Heady, not strong, and foaming tho’ not full.

Unable to leave well enough alone, Welsted continued his attack on Pope with One Epistle and then again in January 1732 with Of Dulness and Scandal, which ran to three editions. The half-title of One Epistle had promised that it was to be continued, and the writer of the preface had said that he intended “in the preface to the next Epistle ... to state several Matters of Fact, in Contradiction to the Notes of the Dunciad” (p. viii). Of Dulness and Scandal, however, has no preface and is an independent attack. Its main charge is Pope’s ingratitude to the Duke of Chandos as shown in the Epistle to Burlington, a famous charge frequently to be repeated,[13] but it claims as well that a lady named Victoria died as a result of reading Pope’s Homer and attacks once more The Rape of the Lock and the First Psalm.

In February 1732 Welsted published his last attack on Pope, Of False Fame, in which he attacks Windsor Forest, The Rape of the Lock, Pope’s edition of Shakespeare, The Dunciad, and the Epistle to Burlington. Pope then mentioned him in the Epistle to Arbuthnot, at first in l. 49, although he altered this to “Pitholeon,” and then in l. 375, where most twentieth-century college students first meet his name.

The charges in One Epistle are unusually comprehensive, but almost none of them is original. To help the reader to evaluate the more important, the following notes may be helpful. The denial in the preface of Pope’s statement that no one is attacked in The Dunciad “who had not before, either in Print or private Conversation, endeavour’d something to his Disadvantage” (p. v) is a reference to The Dunciad, p. 203, where, however, conversation is not mentioned. This sentence of Pope’s annoyed many of the Dunces.[14] What the preface says about Swift and Arbuthnot and the Peri Bathous (p. vii) may well be true.[15] Welsted’s charge that Pope wrote the Prologue to Cato and then “the Play decried” (p. 12) is simply Dennis’s old charge first made in A True Character of Mr. Pope (1716) and repeated in Remarks Upon ... the Dunciad (1729) that Pope had teased Lintot into publishing Dennis’s attack on Cato. The charge rests only on Dennis’s authority.[16] The obscenity of The Rape of the Lock was an old story.[17] So was the notorious First Psalm.[18] Welsted’s attacks on the Pastorals, the Homer, the Peri Bathous, and The Dunciad are simply the commonplaces of Popiana. The charge that he libeled Addison only after the great man’s death is also familiar[19] (Welsted seems to have been the first, though, to mention the libel on Lady Mary) and long since disproved by Sherburn and Ault. That Pope was a plagiarist is an idea that turns up constantly.[20]

Welsted’s other charges are more interesting. He seems to be the only Dunce who objected (p. 12) to Pope’s mentioning Bishop Hoadly in The Dunciad A II.368. It may just possibly be true that Gildon was dismissed by Buckingham because of Gildon’s dislike of Pope (p. 22).[21]

The most curious of the charges is that Pope,

... from the Skies, propitious to the Fair,

Brought down Caecilia, and sent Cloris there. (p. 11)

Welsted apparently means that Pope debased St. Cecilia in his Ode for Musick on St. Cecilia’s Day and glorified a suicide in his Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. He is not saying, as did The Life of the late Celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn (1721), that the heroine of the Elegy died of her unrequited love for Pope. Pope’s note to l. 375 of the Epistle to Arbuthnot accusing Welsted of having “had the Impudence to tell in print, that Mr. P. had occasion’d a Lady’s death, and to name a person he never heard of” refers not to Cloris but to Victoria in Welsted’s Of Dulness and Scandal who died from reading Pope’s Illiad.[22]

The Grub-Street Journal for 21 May 1730 invited “any Person of Credit and Character to stand forth and attest any of the following Facts....”