Daily Journal_, until he was ripe for
the _Dunciad_. Pope enthroned him as the hero of the poem, and so he
remained till he was replaced by Colley Cibber in 1741, when the
alteration necessitated several omissions. In the earlier editions
Theobald soliloquised thus:

Here studious I unlucky Moderns save,
Nor sleeps one error in its father's grave,
Old puns restore, lost blunders nicely seek,
And crucify poor Shakespear once a week.
For thee I dim these eyes, and stuff this head,
With all such reading as was never read;
For the supplying, in the worst of days,
Notes to dull books, and prologues to dull plays;
For thee explain a thing 'till all men doubt it,
And write about it, Goddess, and about it.

Theobald is introduced also in the _Art of Sinking in Poetry_ among the
classes of authors described as swallows and eels: the former "are
eternally skimming and fluttering up and down, but all their agility is
employed to catch flies," the latter "wrap themselves up in their own mud,
but are mighty nimble and pert." About the same time, however, Pope
brought out the second edition (1728) of his Shakespeare, and in it he
incorporated some of Theobald's conjectures, though his recognition of
their merit was grudging and even dishonestly inadequate. (See the preface
to the various readings at the end of the eighth volume, 1728.) Yet one's
sympathies with Theobald are prejudiced by his ascription to Shakespeare
of the _Double Falshood, or the Distrest Lovers_, a play which was acted
in 1727 and printed in the following year. Theobald professed to have
revised it and adapted it to the stage. The question of authorship has not
been settled, but if Theobald is relieved from the imputation of forgery,
he must at least stand convicted of ignorance of the Shakespearian manner.
Pope at once recognised that the play was not Shakespeare's, and added a
contemptuous reference to it in the second edition of his Preface. It was
the opinion of Farmer that the groundwork of the play was by Shirley (see
the _Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare_, p. 181).

Theobald now sought to revenge himself on Pope, and, in his own words, he
"purposed to reply only in Shakespeare" (Nichols, _id._ ii., p. 248). His
first plan was to publish a volume of _Remarks on Shakespeare_. On 15th
April, 1729, he says the volume "will now shortly appear in the world"
(id., p. 222), but on 6th November he writes to Warburt