1709-1742.]

MARTINUS SCRIBLERUS-SMALL POETS.

437

Antiquaries." Who has not laughed in reading that "adventure of the shield ?" It presents the ludicrous side of studies of which we now know the full value, but of which the popular readers of the time of Arbuthnot could only see the ridiculous aspect. Dr. Cornelius could prove from "the colour of the rust the exact chronology of the shield." The scullion "had scoured it as her hand irons," and the rust was vanished. Laugh we must, when the learned Doctor cries out, "Where are all those beautiful absurdities, the cause of much delightful disputation, where doubt and uncertainty went hand in hand, and eternally exercised the speculations of the learned ? " The gossips who had come to the christening of the infant who was brought into the great antiquary's study upon the shield, exclaim ""Tis nothing but a paltry old sconce, with the nozzle broken off." Exquisite banter! Woodward, in 1707, had published "An Account of Roman Urns, and other Antiquities lately dug up near Bishopgate." There were few, perhaps, who would take much interest in the fact, that under the stones on which they daily trod there was a tesselated pavement; there were urns of Roman pottery; relics of unfading interest to those who could carry their minds beyond the material objects, to think of the wondrous changes of civilised life during fourteen centuries. The satire against the antiquary has not damaged such studies as he pursued with real advantage to learning; nor has it damaged his character as the philosopher who founded the Professorship of Geology at Cambridge. Woodward stands upon his own substantial merits; and though advancing knowledge may have disturbed some of his theories, he is entitled to reverence as one of the zealous and disinterested workers in the vast fields of science then lying waste.

"Middling poets," said Pope to Spence," are no poets at all. There is always a great number of such in each age, that are almost totally forgotten in the next. A few curious inquirers may know that there were such men, and that they wrote such and such things; but to the world they are as if they had never been."* Pope has embalmed these dead of his own age. We admire his curious art, as we admire the mummy-cases of the Egyptians; but it is not worth while to unroll the mummies. In a paper written, it is believed, by Pope himself, under the name of Savage, it is said that after various falsehoods and scurrilities against him, he thought " he had now some opportunity of doing good;" and hoped, "by manifesting the dulness of those who had only malice to recommend them, either the booksellers would not find their account in employing them, or the men themselves, when discovered, want courage to proceed in so unlawful an occupation. This it was that gave birth to the 'Dunciad,' and he thought it an happiness that, by the late flood of slander on himself, he had acquired such a peculiar right to their names as was necessary to this design. +" Johnson has assigned a higher motive to Pope than the miserable desire for revenge, which is thus acknowledged by himself, or avowed by his authority. The talk was of Pope: Johnson said, "He wrote his 'Dunciad' for fame. That was his primary motive. Had it not been for that, the dunces might have railed against him till they were weary, without his troubling himself about them. He delighted to vex them, no doubt; but he had more delight in seeing how well he could

* "Anecdotes," p. 150.

+ Quoted in Mr. Carruthers' "Life of Pope," p. 198.

438

THE DUNCIAD.

[1709-1742.

vex them."* In a previous conversation which turned upon Pope, Johnson "repeated to us, in his forcible melodious manner, the concluding lines of the 'Dunciad.' While he was talking loudly in praise of these lines, one of the company ventured to say, 'too fine for such a poem, a poem on what?' 'Why on Dunces. It was worth while being a dunce then. Ah, sir, hadst thou lived in those days!'"+ These "concluding lines" are indeed noble lines; which Pope himself admired "so much that when he repeated them his voice faltered." The whole fourth book of the 'Dunciad' is a grand satire upon many of the remarkable characteristics of the poet's age. It was completed in 1742. Warburton was by the side of Pope when he produced what he called The New Dunciad,' in which the additional book was accompanied by the previous ones recast. The alterations were not judicious. The addition was a proof that the fruit of the sound mind in the feeble body had lost no particle of its spring-time pungency in its autumnal ripeness. With far higher objects than that of damaging authors who had wounded his self-love, Pope in this wonderful poem put forth all his power. We may bestow some care upon its examination; for, perhaps, more than anything he has written, the satirist here paints in the boldest style, and with the most durable as well as brilliant colours, the abuses, as he conceives, of literature, of learning, of science. We may pass over the mere temporary and personal satire of the three first books, then also worked up into their present form, with Theobald deposed from the throne of dulness, and king Cibber installed in his place. Those portions will always be read by the few, in spite of their capricious injustice, and, what is worse, of their miserable grossness. The fourth book, with a little of the same personality, and of the same indelicacy of which it may be readily cleared, may be read by all, as the most magnificent satire in our language.

