OF THE "DUNCIAD."

[Page 199.

I.]

INTEREST EXCITED BY ITS PUBLICATION.

199

was published. The earliest copy met with is a duodecimo, purporting to be reprinted for A. Dodd, 1728. This had been reprinted in Dublin, for Swift in a letter dated July 16, 1728, says, he had run over the Dunciad in an Irish edition, which he supposed was full of faults. This early imperfect copy was but the avant-courier of an enlarged and improved edition, with Notes, which was ready for the press by the end of the year 1728, and being issued early in the following year, a copy was presented, as the poet duly recorded in his Notes, to King George the Second and his Queen, by the hands of Sir Robert Walpole, on the 12th of March, 1728-9. Savage, or rather Pope, gives a lively account of the interest excited by the publication, and this part of the dedication Savage said was true.

On the day the book was first vended a crowd of authors beseiged the shop; entreaties, advices, threats of law and battery, nay, cries of treason were all employed to hinder the coming out of the Dunciad. On the other side the booksellers and hawkers made as great an effort to procure it.

What could a few poor authors do against so great a majority as the public? There was no stopping a torrent with a finger, so out it came. 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, Mr. Pope was the greatest enemy the Government had; and another brought his image in clay, to execute him in effigy; with which sad sort of satisfactions the gentlemen were a little comforted. Some false editions of the book having an owl in their frontispiece, the true one, to distinguish it, fixed in its 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; for 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.

Curll was the publisher of one of these editions, and he also issued "A Complete Key to the Dunciad," price sixpence, to which, with his usual vanity and assumption he prefixed this motto :

:

How easily two wits agree!

One finds the satire, one the Key.

The Key professed to supply the names of the authors satirised by Pope, and indicated in the poem by initial letters. These were well known, and Curll appears to have given the names correctly, with brief notices of the works of the different authors. Another reply, printed also in 1728, and consisting of thirty-two small pages, is entitled "The Popiad," and is sufficiently personal, though chiefly devoted to criticism on the Homeric Translations. Dennis retaliated, not only by an attack on the Dunciad, but by publishing "Remarks on the Rape of the Lock," which had been written in 1714, but not printed. Jonathan Smedley, an enemy of Swift, collected some of these pieces and printed them under the title of "Alexanderiana," being a supplement to his "Gulliveriana." Pope enumerates most of the invectives in the Appendix to the Dunciad; but there is one which he does not mention, that is supposed to have proceeded from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Lady Mary and her friend Lord Hervey had been sarcastically alluded to in the Dunciad—the former in connection with a circumstance which was sufficiently irritating and annoying, and she took a characteristic revenge. She published a brochure entitled, " A Pop upon Pope, or a true and faithful Account of a late horrid and barbarous whipping, committed on the body of Sawney Pope, Poet, as he was innocently walking in Ham Walks, near the river of Thames, meditating verses for the good of the public; supposed to have been done by two evil-disposed persons out of spite and

8 Ruffhead states that the poet had collected and bound together all the libels against himself, prefixing to them a motto from the Book of 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." Savage had most probably collected these, for Pope said he seldom read the papers.

9 Dunciad, Book II. v. 135.

ALLEGED WHIPPING IN HAM WALKS.

201

revenge for a harmless lampoon, which the said poet had writ upon them." The narrative is short, and states that two gentlemen came up to the poet, and "knowing him perfectly well, partly by his back and partly by his face, walked a turn or two with him; when, entering into a conversation (as we hear, on the Dunciad, a pretty poem of the said poet's writing), on a sudden one of the gentlemen hoisted poor Master Pope, the poet, on his back, whilst the other drew out from under his coat a long birchen rod (as we are informed, made out of a stable broom), and with the said long rod did, with great violence,

LORD HERVEY.

and unmerciful hand, strike Master Pope,"&c. As soon as the whipping was over, the gentlemen are said to have made off, "when good Mrs. B (Martha Blount) a good charitable woman, and near neighbour of Master Pope's, at Twickenham, chancing to come by, took him up in her apron and carried him to the water-side, where she got a boat to convey him home." The poet is then described as affected in his head by the whipping, and continually raving for pen, ink, and paper, which were allowed him by her own physician, Dr. A-t, who entirely mistook his case. The allusions to Martha Blount and Dr. Arbuthnot, showed acquaintance with the poet's history. In consequence of this lampoon, and probably as part of the persecution, an advertisement appeared in the Daily Post of Friday, June 14, 1728, which professed to be written by the poet, and in some

accounts is said to have been actually sent by him to the newspaper :

แ

"Whereas there has been a scandalous paper cried 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 all that day, and the same is a malicious and ill-grounded report.

A. P."

If the sensitive poet was really betrayed into writing this advertisement, the malicious satisfaction of Lady Mary may be easily conceived. Colonel Ducket, a Commissioner of Excise, who had been satirised in the Dunciad as entertaining a pious passion for Thomas Burnet, son of the Bishop, threatened personal chastisement, but did not carry his intention into effect, and Pope afterwards altered the lines. Another complainant was Aaron Hill, a dramatic writer of some celebrity, though but small success, who then moved in the higher circles of literary and fashionable society, and was intimate with Peterborough, Bolingbroke, and other friends of Pope. Some notice of Hill will be found in the notes to the Dunciad. He appears to have been such a person as Swift loved to ridicule- —a projector, trying various schemes, and succeeding in none. secretary to Lord Peterborough, then manager of Drury Lane Theatre, then obtaining a patent for extracting oil from beech mast; next organizing a company for cultivating plantations in Georgia; afterwards clearing woods in the Highlands of Scotland, to furnish timber for the navy, and making potash that was to rival the potash brought from Russia! All this time he was cultivating poetry and the drama, writing turgid declamatory tragedies, or translating, with more success, the best productions of the French theatre. This bustling, kind-hearted, and patriotic, but somewhat vain and ostentatious person, had been acquainted with Pope for several years, and had addressed to him copies of complimentary verses. He had written a

At one time we find him