Pope collected these numerous literary libels with extraordinary care. He had them bound in volumes of all sizes; and a range of twelves, octavos, quartos, and folios were marshalled in portentous order on his shelves. He wrote the names of the writers, with remarks on these Anonymiana. He prefixed to them this motto, from Job: “Behold, my desire is, that mine adversary had written a book: surely I would take it upon my shoulder, and bind it as a crown to me.” xxxi. 35. Ruffhead, who wrote Pope’s Life under the eye of Warburton, who revised every sheet of the volume, and suffered this mere lawyer and singularly wretched critic to write on, with far inferior taste to his own—offered “the entire collection to any public library or museum, whose search is after curiosities, and may be desirous of enriching their common treasure with it: it will be freely at the service of that which asks first.” Did no one accept the invitation? As this was written in 1769, it is evidently pointed towards the British Museum; but there I have not heard of it. This collection must have contained much of the Secret Memoirs of Grub-street: it was always a fountain whence those “waters of bitterness,” the notes in the Dunciad, were readily supplied. It would be curious to discover by what stratagem Pope obtained all that secret intelligence about his Dunces, with which he has burthened posterity, for his own particular gratification. Arbuthnot, it is said, wrote some notes merely literary; but Savage, and still humbler agents, served him as his Espions de Police. He pensioned Savage to his last day, and never deserted him. In the account of “the phantom Moore,” Scriblerus appeals to Savage to authenticate some story. One curious instance of the fruits of Savage’s researches in this way he has himself preserved, in his memoirs of “An Author to be Let, by Iscariot Hackney.” This portrait of “a perfect Town-Author” is not deficient in spirit: the hero was one Roome, a man only celebrated in the Dunciad for his “funereal frown.” But it is uncertain whether this fellow had really so dismal a countenance; for the epithet was borrowed from his profession, being the son of an undertaker! Such is the nature of some satire! Dr. Warton is astonished, or mortified, for he knew not which, to see the pains and patience of Pope and his friends in compiling the Notes to the Dunciad, to trace out the lives and works of such paltry and forgotten scribblers. “It is like walking through the darkest alleys in the dirtiest part of St. Giles’s.” Very true! But may we not be allowed to detect the vanities of human nature at St. Giles’s as well as St. James’s? Authors, however obscure, are always an amusing race to authors. The greatest find their own passions in the least, though distorted, or cramped in too small a compass.
It is doubtless from Pope’s great anxiety for his own literary celebrity that we have been furnished with so complete a knowledge of the grotesque groups in the Dunciad. “Give me a shilling,” said Swift, facetiously, “and I will insure you that posterity shall never know one single enemy, excepting those whose memory you have preserved.” A very useful hint for a man of genius to leave his wretched assailants to dissolve away in their own weakness. But Pope, having written a Dunciad, by accompanying it with a commentary, took the only method to interest posterity. He felt that Boileau’s satires on bad authors are liked only in the degree the objects alluded to are known. But he loved too much the subject for its own sake. He abused the powers genius had conferred on him, as other imperial sovereigns have done. It is said that he kept the whole kingdom in awe of him. In “the frenzy and prodigality of vanity,” he exclaimed—
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“————Yes, I am proud to see |
Tacitus Gordon said of him, that Pope seemed to persuade the nation that all genius and ability were confined to him and his friends.
Pope, in his energetic Letter to Lord Hervey, that “masterpiece of invective,” says Warton, which Tyers tells us he kept long back from publishing, at the desire of Queen Caroline, who was fearful her counsellor would become insignificant in the public esteem, and at last in her own, such was the power his genius exercised;—has pointed out one of these causes. It describes himself as “a private person under penal laws, and many other disadvantages, not for want of honesty or conscience; yet it is by these alone I have hitherto lived excluded from all posts of profit or trust. I can interfere with the views of no man.”
