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Harte’s reply to those who believed Pope had wasted his talent in attacking “the Refuse of the Town” centers in the stanza beginning on p. 24 but can be found elsewhere as well. Literary “Refuse,” he realized, could not safely be ignored, for he at least came close to understanding that it was “the metaphor by which bigger deteriorations,” social and moral, “are revealed” (Williams, p. 14).

… Rules, and Truth, and Order, Dunces strike;
Of Arts, and Virtues, enemies alike. (p. 24)

Ultimately, then, Harte seemed aware that the dunces pose a colossal threat, a threat which warrants Pope’s numerous echoes of Paradise Lost. Harte’s Essay, in fact, contains several echoes of the same poem. Though, like most of Pope’s, these Miltonic echoes are given a comic turn which indicates a wide gap between the real satanic host and its London auxiliary, there is little doubt that Harte grasped the underlying seriousness of his mentor’s analogies and his own.

* * * * *

A few words remain to be said about Boileau’s Discourse of Satires Arraigning Persons by Name, which so far as I know appeared with all early printings of Harte’s Essay.

The Discourse was first published in 1668, with the separately printed edition of Boileau’s ninth satire; in the same year it was included in a collected edition of the satires. It was occasioned, evidently, by a critic’s complaint that the modern satirist, departing from ancient practice, “offers insults to individuals.”[24]

The only English translation of the Discourse that I have discovered before 1730 appears in volume two (1711) of a three-volume translation of Boileau’s works. This, however, is not the same translation as the one accompanying Harte’s Essay ; it is noticeably less fluent and lacks (as does the French) the subtitle “arraigning persons by name.”

The 1730 translation is faithful to the original, and the subtitle calls attention to the aptness of the Discourse as a defense of Pope’s satiric practice.[25] It is so apt, indeed, that one could almost suspect Pope himself of making the translation and submitting it to Harte or his publisher. Pope had already invoked Boileau’s name and precedent in the letter from “William Cleland”; nothing could be more logical than for Pope to turn the esteemed Boileau’s self-justification to his own ends.

Cornell College

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

[1] Robert W. Rogers, The Major Satires of Alexander Pope, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XL (Urbana, 1955), p. 140, dates the Essay January 7-14, 1731, N. S., on the evidence of The Grub-Street Journal ; No. 484 of The London Evening-Post (Saturday, January 9, to Tuesday, January 12, 1731) advertises its publication for the following day.

[2] Rogers, p. 141. Thomas Park, Supplement to the British Poets (London, 1809), VIII, 21-36; Alexander Chalmers, The Works of the English Poets (London, 1810), XVI, 348-352; Robert Anderson, A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (London, 1794), IX, 825-982 .

[3] Pope’s “Dunciad”: A Study of Its Meaning (Baton Rouge, 1955), p. 54n.

[4] The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), II, 430 n., 497.

[5] George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904), II, 27.

[6] Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance, Yale Studies in English, CXLII (New Haven, 1959), pp. 55, 58, 62; Oscar James Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida” (San Marino, 1959), pp. 24-25, 27, 29-30.