The Morals blacken’d when the Writings scape;
The libel’d Person, and the pictur’d Shape
(Epistle to Arbuthnot, ll. 353-353)
which is most impressive. The writer shows a talent for invective, but there is a good deal of evidence that he was well-read in other Pope attacks. The phrase, Pope’s “Mountain Shoulders,” (p. 5) recalls Pope’s “Mountain Back” in The Difference Between Verbal and Practical Virtue, p. 5, published in August 1742. The image of the wasp (pp. 6, 10) had appeared in Hervey’s and Lady Mary’s Verses Address’d to the Imitator Of ... Horace (1733), p. 7,[24] as had the metaphor of Pope as Satan (pp. 5-6) with which The Blatant Beast opens.[25]
Pope had already been pictured as a mad dog (p. 7) in The Metamorphosis (1728), attributed by Pope to Smedley and one of the least pleasant of the pamphlets. Pope as Aesop’s toad bursting with spleen (p. 12) had been used in Codrus (1728), p. 12, attributed by Pope to Curll and Mrs. Thomas. Cibber’s prevention of Pope from peopling the isle with Calibans (p. 9) is a reference, of course, to Cibber’s famous anecdote about rescuing Pope in the bawdy-house; but in Mr. Taste, The Poetical Fop (1732) where Pope figures as the monkey-like poetaster Taste, the servant-maid who was to have married him is delighted the marriage is broken off, “for fear our children should have resembled Baboons, Ha, ha, ha!” (p. 73). Stern anti-sentimentalists sometimes point out that we react too squeamishly to the abuse of Pope’s deformity. I doubt it myself. The eighteenth century was probably a coarser and more outspoken age than ours, but scurrilous attacks on the physical appearance of distinguished poets do not otherwise seem to have been a prominent feature of the Augustan literary scene.
It is hoped that both these pamphlets will prove useful to those who have little first-hand knowledge of what his enemies said of Pope and will help to warn the novice of the fatal ease with which we can read “with but a Lust to mis-apply,/ Make Satire a Lampoon, and Fiction, Lye” (Epistle to Arbuthnot, ll. 301-302).
One Epistle was reprinted by John Nichols in his edition of The Works in Verse and Prose of Leonard Welsted (London, 1787). Nichols normalizes the text, spells out several names in full, and adds several unimportant notes. It is here reproduced from the copy in the Sterling Library, Yale University. The Blatant Beast has never been reprinted and is reproduced from the copy in the Huntington Library.
Hunter College
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1.] Pope to Bethel, 9 June 1730, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), III, 114.