The first publisher of the “Essay on Criticism” must have been a Mr. Lewis, a Catholic bookseller in Covent-garden; for, from a descendant of this Lewis, I heard that Pope, after publication, came every day, persecuting with anxious inquiries the cold impenetrable bookseller, who, as the poem lay uncalled for, saw nothing but vexatious importunities in a troublesome youth. One day, Pope, after nearly a month’s publication, entered, and in despair tied up a number of the poems, which he addressed to several who had a reputation in town, as judges of poetry. The scheme succeeded, and the poem, having reached its proper circle, soon got into request.
He was the author of “The Key to the Lock,” written to show that “The Rape of the Lock” was a political poem, designed to ridicule the Barrier Treaty; [so called from the arrangement made at the Peace of Utrecht between the ministers of Great Britain and the States General, as to the towns on the frontiers of the Dutch, which were to be permanently strengthened as barrier fortresses. Pope, in the mask of Esdras Barnivelt, apothecary, thus makes out his poem to be a political satire. “Having said that by the lock is meant the Barrier Treaty—first then I shall discover, that Belinda represents Great Britain, or (which is the same thing) her late Majesty. This is plainly seen in the description of her,
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“On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore.” |
Alluding to the ancient name of Albion, from her white cliffs, and to the cross which is the ensign of England. The baron who cuts off the lock, or Barrier Treaty, is the Earl of Oxford. Clarissa, who lent the scissors, my Lady Masham. Thalestris, who provokes Belinda to resent the loss of the lock or treaty, the Duchess of Marlborough; and Sir Plume, who is moved by Thalestris to re-demand it of Great Britain, Prince Eugene, “who came hither for that purpose.” He concludes 32 pages of similar argument by saying, “I doubt not if the persons most concerned would but order Mr. Bernard Lintott, the printer and publisher of this dangerous piece, to be taken into custody and examined, many further discoveries might be made both of this poet’s and his abettors secret designs, which are doubtless of the utmost importance to Government.” Such is a specimen of Pope’s chicanery.] Its innocent extravagance could only have been designed to increase attention to a work, which hardly required any such artifice. [In the preface to this production, “the uncommon sale of this book” is stated as one reason for the publication; “above six thousand of them have been already vended.”] In the same spirit he composed the “Guardian,” in which Phillips’s Pastorals were insidiously preferred to his own. Pope sent this ironical, panegyrical criticism on Phillips anonymously to the “Guardian,” and Steele not perceiving the drift, hesitated to publish it, till Pope advised it. Addison detected it. I doubt whether we have discovered all the supercheries of this kind. After writing the finest works of genius, he was busily employed in attracting the public attention to them. In the antithesis of his character, he was so great and so little! But he knew mankind! and present fame was the great business of his life.
Cleland was the son of Colonel Cleland, an old friend of Pope; he and his son had served in the East Indian army; but the latter returned to London, and became a sort of literary jackal to Pope, and a hack author for the booksellers. He wrote several moral and useful works; but as they did not pay well, he wrote an immoral one, for which he obtained a better price, and a pension of 100l. a-year, on condition that he never wrote in that manner again. This was obtained for him by Lord Granville, after Cleland had been cited before the Privy Council, and pleaded poverty as the reason for such authorship.—Ed.
The narrative of this dark transaction, which seems to have been imperfectly known to Johnson, being too copious for a note, will be found at the close of this article.
A list of all the pamphlets which resulted from the Dunciad would occupy a large space. Many of them were as grossly personal as the celebrated poem. The poet was frequently ridiculed under the names of “Pope Alexander” (from his dictatorial style), and “Sawney.” In “an heroic poem occasioned by the Dunciad,” published in 1728, the poet’s snug retreat at Twickenham is thus alluded to:—
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“Sawney! a mimic sage of huge renown, |
A fragment of Pope’s celebrated grotto still remains; the house is destroyed. Pope spent all his spare cash over his Twickenham villa. “I never save anything,” he said once to Spence; and the latter has left a detailed account of what he meant to do in the further decoration of his garden if he had lived. As he gained a sum of money, he regularly spent it in this way.—Ed.
