word. His example was followed and, indeed, surpassed by Bernard Lintot, whose bargain with Pope for the property of the 'Translation of the Iliad' strikes us, even at this day, as an extraordinary piece of commercial enterprise. Yet Lintot appears in the 'Dunciad.' Pope put him there because he was dissatisfied with his conduct about the Translation of the Odyssey,' but such retaliation would have been ineffective, if the poet had not been afforded an opportunity of reflecting on the booksellers as a class in the person of Edmund Curll. This man was the genuine product of Grub Street. He had been sentenced to stand in the pillory for publishing obscene and blasphemous pamphlets. He made his profits from the publication of pirated letters and poems, and from the translations of literary hacks, whom he maintained in a state of semi-starvation. He boasted of his shameful exploits with brazen impudence. Nothing can be more significant of Pope's rancour, and of the intellectual condition of the times, than the fact that such a scoundrel as Curl should be classed in the 'Dunciad' with respectable tradesmen like Tonson and Lintot, as the type of the bookseller, whom Johnson afterwards asserted to be "the only Maecenas of modern times."

A few words are required in explanation of the attack which Pope makes at the end of the Third Book and throughout the Fourth Book on the taste of the age, notably in respect of the stage, the opera, and the amusements of the Virtuosi. Though the motive of his satire on the stage is mainly personal, and is to be ascribed to the failure of Three Hours after Marriage,' the state of the theatre was such as to invite his strictures. The drama had been thoroughly purified since the accession of Queen Anne, but in becoming moral it had also become dull. The public sought for some more stimulating amusement than the authors of the day could provide; and, in default of good plays, they turned to raree-shows. Cibber, it is true, ascribes the rise of pantomime to the competition between the playhouses, and cites in support of his argument, the similar

VOL. IV. POETRY.

D

experience of the two companies of actors who received patents after the Restoration. His plea is, of course, not altogether invalid; taste must always modify art. But after making due allowance for popular caprice, we can hardly doubt that if the age had produced dramatists like those of the Elizabethan, or even the Caroline period, the theatre would have continued to flourish. The society, however, that stimulated the genius of Pope was not favourable to that of Shakespeare, and the prevalence of the lower forms of the drama may fairly be attributed to the dulness' of the Georgian era. To hold Cibber solely responsible for this degenerate taste was unfair; but, as a theatrical manager, he must bear the odium which satire justly attaches to the procurer of corrupting pleasures.

In considering the character of Pope's attack on the Italian opera, we must remember, that like almost all the great writers of the early part of the eighteenth century, he was deficient in musical sensibility, and that he was carrying on the critical tradition which had been established by the essayists of the 'Tatler' and 'Spectator.' Opera, which took its rise in Italy in the beginning of the seventeenth century, had been slow in making its way to England. Pope, indeed, says in a note on v. 153 of the 'Epistle to Augustus,' that the first English opera was the 'Siege of Rhodes' produced in 1658; but it appears that this play, and others of the same kind, were only declamatory dramas, interspersed with airs and melodies, and wanting in the essential characteristic of opera, recitative. Italian operas were introduced into England in the first years of the eighteenth century, and were vehemently denounced both by Steele, who had a share in the patent of Drury Lane Theatre, the profits of which were threatened by the new entertainment, and by Addison, who was mortified by the ill-success of his own English opera, Rosamond.' Both of these eminent essayists criticise the opera as being irrational: Pope carries the cen sure one step farther, and condemns it as effeminate. To his embittered strictures he was doubtless led by his party

spirit. The growing demand for Italian music, in the first decade of the eighteenth century, attracted to England many of the most famous composers and singers of the Continent, and the rivalry between these artists was intensified by the eagerness with which party politicians entered into their quarrels. Whig and Tory had each their own musical faction, and cried down the side of their opponents. The feud extended into the highest circles. Lord Hervey compares it to the struggle between the Green and Blue factions at Byzantium, and relates how it widened the breach between the King and the Prince of Wales. Pope embraced the cause of Handel against Senesino, partly because the former was favoured by Lord Burlington and Arbuthnot, but still more, perhaps, because he was engaged in a struggle with the Whig nobility, most of whom were on the side of the Court. It will be observed that he sings the praises of the great musician at a moment when the latter, unable any longer to sustain the conflict with his opponents, retired to Dublin, whence he was so soon to return the acknowledged master of the musical world.

