[Dr. Delany, who had just come from England, where he had seen Pope]' told me your secret about the Dunciad, which does not please me, because it defers gratifying my vanity in the most tender point.' Swift's 'vanity' could be gratified in no other way through the appearance of the Dunciad than by the publication in it of the inscription to himself, which, as we have already seen, the poem contained. But now the gratification of his vanity is to be 'deferred; ' that is to say, Pope, whose plans for mystifying and bewildering the public were, by this time, matured in his head, had determined to suppress the inscription to Swift, besides other passages doubtless, in the first edition published, that he might afterwards restore them in an edition which was to be heralded to the world as correct and authoritative, furnished with notes, prolegomena, and a whole array of concomitant learned disquisitions, whereas the previous edition, or editions, were to be branded as 'imperfect,'' surreptitious,' ' unauthorized,' and so on. Accordingly, as already mentioned, the inscription to Swift does not occur either in the first or the second edition; but appears in the edition entitled The Dunciad Variorum, with the Prolegomena of Scriblerus, printed for A. Dod, 1729. The notes in this edition were not all by Pope himself; many were contributed by his friends. He desires Swift3 to read over the text and make a few in any way he likes best; 'whether dry raillery, upon

1 Marked respectively A and A' in the list of editions of the Dunciad given in the Appendix.

2 B, in the same list.

3 Letter of June 28, 1728.

b

the style and way of commenting of trivial critics; or humorous, upon the authors in the poem; or historical, of persons, places, times; or explanatory, or collecting the parallel passages of the ancients.' Whether Swift complied with this request is unknown; but from the tone of his letters at and after this time, one might infer that his deafness and giddiness had now increased to such a degree as to incapacitate him for the task. In his reply to the last quoted letter of Pope, the Dean enters con amore into the fun of the wholesale mystification proposed. I would be glad to know,' he says, 'whether the quarto [authorized] edition is to come out anonymously, as published by the commentator, with all his pomp of prefaces, &c., and among many complaints of spurious editions'?

We have seen how Pope chose to account in a formal way for the appearance of the Dunciad; another, and a less premeditated account, taken from one of the letters 2 to Swift before quoted, will be found interesting. As the obtaining the love of valuable men is the happiest end I know of this life, so the next felicity is to get rid of fools and scoundrels; which I cannot but own to you was one part of my design in falling upon these authors, whose incapacity is not greater than their insincerity, and of whom I have always found (if I may quote myself)

This

That each bad author is as bad a friend.

poem will rid me of those insects :

Cedite, Romani scriptores, cedite, Graii;
Nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade.

I mean than my Iliad; and I call it Nescio quid, which is a degree of modesty; but however, if it silence these fellows, it must be something greater than any Iliad in Christendom.'

The Dunciad is, in form, a mock-heroic poem, and its subject is the adventures of its Hero, including his coronation by the Goddess of Dulness, his presiding over the solemn Games instituted on that occasion, and his Descent to the Shades. These are the subjects of the first three books respectively, and here, in all editions prior to 1742, the poem stopped. The hero was Theobald, a book-collector and bookworm, whose criticisms on Pope's edition of Shakspeare had, as we have already stated, offended the poet. The fourth Book-in which the Goddess of Dulness holds a sort of court at which she receives her numerous votaries, gives them useful counsel, and finally, with a yawn of preternatural power, ushers in the reign of soporific stupor, darkness, and chaos throughout the bounds of Nature-was written at the instigation of Warburton, and first published in 1742. There is no internal connexion, or only one of the slightest and flimsiest character, between this book and the other three; and there is much to be said in favour of Warton's opinion, that, however brilliant may be the passages and single lines which may be picked out of it, its annexation to the poem by no means improves it as a work of art. The celebrated closing passage, it should be remarked, which now concludes Book IV., stood originally at the end of Book III. The mockheroic form is almost abandoned in the last book,

which is little else than pure satire, partly on classes, but far more on individuals.

Colley Cibber, who had succeeded Eusden as poet laureate in 1730, was satirized in Books I. and III. of the early editions of the Dunciad. He replied, but with considerable moderation, in the Apology for his Life, published in 1740. Again Pope caused him to figure in the fourth Book of the Dunciad, when the Goddess of Dulness is introduced with Cibber on her lap :

Soft on her lap her laureate son reclines.

Cibber was nettled by the persistency of these attacks, and retaliated in a pamphlet called A Letter to Mr. Pope, inquiring into the Motives that might induce him in his Satyrical Works to be so frequently fond of Mr. Cibber's name. In this he accounts for Pope's hostility to him by a long story, the upshot of which is, that in acting the Rehearsal some years before, he had turned the laughter of the public upon some ludicrous stage artifices introduced in a play1 of which Pope was in part the author. This pamphlet provoked the ire of the poet to an extraordinary degree, and he resolved to depose Theobald from his place as hero of the Dunciad, and install Cibber there. The process of transformation may be exactly traced by any one who will take the trouble to study the various readings of the earliest edition, collated with that of 1743, in which Cibber first figured as hero, which we have given in the Appendix. It has been

1 Three Hours after Marriage.

truly said by the commentators that the substitution was not a happy thought; since Theobald, a plodding student, with a strong turn for bibliography and a taste for textual criticism, could more suitably be represented as the chosen favourite of Dulness than the gay, mercurial Cibber, who, whatever his short comings might be, could not be taxed with want of liveliness and versatility. Yet on the other hand, laxity of principle, luxury, and selfish frivolity, do in the end inaugurate the reign of Dulness-whether for the individual whose old age, through these, is cheerless and unhonoured, or for the nation that. chooses ignoble paths-more inevitably than the profitless but harmless industry of the bookworm or the antiquary.

The altered Dunciad appeared in 1743. Cibber, on finding himself so severely handled, wrote another pamphlet, which stung Pope to the quick, though he pretended to his friends that 'these things were his diversion.' But his vital powers were now declining, and henceforward 'he no longer strained his faculties with any original composition, nor proposed any other employment for his remaining life than the revisal and correction of his former works.'1 Pope died on May 30, 1744, a few days after his fifty-sixth birthday.

In the Appendix will be found, besides a list of various readings resulting from the collation of the first editions of the Essay on Criticism and the Dunciad with the standard text, much matter illustrative of

1 Dr. Johnson.