Pope is, perhaps, the finest character-painter of all satirists. Atterbury, after reading the portrait of Atticus, advised him to proceed in a way which his genius had pointed out; but Arbuthnot, with his dying breath, conjured him “to reform, and not to chastise;” that is, not to spare the vice, but the person. It is said, Pope answered, that, to correct the world with due effect, they become inseparable; and that, deciding by his own experience, he was justified in his opinion. Perhaps, at first, he himself wavered; but he strikes bolder as he gathers strength. The two first editions of the Dunciad, now before me, could hardly be intelligible: they exhibit lines after lines gaping with an hiatus, or obscured with initial letters: in subsequent editions, the names stole into their places. We are told, that the personalities in his satires quickened the sale: the portraits of Sporus, Bufo, Clodius, Timon, and Atossa, were purchased by everybody; but when he once declared, respecting the characters of one of his best satires, that no real persons were intended, it checked public curiosity, which was felt in the sale of that edition. Personality in his satires, no doubt, accorded with the temper and the talent of Pope; and the malice of mankind afforded him all the conviction necessary to indulge it. Yet Young could depend solely on abstract characters and pure wit; and I believe that his “Love of Fame” was a series of admirable satires, which did not obtain less popularity than Pope’s. Cartwright, one of the poetical sons of Ben Jonson, describes, by a beautiful and original image, the office of the satirist, though he praises Jonson for exercising a virtue he did not always practise; as Swift celebrates Pope with the same truth, when he sings:—
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“Yet malice never was his aim; |
Cartwright’s lines are:—
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“————’tis thy skill To strike the vice, and spare the person still; |
Cooke, the translator of Hesiod, published a letter in Mist’s Journal, insisting that Pope had mistaken the whole character of Thersites, from ignorance of the language. I regret I have not drawn some notes from that essay. The subject might be made curious by a good Greek scholar, if Pope has really erred in the degree Cooke asserts. Theobald, who seems to have been a more classical scholar than has been allowed, besides some versions from the Greek tragic bards, commenced a translation of the Odyssey as soon as Pope’s Iliad appeared.
In one of these situations, Pope issued a very grave, but very ludicrous, advertisement. They had the impudence to publish an account of Pope having been flagellated by two gentlemen in Ham Walks, during his evening promenade. This was avenging Dennis for what he had undergone from the narrative of his madness. In “The Memoirs of Grub-street,” vol. i. p. 96, this tingling narrative appears to have been the ingenious forgery of Lady Mary! On this occasion, Pope thought it necessary to publish the following advertisement in the Daily Post, June 14, 1728:—
“Whereas, there has been a scandalous paper cried aloud about the streets, under the title of ‘A Pop upon Pope,’ insinuating that I was whipped in Ham Walks on Thursday last:—This is to give notice, that I did not stir out of my house at Twickenham on that day; and the same is a malicious and ill-founded report.—A. P.”
[Spence, on the authority of Pope’s half-sister, says: “When some of the people that he had put into the Dunciad were so enraged against him, and threatened him so highly, he loved to walk alone to Richmond, only he would take a large faithful dog with him, and pistols in his pocket. He used to say to us when we talked to him about it, that ‘with pistols the least man in England was above a match for the largest.’”]
It seems that Phillips hung up a birchen-rod at Button’s. Pope, in one of his letters, congratulates himself that he never attempted to use it. [His half-sister, Mrs. Rackett, testifies to Pope’s courage; she says, “My brother never knew what fear was.”]
According to the scandalous chronicle of the day, Pope, shortly after the publication of the Dunciad, had a tall Irishman to attend him. Colonel Duckett threatened to cane him, for a licentious stroke aimed at him, which Pope recanted. Thomas Bentley, nephew to the doctor, for the treatment his uncle had received, sent Pope a challenge. The modern, like the ancient Horace, was of a nature liable to panic at such critical moments. Pope consulted some military friends, who declared that his person ought to protect him from any such redundance of valour as was thus formally required; however, one of them accepted the challenge for him, and gave Bentley the option either of fighting or apologising; who, on this occasion, proved, what is usual, that the easiest of the two was the quickest done.
