“See in the circle next, Eliza plac’d;
  Two babes of love close clinging to her waste;
  Fair as before her works she stands confess’d
  In flow’r’d brocade by bounteous Kirkall dress’d,
  Pearls on her neck, and roses in her hair,
  And her fore-buttocks to the navel bare."[7]

The Goddess of Dullness offers “yon Juno of majestic size” as the chief prize in the booksellers’ games.  “Chetwood and Curll accept this glorious strife,” the latter, as always, wins the obscene contest, “and the pleas’d dame soft-smiling leads away.”  Nearly all of this account is impudent slander, but Mr. Pope’s imputations may have had enough truth in them to sting.  His description of Eliza is a savage caricature of her portrait by Kirkall prefixed to the first edition of her collected novels, plays, and poems (1724).[8] Curll’s “Key to the Dunciad,” quoted with evident relish by Pope in the Variorum notes, recorded on the authority of contemporary scandal that the “two babes of love” were the offspring of a poet[9] and a bookseller.  This bit of libel meant no more than that Mrs. Haywood’s relations with Savage and other minor writers had been injudiciously unconventional.  As for the booksellers, Curll had not been professionally connected with the authoress before the publication of “The Dunciad,” and the part he played in the games may be regarded as due entirely to Pope’s malice.  W. R. Chetwood was indeed the first publisher of Eliza’s effusions, but his name was even more strongly associated with the prize which actually fell to his lot.[10] In 1735 Chapman was substituted for Chetwood, and in the last revision Thomas Osborne, then the object of Pope’s private antipathy, gained a permanent place as Curll’s opponent.  Taken all in all, the chief virulence of the abuse was directed more against the booksellers than against Mrs. Haywood.

The second mention of Eliza was also in connection with Corinna in a passage now canceled.

  “See next two slip-shod Muses traipse along,
  In lofty madness meditating song,
  With tresses staring from poetic dreams
  And never wash’d, but in Castalia’s streams. 
  H——­ and I——­, glories of their race!"[11]

The first initial is written in the manuscript “Heywood,” and the second was doubtless intended for Mrs. Thomas.  But in this case the very catholicity of Pope’s malice defeated its own aim.  Originally the first line stood:  “See Pix and slip-shod W——­ [Wortley?] traipse along.”  In 1729 the place of the abused Corinna was given to Mrs. Centlivre, then five years dead, in retaliation for a verse satire called “The Catholic Poet, or Protestant Barnaby’s Sorrowful Lamentation:  a Ballad about Homer’s Iliad,” (1715).[12] Evidently abuse equally applicable to any one or more of five women writers could not be either specific or strikingly personal.  Nothing can be inferred from the lines except that Pope despised the whole race of female wits and bore particular malice against certain of their number.  Eliza Haywood sustained the largest share of anathema, for not only was she vilified in the poem, but “Haywood’s Novels” and the offensive “Court of Carimania” occupied a conspicuous position in the cargo of books carried by the “ass laden with authors” which formed the well-known vignette to the quarto edition of 1729.