this particular controversy seemed to burn itself out, although an anonymous poem entitled _The Art of Poetry_, published on 17 March 1741, contains a long attack on _Are these things so?_. This confused battle is most easily summarized by saying that four separate pamphlets (not counting second and third editions) were published which attacked Walpole, and five which defended him. The poems attacking Walpole are far more poetically versatile than those defending him and it is the two most interesting of these attacks that are reproduced here. Taken together, this series of nine pamphlets forms a separate battle within that much larger and continuing war waged by Lord Bolingbroke and the various supporters of the Patriot Opposition against Sir Robert Walpole and the defenders of his Whig Ministry. From the first publication of _The Craftsman_ on 5 December 1726 to the final resignation of the "Great Man" on 11 February 1742 it is probably true to say that no English politician has ever been so continuously and so virulently attacked by so eminent an assemblage of literary persons. Gay, Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, Chesterfield, Lyttleton, Thomson, Fielding, and Johnson each entered the fray at various stages. The fact that Walpole rode out these attacks for so long is more of a comment on the disorganized nature of the opposition politically and on the astute manoeuvring of Walpole himself, than on the ineffectiveness of the attacks. During the protracted span of this campaign there were only two periods during which the supporters of the Patriot cause had any real chance of toppling Walpole. The first came in 1733 when sustained opposition forced Walpole to drop his proposed Excise Scheme, while the second occurred five years later in 1738 and sprang from a new deterioration in Anglo-Spanish relations. Although Walpole did not finally resign until 11 February 1742 his fall from power was a direct result of this deterioration. His position in the House of Commons, and in the country at large, was never as assured in the last four years of his "reign" as it had been in the first seventeen.