Sullen, she meditates on Deaths to come,

And meliorates the Poison in her Womb.

h Should hapless Clarion thither take his Flight,

He falls her Prey, mindful of ancient Spite.

With Malice swoll’n, Pride, Envy, Avarice,

Ingratitude attends this Train to Vice.

Yet one remains untold; with Lust endu’d,

Behold the Fribler lab’ring to be lewd.

Kind Cibber interpos’d, forbad the Banns,

He’d peopled else this Isle with Calibans.

i The noble Timon, in thy waspish Strains,

A Proof of thy Ingratitude remains.

Courteous to all, munificent, humane,

Subject of others Praise, to thee of Pain.

Exalted far above thy groveling State,

The Object of his Pity, not his Hate.

He smiles at Scandal so unjustly thrown,

And at thy Malice he disdains to frown.

Thus oft we see a currish, Mungrel Crew,

A stately Mastiff eagerly pursue.

They swarm around, they yelp, they snarl, they grin,

Bold in Appearance, timerous within:

With such mean Foes he deigns not to engage,

But lifts his Leg, and pisses out their Rage.

How dar’st thou, Peasant, give thy Pen this Loose?

Becomes it thee thus madly to traduce?

The Great, the Low, the Virtuous, and the Base,

Alike are grown thy Subject of Disgrace.

Safe in thy Weakness, thou defi’st a Foe;

E’en k Cibber’s Cudgel scorn’d to stoop so low.

The Mercy of the Law restrains thy Fears;

Coventry’s Act secures thy Nose and Ears.

Yet there remains, to fill thy Soul with Care,

A Blanket to curvet thee in the Air.

O wretched Life consum’d in restless Pains,

Where Dread of Punishment incessant reigns!

Poor Self-Tormentor! in whose gloomy Breast

The Vulture dwells, inhospitable Guest.

Be to my Foe no greater Curse assign’d!

Than a malignant Heart and envious Mind.

Thrice happy he! that’s with Good Nature blest,

Love of his Species rules his tender Breast;

Nor there confin’d: The Brute Creation share

His kind Beneficence and gen’rous Care.

No base malicious Thoughts his Peace annoy:

Are others happy? he partakes their Joy.

Chearful and innocent the Day he spends,

And Silver Sleep his quiet Nights attends.

But thou, a Stranger to this Peace of Mind,

Search where thou may’st conspicuous Merit find:

There strive to blacken with thy utmost Art,

And rail the more, the greater the Desert.

Is there a Man, an Honour to the Age,

Unsully’d by the keenest Party-rage;

By Vice untainted; who, from early Youth,

Firmly adher’d to Honour, Justice, Truth;

Whom no unruly Passions e’re cou’d blind,

Nor ruffle his Serenity of Mind;

His Country’s Good, the Patriot’s noblest View,

Unbrib’d, unaw’d, does stedfastly pursue;

Polite in Manners, and rever’d his Sense,

And long in Senates fam’d for Eloquence;

But if to these Endowments of the Mind,

A graceful Figure happily is join’d,

Then flows thy Gall, then raves thy half-form’d Clay,

Then frets thy putrid Carcass to Decay.

So when the croaking Toad the Ox beheld,

His envious Heart with Indignation swell’d.

Vainly the Reptil thought he could extend

His bloated Form, and Nature’s Error mend.

He drew his Breath; he swell’d—he burst; he dy’d

A Victim to his Arrogance and Pride.

FINIS.

Footnotes to The Blatant-Beast

(a) It is surely allowable to treat a Man after this manner who abuses all others, and to make this just Reflexion, since in his new Dunciad he not only calls Mummius a Fool, but uses this filthy Expression—who stinks above the Ground.

(b) See this farther explained in the ingenious Dialogues of Sawney and Colley.

(c) Tho’ he was informed that Wreck was improper, yet he was resolv’d it should be inscrib’d, because the Nonsense was in his Edition of Shakespear.

(d) When he sent his Homer to his Acquaintance for their Emendations, it was written on the Back of the Letters of his Correspondents, whether of Business, Complement or Secrecy. A shameful Instance of Avarice and Treachery!

(e) Vide Notes on the new Dunciad.

(f) Goddess of Dullness.

