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Updated: June 19, 2025
At length the butchers deserted him, and, falling from one disgrace to another, he sank into dirt and debauchery, and died in 1750 at the age of sixty-four, remembered in the world only by being pilloried in the Dunciad. "Embrown'd with native bronze, lo!
Yet, prompted by the "Dunciad," it is the fashion of literature to regard Theobald with compassion, as a block-head and empiric. Cibber escapes but little better, and yet he was a man of respectable talent, and played no second-rate part in the literary history of the time.
And never, certainly, since Pope wrote his Dunciad, did the beautiful require more taking care of, or evince less capacity for taking care of itself, and never, we must add, was less capacity for taking care of it evinced by its accredited guardians of the press than at this present time, if the reception given to Mr. Smith's poem is to be taken as a fair expression of "the public taste."
But in Pope's own day the Dunciad called forth cries of anger and revenge from the victims, and involved the author in still more quarrels. Pope wrote many more poems, the chief being the Essay on Criticism and the Essay on Man. But his translations of Homer and the Rape of the Lock are those you will like best in the meantime.
Wherever I have evidence, or think I have evidence, which is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate as all the mules in Persia." This poet of warm affections felt so irritably the perverse criticisms of his learned friends, that they were to share alike a poetic Hell probably a sort of Dunciad, or lampoons.
Tresham, I believe you are guiltless of having ever essayed to build the lofty rhyme; but you must have known in your day many an apprentice and fellow-craft, if not some of the master-masons, in the temple of Apollo. Vanity is their universal foible, from him who decorated the shades of Twickenham, to the veriest scribbler whom he has lashed in his Dunciad.
Every good Christian ought no doubt to lament that a man of such noble gifts should have had also such a terrible gift of hate. But even a very good Christian could hardly help admitting that it must have been all for the best, seeing that only for that passion of hatred we should never have had "The Dunciad."
It was necessary to call in the aid of a professed critic; and Theobald, the editor of Shakspeare, and the hero of the first Dunciad, was employed to ascertain the true reading. In this way a volume of miscellanies in verse and prose was got up for the market. The collection derives all its value from the traces of Pope's hand, which are everywhere discernible.
Talebearers were not wanting to carry the sarcasm to the royal ear; and Frederic was as much incensed as a Grub Street writer who had found his name in the Dunciad. This could not last. A circumstance which, when the mutual regard of the friends was in its first glow, would merely have been matter for laughter, produced a violent explosion.
"The Popiad" and "The Curliad" were rapidly huddled together and placed upon the market. Close upon the heels of these publications came "The Female Dunciad," containing beside the "Metamorphosis of P. into a Stinging Nettle" by Mr. Foxton, a novel called "Irish Artifice; or, the History of Clarina" by Mrs. Eliza Haywood.
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