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Embalmed in The Dunciad, his name has attained a fame which no work of his own could have given it. Of Milton, however, he showed a true appreciation. Among his works are Rinaldo and Armida , Appius and Virginia , Reflections Critical and Satirical , and Three Letters on Shakespeare. He d. in straitened circumstances.

The story has no possible bearing either on Pope or on "The Dunciad," but was evidently seized by the shifty publisher as the nearest thing to hand when he came to patch up another pamphlet against Pope. Nothing could be more characteristic of Curll than his willingness to make capital out of his own disgrace.

Few now re-echo the praises which the critics of fifty years ago gave to the "Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady" and "Eloisa to Abelard;" nor do any but the habitual pilgrims of the by-ways of literature devote their serious attention to the different versions of the "Dunciad."

In these and the cognate "Moral Essays," which belong to his ripest period of production, Pope's unmatched mastery over heroics, perfected by the long probation of his Homeric translations, and his equally unrivalled powers of satire, let loose and emboldened by the brutalities of the "Dunciad," found their fitting field.

All Pope's nobler feelings of loyalty to his art revolted from the degradation of letters which he saw about him: and after an interval of hack-work in a translation of Homer he revealed his terrible power of sarcasm in his poem of the "Dunciad." The poem is disfigured by mere outbursts of personal spleen, and in its later form by attacks on men whose last fault was dulness.

I wish you also to remember these lines of Pope, and to make yourselves entirely masters of his system of ethics; because, putting Shakespeare aside as rather the world's than ours, I hold Pope to be the most perfect representative we have, since Chaucer, of the true English mind; and I think the Dunciad is the most absolutely chiselled and monumental work "exacted" in our country.

In The Dunciad, an epic of the dunces, he holds up to ridicule every person and writer who had offended him. These were in many cases scribblers who had no business with a pen; but in a few instances they were the best scholars of that day. A great deal of the poem is now very tiresome reading. Much of it is brutal.

This resolution he intimated with a yawn, resistless as that of the Goddess in the Dunciad, which was responsively echoed by his giant sons, as they dispersed in quest of the pastimes to which their minds severally inclined them Percie to discuss a pot of March beer with the steward in the buttery, Thorncliff to cut a pair of cudgels, and fix them in their wicker hilts, John to dress May-flies, Dickon to play at pitch and toss by himself, his right hand against his left, and Wilfred to bite his thumbs and hum himself into a slumber which should last till dinner-time, if possible.

It was on such a literary chaos as this that the one great poet of the time poured scorn in his "Dunciad." Pope was a child of the Revolution; for he was born in 1688, and he died at the moment when the spirit of his age was passing into larger and grander forms in 1744. But from all active contact with the world of his day he stood utterly apart.

The political scribblers the Arnalls, Gordons, Trenchards, Guthries, Ralphs, and Amhersts, whose names meet us in the notes to the Dunciad and in contemporary pamphlets and newspapers form another variety of the class. Their general character may be estimated from Johnson's classification of the "Scribbler for a Party" with the "Commissioner of Excise," as the "two lowest of all human beings."