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Updated: June 19, 2025
The task was one for which he had few qualifications, and his execution of it at once laid him open to a new attack from a fresh opponent, Lewis Theobald, afterward the Tibbald of the "Dunciad" and the "Satires." Then he followed up the "Iliad" by the "Odyssey," in which he was assisted by Fenton and Broome.
Of all those whom Pope lashed in his Dunciad, there was not one who did not richly deserve the imputation of dulness, and every one of them had provoked the satirist by a personal attack.
On the day the book was first vended a crowd of authors besieged the shop; entreaties, advices, threats of law and battery nay, cries of treason were all employed to hinder the coming out of the 'Dunciad. On the other side, the booksellers and hawkers made as great efforts to procure it. What could a few poor authors do against so great a majority as the public?
The greatest of all the wits, however, Alexander Pope, was his firm friend and admirer; and in the "Dunciad," wherein the wittiest of poets impaled so many of the small fry of the age with his pungent and vindictive shaft, he also slew some of the most malevolent of Handel's foes. Fielding, in "Tom Jones," has an amusing hit at the taste of the period: "It was Mr.
But even if one admits the indiscriminate nature of that onslaught which confuses Bentley with such creatures of a day as Ralph and Oldmixon, it is impossible not to admire the surpassing skill of the measure; and it is probable that, in spite of the "higher criticism," the "Dunciad," swarming as it does with contemporary allusions, will continue to hold its own with the antiquary and the literary historian, though it has ceased to be regarded as one of the desirable masterpieces of its class.
The life of the unfortunate victims, pilloried in the Dunciad and accused of the unpardonable sins of poverty and dependence, was too often one which might have extorted sympathy even from a thin-skinned poet and critic. The best writers of the day could tell of hardships endured in that dismal region. Richardson went on the sound principle of keeping his shop that his shop might keep him.
A second engraving by Vertue after Parmentier formed the frontispiece of Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems. E. Curll, Key to the Dunciad, 12. Some copies apparently read "peer" for "poet." See Elwin and Courthope's Pope, IV, 330, note pp.; and Sir Sidney Lee, article Haywood in the D.N.B. Elwin and Courthope's Pope, IV, 330, note ss. Elwin and Courthope's Pope, IV, 294.
Beginning with tragedy, in which he failed, he turned to comedy, and became popular in eccentric rôles. In 1696 he brought out his first play, Love's Last Shift, and produced in all about 30 plays, some of which were very successful. In 1730 he was made Poet Laureate, and wrote some forgotten odes of no merit, also an entertaining autobiography. Pope made him the hero of the Dunciad.
Unless I am much mistaken, there is not a fellow of the Dunciad to whom he has not assigned a house. Nor is any man of deeper knowledge of the clubs and coffee-houses and taverns. One would say that he had sat at Will's with Dryden, and that he had gone to Button's arm in arm with Addison.
For the rest, Pope's own immortal "Dunciad," though doubtless more immediately suggested by a personal satire of Dryden's, is in one sense a kind of travesty of the "House of Fame," A "House of Infamy." In the theme of this poem there was undoubtedly something that could hardly fail to humour the half-melancholy mood in which it was manifestly written.
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