Party spirit again scarcely disguises itself in the satire on the amusements of the virtuosi. They are represented as unmanly and unphilosophical. To an age like our own, moved by an absorbing passion for the solution of scientific problems, such an attitude of mind is not easily understood; yet it was almost a part of the literary tradition of England in the first half of the eighteenth century. The Royal Society had been founded in 1660, by men wearied of the strife of faction, and though welcomed by the muse of Cowley and Dryden, it had from the first been regarded with suspicion both by politicians and men of letters. Butler had satirised the dreams of the philosophers in his Elephant in the Moon;' Addison had raised a mild protest on behalf of antiquaries, in his 'Dialogue on Medals,' only to show the extent of the public prejudice against them; while both Swift, in the 'Voyage to Laputa,' and Pope and Arbuthnot, in the 'Memoirs of Scriblerus,' had amused their countrymen with their ridicule of

the pedant. To conclude that the most distinguished writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were men of narrow and illiberal opinions, would discover in ourselves a pettiness of view as characteristic as that which we impute to them. The fact is that the age was one of Revolution, and the most active minds in the country were engaged in the investigation of first principles in religion, morals, and politics. The pursuit of physical science or of archæology for their own. sakes was an idea unintelligible to men accustomed to refer all things to final causes and to some general scheme of society; all questions in the minds of such men took a political tinge : and, as at Athens under Solon, the individual who stood aside from the party struggle was regarded as unpatriotic. But though this was the predominant feeling in English society, it did not extend to the reigning family. Queen Caroline was something of an esprit fort; many of the young nobility who surrounded her shared her taste for science and it was Pope's object to exasperate the political feeling of the time against what he pretended to be the trifling or greedy dilettantism prevalent in Court circles.

A word of explanation remains to be said of the amusing commentary which accompanies the 'Dunciad.' It has already been pointed out that the fiction of the uncertain authorship of the poem, put forward by the publisher in the first edition, was originally adopted by Pope from simple caution. But when he thought that the danger had passed, he made use of the idea to heighten the satire. For some years, Bentley had been astonishing the world with the boldness of his conjectures respecting the texts of ancient authors; he had treated Horace with the same audacity he afterwards exhibited in his monstrous edition of Milton; and Theobald, without any of his genius, but with all his industry, had applied his method to the restoration of the text of Shakespeare. The notes to the 'Dunciad,' signed "BENTLEY" or "SCRIBLERUS," are of course intended to ridicule the new school of verbal criticism. Many of them appear to have been furnished by Swift and Arbuthnot;

Pope himself made frequent alterations and additions to them in the various editions of the satire; and Warburton wrote on the same principle, but with a much heavier hand, parts of the commentary to the New Dunciad' in 1742. When the latter published his edition of Pope's works in 1751, he appended initials to the notes to the Dunciad,' in order to distinguish Pope's notes from his own. But though he could not have written a note which appeared before 1742, he lays claim to many of those which appear in the earlier editions. Warton and Bowles follow him, without attempting to test his accuracy. Roscoe seems to be aware of the error into which his two immediate predecessors have fallen by trusting to Warburton, and to some extent repairs it by correcting the initials. Those, however, which he appends are often incorrect; and I have thought it advisable to place the matter beyond question, by giving after each note the date of the edition in which it first appeared. To all that were printed before the appearance of the 'New Dunciad' in 1742, I have added the name of Pope; while, as the authorship of the others cannot be positively ascertained, I have accepted the initials given by Warburton. Warton, Bowles, and Roscoe have mixed their own notes with Pope's, but as the commentary of the latter is an essential part of the satire, the additional notes supplied in illustration of the text are printed in this edition in a separate place. The variations of the existing text, which in other editions are given with the footnotes, are here placed under the text of the first edition, which is printed in an Appendix. It should be observed that the version which in Warton, Bowles, and Roscoe is published as the first edition, is really the text of the edition of 1736. This error, originated by Warton and perpetuated by his successors, has led both Mr. Croker, in his edition of Lord Hervey's 'Memoirs,' and Dr. Monk, in his 'Life of Bentley,' into some natural mistakes.

The poem in

1 I am myself responsible for an erroneous statement in Vol. iii. p. 283. It