Note 1 — Front matter
Reading edition
Pope to Bethel, 9 June 1730, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), III, 114.
2. Robert W. Rogers, The Major Satires of Alexander Pope (Urbana, 1955), p. 139. The two epistles of the title are Edward Young’s Two Epistles To Mr. Pope which had appeared in January 1730 and which praised Pope warmly. See One Epistle, p. 22.
3. The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, General Editor, John Butt, 6 vols. (London, 1939-1961), W, 211-212. Citations from Pope’s poetry in my text are from this edition.
4. Savage in An Author To Be Lett (1729), which appeared nine days after The Dunciad A, says, “I have extracted curious Hints to assist Welsted in his new Satire against Pope, which was once (he told me) to have been christen’d Labeo. ’Tis yet an Embrio, and there are divers Opinions about the Birth of it” (pp. 5-6). He seems clearly to have been Pope’s informant about the unpublished Labeo. See Richard Savage, An Author To be Lett, ed. James Sutherland, The Augustan Reprint Society, Number 84 (Los Angeles, 1960), p. ii. For Labeo see Persious 1. 4.
5. Daniel Fineman, Leonard Welsted, Gentleman Poet of the Augustan Age (Philadelphia, 1950), p. 190.
6. Correspondence, III, 59-60 and n.
7. Ibid., III, 106, 114. Dr. Arbuthnot, for the abuse he received in the poem, is reported to have flogged Moore Smythe (ibid., III, 106, n. 2, and 114, n. 1)
8. For a convenient summary of these references from 14 May to 23 July 1730 see James T. Hillhouse, The Grub-Street Journal (Durham, N.C., 1928), pp. 58-63. On 14 May 1730 it printed a letter supposedly by Moore Smythe in which he says of himself and his collaborators in One Epistle, “we ... call our selves Gentlemen which sure no body will deny, because one of is the Son of an Alehouse-keeper Thoms Cooke?, one the Son of a Foot-man, and one the Son of a ____.”
9. Fineman, p. 192.
10. Hillhouse, p. 64, n. 19.
11. David Mallet, Of Verbal Criticism (1733), p. 14. He added the note: “See a Poem published some time ago under that title, said to be the production of several ingenious and prolific heads; One contributing a simile, Another a character, and a certain Gentleman four shrewd lines wholly made up of Asterisks.”
12. See also Pope’s quotation from the “Dissertation” in The Dunciad A, p. 26.
13. For the Duke’s protestation against Welsted’s attack see George Sherburn, “‘Timon’s Villa’ and Cannons,” The Huntington Library Bulletin, VIII (1935), 140.
14. See, for example, Giles Jacob’s The Mirrour (1733), p. 6, although oddly enough Jacob (like Welsted) had begun the quarrel with his The Rape of the Smock (1717).
15. Twickenham, V. xvi. For The Progress of Dulness (pp. vi-vii) see ibid. xvii., n. 2; xxi-xxii.
16. See the full discussion in George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1934), pp. 105-106.
17. See Twickenham, II. 90, n. 1.
18. See, inter alia, A Letter from Sir J____ B____ to Mr. P____ (1716), p. 1; The Female Dunciad (1728), p. 4; and the careful discussion in Norman Ault, New Light on Pope (London, 1949), pp. 156-162.
19. See Cythereia (1723), pp. 92-93; Characters of The Times (1728), p. 29.
20. See Eliza Haywood, Memoirs Of The Court of Lilliput (1727), p. 17; A Collection Of Several Curious Pieces (1728), pp. 4, 6; James Ralph, Sawney (1728), pp. 5-8.
21. See Twickenham, V. 440-441.
22. See Daniel A. Fineman, “The Case of the Lady ‘Killed’ by Alexander Pope,” MLO, XII (1951), 137-149. Sutherland in his continuation of Pope’s note confuses the two charges.
23. For the debate over the Latin inscription see Twickenham, VI. 395-396, and The Gentleman’s Magazine, XI, 105.
24. See Pope’s note to l. 319 of the Epistle to Arbuthnot.
25. Dennis, as far back as 1716, in A True Character of Mr. Pope, pp. 10-11, had used the metaphor. So had An Epistle To the Egregious Mr. Pope (1734), pp. 15-16.