(g) He writ a vile Lampoon on Mr. Addison, and then in a Preface owns, he deserves Respect from every Lover of Learning.

(h) Vide Spencer’s Fate of the Butterfly.

(i) Vide a Poem on Taste.

(k) Vide Cibber’s Letter to Pope.

The Augustan Reprint
Society

WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles

PUBLICATIONS IN PRINT

Where available, links are included to Project Gutenberg e-texts.

1948-1949

16. Nevil Payne, Fatal Jealousy (1673).

17. Nicholas Rowe, Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespeare (1709).

18. “Of Genius,” in The Occasional Paper, Vol. III, No. 10 (1719); and Aaron Hill’s Preface to The Creation (1720).

1949-1950

22. Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and two Rambler papers (1750). 

23. John Dryden, His Majesties Declaration Defended (1681).

1950-1951

26. Charles Macklin, The Man of the World (1792).

1951-1952

31. Thomas Gray, An Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard (1751); and The Eton College Manuscript.

1952-1953

41. Bernard Mandeville, A Letter to Dion (1732).

1954-1955

49. Two St. Cecilia’s Day Sermons (1696, 1697).

52. Pappity Stampoy, A Collection of Scotch Proverbs (1663).

1958-1959

75. John Joyne, A Journal (1679).

76. André Dacier, Preface to Aristotle’s Art of Poetry (1705).

1959-1960

80. [P. Whalley], An Essay on the Manner of Writing History (1746).

83. Sawney and Colley (1742) and other Pope Pamphlets.

84. Richard Savage, An Author to be lett (1729).

1960-1961

85-6. Essays on the Theatre from Eighteenth-Century Periodicals.

90. Henry Needler, Works (1728).

1961-1962

93. John Norris, Cursory Reflections Upon a Book Call’d, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).

94. An. Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653).

95. An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding (1751).

96. Hanoverian Ballads.

1962-1963

97. Myles Davies, Selections from Athenae Britannicae (1716-1719).

98. Select Hymns Taken Out of Mr. Herbert’s Temple (1697).

99. Thomas Augustine Arne, Artaxerxes (1761).

100. Simon Patrick, A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude Men (1662).

101-2. Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762).

1963-1964

103. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript.

104. Thomas D’Urfey, Wonders in the Sun, or, the Kingdom of the Birds (1706).

105. Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn (1725).

106. Daniel Defoe, A Brief History of the Poor Palatine Refugees (1709).

107-8. John Oldmixon, An Essay on Criticism (1728).

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library:
University of California, Los Angeles

The Augustan Reprint Society

GENERAL EDITORS

Earl Miner
University of California, Los Angeles

Maximillian E. Novak
University of California, Los Angeles

Lawrence Clark Powell
Wm. Andrews Clark Memorial Library

Corresponding Secretary: Mrs. Edna C. Davis, Wm. Andrews Clark Memorial Library

The Society’s purpose is to publish reprints (usually facsimile reproductions) of rare seventeenth and eighteenth century works. All income of the Society is devoted to defraying costs of publication and mailing.

Correspondence concerning subscriptions in the United States and Canada should be addressed to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2205 West Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. Correspondence concerning editorial matters may be addressed to any of the general editors. The membership fee is $5.00 a year for subscribers in the United States and Canada and 30/- for subscribers in Great Britain and Europe. British and European subscribers should address B. H. Blackwell, Broad Street, Oxford, England. Copies of back issues in print may be obtained from the Corresponding Secretary.

PUBLICATIONS FOR 1964-1965

John Tutchin, Selected Poems (1685-1700). Introduction by Spiro Peterson.

Sir William Temple, An Essay upon the Original and Nature of Government (1680). Introduction by Robert C. Steensma.

T. R., An Essay Concerning Critical and Curious Learning (1698). Introduction by Curt A. Zimansky.

Anonymous, Political Justice. A Poem (1736). Introduction by Burton R. Pollin and John W. Wilkes.

Two Poems Against Pope: Leonard Welsted, One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope (1730); Anonymous, The Blatant Beast (1740). Introduction by Joseph V. Guerinot.

Robert Dodsley, An Essay on Fable (1764). Introduction by Jeanne K. Welcher and Richard Dircks.

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