I shall preserve one specimen, so classically elegant, that Pope himself might have composed it. It is from the pen of that Leonard Welsted whose “Aganippe” Pope has so shamefully characterised—
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“Flow, Welsted, flow, like thine inspirer, beer!” |
Can the reader credit, after this, that Welsted, who was clerk in ordinary at the Ordnance Office, was a man of family and independence, of elegant manners and a fine fancy, but who considered poetry only as a passing amusement? He has, however, left behind, amid the careless productions of his muse, some passages wrought up with equal felicity and power. There are several original poetical views of nature scattered in his works, which have been collected by Mr. Nichols, that would admit of a comparison with some of established fame.
Welsted imagined that the spirit of English poetry was on its decline in the age of Pope, and allegorises the state of our poetry in a most ingenious comparison. The picture is exquisitely wrought, like an ancient gem: one might imagine Anacreon was turned critic:—
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“A flask I rear’d whose sluice began to fail, Palœmon to Cœlia at Bath, or the Triumvirate. |
“The empty flask” only retaining “the costly flavour,” was the verse of Pope.
Pope was made to appear as ridiculous as possible, and often nicknamed “Poet Pug,” from the frontispiece to an attack in reply to his own, termed “Pope Alexander’s Supremacy and Infallibility examined.” It represents Pope as a misshapen monkey leaning on a pile of books, in the attitude adopted by Jervas in his portrait of the poet.—Ed.
Dennis tells the whole story. “At his first coming to town he was importunate with Mr. Cromwell to introduce him to me. The recommendation engaged me to be about thrice in company with him; after which I went to the country, till I found myself most insolently attacked in his very superficial ‘Essay on Criticism,’ by which he endeavoured to destroy the reputation of a man who had published pieces of criticism, and to set up his own. I was moved with indignation to that degree, that I immediately writ remarks on that essay. I also writ upon part of his translation of ‘Homer,’ his ‘Windsor Forest,’ and his infamous ‘Temple of Fame.’” In the same pamphlet he says:—“Pope writ his ‘Windsor Forest’ in envy of Sir John Denham’s ‘Cooper’s Hill;’ his infamous ‘Temple of Fame’ in envy of Chaucer’s poem upon the same subject; his ‘Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day,’ in envy of Dryden’s ‘Feast of Alexander.’” In reproaching Pope with his peculiar rhythm, that monotonous excellence, which soon became mechanical, he has an odd attempt at a pun:—“Boileau’s Pegasus has all his paces; the Pegasus of Pope, like a Kentish post-horse, is always upon the Canterbury.”—“Remarks upon several Passages in the Preliminaries to the Dunciad,” 1729.
Two parties arose in the literary republic, the Theobaldians and the Popeians. The “Grub-street Journal,” a kind of literary gazette of some campaigns of the time, records the skirmishes with tolerable neutrality, though with a strong leaning in favour of the prevailing genius.
The Popeians did not always do honour to their great leader; and the Theobaldians proved themselves, at times, worthy of being engaged, had fate so ordered it, in the army of their renowned enemy. When Young published his “Two Epistles to Pope, on the Authors of the Age,” there appeared “One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope, in Answer to two of Dr. Young’s.” On this, a Popeian defends his master from some extravagant accusations in “The Grub-street Memoirs.” He insists, as his first principle, that all accusations against a man’s character without an attestor are presumed to be slanders and lies, and in this case every gentleman, though “Knight of the Bathos,” is merely a liar and scoundrel.
“You assure us he is not only a bad poet, but a stealer from bad poets: if so, you have just cause to complain of invasion of property. You assure us he is not even a versifier, but steals the sound of his verses; now, to steal a sound is as ingenious as to paint an echo. You cannot bear gentlemen should be treated as vermin and reptiles; now, to be impartial, you were compared to flying-fishes, didappers, tortoises, and parrots, &c., not vermin, but curious and beautiful creatures”—alluding to the abuse, in this “Epistle,” on such authors as Atterbury, Arbuthnot, Swift, the Duke of Buckingham, &c. The Popeian concludes:—
“After all, your poem, to comfort you, is more innocent than the Dunciad; for in the one there’s no man abused but is very well pleased to be abused in such company; whereas in the other there’s no man so much as named, but is extremely affronted to be ranked with such people as style each other the dullest of men.”
