public? There was no stopping a torrent with a finger, so out it came." The effect produced by its publication on the persons whom it held up to contempt, may be easily conceived. By the inhabitants of the realms of Dulness, from King Theobald down to the meanest subject, a universal clamour was raised against the author. In the prefatory matter to the poem will be found a list of the angry effusions to which it gave birth. Among others, it called forth from Dennis, Remarks on Mr. Pope's Rape of the Lock, in several Letters to a Friend (which he had kept by him in manuscript for many years, and which have been already noticed1), as well as Remarks on the Dunciad, dedicated to Theobald. But Pope now regarded his attacks with indifference; and in 1733, when a play was performed for the benefit of Dennis, who was then blind and in great distress, he wrote a Prologue for the occasion, in which he compares him to Belisarius, and solicits the audience to assist a veteran critic, "who long had warr'd with modern Huns, On the appearance of The Dunciad, the enemies of Pope invented a story of his having been 1 See p. xxix. 2 Mr. Roscoe mentions the invention of this story as prior to the publication of The Dunciad, but it must have been seized by two persons in the dusk of the evening in Ham-walks, and whipped with rods; a particular account of which was circulated in print. It is difficult to determine whether the following advertisement, which appeared in the Daily Post, June 14, 1728, really proceeded from our poet, or was only an attempt of the fabricators of the story to render him still more ridiculous: "Whereas there has been a scandalous paper cried about the streets, under the title of A Pop upon Pope, insinuating that I was whipt 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.” To enter into a detail of the misunderstandings between Pope and Aaron Hill, the author of sundry forgotten plays and poems, is here unnecessary. Several circumstances had occurred to interrupt their amity before the publication of The Dunciad; and when it appeared, the following lines in the second book, together with fabricated after the appearance of that poem. In A true and faithful Account of a late horrid and barbarous Whipping committed on the Body of Sawney Pope, we are informed that the "two Gentlemen," before attacking Pope, "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," &c. This piece, which is not without considerable humour, is said to have been the production of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. the note on them, were generally understood to point at Hill: "Next ** tried; but hardly snatch'd from sight, He bears no token of the sabler streams, And mounts far off among the swans of Thames." "Note. This is an instance of the tenderness of our author. The person here intended writ an angry preface against him, grounded on a mistake, which he afterwards honourably acknowledged in another printed preface. Since when he fell into a second mistake, and abused both him and his friend [Swift]. He is a writer of genius and spirit, though in his youth he was guilty of some pieces bordering upon bombast. Our poet here gives him a panegyric instead of a satire; being edified beyond measure at this only instance he ever met with in his life, of one who was much a poet confessing himself in an error; and has suppressed his name, as thinking him capable of a second repentance." In a correspondence which took place between Hill and Pope on the subject of these passages, the latter was obliged to have recourse to a rather inconsistent explanation. It, however, removed the dissatisfaction of Hill; and they seem ever after to have lived on very friendly terms. In 1731, appeared an Epistle on Taste, addressed to Lord Burlington, and so favourable was its reception, that in the course of the same |