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Updated: May 19, 2025
With an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time. Cibber, soon to be scornfully chosen by Pope as dunce-hero of the Dunciad, had, for the past six years, been pilloried by Fielding; and, not unmindful of these onslaughts, he inserted in his new work a virulent attack on the late manager of the New Theatre in the Haymarket. The tenor of Pasquin was here grossly misrepresented.
Though he condescended to commend Cibber once, he mentioned him afterwards contemptuously in one of his satires, and again in his "Epistle to Arbuthnot," and in the fourth book of the "Dunciad" attacked him with acrimony, to which the provocation is not easily discoverable.
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.
So long as that was done, that labour would, I believe, seem to him the pleasanter which required the less thought. Nathan Bailey published his English Dictionary in 1721. 'Woolston, the scourge of scripture, mark with awe! And mighty Jacob, blunderbuss of law. The Dunciad, first ed., bk. iii. l. 149. Giles Jacob published a Law Dictionary in 1729. Ante, p. 393. A writer in the Gent.
Poet, b. at Borderstown, New Jersey, was successively a lawyer, a soldier, and a journalist, in which last capacity he ed. Critic and dramatist, belonged to a Roman Catholic family, and was an unsuccessful playwright, a literary hack, and a critic of little acumen or discrimination. He attacked Pope as "Sawny Dapper," and was in return embalmed in The Dunciad. He also wrote a Life of Defoe.
Certainly, no one of the Laureates, Cibber excepted, was so mercilessly lampooned. What Cibber suffered from the "Dunciad" Shadwell suffered from "MacFlecknoe." Incited by Dryden's example, the poets showered their missiles at him, and so perseveringly as to render him a traditional butt of satire for two or three generations. Thus Prior:
Haywood's contribution was probably on her part unintentional, and was due entirely to the activity of the same infamous bookseller, who was among the first to get his replies and counter-slanders into print. The "Key to the Dunciad" already mentioned ran through three editions in competition with an authorized key.
Accordingly, when he came forward in gala-dress as a philosopher, he assumed the serene air of one upon whom all such idle distinctions as rich and poor were literally thrown away. But watch him: follow his steps for a few minutes, and the deep realities of his nature will unmask themselves. For example, in the first book of the 'Dunciad' he has occasion to mention Dennis:
Elsewhere in Pope the accomplishment is too often rhetorical, though The Rape of the Lock is as delicate in artifice as a French fairy-tale, the Dunciad an amusing assault of a major Lilliputian on minor Lilliputians, and the Essay on Criticism what a regiment of witty lines to be written by a youth of twenty or twenty-one! much nearer being a great essay in verse than is generally admitted nowadays.
The papers signed C. and L. are by far the most numerous, the majority of the remainder being distinguished by two stars, or the signature "Lilbourne." These are understood to have been from the pen of James Ralph, whose poem of Night gave rise to a stinging couplet in the Dunciad, but who was nevertheless a man of parts, and an industrious writer.
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