describes some critics of a witless nature. In his various Moral Epistles, Pope likewise constructs characters of contemporary authors of poor taste. The general structure owes its origins to the communal project of the Scriblerians and other similar works such as the mock-heroic MacFlecknoe by John Dryden and Pope's own The Rape of the Lock. The Scriblerian club most consistently comprised Jonathan Swift, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Robert Harley, and Thomas Parnell. The group met during the spring and summer of 1714. One group project was to write a satire of contemporary abuses in learning of all sorts, in which the authors would combine their efforts to write the biography of the group's fictional founder, Martin Scriblerus, through whose writings they would accomplish their satirical aims. The resulting The Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus contained a number of parodies of the most lavish mistakes in scholarship. For the mock-heroic structure of the Dunciad itself, however, the idea seems to have come most clearly from MacFlecknoe. MacFlecknoe is a poem celebrating the apotheosis of Thomas Shadwell, whom Dryden nominates as the dullest poet of the age. Shadwell is the spiritual son of Flecknoe, an obscure Irish poet of low fame, and he takes his place as the favourite of the goddess Dulness. Pope takes this idea of the personified goddess of Dulness being at war with reason, darkness at war with light, and extends it to a full Aeneid parody. His poem celebrates a war, rather than a mere victory, and a process of ignorance, and Pope picks, as his champions of all things insipid, Lewis Theobald (1728 and 1732) and Colley Cibber (1742). Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, who wrote a biting commentary on Pope's Essay on Man, found that Pope had "reserved a place for him in the Dunciad". The three-book Dunciad A and the Dunciad Variorum Pope first published The Dunciad in 1728 in three books, with Lewis Theobald as its "hero". The poem was not signed, and he used only initials in the text to refer to the various Dunces in the kingdom of Dulness. However, "Keys" immediately came out to identify the figures mentioned in the text, and an Irish pirate edition was printed that filled in the names (sometimes inaccurately). Additionally, the men attacked by Pope also wrote angry denunciations of the poem, attacking Pope's poetry and person. Pope endured attacks from, among others, George Duckett, Thomas Burnet,