ive, 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 Sher