ct 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, i