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He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when the Dunciad was written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore.
The Miscellanies, the joint work of Pope and Swift, were pub. in 1727-28, and drew down upon the authors a storm of angry comment, which in turn led to the production of The Dunciad, first pub. in 1728, and again with new matter in 1729, an additional book the fourth being added in 1742.
'For thee we dim the eyes, and stuff the head With all such reading as was never read; For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it, And write about it, goddess, and about it. The Dunciad, iv. 249. Genius is chiefly exerted in historical pictures; and the art of the painter of portraits is often lost in the obscurity of his subject.
Its reception is thus recorded in the notes to the "Dunciad": "This piece was received with greater applause than was ever known. Besides being acted in London sixty-three days without interruption, and renewed the next season with equal applause, it spread into all the great towns of England; was played in many places to the thirtieth and fortieth time; at Bath and Bristol fifty, etc.
Barker, the novelist; Aaron Hill; a Mr. Osborne, possibly the bookseller whose name was afterward infamously connected with Eliza's in "The Dunciad"; Charles de La Faye, the under-secretary of state with whom Defoe corresponded; and a sprinkling of aristocratic titles.
In reality, let us not deny, that had Pope never written any thing else, his name would not have been known as a name even of promise, but would probably have been redeemed from oblivion by some satirist or writer of a Dunciad. Were a man to meet with such a nondescript monster as the following, viz.," Love out of Mount Mlna by Whirlwind"he would suppose himself reading the Racing Calendar.
In Poetry thy Dunciad expires, When Wit has shot 'her momentary Fires. 'T is Tragedy that watches by the Bed 'Where tawdry Yellow strove with dirty Red, And men, remembering all, can scarce deny To lay the Laurel where thine Ashes lie! VI. To Lucian of Samosata.
Cornhill Magazine 1860, his last great work, Denis Duval, left unfinished, d. 1863. Article in Dictionary of National Biography by Leslie Stephen. In 1715 he pub. Shakespeare Restored, etc., in which he severely criticised Pope's ed., and was in consequence rewarded with the first place in The Dunciad, and the adoption of most of his corrections in Pope's next ed.
As the title of Crabbe's poem stands for the bane and not the antidote, he could not adopt the same method, but he could not resist some other precedents of the epic sort, and begins thus, in close imitation of The Dunciad "The mighty spirit, and its power which stains The bloodless cheek and vivifies the brains, I sing"
Fortunately, beneath the crust of insolence and vanity, there was a substratum of genuine power in the Laureate's make, which rendered him not only a match for these, but for even a greater than these, the author of the "Dunciad." Pope's antipathy for the truculent actor dated some distance back. Back to the 'Devil, the last echoes roll, And 'Coll! each butcher roars at Hockley-hole.
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