' was not.

Born in 1671, he disappointed the hopes of his father, the famous
sculptor, and at the age of eighteen made his first appearance on the
stage. As actor and as dramatist, the theatre throughout his life was
Cibber's all-absorbing interest. His first play, _Love's Last Shift_
(1696), kept possession of the stage for forty years, and his best play,
_The Careless Husband_ (1704), received a like welcome. As an actor he
was also successful, and played for L50 a night, the highest sum ever
given at that time to any English player. His career was as long as it
was prosperous. 'Old Cibber plays to-night,' Horace Walpole wrote in
1741, 'and all the world will be there.'

It was only as Poet Laureate, for he could not write poetry, that Cibber
displayed his inferiority. The honour was conferred in 1730, two years
after Gay had produced the _Beggar's Opera_, when Pope was in the height
of his fame, when Thomson had published his _Seasons_ and Young _The
Universal Passion_. Pope, as a Roman Catholic, was out of the running,
but there were poets living who would have saved the office from the
disgrace brought upon it by Cibber. 'As to Cibber,' Swift wrote to Pope,
'if I had any inclination to excuse the Court, I would allege that the
Laureate's place is entirely in the Lord Chamberlain's gift; but who
makes Lord Chamberlains is another question.' The sole result of the
appointment that deserves to be recorded is an epigram by Johnson, as
just as it is severe:

'Augustus still survives in Maro's strain,
And Spenser's verse prolongs Eliza's reign;
Great George's acts let tuneful Cibber sing,
For Nature formed the Poet for the King!'

Of poetry there is no trace in the five volumes of his dramatic works;
there are few touches of nature, and little genuine wit, but these
defects are to some extent supplied by sparkling dialogue and lively
badinage. Cibber is often sentimental, and when he is sentimental he is
odious. His attempts to express strong emotion and honourable feeling
excite laughter instead of sympathy, and on this account it is difficult
to accept without some deduction Mr. Ward's favourable judgment of _The
Careless Husband_,[54] which, if it be one of the cleverest of Cibber's
dramas, is also one of the most conspicuous for this defect. Here, as
elsewhere, Cibber should have left sentiment alone. Imagine a lover
exclaiming to a relenting mistress, 'Oh, let my soul thus bending to
your power