Warburton.

The heroic games of the Goddess Dulness are over. The rival booksellers, Curll, Lintot, and Tonson have run their race. The authors have dived "Where Fleet-ditch, with disemboguing streams, Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames."

Hoadly and Blackmore have read the assembly to sleep. King Cibber has been carried to the Elysian shades. The future reign of universal ignorance is foretold:

"Proceed, great days, till learning fly the shore."

The prophecy is about to be accomplished. The Goddess is "coming in her majesty, to destroy order and science, and to substitute the kingdom of the dull upon earth."

Boswell, one volume edition, p. 442.

+ Ibid. p. 203.

1709-1742.]

COMMENTATORS-PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

439

"Beneath her foot-stool Science groans in chains,
And wit dreads exile, penalties and pains."

"In ten-fold bonds the muses lie." The Act for subjecting plays to a Licenser, which Walpole had managed to pass, had thus made "Thalia nerveless, cold, and dead." Walpole perhaps had saved Thalia from her own degradation. Opera comes to supplant Comedy.

"When lo! a harlot form soft sliding by

With mincing step, small voice, and languid eye:
Foreign her air, her robe's discordant pride
In patch-work fluttering, and her head aside;

By singing peers upheld on either hand

She tripp'd and laugh'd, too pretty much to stand "

Opera "cast on the prostrate Nine a scornful look," and she drove Handel, with her rival Oratorio, "to the Hibernian shore." Fame blows her trumpet, and a "vast involuntary throng" crowd round the throne of the Goddess. There come the

"Patrons, who sneak from living worth to dead."

The commentators come. Dulness, smiling, exclaims

"Let standard-authors, thus, like trophies borne,
Appear more glorious, as more hack'd and torn;

And you my critics in the chequer d shade

Admire new light through holes yourself have made."

Alderman Benson is there, noted for the monuments he put up to departed genius, with his own name and titles pompously recorded in the inscription upon one tomb:

"On two unequal crutches propp'd he came ;
Milton's on this, on that one Jonson's name."

The vanity of the age of Anne is less offensive than the cold neglect of the age of Victoria, in which it was fruitlessly tried to raise a monument to Caxton. The spectre of the Public Schools appears, with his "beaver'd brow," and his "birchen garland." He would speak in humbler tones now, but the time is not long passed since he thus might have spoken :

"Since man from beast by words is known,
Words are man's province, words we teach alone.
When Reason doubtful, like the Samian letter,
Points him two ways, the narrower is the better.
Plac'd at the door of Learning, youth to guide,
We never suffer it to stand too wide.

To ask, to guess, to know, as they commence,
As fancy opens the quick springs of sense,
We ply the memory, we load the brain,
Bind rebel Wit, and double chain on chain,
Confine the thought, to exercise the breath;
And keep them in the pale of words till death.
Whate'er the talents, or howe'er design'd,
We hang one jingling padlock on the mind:
A poet the first day, he dips his quill;
And what the last? a very poet still.
Pity the charm works only in our wall,
Lost, lost too soon in yonder House or Hall."

440

UNIVERSITIES-TRAVELLING.

