to taste the cup of the Magus, her High Priest, which causes a total oblivion of all obligations, divine, civil, moral, or rational. To these her adepts she sends priests, attendants, and comforters, of various kinds; confers on them orders and degrees; and then dismissing them with a speech, confirming to each his privileges, and telling what she expects from each, concludes with a yawn of extraordinary virtue: The progress and effects whereof on all orders of men, and the consummation of all, in the restoration of Night and Chaos, conclude the poem, BOOK IV. 2 YET, yet a moment, one dim Ray of Light (a) This Book may properly be distinguished from the former, by the name of the GREATER DUNCIAD, not so indeed in size, but in subject; and so far contrary to the distinction anciently made of the Greater and Lesser Iliad. But much are they mistaken who imagine this Work in any wise inferior to the former, or of any other hand than of our Poet; of which I am much more certain than that the Iliad itself was the work of Solomon, or the Batrachomuomachia of Homer, as Barnes hath affirmed.BENTLEY [POPE and WARBURTON, 1742]. 2 This is an Invocation of much piety. The Poet, willing to approve himself a genuine son, beginneth by showing (what is ever agreeable to Dulness) his high respect for antiquity and a great family, how dead or dark soever next declareth his passion for explaining mysteries; and lastly his impatience to be re-united to her. -SCRIBLERUS [POPE and WARBURTON, 1742]. See Editor's note. 3 Invoked, as the restoration of their empire is the action of the poem. -POPE and WARBURTON [1742]. This is a great propriety, for a 5 dull poet can never express himself otherwise than by halves, or imperfectly. SCRIBLERUS [POPE and WARBURTON, 1742]. I understand it very differently; the author in this work had indeed a deep intent; there were in it Mysteries or ἀπόῤῥητα which he durst not fully reveal, and doubtless in divers verses (according to Milton) More is meant than meets the ear. -BENTLEY.-POPE and WARBURTON. 5 Fair and softly, good poet! (cries the gentle Scriblerus on this place). For sure in spite of his unusual modesty, he shall not travel so fast toward Oblivion, as divers others of more confidence have done: For when I revolve in my mind the catalogue of those who have the most boldly promised to themselves immortality, viz., Pindar, Luis Gongora, Ronsard, Oldham [Lyrics]; Lycophron, Statius, Chapman, Blackmore [Heroics]; I find the one half to be already dead, and the other in utter darkness. But it becometh not us, who have taken up the office of his commentator, to suffer our Poet thus prodigally to cast away his life; contrariwise, the more hidden and abstruse is his work, and the more Suspend a while your Force inertly strong,' Now flam'd the Dog-star's unpropitious ray, She mounts the Throne: her head a Cloud conceal'd, In broad Effulgence all below reveal'd;" ('Tis thus aspiring Dulness ever shines) Soft on her lap her Laureate son reclines.' remote its beauties from common understanding, the more is it our duty to draw forth and exalt the same, in the face of men and angels. Herein shall we imitate the laudable spirit of those, who have (for this very reason) delighted to comment on dark and uncouth authors, and even on their darker fragments; preferred Ennius to Virgil, and chosen to turn the dark lanthorn of LYCOPHRON, rather than to trim the everlasting Lamp of Homer.-SCRIBLERUS [POPE and WARBURTON, 1742]. See Editor's note. 1 Alluding to the vis inertia of Matter, which, though it really be no power, is yet the foundation of all the qualities and attributes of that sluggish substance.-POPE and WARBURTON [1742]. 2 The two great ends of her mission; the one in quality of Daughter of Chaos, the other as Daughter of Night. Order here is to be understood extensively, both as civil and moral; the distinctions between high and low in society, and true and false in individuals: Light, as intellectual only, Wit, Science, Arts.POPE and WARBURTON [1742]. 10 15 20 3 The allegory continued; dull referring to the extinction of light or science; venal to the destruction of order, or the truth of things.-POPE and WARBURTON [1742]. 4 In allusion to the Epicurean opinion, that from the dissolution of the natural world into night and chaos a new one should arise; this the poet alluding to, in the production of a new moral world, makes it partake of its original principles.-POPE and WARBURTON [1742]. 5 i.e., dull and venal.