ABSTRACT
Once Alexander Pope had begun to write An Essay on Man he stood back from the literary war he had provoked with the Dunciad. His foes continued to snipe away in poems and pamphlets but, if and when, Alexander Pope returned their fire, he did so indirectly via items he wrote, or got his friends to write, in the Grub Street Journal, a new Tory periodical which started up in January 1730. By 1730 Alexander Pope was on good terms with Walpole, the Court and a cross section of the aristocracy. Alexander Pope had not played an active part in the debate over who should be Laureate. An uproar greeted the Epistle to Burlington, which not only took Alexander Pope by surprise but was disturbing because he found himself on a new battlefield, no longer Grub Street but the Court and drawing rooms of St James's.
