Note 611 — CANTO THE ELEVENTH.
Reading edition
[See the Secret Memoirs and Manners of several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes, from the New Atalantis, 1709, a work in which the authoress, Mrs. Manley, satirizes the distinguished characters of her day. Warburton (Works of Pope, ed. 1751, i. 244) calls it "a famous book.... full of court and party scandal, and in a loose effeminacy of style and sentiment, which well suited the debauched taste of the better vulgar." Pope also alludes to it in the Rape of the Lock, iii. 165, 166—
"As long as Atalantis shall be read, Or the small pillow grace a lady's bed."
And Swift, in his ballad on "Corinna" (stanza 8)—
"Her common-place book all gallant is, Of scandal now a cornucopia, She pours it out in Atalantis, Or memoirs of the New Utopia."
Works, 1824, xii. 302.]