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Pope, by the profits of its publication, saved his library, wherein unpawned much learned lumber lay." shows that the two victims of Pope's most bitter satire felt a sort of companionship in misfortune. But there is no evidence to show that Eliza took any part in the War of the Dunces. But that the immortal infamy heaped upon her by "The Dunciad" injured her prospects cannot be doubted.
The Duc de Rohan used to say that Louis XIII. was jealous of his own authority because he was ignorant of its full extent, for the Marechal d'Ancrel and M. de Luynes were mere dunces, incapable of informing him. Cardinal de Richelieu, who succeeded them, collected all the wicked designs and blunders of the two last centuries to serve his grand purpose.
There is an idle tradition that he was directed to prepare a letter to the King, that he could not satisfy himself as to the style of this composition, and that the Lords Justices called in a clerk who at once did what was wanted. It is not strange that a story so flattering to mediocrity should be popular; and we are sorry to deprive dunces of their consolation. But the truth must be told.
With twelve millions of our workers on the verge of famine, with rich fools and richer rogues lording it over nations of untaught and half-fed dupes and drudges. Holiness! With a recognised establishment of manufactured paupers, cripples, criminals, idlers, dunces, and harlots. Holiness!
His pride may prompt him to deny, but in honesty and fairness he must admit, that the established system of education is radically vicious; that his attainments are meagre and superficial; that his knowledge of the world is selfishness and cunning; and that, to rise above the herd of slaves and dunces, he must give himself a second and widely different education; more liberal, comprehensive, and practical.
This prison was what every prison in the English provinces will be in five years' time a well-ordered community, an epitome of the world at large, for which a prison is to prepare men, not unfit them as frenzied dunces would do; it was also a self-sustaining community, like the world.
He finally graduated as B.A. without honours, afterwards recording his indifference to academic distinction in the well-known lines: Of College labours, of the Lecturer's room, All studded round, as thick as chairs could stand, With loyal students faithful to their books, Half-and-half idlers, hardy recusants, And honest dunces of important days, Examinations, when the man was weighed As in a balance!
But what I am quite sure of is that its perusal was a source of great comfort and encouragement to me in the midst of our own struggle; because it assured me, as I compared Raglan's experience with ours, that we had not gone so far astray in learning our lesson, and were not so completely on the dunces' bench, as I had been disposed to fear.
But this is what the dunces are the last people to realize: indeed, "every man is of importance to himself, and therefore, in his own opinion, to others"; so the victim is the first to "publish injuries or misfortunes which had never been known unless related by himself, and at which those that hear them will only laugh; for no man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity."
For instance, did he really think that the Revue des Deux Mondes, an organ of "dukes, dunces, and dévotes," as it used to be called even in those days by the wicked knowing ones, a nursing mother of Academies certainly, and a most respectable periodical in all ways that this good Revue actually "had for its main function to understand and utter the best that is known and thought in the world," absolutely existed as an organ for "the free play of mind"? I should be disposed to think that the truer explanation of such things is that they were neither quite paradoxes nor quite paralogisms; but the offspring of an innocent willingness to believe what he wished, and of an almost equally innocent desire to provoke the adversary.
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