ere performed, there
is no reason to doubt, to the contentment of the King and court.[11]
But the Laureate himself was peculiarly the object of sarcastic
satire. The standing causes were of course in operation: the envy of
rival poetasters, the dislike of political opponents, the enmities
originating in professional disputes and jealousies. Cibber's manners
had not been studied in the school of Chesterfield, although that
school was then open and flourishing. He was rude, presumptuous,
dogmatic. To superiors in rank he was grudgingly respectful; to equals
and inferiors, insupportably insolent. But when to these aggravating
traits he added the vanity of printing an autobiography, exposing a
thousand assailable points in his life and character, the temptation
was irresistible, and the whole population of Grub Street enlisted in
a crusade against him.[12] Fortunately, beneath the crust of insolence
and vanity, there was a substratum of genuine power in the Laureate's
make, which rendered him not only a match for these, but for even a
greater than these, the author of the "Dunciad." Pope's antipathy for
the truculent actor dated some distance back.

Back to the 'Devil,' the last echoes roll,
And 'Coll!' each butcher roars at Hockley-hole.

The latter accounts for it by telling, that at the first
representation of Gay's "Three Hours after Marriage," in 1717, where
one of the scenes was violently hissed, some angry words passed
between the irritated manager and Pope, who was behind the scenes, and
was erroneously supposed to have aided in the authorship. The odds of
a scolding match must have been all in favor of the blustering Cibber,
rather than of the nervous and timid Pope; but then the latter had a
faculty of hate, which his antagonist had not, and he exercised it
vigorously. The allusions to Cibber in his later poems are frequent.
Thus, in the "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot":--

"And has not Colley still his Lord and whore?
His butchers Henley? his freemasons Moore?"

And again:--

"So humble he has knocked at Tibbald's door,
Has drunk with Colley, nay, has rhymed for Moore."

And in the "Imitation of Horace," addressed to Lord Fortescue:--

"Better be Cibber, I maintain it still,
Than ridicule all taste, blaspheme, quadrille."

"The Dunciad," as originally published in 1728, had Lewis Theobald for
its hero. There was neither sense nor justice in the selection. Pope
hated Theobald for presuming to