(at this time Sir Richard Blackmore) had published his Prince Arthur in 1695, and followed it up in 1697 by King Arthur, so that the point of the satire seems to lie in pretending that his second epic was a counterfeit. Blackmore afterwards made a bitter attack on the Tale of a Tub in his Essays (1716). But the reference to Blackmore in the Battle of the Books is not altogether uncomplimentary (p. 220).