ount in employing them, or the men themselves, when
discovered, would want courage to proceed in so unlawful an occupation.
This it was that gave birth to the 'Dunciad,' and he thought it a
happiness, that by the late flood of slander on himself, he had acquired
such a peculiar right over their names as was necessary to this
design."[1] But gentlemanly reproof and delicate satire would be wasted
on "libellers and common nuisances." They must be met upon their own
ground and overwhelmed with filth. "Thus the politest men are obliged
sometimes to swear when they have to do with porters and
oyster-wenches." Moreover, those unexceptionable models, Homer, Virgil,
and Dryden had all admitted certain nasty expressions, and in comparison
with them "our author ... tosses about his dung with an air of
majesty."[2] In the episode devoted to the "authoress of those most
scandalous books called the Court of Carimania, and the new Utopia,"
remarks the annotator of "The Dunciad, Variorum," "is exposed, in the
most contemptuous manner, the profligate licentiousness of those
shameless scribblers (for the most part of that sex, which ought least
to be capable of such malice or impudence) who in libellous Memoirs and
Novels, reveal the faults and misfortunes of both sexes, to the ruin of
public fame, or disturbance of private happiness. Our good poet (by the
whole cast of his work being obliged not to take off the irony) where he
could not show his indignation, hath shewn his contempt, as much as
possible; having here drawn as vile a picture as could be represented in
the colours of Epic poesy."[3] On these grounds Pope justified the
coarseness of his allusions to Mrs. Thomas (Corinna) and Eliza Haywood.
But a statement of high moral purpose from the author of "The Dunciad"
was almost inevitably the stalking-horse of an unworthy action. Mr.
Pope's reasons, real and professed, for giving Mrs. Haywood a
particularly obnoxious place in his epic of dullness afford a curious
illustration of his unmatched capacity ostensibly to chastise the vices
of the age, while in fact hitting an opponent below the belt.

The scourge of dunces had, as we have seen, a legitimate cause to resent
the licentious attack upon certain court ladies, especially his friend
Mrs. Howard, in a scandalous fiction of which Eliza Haywood was the
reputed author. Besides she had allied herself with Bond, Defoe, and
other inelegant pretenders in the domain of letters, and was k