On 16 May 1738, Pope published One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight: A Dialogue Something Like Horace. Two months later he published its sequel One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight: Dialogue II. These two poems, known together, since The Works of Alexander Pope, Vol. II, Part II, 1740, as the Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogues I & II, constitute Pope's most ringing indictment of “that insuperable corruption and depravity of manners, which he had been so unhappy as to live to see” in Hanoverian England in the 1730s. The two poems continue the style of the Imitations of Horace, written during the previous five years, but, unlike them, are not based on any single Horatian origin

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Published 21 March 2002

Citation: Gordon, Ian. "Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogues I & II". The Literary Encyclopedia. 21 March 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5337, accessed 20 November 2009.]