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Proceed, great days! till learning fly the shore,
Till birch shall blush with noble blood no more,
Till Thames see Eton's sons for ever play,
Till Westminster's whole year be holiday,
Till Isis' elders reel, their pupils sport,
And Alma mater lie dissolv'd in port?

REMARKS.

labours and outcries of a whole life could not over throw, was demolished by a single stroke of this gentleman's pen. This happened in the year 1798 Yet so great was his modesty, that he constantly prefixed to all the editions of it this motto: Nos hæc novimus esse nihil.

Ver. 332. And Pope's, ten years to comment and translate.] The author here plainly laments, that he was so long employed in translating and commenting. He began the Iliad in 1713, and finished it in 1719. The edition of Shakespeare (which he under took merely because nobody else would) took up near two years more in the drudgery of comparing impressions, rectifying the scenery, &c. and the translation of half the Odyssey employed him from that time to 1725.

Ver. 333. Proceed, great days! &c.] It may, per haps, seem incredible, that so great a revolution in learning as is here prophesied, should be brought about by such weak instruments as have been [hitherto] described in our poem: but do not thou, gentle reader, rest too secure in thy contempt of these instruments. Remember what the Dutch stories somewhere relate, that a great part of their provinces was once overflowed, by a small opening made in one of their dykes by a single water-rat.

However, that such is not seriously the judgement of the poet, but that he conceiveth better hopes from the diligence of our schools, from the regularity of our universities, the discernment of our great men, the accomplishments of our nobility,

'Enough! enough! the raptur'd monarch cries! And through the ivory gate the vision flies.

REMARKS.

340

the encouragement of our patrons, and the genius of our writers of all kinds (notwithstanding some few exceptions in each), may plainly be seen from his conclusion; where, causing all this vision to pass through the ivory gate, he expressly, in the language of poesy, declares all such imaginations to be wild, ungrounded, and fictitious. SCRIBL.

BOOK THE FOURTH.

ARGUMENT.

The poet being, in this book, to declare the com pletion of the prophecies mentioned at the end of the former, makes a new invocation; as the greater poets are wont, when some high and wor thy matter is to be sung. He shows the goddess coming in her majesty, to destroy order and science, and to substitute the kingdom of the dull upon earth. How she leads captive the sciences, and silences the muses; and what they be who succeed in their stead. All her children, by a wonderful attraction, are drawn about her; and bear along with them divers others, who promote her empire by connivance, weak resistance, or discouragement of arts; such as half wits, tasteless admirers, vain pretenders, the flatterers of dunces, or the patrons of them. All these crowd round her; one of them, offering to approach her, is driven back by a rival, but she commends and encourages both. The first who speak in form are the geniuses of the schools, who assure her of their care to advance her cause by confining youth to words, and keeping them out of the way of real knowledge. Their address, and her gracious an swer; with her charge to them and the universi. ties. The universities appear by their proper deputies, and assure her that the same method is

observed in the progress of education. The speech of Aristarchus on this subject. They are driven off by a band of young gentlemen returned from travel with their tutors; one of whom delivers to the goddess, in a polite oration, an account.of the whole conduct and fruits of their travels: presenting to her at the same time a young nobleman perfectly accomplished. She receives him graciously, and endues him with the happy quality of want of shame. She sees loitering about her a number of indolent persons abandoning all business and duty, and dying with laziness: to these approaches the antiquary Annius, entreating her to make them virtuosos, and assign them over to him: but Mummius, another antiquary, complaining of his fraudulent proceeding, she finds a me. thod to reconcile their difference. Then enter a troop of people fantastically adorned, offering her strange and exotic presents: amongst them, one stands forth and demands justice on another, who had deprived him of one of the greatest curiosities in nature; but he justifies himself so well, that the goddess gives them both her approbation. She recommends to them to find proper employment for the indolents before mentioned, in the study of butterflies, shells, birds-nests, moss, &c. but with particular caution, not to proceed beyond trifles, to any useful or extensive views of nature, or of the Author of nature. Against the last of these apprehensions, she is secured by a hearty address from the minute philosophers and free-thinkers, one of whom speaks in the name of the rest. The youth, thus instructed and principled, are delivered to her in a body, by the hands of Silenus; and then admitted to taste the cup of the Magus, her high priest, which causes a total oblivion of all obligations, divine, civil, mo. ral, or rational. To these, her adepts, she sends priests, attendants, and comforters, of various kinds; confers on them orders and degrees; and

then dismissing them with a speech, confirming to each his privileges, and telling what she expects from each, concludes with a yawn of extraordinary virtue: the progress and effects whereof on all orders of men, and the consummation of all, in the restoration of night and chaos, conclude the poem.

BOOK IV.

YET, yet a moment, one dim ray of light
Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night!
Of darkness visible so much be lent,

As half to show, half veil the deep intent.

REMARKS.

This Book may properly be distinguished from the former, by the name of the Greater Dunciad, not so, indeed, in size, but in subject; and so far contrary to the distinction anciently made of the Greater and Lesser Iliad. But much are they mistaken who imagine this work in anywise inferior to the former, or of any other hand than of our poet; of which I am much more certain than that the Iliad itself was the work of Solomon, or the Batrachomuomachia of Homer, as Barnes hath affirmed.

BENTL

Ver. 1, &c.] This is an invocation of much piety. The poet, willing to approve himself a genuine son, beginneth by showing (what is ever agreeable to Dulness) his high respect for antiquity and a great family, how dead or dark soever: next declareth his passion for explaining mysteries; and lastly his SCRIBL. impatience to be reunited to her.

Ver. 2. dread Chaos, and eternal Night!] Invoked, as the restoration of their empire is the action of the poem.

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