Many ludicrous circumstances attended it. The 'Dunces' (for by this name they were called) held weekly clubs to consult of hostilities against the author: one wrote a letter to a great minister, assuring him Mr. Pope was the greatest enemy the Government had; and another bought his image in clay to execute him in effigy; with which sad sort of satisfaction the gentlemen were a little comforted.

121

Some false editions of the book having an owl in their frontispiece, the true one, to distinguish it, fixed in his stead an ass laden with authors. Then another surreptitious one being printed with the same ass, the new edition in octavo returned for distinction to the owl again.' Hence arose a great contest of booksellers against booksellers, and advertisements against advertisements; some recommending the edition of the owl, and others the edition of the ass; by which names they came to be distinguished, to the great honour also of the gentlemen of 'The Dunciad.""

Pope appears by this narrative to have contemplated his victory over the 'Dunces' with great exultation; and such was his delight in the tumult which he had raised, that for a while his natural sensibility was suspended, and he read reproaches and invectives without emotion, considering them only as the necessary effects of that pain which he rejoiced in having given.

122

It cannot, however, be concealed that by his own confession, he was the aggressor; for nobody believes that the letters in the 'Bathos' were placed at random; and it may be discovered that, when he thinks himself concealed, he indulges the common vanity of common men, and triumphs in those distinctions which he had affected to despise. He is proud that his book was presented to the King and Queen by the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole; he is proud that they had read it before; he is proud that the

121 The first ass edition is the quarto of 1729. Even the owl plates vary.

122 Let us try and hit a few of these random letters:

edition was taken off by the nobility and persons of the first distinction.

The edition of which he speaks was, I believe, that which, by telling in the text the names, and in the notes the characters of those whom he had satirised, was made intelligible and diverting. 123 The critics had now declared their approbation of the plan, and the common reader began to like it without fear; those who were strangers to petty literature, and therefore unable to decipher initials and blanks, had now names and persons brought within their view; and delighted in the visible effect of those shafts of malice which they had hitherto contemplated as shot into the air.

Dennis, upon the fresh provocation now given him, renewed the enmity which had for a time been appeased by mutual civilities; and published [1728] remarks which he had till then suppressed, upon The Rape of the Lock.' Many more grumbled in secret, or vented their resentment in the newspapers by epigrams or invectives.

Ducket, indeed, being mentioned as loving Burnet with "pious passion," pretended that his moral character was injured, and for some time declared his resolution to take vengeance with a cudgel. But Pope appeased him by changing "pious passion" to "cordial friendship," ," 125 and by a note, in which he vehemently disclaims the malignity of meaning imputed to the first expression.

124

Aaron Hill, who was represented as diving for the prize,'

126

123 Yes, the 4to. of 1729; but a better edition is that of the octavo of 1729, "the second edition, with some additional notes ;" printed for Lawton Gilliver, and recommended by Pope to Swift. (Letter, Oct. 9, 1729.) 'The Dunciad' was registered at Stationers' Hall, by Lawton Gilliver, on 12 April, 1729. He was then the sole publisher, registering "the whole."

124 Some one said to Lord Chesterfield he wondered Pope was not beaten for his personality in his satires. Lord Chesterfield said, "What was everybody's business, is no one's business."-HORACE WALPOLE: MS. Note quoted in Mitford's Gray, v. 182.

"Cordial friend

125 This is not quite correct. The couplet in which "pious passion" occurs was retained with an explanatory note, and is to be found in the edition of 1786, 12mo. ship" occurs in no edition that I have seen.

126 Then * *try'd, but hardly snatched from sight,
Instant buoys up, and rises into light.

Ed. 1729.

Ed. 1786, and all subsequent editions,

Johnson has somewhat mistaken the exact point of the controversy. The first blow of

expostulated with Pope in a manner so much superior to all mean solicitation, that Pope was reduced to sneak and shuffle, sometimes to deny, and sometimes to apologise; he first endeavours to wound, and is then afraid to own that he meant a blow.

'The Dunciad,' in the complete edition, is addressed to Dr. Swift: 127 of the notes, part were written by Dr. Arbuthnot, and an apologetical letter was prefixed, signed by, Cleland,128 but supposed to have been written by Pope.

After this general war upon Dulness, he seems to have indulged himself a while in tranquillity; but his subsequent productions prove that he was not idle. He published (1731) a poem on 'Taste,' in which he very particularly and severely criticises the house, the furniture, the gardens and the entertainments of Timon, a man of great wealth and little taste. By Timon he was universally supposed, and by the Earl of Burlington, to whom the poem is addressed, was privately said, to mean the Duke of Chandos; a man perhaps too much delighted with pomp and show, but of a temper kind and beneficent, and who had consequently the voice of the public in his favour.

A violent outcry was therefore raised against the ingratitude and treachery of Pope, who was said to have been indebted to the patronage of Chandos for a present of a thousand pounds,' 129 and who gained the opportunity of insulting him by the kindness of his invitation.

The receipt of a thousand pounds Pope publicly denied ; 130 but from the reproach which the attack on a character so amiable brought upon him, he tried all means of escaping. The name of Cleland was again employed in an apology,' by which no man was satisfied; and he was at last reduced to shelter his temerity behind

131

which Hill complains in his manly letters to Pope is not in 'The Dunciad,' but in 'The Art of Sinking.' Hill accuses Pope of having attacked him under the initials A. H. in 'The Art of Sinking.' The diving scene, which was a kind of palinode on Pope's part, is in 'The Dunciad.'