The publication of the Dunciad, however, drove the Theobaldians out of the field. Guerillas, such as the “One Epistle,” sometimes appeared, but their heroes struck and skulked away. A Theobaldian, in an epigram, compared the Dunciad of Pope to the offspring of the celebrated Pope Joan. The neatness of his wit is hardly blunted by a pun. He who talks of Pope’s “stealing a sound,” seems to have practised that invisible art himself, for the verse is musical as Pope’s.
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TO THE AUTHOR OF THE DUNCIAD.
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The answers to this epigram by the Popeians are too gross. The “One Epistle” is attributed to James Moore Smyth, in alliance with Welsted and other unfortunate heroes.
Curll was a bookseller, from whose shop issued many works of an immoral class, yet he chose for his sign “The Bible and Dial,” which were displayed over his shop in Fleet-street. The satire of Pope’s Dunciad seems fairly to have been earned, as we may judge from the class of books still seen in the libraries of curious collectors, and which are certainly unfitted for more general circulation. For these publications he was fined by the Court of King’s Bench, and on one occasion stood in the pillory as a punishment. Yet himself and Lintot were the chief booksellers of the era, until Tonson arose, and by taking a more enlarged view of the trade, laid the foundation of the great publishing houses of modern times.—Ed.
Cromwell was one of the gay young men who frequented coffee-houses and clubs when Pope, also a young man, did the same, and corresponded freely with him for a few years, when the intimacy almost entirely ceased. The lady was a Mrs. Thomas, who became a sort of literary hack to Curll, and is celebrated in the Dunciad under the name of Corinna. Roscoe, in his edition of Pope, says, “Of Henry Cromwell little is known, further than what is learnt from this correspondence, from which he appears to have been a man of respectable connections, talents, and education, and to have intermingled pretty freely in the gallantries of fashionable life.” He seems to have been somewhat eccentric, and the correspondence of Pope only lasted from 1708 to 1711.—Ed.
Pope, in his conversations with Spence, says, “My letters to Cromwell were written with a design that does not generally appear: they were not written in sober sadness.”—Ed.
Pope’s victory over Curll is represented by Hogarth in a print ostentatiously hung in the garret of his “Distressed Poet.”—Ed.
Johnson says, that though “Pope attacked Cibber with acrimony, the provocation is not easily discoverable.” But the statements of Cibber, which have never been contradicted, show sufficient motives to excite the poetic irascibility. It was Cibber’s “fling” at the unowned and condemned comedy of the triumvirate of wits, Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, Three Hours after Marriage, when he performed Bayes in the Rehearsal, that incurred the immortal odium. There was no malice on Cibber’s side; for it was then the custom to restore the zest of that obsolete dramatic satire, by introducing allusions to any recent theatrical event. The plot of this ridiculous comedy hinging on the deep contrivance of two lovers getting access to the wife of a virtuoso, “one curiously swathed up like an Egyptian mummy, and the other slily covered in the pasteboard skin of a crocodile,” was an incident so extremely natural, that it seemed congenial with the high imagination and the deep plot of a Bayes! Poor Cibber, in the gaiety of his impromptu, made the “fling;” and, unluckily, it was applauded by the audience! The irascibility of Pope too strongly authenticated one of the three authors. “In the swelling of his heart, after the play was over, he came behind the scenes with his lips pale and his voice trembling, to call me to account for the insult; and accordingly fell upon me with all the foul language that a wit out of his senses would be capable of, choked with the foam of his passion.” Cibber replied with dignity, insisted on the privilege of the character, and that he would repeat the same jest as long as the public approved of it. Pope would have certainly approved of Cibber’s manly conduct, had he not been the author himself. To this circumstance may be added the reception which the town and the court bestowed on Cibber’s “Nonjuror,” a satire on the politics of the jacobite faction; Pope appears, under the assumed name of Barnevelt, to have published “an odd piece of wit, proving that the Nonjuror, in its design, its characters, and almost every scene of it, was a closely-couched jacobite libel against the Government.” Cibber says that “this was so shrewdly maintained, that I almost liked the jest myself.” Pope seems to have been fond of this new species of irony; for, in the Pastorals of Phillips, he showed the same sort of ingenuity, and he repeated the same charge of political mystery against his own finest poem; for he proved by many “merry inuendoes,” that “The Rape of the Lock” was as audacious a libel as the pretended Barnevelt had made out the Nonjuror to be. See note, p. 280.
