es 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 produ