The year 1725 may be taken as the beginning of the third period of Pope's career, when he made his fame as a moralist and a satirist. Edward Young's satire, The Universal Passion, had just appeared, and been received with more enthusiasm than any thing published since Pope's own early successes. Swift was finishing Gulliver's Travels, and the survivors of the Scriblerus Club resumed their old amusement of parodying and otherwise ridicul ing bad writers, especially bad writers in the Whig interest ; four volumes of their Miscellanies in Prose and Verse were published from 1727 to 1732. According to Pope's own history of the Dunciad, an Heroic Poem in Three Books, which first appeared on May 28, 1728, the idea of it grew out of this. Among the Miscellanies was a "Treatise of the Bathos or the Art of Sinking in Poetry," which gave rise to a torrent of abusive falsehoods and scurrilities from those who thought themselves injured by it.
The Dunciad was Pope's answer to them, and among the most prominent objects of his satire were Lewis Theobald, Colley Cibber, John Dennis, Richard Bentley, Aaron Hill and Bernard Lintot, who, in spite of his former relations with Pope, was now classed with the piratical Edmund Curll. The book was published anonymously with the greatest precautions. When the success of the poem was assured, it was republished in 1729, and a copy was presented to the king by Sir Robert Walpole. Names took the place of initials, and a defence of the satire, written by Pope himself, but signed by his friend William Cleland, was printed as "A letter to the Publisher." Various indexes, notes and par ticulars of the attacks on Pope made by the different authors satirized were added. To avoid any danger of prosecution, the copyright was assigned to Lord Oxford, Lord Bathurst and Lord Burlington, whose position made them practically unassailable. The most unprovoked assault was on Richard Bentley, whom he satirized in the reconstruction and enlargement of the Dunciad made in the last years of his life at the instigation, it is said, of William Warburton. In the earlier editions the place of hero had been occupied by Lewis Theobald, who had ventured to criticize Pope's Shakespeare. In the edition which appeared in Pope's Works (1742), he was dethroned in favour of Colley Cibber; Warburton's name is attached to many new notes, and one of the preliminary dissertations by Ricardus Aristarchus on the hero of the poem seems to be by him.
The four epistles of the Essay on Man (1733) were also inti mately connected with passing controversies. The subject was suggested to him by Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, who had returned from exile in 1723 and was a fellow-member of the Scriblerus Club. Bolingbroke is said—and the statement is sup ported by the contents of his posthumous works—to have fur nished most of the arguments. In this didactic work, as in his Essay an Criticism, Pope put together on a sufficiently simple plan a series of happy sayings, separately elaborated, picking up the thoughts as he found them in miscellaneous reading and conversation and trying only to fit them with perfect expression. His readers were too dazzled by the verse to be severely critical of the sense. Pope himself had not comprehended the drift of the
arguments he had adopted from Bolingbroke, and was alarmed when he found that his poem was generally interpreted as an apology for the freethinkers. Warburton is said to have qualified its doctrines as "rank atheism," and asserted that it was put to gether from the "worst passages from the worst authors." The essay was soon translated into the chief European languages, and in 1737 its orthodoxy was assailed by a Swiss professor, Jean Pierre de Crousaz, in an Examen de l'essay de M. Pope sur l'homme. Warburton now saw fit to revise his opinion of Pope's abilities and principles—for what reason does not appear. In any case he now became as enthusiastic in his praise of Pope's ortho doxy and his genius as he had before been scornful, and pro ceeded to employ his unrivalled powers of sophistry in a defence of the orthodoxy of the conflicting and inconsequent positions adopted in the Essay on Man. Pope was wise enough to accept with all gratitude an ally who was so useful a friend and so dangerous an enemy, and from that time onward Warburton was the authorized commentator of his works.
The Essay on Man was to have formed part of a series of philosophic poems on a systematic plan. The other pieces were to treat of human reason, of the use of learning, wit, education and riches, of civil and ecclesiastical polity, of the character of women, etc. Of the ten epistles of the Moral Essays, the first four, written between 1731 and 1735, are connected with this scheme, which was never completed.
There was much bitter, and sometimes unjust, satire in the Moral Essays and the Imitations of Horace. In these epistles and satires, which appeared at intervals, Pope was often the mouthpiece of his political friends, who were all of them in opposition to Walpole, then at the height of his power, and Pope chose the objects of his attacks from among the minister's adherents. Epistle III., "Of the Use of Riches," addressed to Allen Bathurst, Lord Bathurst in 1732, is a direct attack on Walpole's methods of corruption and on his financial policy in general; and the two dialogues (1738) known as the "Epilogue to the Satires," professedly a defence of satire, form an eloquent attack on the court. Pope was attached to the prince of Wales's party and he did not forget to insinuate, what was indeed the truth, that the queen had refused the prince her pardon on her death-bed. The "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" contains a description of his personal attitude towards the Scriblerus and is made to serve as a "prologue to the satires." The gross and unpardonable insults bestowed on Lord Hervey and on Lady Mary Wortley Montague in the first satire "to Mr. Fortescue" provoked angry retaliation from both. The descriptions of Timon's ostentatious villa in Epistle IV., addressed to the earl of Burlington, was generally taken as a picture of Canons, the seat of John Brydges, duke of Chandos, one of Pope's patrons. Epistle II., addressed to Martha Blount, contained the picture of Atossa, which was taken to be a portrait of Sarah Jennings, duchess of Marlborough.