Produced by David Starner, Dave Morgan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY JOHN TUTCHIN _SELECTED POEMS_ (1685-1700) _INTRODUCTION_ BY SPIRO PETERSON PUBLICATION NUMBER 110 WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES 1964 GENERAL EDITORS Earl R. Miner, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Maximillian E. Novak, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Lawrence Clark Powell, _Wm. Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ ADVISORY EDITORS John Butt, _University of Edinburgh_ James L. Clifford, _Columbia University_ Ralph Cohen, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Vinton A. Dearing, _University of California, Los Angeles_ Arthur Friedman, _University of Chicago_ Louis A. Landa, _Princeton University_ Samuel H. Monk, _University of Minnesota_ Everett T. Moore, _University of California, Los Angeles_ James Sutherland, _University College, London_ H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., _University of California, Los Angeles_ CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Edna C. Davis, _Clark Memorial Library_ INTRODUCTION When John Tutchin died on September 23, 1707, he had already created the image of himself which Alexander Pope has transmitted to posterity. There, in Book II of _The Dunciad_ (1728), the Whig journalist appears as one of two figures in a "shaggy Tap'stry": Earless on high, stood un-abash'd Defoe, And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge, below. Pope, in his variorum notes on the passage, identified Tutchin as the "author of some vile verses, and of a weekly paper call'd the _Observator_," and revived the fiction of his sentence "to be whipp'd thro' several towns in the west of _England_, upon which he petition'd King _James_ II. to be hanged." The "invective" against James II's memory, which Pope mentions, has now been identified in the Twickenham Edition as _The British Muse: or Tyranny Expos'd_ (1701).[1] By 1728, this was all the reputation that remained for Mr. John Tutchin, Gentleman--irascible journalist, pamphleteer, and writer of verses.