It would be misleading to suggest a narrow definition of Pope’s Dunces. Some were critics of worth, such as Dennis and Gildon; some were not despicable minor poets, such as Welsted and Cooke. But if we leave these aside, as well as his aristocratic enemies, Lady Mary and Lord Hervey, some valid generalizations emerge. The very persistency of the Dunces’ attacks on Pope (I have located over one hundred and fifty published during Pope’s lifetime) and the large number of anonymous pamphlets that we cannot definitely ascribe to anyone Pope ever mentioned suggest that the Battle of the Dunces is best seen economically and sociologically. They were, for the most part, hack-writers, who were attempting the commercialization of literature that Pope recognized and deplored. Since they were authors to be let, they were neither fastidious about standards of taste nor filled with reverence for the Word. Yet Pope had succeeded in doing what they could not do--he had made himself a moderately rich man entirely by writing poetry. No theme recurs more insistently and suggestively in Popiana than Pope’s wealth. Faced with the nasty fact that if one wrote well enough, there was a public to support one, they could only accuse Pope monotonously of venality and avarice. In all of this there is a strong element of class antagonism. The Dunces were middle-class and Whiggish, their spirit capitalist. Pope, though middle-class by birth, was aristocratic in his sympathies, Tory in a loose sense, and firmly anti-Walpole. Perhaps verse satire is essentially aristocratic. Perhaps wit is, too. Certainly they never seem at home in a middle-class society. Wit comes to savor of indecency and blasphemy; satire in its incessant defence of moral value and centers of order comes to seem the expression of an arrogant disdain and a disquieting unease. His poise and verbal brilliance and hieratic commitment to the venerable tradition of classical and Christian ethical thought set the Satirist coolly apart from the _profanum vulgus_. Had Pope never mentioned one of the Dunces, although they would have done so less frequently, they would still have cried out against him. II. _One Epistle To Mr. A. Pope, Occasion’d By Two Epistles Lately Published_ appeared, according to the _Daily Journal_, on 28 April 1730.[2] Pope’s mention of it in Appendix II to _The Dunciad A_, his “List of Books, Papers, and Verses, in which our Author was abused” which is our best guide to Popiana, is somewhat confusing and made more difficult because the first part dates from 1729, the second from 1735: “_Labeo_, A Paper of Verses written by Leonard Welsted. [1729 a-d], which after came into One Epistle, and was publish’d by James Moore. 4to. 1730. Another part of it came out in Welsted’s own name in 1731, under the just Title of _Dulness and Scandal_, fol. [1735a].”[3]