Many of these
inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope and others of
their more successful rivals called out Pope's _Dunciad_, or epic of the
dunces, by way of retaliation. The politics of the time were sordid, and
consisted mainly of an ignoble scramble for office. The Whigs were
fighting to maintain the Act of Succession in favor of the House of
Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the exiled
Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, John
Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle or even
personal honesty. The Church, too, was in a condition of spiritual
deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold, and given to political
favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were worldly in
their lives and immoral in their writings, and were practically
unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism appeared in the Deist
controversy. Numbers of men in high position were Deists; the Earl of
Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant friend, Henry St. John,
Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose political
writings had much influence upon his young French acquaintance,
Voltaire. Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there was little to show it
in his writings, and the underlying thought of his famous _Essay on Man_
was furnished him by Bolingbroke.
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