Cibber did not obtrude himself in this contest. Had he been merely a poor vain creature, he had not preserved so long a silence. His good-temper was without anger, but he remonstrates with no little dignity, when he chooses to be solemn; though to be playful was more natural to him. “If I have lain so long stoically silent, or unmindful of your satirical favours, it was not so much for want of a proper reply, as that I thought there never needed a public one; for all people of sense would know what truth or falsehood there was in what you said of me, without my wisely pointing it out to them. Nor did I choose to follow your example, of being so much a self-tormentor, as to be concerned at whatever opinion of me any published invective might infuse into people unknown to me. Even the malicious, though they may like the libel, don’t always believe it.” His reason for reply is, that his silence should not be farther reproached “as a plain confession of my being a bankrupt in wit, if I don’t immediately answer those bills of discredit you have drawn upon me.” There is no doubt that Cibber perpetually found instigators to encourage these attacks; and one forcible argument he says was, that “a disgrace, from such a pen, would stick upon me to posterity.” He seems to be aware that his acquaintance cheer him to the lists “for their particular amusement.”
“His edition of Shakspeare proved no better than a foil to set off the superiority of Theobald’s; and Cibber bore away the palm from him in the drama. We have an account of two attempts of Pope’s, one in each of the two principal branches of this species of poetry, and both unsuccessful. The fate of the comedy has been already mentioned (in page 300), and the tragedy was saved from the like fate by one not less ignominious, being condemned and burnt by his own hands. It was called Cleone, and formed upon the same story as a late one wrote and published by Mr. Dodsley with the same title in 1759. See Dodsley’s Preface.”—Biographia Britannica, 1760.
Armstrong, who was a keen observer of man, has expressed his uncommon delight in the company of Cibber. “Beside his abilities as a writer (as a writer of comedies, Armstrong means), and the singular variety of his powers as an actor, he was to the last one of the most agreeable, cheerful, and best-humoured men you would ever wish to converse with.”—Warton’s Pope, vol. iv. 160.
Cibber was one of those rare beings whose dispositions Hume describes “as preferable to an inheritance of 10,000l. a year.”
Dr. Aikin, in his Biographical Dictionary, has thus written on Cibber: “It cannot be doubted, that, at the time, the contest was more painful to Pope than to Cibber. But Pope’s satire is immortal, whereas Cibber’s sarcasms are no longer read. Cibber may therefore be represented to future times with less credit for abilities than he really deserves; for he was certainly no dunce, though not, in the higher sense of the word, a man of genius. His effrontery and vanity could not be easily overcharged, even by a foe. Indeed, they are striking features in the portrait drawn by himself.” Dr. Aikin’s political morality often vented its indignation at the successful injustice of great power! Why should not the same spirit conduct him in the Literary Republic? With the just sentiments he has given on Cibber, it was the duty of an intrepid critic to raise a moral feeling against the despotism of genius, and to have protested against the arbitrary power of Pope. It is participating in the injustice to pass it by, without even a regret at its effect.
