Like the last Gazette, or the last Address 1. When black Ambition stains a public Cause 2, 230 Not so, when diadem'd with rays divine, Touch'd with the Flame that breaks from Virtue's Shrine, Her Priestless Muse forbids the Good to die, And opes the Temple of Eternity. 235 * There, other Trophies deck the truly brave, * * wear, 240 And bark at Honour not conferr'd by Kings; 245 250 1 After v. 227 in the MS. 'Where's now the Star that lighted Charles to -With that which follow'd Julius to the skies. 2 When black Ambition, etc.] The cause of Cromwell in the civil war of England; (v. 229) of Louis XIV. in his conquest of the Low Countries. P. [Waller's Panegyric to my Lord Protector was written about 1654.] 3 Nor Boileau turn the Feather to a Star.] See his Ode on Namur; where (to use his own words) "il a fait un Astre de la Plume blanche que le Roy porte ordinairement à son Chapeau, et qui est en effet une espèce de Comète, fatale à nos ennemis." P. Anstis] The chief Herald at Arms. It is the custom, at the funeral of great peers, to Cast into the grave the broken staves and ensigns of honour. P. Stair] John Dalrymple, Earl of Stair, Knight of the Thistle; served in all the wars 255 under the Duke of Marlborough; and afterwards as Ambassador in France. P. [Bennet, who supplies the blanks in v. 239 by the names of Kent and Grafton has 'some notion that Lord Mordington kept a gaming-house.'] Hough and Digby] Dr John Hough, Bishop of Worcester, and the Lord Digby. The one an assertor of the Church of England in opposition to the false measures of King James II. The other as firmly attached to the cause of that King. Both acting out of principle, and equally men of honour and virtue. P. ? Ver. 255 in the MS. Quit, quit these themes, and write Essays on Man. This was the last poem of the kind printed by our author, with a resolution to publish no more; but to enter thus, in the most plain and solemn manner he could, a sort of PROTEST against that insuperable corruption and depravity of manners, which he had been so unhappy as to live to see. Could he have hoped to have amended any, he had continued those attacks; but bad men were grown so shameless and so powerful, that Ridicule was become as unsafe as it was ineffectual. The Poem raised him, as he knew it would, some enemies; but he had reason to be satisfied with the approbation of good men, and the testimony of his own conscience. P. THE DUNCIAD. [IT may fairly be doubted whether the mystification in which every step connected with the publication of the various editions of the Dunciad was intentionally involved by Pope, has not answered an end beyond that proposed to himself by the poet, and provided a tangle of literary difficulties, which no learned ingenuity will ever suffice entirely to unravel. In the second volume of Notes and Queries for 1854 will be found an animated and sustained controversy on the subject, which even the editorial summing-up leaves to a certain degree in suspenso. It is therefore necessary in the following Remarks to confine ourselves to such an enumeration of editions as will suffice to indicate the main history of the work. The earliest known edition of the Dunciad (in three Books), and in all probability the earliest actual edition, was published in May 1728. It bore the frontispiece of an Owl. The Edition with the notes Variorum and the Prolegomena of Martinus Scriblerus (accompanied by the Letter to the Publisher, infra, p. 355, signed William Cleland) appeared in 1729. It bore the vignette of an ass laden with a pile of books1, with an owl perched on the top of these. It contained nearly all the pieces with which the poem is surrounded in subsequent editions, though these were afterwards varied as to both length and arrangement. The New Dunciad, 'as it was found in the year 1741,' appeared in 1742; and this is the first edition of the Fourth Book. The edition forming the third volume of Dodsley's edition of Pope's Works, in which Colley Cibber was by mere 'proclamation' (see p. lv.) substituted as hero for Theobald, appeared in 1743; and in the same year was published an edition 'according to the complete copy found in the year 1742,' which contained Warburton's Dissertation under the name of Ricardus Áristarchus, on the Hero of the Poem, and an Advertisement by the same hand (for which see p. 360). It is uncertain what amount of influence should be ascribed to Swift upon the gradual growth of the original idea of the Dunciad. Without you,' Pope wrote to Swift, Nov. 12th, 1728, the poem had never been.' It cannot however be doubted that the original idea itself was Pope's own, except in so far as it was founded upon the supposed contents of the Margites ascribed to Homer (see note to p. 361), and upon Dryden's satire of MacFlecknoe. But MacFlecknoe (like Margites as it would seem) is only a Satire upon one dull poet; Pope from the first appears to have had a wider scheme; for