-POPE and WARBURTON [1742]. It was the opinion of the ancients, that the Divinities manifested themselves to men by their backparts. Virg. Æn. i. et avertens, rosea cervice refulsit. But this pas sage may admit of another exposi tion. - Vet. Adag., THE HIGHER YOU CLIMB, THE MORE YOU SHOW YOUR A, verified in no instance more than in Dulness aspiring. Emblematised also by an ape climbing and exposing his posteriors.-SCRIBLERUS [POPE and WARBURTON, 1742]. 7 With great judgment it is imagined by the Poet, that such a Beneath her footstool, Science groans in Chains,' And shameless Billingsgate her Robes adorn. (e) colleague as Dulness had elected, should sleep on the throne, and have very little share in the action of the poem. Accordingly he hath done little or nothing from the day of his anointing; having past through the second book without taking part in anything that was transacted about him; and through the third in profound sleep. Nor ought this, well considered, to seem strange in our days, when so many king-consorts have done the like. SCRIBLERUS [POPE and WARBURTON, 1742]. See Editor's note. This verse our excellent laureate took so to heart, that he appealed to all mankind, "if he was not as seldom asleep as any fool?" But it is hoped the Poet hath not injured him, but rather verified his prophecy (p. 243 of his own Life, 8vo. ch. ix.) where he says, "The reader will be as much pleased to find me a Dunce in my old age, as he was to prove me a brisk blockhead in my youth." Wherever there was any room for briskness, or alacrity of any sort, even in sinking, he hath had it allowed; but here, where there is nothing for him to do but to take his natural rest, he must permit his historian to be silent. It is from their actions only that princes have their character, and poets from their works: and if in those he be as much asleep as any fool, the Poet must leave him and them to sleep to all eternity.-BENTLEY [Pope, 1743]. "When I find my name in the satirical works of this poet, I never look upon it as any malice meant to me, but PROFIT to himself. For he considers that my face is more known than most in the nation; and therefore a lick at the laureate will be a sure bait ad captandum vulgus, to catch little readers."-Life of Colley Cibber, ch. ii. Now if it be certain, that the works of our Poet have owed their success to this ingenious expedient, we hence derive an unanswerable argument, that this fourth DUNCIAD, as well as the former three, hath had the author's last hand, and was by him intended for the press or else to what purpose hath he crowned it, as we see, by this finishing stroke, the profitable lick at the laureate.— BENTLEY [POPE and WARBURTON, 1742]. 1 We are next presented with the pictures of those whom the Goddess leads in captivity. Science is only depressed and confined so as to be rendered useless; but Wit or Genius, as a more dangerous and active enemy, punished, or driven away : Dulness being often reconciled in some degree with Learning, but never upon any terms with Wit. And accordingly it will be seen that she admits something like each science, as Casuistry, Sophistry, &c., but nothing like Wit, Opera alone supplying its place.-POPE and WARBURTON [1743]. 2 Morality is the daughter of Gasps, as they straiten at each end the cord, And dies, when Dulness gives her Page the word.' (g) Too mad for mere material chains to bind, Now to pure Space' lifts her ecstatic stare, Watch'd both by Envy's and by Flatt'ry's eye:3 (i) Astræa. This alludes to the mytho- 1 There was a judge of this name, always ready to hang any man that came before him, of which he was suffered to give a hundred miserable examples during a long life, even to his dotage. - Though the candid Scriblerus imagined Page here to mean no more than a Page or Mute, and to allude to the custom of strangling State criminals in Turkey by Mutes or Pages, a practice more decent than that of our Page, who, before he hanged any one, loaded him with reproachful language. -SCRIBLERUS, [POPE and WARBURTON, 1742 and 1743]. See Editor's note. 2 Alluding to the strange conclusions some mathematicians have deduced from their principles, concerning the real quantity of matter, the reality of space, &c. POPE and WARBURTON [1742]. See Editor's note. 3 i.e., pure and defecated from matter [1742].-Extatic stare, the action of men who look about with full assurance of seeing what does not exist, such as those who expect to find space a real being.-WARBURTON [1743]. |