As for Cibber himself, he declares he was not impudent, and I am disposed to take his own word, for he modestly asserts this, in a remark on Pope’s expression,
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“‘Cibberian forehead,’ |
“by which I find you modestly mean Cibberian impudence, as a sample of the strongest.—Sir, your humble servant—but pray, sir, in your ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’ (where, by the way, in your ample description of a great Poet, you slily hook in a whole hat-full of virtues to your own character) have not you this particular line?
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‘And thought a Lie, in verse or prose, the same—’” |
Cibber laments it is not so, for “any accusation in smooth verse will always sound well, though it is not tied down to have a tittle of truth in it, when the strongest defence in poor humble prose, not having that harmonious advantage, takes nobody by the ear—very hard upon an innocent man! For suppose in prose, now, I were as confidently to insist that you were an honest, good-natured, inoffensive creature, would my barely saying so be any proof of it? No sure. Why then, might it not be supposed an equal truth, that both our assertions were equally false? Yours, when you call me impudent; mine, when I call you modest, &c. While my superiors suffer me occasionally to sit down with them, I hope it will be thought that rather the Papal than the Cibberian forehead ought to be out of countenance.” I give this as a specimen of Cibber’s serious reasonings—they are poor; and they had been so from a greater genius; for ridicule and satire, being only a mere abuse of eloquence, can never be effectually opposed by truisms. Satire must be repelled by satire; and Cibber’s sarcasms obtained what Cibber’s reasonings failed in.
Vain as Cibber has been called, and vain as he affects to be, he has spoken of his own merits as a comic writer,—and he was a very great one,—with a manly moderation, very surprising indeed in a vain man. Pope has sung in his Dunciad, most harmoniously inhuman,
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“How, with less reading than makes felons scape, |
Blasting as was this criticism, it could not raise the anger of the gay and careless Cibber. Yet what could have put it to a sharper test? Johnson and Ozell are names which have long disappeared from the dramatic annals, and could only have been coupled with Cibber to give an idea of what the satirist meant by “the human genius of an ape.” But listen to the mild, yet the firm tone of Cibber—he talks like injured innocence, and he triumphs over Pope, in all the dignity of truth.—I appeal to Cibber’s posterity!
“And pray, sir, why my name under this scurvy picture? I flatter myself, that if you had not put it there, nobody else would have thought it like me; nor can I easily believe that you yourself do: but perhaps you imagined it would be a laughing ornament to your verse, and had a mind to divert other people’s spleen with it as well as your own. Now let me hold up my head a little, and then we shall see how the features hit me.” He proceeds to relate, how “many of those plays have lived the longer for my meddling with them.” He mentions several, which “had been dead to the stage out of all memory, which have since been in a constant course of acting above these thirty or forty years.” And then he adds: “Do those altered plays at all take from the merit of those more successful pieces, which were entirely my own?—When a man is abused, he has a right to speak even laudable truths of himself, to confront his slanderer. Let me therefore add, that my first Comedy of The Fool in Fashion was as much (though not so valuable) an original, as any work Mr. Pope himself has produced. It is now forty-seven years since its first appearance on the stage, where it has kept its station, to this very day, without ever lying one winter dormant. Nine years after this, I brought on The Careless Husband, with still greater success; and was that too
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‘A patch’d, vamp’d, future, old, revived new piece?’ |
Let the many living spectators of these plays, then, judge between us, whether the above verses came from the honesty of a satirist, who would be thought, like you, the upright censor of mankind. Sir, this libel was below you! Satire, without truth, recoils upon its author, and must, at other times, render him suspected of prejudice, even where he may be just; as frauds, in religion, make more atheists than converts; and the bad heart, Mr. Pope, that points an injury with verse, makes it the more unpardonable, as it is not the result of sudden passion, but of an indulged and slowly-meditating ill-nature. What a merry mixed mortal has nature made you, that can debase that strength and excellence of genius to the lowest human weakness, that of offering unprovoked injuries, at the hazard of your being ridiculous too, when the venom you spit falls short of your aim!” I have quoted largely, to show that Cibber was capable of exerting a dignified remonstrance, as well as pointing the lightest, yet keenest, shafts of sarcastic wit.
