That the late Duke of Buckingham paid any Pension to Charles Gildon, which he took from him since his acquaintance with Mr. P.

That the present Archbishop of Canterbury hath past any Censure on Mr. P.

That Mr. F[ento]n and he ever were at distance on variance with each other.

That the Rev. Mr. Br[oo]me ever asserted or complain’d, he was not gratify’d with a competent Sum for his Share in the Odyssey; nay did not own that he thought himself highly paid.

That Mr. Addison or any other but Mr. P. writ, or alter’d, one line of the Prologue to Cato.

Who will name any young Writer, allow’d to have Merit, that hath been personally discourag’d by him; or who hath not received either actual Services, or amicable Treatment from him?

III.

The Blatant Beast appeared in December 1742, according to The London Magazine; its authorship remains unknown. Pope had published The New Dunciad in March 1742, and Cibber had published his famous A Letter From Mr. Cibber, To Mr. Pope in July. Five other pamphlets attacking Pope appeared in August, obviously capitalizing on the Cibber attack.

The Blatant Beast is pro-Cibber, of course, but it criticizes specifically only a few lines from The New Dunciad. The writer’s chief interest is in a general attack. The criticisms of the Shakespeare, of Three Hours and the Epistle to Burlington, and of Pope’s plagiarism are perfectly conventional. More interesting is the accusation (p. 6) that Pope wrote (as, of course, he did) his Homer on the backs of personal letters. Also interesting is the reference to Pope’s inscription on the Shakespeare monument in Westminster Abbey (p. 5). Pope was, with several others, responsible for the Latin inscription; it does not seem that he had anything to do with the lines from The Tempest IV. i. 152-156, which were added several months later. These lines are given in the first note to The Dunciad B I. and, in slightly different form, in The Gentleman’s Magazine, XI, 276. The last line reads, “Leave not a wreck behind.” Pope’s version of the lines in both his 1725 and 1728 editions of Shakespeare (Griffith 149 and 210) does not commit the errors of the inscription and prints, “Leave not a rack behind!”[23] The bantering note about the monument which begins The Dunciad B may have been prompted by this passage in The Blatant Beast as well as by the comment of Theobald which Sutherland refers to.

But it is the shrill personal abuse of Pope’s deformity and moral obliquity,