(1709-1742. Aristarchus comes to represent the Universities. Aristarchus, the Bentley of the "Battle of the Books." For a century the ruling powers of Oxford and Cambridge stood up against the terrible satire which their representative thus enunciates :

The man

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:
So spins the silkworm small its slender store,
And labours, till it clouds itself all o'er.
What though we let some better sort of fool,
Thread ev'ry science, run through every school!
Never by tumbler through the hoops was shown
Such skill in passing all, and touching none.
He may indeed (if sober all this time)
Plague with Dispute, or persecute with Rhyme.
We only furnish what he cannot use,

Or wed to what he must divorce, a muse :
Full in the midst of Euclid dip at once,
And petrify a Genius to a Dunce :
Or set on metaphysic ground to prance,
Show all his paces, not a step advance.
With the same cement, ever sure to bind,
We bring to one dead level every mind :
Then take him to develope if you can,

And hew the block off, and get out the man."

formed in the seats of learning then comes with his "laced governor from France," who thus addresses the Goddess:

"Through school and college, thy kind cloud o'ercast,
Safe and unseen the young Eneas past:

Thus bursting glorious, all at once let down,
Stunn'd with his giddy larum half the town.
Intrepid then, o'er seas and lands he flew :
Europe he saw, and Europe saw him too.
There all thy gifts and graces we display,
Thou, only thou, directing all our way:
To where the Seine, obsequious as she runs,
Pours at great Bourbon's feet her silken sons;
Or Tiber, now no longer Roman, rolls,

Vain of Italian arts, Italian souls:

To happy convents, bosom'd deep in vines,

Where slumber abbots, purple as their wines:
To isles of fragrance, lily-silvered vales,

Diffusing languor in the panting gales:

To lands of singing or of dancing slaves,

Love-whispering woods, and lute-resounding waves.
But chief her shrine where naked Venus keeps,
And Cupids ride the lion of the deeps,
Where eas'd of fleets, the Adriatic main
Wafts the smooth eunuch and enamour'd swain,

Led by my hand he saunter'd Europe round,

And gather'd every vice on Christian ground."

Never was nobler poetry. With slight difference of times and manners, never was more enduring satire.

1709-1742.]

ENTOMOLOGISTS AND FLORISTS.

441

The pedants make room for the collectors of coins and curiosities; and these are succeeded by entomologists and florists:

"A tribe, with weeds and shells fantastic crown'd,

Each with some wondrous gift approach'd the power,

A nest, a toad, a fungus, or a flower."

The Goddess expresses her anxiety that such studies should be pursued in the manner in which they have been, and possibly still are, worse than useless :

It was the "partial narrow shape" which in the infancy of scientific investigation led men to be mere collectors and classifiers. The broad views of great general laws, which connect together the whole natural world, have slowly been formed upon those employments which the poet derides as frivolous. It is not only the dull that "may waken to a humming-bird," find " congenial matter in the cockle-kind," or "wander in a wilderness of moss," but the acutest intellect may be led to the highest generalisations by the study of a mollusk. In the same way it is simply the abuse of learning when the pedant says,—

"On words is still our whole debate, Dispute of me or te, of aut or ut."

But in such debate were laid the foundations of accurate scholarship; and even in "the pale of words" of the public schools did boys learn to do some one thing well, and thereby to discipline the mind to a comprehension of many things. Perhaps in our day some satirist may arise to proclaim the evils of a totally opposite system, with reference to the general enlightenment of much larger masses of society. He may deride a system of competitive examination which embraces the whole circle of knowledge, and thus may produce in all, and not only in the "better sort of fool," the skill of the tumbler jumping through the hoops-passing every science and touching It is this sciolism, he may say, which will tend to the same results as the poet has described in him

none.

"Whose pious hope aspires to see the day
When moral evidence shall quite decay."

The solitary freethinker addresses the Goddess in words which may be echoed by a conceited multitude:

"Let others creep by timid steps and slow,

On plain experience lay foundations low;

By common sense to common knowledge bred,

And, last to Nature's Cause through Nature led:
All-seeing in thy mists, we want no guide,
Mother of arrogance, and source of pride."

There is nothing more characteristic of the eminent writers of the earlier