Even the “Grub-street Journal” had its jest on his appointment to the laureateship. In No. 52 was the following epigram:—
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“Well, said Apollo, still ’tis mine |
It may be reasonably doubted, however, if vanity had not something to do with this—the vanity of appearing as a philosophical writer, and astonishing the friends who had considered him only as a good comedian. The volume was magnificently printed in quarto on fine paper, “for the author,” in 1747. It is entitled, “The Character and Conduct of Cicero Considered, from the History of his Life by the Rev. Dr. Middleton; with occasional Essays and Observations upon the most Memorable Facts and Persons during that Period.” The entire work is a series of somewhat too-familiar notes on the various passages of “Cicero’s Life and Times,” as narrated by Middleton. He terms the unsettled state after the death of Sylla “an uncomfortable time for those sober citizens who had a mind and a right to be quiet.” His professional character breaks forth when he speaks of Roscius instructing Cicero in acting; and in the very commencement of his grave labour he rambles back to the theatre to quote a scene from Vanbrugh’s Relapse, as a proof how little fashionable readers think while they read. Colley’s well-meaning but free-and-easy reflections on the gravities of Roman history, in the progress of his work, are remarkable, and have all the author’s coarse common sense, but very little depth or refinement—Ed.
With what good-humour he retorts a piece of sly malice of Pope’s; who, in the notes to the Dunciad, after quoting Jacob’s account of Cibber’s talents, adds—“Mr. Jacob omitted to remark that he is particularly admirable in tragedy.” To which Cibber rejoins—“Ay, sir, and your remark has omitted, too, that (with all his commendations) I can’t dance upon the rope, or make a saddle, nor play upon the organ. My dear, dear Mr. Pope, how could a man of your stinging capacity let so tame, so low a reflection escape him? Why, this hardly rises above the petty malice of Miss Molly. ‘Ay, ay, you may think my sister as handsome as you please, but if you were to see her legs!’ If I have made so many crowded theatres laugh, and in the right place, too, for above forty years together, am I to make up the number of your dunces, because I have not the equal talent of making them cry too? Make it your own case. Is what you have excelled in at all the worse for your having so dismally dabbled in the farce of Three Hours after Marriage? What mighty reason will the world have to laugh at my weakness in tragedy, more than at yours in comedy?”
I will preserve one anecdote of that felicity of temper—that undisturbed good-humour which never abandoned Cibber in his most distressful moments. When he brought out, in 1724, his Cæsar in Egypt, at a great expense, and “a beggarly account of empty boxes” was the result, it raised some altercations between the poet and his brother managers, the bard still struggling for another and another night. At length he closed the quarrel with a pun, which confessed the misfortune, with his own good-humour. In a periodical publication of the times I find the circumstance recorded in this neat epigram:—
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On the Sixth Night of Cibber’s “Cæsar in Egypt.”
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A wicked wag of a lord had enticed Pope into a tavern, and laid a love-plot against his health. Cibber describes his resolute interference by snatching “our little Homer by the heels. This was done for the honour of our nation. Homer would have been too serious a sacrifice to our evening’s amusement.” He has metamorphosed our Apollo into a “Tom-tit;” but the Ovidian warmth, however ludicrous, will not now admit of a narrative. This story, by our comic writer, was accompanied by a print, that was seen by more persons, probably, than read the Dunciad. In his second letter, Cibber, alluding to the vexation of Pope on this ridiculous story, observes—“To have been exposed as a bad man, ought to have given thee thrice the concern of being shown a ridiculous lover.” And now that he had discovered that he could touch the nerves of Pope, he throws out one of the most ludicrous analogies to the figure of our bard:—“When crawling in thy dangerous deed of darkness, I gently, with a finger and a thumb, picked off thy small round body by thy long legs, like a spider making love in a cobweb.”
“The Egotist, or Colley upon Cibber; being his own picture retouched to so plain a likeness that no one now would have the face to own it BUT HIMSELF.
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‘But one stroke more, and that shall be my last.’ |
London, 1743.
Dryden.”