127 The name of Swift appears for the first time before the 12mo. edition, 1736. 128 Dated" St. James's, Dec. 22, 1728."

129 Only five hundred pounds. (See 'Ingratitude. To Mr Pope, 1733,' fol. p. 7.)

130 In an undated letter to the Earl of Burlington, before the third edition of the 'Epistle,' and included in his 'Letters,' 4to. 1787, p. 310. He got into a scrape with the critics by signing his letter "your faithful affectionate servant."

131 In the shape of a letter to Gay, dated Dec. 16, 1731.

dissimulation, and endeavour to make that disbelieved which he never had confidence openly to deny. He wrote an exculpatory letter to the Duke, which was answered with great magnanimity, as by a man who accepted his excuse without believing his professions. He said, that to have ridiculed his taste, or his buildings, had been an indifferent action in another man; but that in Pope, after the reciprocal kindness that had been exchanged between them, it had been less easily excused.13

Pope, in one of his letters, complaining of the treatment which his poem had found,

22 133

owns that such critics can intimidate him, nay, almost persuade him to write no more, which is a compliment this age deserves." The man who threatens the world is always ridiculous; for the world can easily go on without him, and in a short time will cease to miss him. I have heard of an idiot who used to revenge his vexations by lying all night upon the bridge. "There is nothing," says Juvenal, "that a man will not believe in his own favour." Pope had been flattered till he thought himself one of the moving powers in the system of life. When he talked of laying down his pen, those who sat round him intreated and implored; and self-love did not suffer him to suspect that they went away and laughed.134

The following year [4th Dec., 1732] deprived him of Gay, a man whom he had known early, and whom he seemed to love with more tenderness than any other of his literary friends. Pope was now forty-four years old; an age at which the mind begins less easily to admit new confidence, and the will to grow less flexible, and when, therefore, the departure of an old friend is very acutely felt.

In the next year [7th June, 1733] he lost his mother, not by an unexpected death, for she had lasted to the age of ninety-three; but she did not die unlamented. The filial piety of Pope was in the

132 This does not agree with the account in Spence by Singer, p. 145.

133 Letter to Lord Burlington, first prefixed to the third edition of 'The Epistle on Taste.' 134 There is a general outcry against that part of the poem which is thought an abuse on the Duke of Chandos. Other parts are quarrelled with as obscure and unharmonious; and I am told there is an advertisement that promises a publication of Pope's Epistle versified. . . I am surprised Mr. Pope is not weary of making enemies.-Dr. DELANY to Sir Thomas Hanmer, 23rd Dec. 1741 (Hanmer Corresp. p. 217).

The hundred footsteps scraping the marble hall indicated exactly, it was said, the number for some years of the Duke's domestics at Canons.

highest degree amiable and exemplary; his parents had the happiness of living till he was at the summit of poetical reputation, till he was at ease in his fortune, and without a rival in his fame, and found no diminution of his respect or tenderness.135 Whatever was his pride, to them he was obedient; and whatever was his irritability, to them he was gentle. Life has, among its soothing and quiet comforts, few things better to give than such a son.136

137

One of the passages of Pope's life which seems to deserve some inquiry was a publication of Letters between him and many of his friends, which falling into the hands of Curll, a rapacious bookseller of no good fame, were by him [May 1735] printed and sold. This volume containing some letters from noblemen, Pope incited a prosecution against him in the House of Lords for breach of privilege, and attended himself to stimulate the resentment of his friends. Curll appeared at the bar, and, knowing himself in no great danger, spoke of Pope with very little reverence. "He has," said Curll, "a knack at versifying, but in prose I think myself a match for him." When the orders of the House were examined, none of them appeared to have been infringed; Curll went away triumphant; and Pope was left to seek some other remedy.

Curll's account was, that one evening a man in a clergyman's gown, but with a lawyer's band, brought and offered to sale a number of printed volumes, which he found to be Pope's epistolary correspondence; that he asked no name, and was told none, but gave the price demanded, and thought himself authorised to use his purchase to his own advantage.

135 As to Pope's being born of honest parents, I verily believe it; and will add one praise to his mother's character, that (though I only knew her very old) she always appeared to me to have much better sense than himself.-LADY M. W. MONTAGU to Dr. Arbuthnot, Jan. 3, [1784-5].

136 The obelisk which Pope erected in his garden to his mother was bought by the present Earl Howe, and removed to his Lordship's seat, Gopsall, in Leicestershire. I remember it at Twickenham, and I have seen it at Gopsall.

137 Johnson is here incorrect. The volume complained of does not contain a single letter from any nobleman, and Curll was acquitted, and the copies returned to him, on this ground alone, the Committee finding (15th May, 1735) that the publication was not contrary to the standing order of the House, of 31st January, 1721-2, though the advertisement in 'The Postboy' expressly mentioned letters from Lord Halifax and Burlington. The standing order was founded on an advertisement by Curll of an intended publication, 'The Works and Life of Sheffield Duke of Buckingham,' for which Curll, on his knees, was reprimanded by the Lord Chancellor.