Alexander Pope. He attacked Swift for Swift's enmity with Mainwaring, and his quarrel with Pope was probably similarly political. After The British Mercury folded, he launched another attack on Pope in a play called A New Rehearsal (1714) and in the body of Memoirs of the Life of William Wycherley (one of Pope's mentors) in 1718. Also in 1718, Gildon switched literary sides in Complete Art of Poetry, which he dedicated to the Duchess of Buckingham. In it, he reiterated Rymer's dicta of neo-classicism, which he had disapproved of earlier in his career, with Dryden. By 1719, Gildon was blind and in great poverty. Alexander Pope suggested, in his correspondence, that the blindness was due to syphilis. However, Gildon was in danger of starvation. In 1721, the Duchess of Buckingham gave him some relief. The same year, Robert Harley (patron and friend to Swift and Pope, earlier) gave him a 100-pound annuity as a "Royal Bounty." On 12 December 1723, a benefit of Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko was probably intended for him. Gildon is also involved with the biographies of women writers. He is assumed to be the biographer who masqueraded as "One of the Fair Sex" of Memoirs on the Life of Mrs. Behn which appears at the beginning of the first edition of The Histories and Novels or the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn (1696). Gildon wrote two sheets of Mrs. Manley's life under the title of The History of Rivella, Author of the Atalantis, probably in a negative light. Delarivier Manley persuaded the publisher Edmund Curll to defer the publication; soon Manley met and reconciled with Gildon to suppress his materials. Then Manley wrote her own version of history under strict time constraints and published it anonymously under the title The Adventures of Rivella (1714). He also published the pamphlet titled The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D––– De F , of London, Hosier (1719) just after The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. This humorous pamphlet includes the dialogue between Defoe and his characters Robinson Crusoe and Friday, in which Gildon exposes narrative inconsistencies in the novel. In the ending of this pamphlet, Crusoe and Friday made Defoe swallow his own big books as a punishment for his unfair depiction of characters, saying "if you will make such large Compositions, you must take them for your Pains". Daniel Defoe defends himself against Gildon's attacks in his preface