in his correspondence with Bolingbroke and Swift the embryo poem is mentioned under the titles of 'Dulness,' or the 'Progress of Dulness. Mr Carruthers points out that the date of the action of the poem is 1720, when Sir George Thorold was Lord Mayor; and that this circumstance and the introduction of several dunces long dead 'seem to point to a period anterior to 1727' as the time when Pope commenced to work out his conception. In 1727, however, when Swift was in England, the main labour of the execution was accomplished; and to Swift, who had watched over its birth and influenced its character, the first complete edition (that of April 1729) was duly dedicated. The prolego [The works of Welsted, Ward, Dennis, Theobald, Oldmixon and others, and the Mist's Journal being labelled with their authors' names.] 2 [The Testimonies of Authors,' arguments and indices.] mena of Scriblerus and the notes Variorum were the work of several hands, and Swift (see Pope's letter to him of June 28th, 1728) was specially invited to exercise his wit in a favourite direction. The deception practised upon the public in this matter was an innocent fraud. But such will hardly be the judgment which must be passed on the pretence as to the authorship of the letter signed 'William Cleland.' This Cleland was a real personage, a Major in the Army and a friend of the poet's; but it is impossible to doubt the correctness of Mr Carruthers' conjecture, that at the most he re-cast 'in a somewhat freer and less author-like style' what the author had himself substantially dictated. The original hero of the Dunciad was Lewis Theobald. He had earned this eminence by a quarrel originating in Pope's edition of Shakspere, which had made its appearance in 1725. In the following year Theobald had published a pamphlet under the title of Shakspere Restored, or a Specimen of the many Errors committed as well as unamended by Mr Pope in his late edition of this Poet. Theobald (whose own edition of Shakspere was not published till 1733) was in the habit of contributing notes on passages of Shakspere to a weekly paper called Mist's Journal-crucifying Shakspere once a week,' according to a line omitted from the later editions of the Dunciad. He translated several Greek plays, and adapted Shakspere's Richard II. for the stage, besides producing several original pantomimes and palming off his tragedy of the Double Falsehood upon the world as a Shaksperian original. Upon the whole he constituted a very suitable hero for a Dunce-epic; and less injustice was done to him by the selection of his well-worn name for that office, than by Dryden to the worthy Flecknoe. Theobald accepted his castigation very goodhumouredly; but such was not the spirit in which the other petty writers sacrificed by Pope met their fate. An endless series of retaliations, or attempts at retaliation ensued, in which Dennis was not behind-hand, and which were published in a collective form by Smedley. Pope and his friends retorted by an ironical series of criticisms in the Grubstreet Journal, which lasted from 1730 to 1737; and concerning which see Introductory Memoir. Lady M. W. Montagu, who retorted upon the insult offered to her by a lampoon entitled a Pop upon Pope, appears to have remained unanswered. The Fourth Book of the Dunciad was not published till March 1742, when Pope was in the constant society and under the constant influence of Warburton. 'The encouragement,' writes Pope to Warburton on Dec. 28, 1742, 'you gave me to add the fourth Book first determined me to do so; and the approbation you seemed to give to it was what singly determined me to print it.' Colley Cibber, against whom Pope had borne a grudge ever since the mishaps which had attended his sole dramatic attempt, and who had recently succeeded to the Laureateship, was sarcastically alluded to in v. 20. He retorted by publishing a Letter which goaded Pope into sufficient resentment to induce him, in a new edition of the entire poem, to dethrone Theobald and place Cibber in his stead. To help the scheme, Warburton contributed the prefatory dissertation Ricardus Aristarchus of the Hero of the Poem and notes, to the new edition. Cibber replied by another epistle; but the change was made, and Cibber, not Theobald, remains the hero of the Dunciad. The above is the barest outline of the history of this immortal satire. Elsewhere must be read, by those interested in such matters, the whole narrative of the mystifications which preceded, accompanied, and followed, its publication—of the proclamation of the Ass-Dunciad as the only true edition, of the prefaces and introductions and excerpts and keys (Curll's Key will be found occasionally quoted in the notes) and commentaries, issued by Pope to increase the notoriety of his work. On no occasion was he so thoroughly in his glory, and his glory was a wasp's nest which he had himself agitated into uncontrollable fury. |