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;