The burlesque achieves its satirical power through an "incongruity between style and subject". More specifically, the burlesque that is mock epic, sometimes identified as high burlesque, exploits the discrepancy between the elevation of its style and the triviality of its subject. The technique of mockery through deflation in the mock epic's high burlesque has been a popular means with which to carry out socio-political satire, for it is a way, as C. E. Vulliamy once remarked, of "putting down the mighty". Such 'putting down' may occur in either the Horatian or Juvenalian modes, that is, it may be, at its roots, either good-naturedly tolerant or seriously condemnatory. Gilbert Highet's Anatomy of Satire distinguishes the Horatian burlesque from the Juvenalian according to a contrast between "optimist" and "misanthropist" outlooks respectively. Interestingly, Highet also suggests that the Juvenalian mode is peculiarly masculine, the form's predilection for contempt and derision being absent among "Women, … with their kind hearts", and, thus, "very few of them have ever written, or even enjoyed, satire". What happens, then, when women attempt the Juvenalian mock epic, when they assume the task of deflating, ridiculing, and judging, a task that is unfeminine not just because it requires 'unkindness' but because it implies moral supremacy? I propose to examine two little known mock epics by women of the Romantic age. Elizabeth Ryves's The Hastiniad (1785) is a pro-Whig burlesque in the manner of the notable Whig satirist John Wolcot, while Lady Anne Hamilton's The Epics of the Ton (1807) appeared as a defence of the Princess of Wales in the aftermath of the Delicate Investigation of 1806 into charges of adultery against the Princess. Not only are these poems little known examples of mock epic poetry of the Romantic age, the true gender of their authors has only recently been acknowledged. Significantly, neither of these poems has received any detailed literary criticism in recent discussions of female Romantic poets, although they yield no small insight into the age's perceptions of women. They raise questions of gender and genre, and reveal something of the clash between courtly culture and the cult of domesticity that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century. Finally, a look at a third mock epic, The Mousiad (1787), by the pseudonymous Polly Pindar, paying particular attention to its use of a female pseudonym, is intended to shed further light on the issue of gender as it relates to the genre of the mock epic in the Romantic age. The idea of the female mock epic poet raises a host of possibilities. First, it suggests that obstacles to adopting an authoritative position would have had to be overcome by any woman who attempted the mock epic. Certainly, both The Hastiniad (1785) and The Epics of the Ton (1807) were published anonymously. Indeed, Hamilton not only remained anonymous but subtly implied, in the second edition of her poem, that she was male. She plays up the issue of the poet's hidden identity in her preface. Acknowledging that "It is pleasing to know the name of an Author, and doubly gratifying to learn his private history", Hamilton pretends that her publisher has attempted to discover this name by procuring expert advice on "the styles of all men that have written, or that may write". Thus, Hamilton allows readers to take for granted that the poet is a man and to turn their attention instead to the question of just which man he may be. Such active concealment of gender would seem to confirm the idea that females were reluctant to assume openly the position of Juvenalian satirist, …