n the effort, who had brought a sound verbal criticism
to bear on the text. It is to his credit, that many of the most
ingenious emendations suggested in Mr. Collier's famous folio were
anticipated by this "king of the dunces"; and it must be owned, that
his edition is as far superior to Warburton's and Hanmer's, which were
not long after brought out with a deafening flourish of trumpets, as
the editions of Steevens and Malone are to his. Yet, prompted by the
"Dunciad," it is the fashion of literature to regard Theobald with
compassion, as a block-head and empiric. Cibber escapes but little
better, and yet he was a man of respectable talent, and played no
second-rate part in the literary history of the time.

As Laureate Cibber drew near the end of earthly things, a desire,
common to poetical as well as political potentates, possessed him,--a
desire to nominate a successor. In his case, indeed, the idea may have
been borrowed from "MacFlecknoe" or the "Dunciad." The Earl of
Chesterfield, during his administration in Ireland, had discovered a
rival to Ben Jonson in the person of a poetical bricklayer, one Henry
Jones, whom his Lordship carried with him to London, as a specimen of
the indigenous tribes of Erin. It was easier for this Jones to rhyme
in heroics than to handle a trowel or construct a chimney. He rhymed,
therefore, for the amusement and in honor of the polite circle of
which Stanhope was the centre; the fashionable world subscribed
magnificently for his volume of "Poems upon Several Occasions";[14]
his tragedy, "The Earl of Essex," in the composition of which his
patron is said to have shared, was universally applauded. Its
introduction to the stage was the work of Cibber; and Cibber, assisted
by Chesterfield, labored zealously to secure the author a reversion of
the laurel upon his own lamented demise.

The effort was unsuccessful. Cibber's death occurred in December,
1757. The administration of the elder Pitt, which had been restored
six months before, was insensible to the merits of the prodigious
bricklayer. The wreath was tendered to Thomas Gray. It would, no
doubt, have proved a grateful relief to royalty, obliged for
twenty-seven years to listen twice yearly, if not oftener, to the
monotonous felicitations of Colley, to hear in his stead the author of
the "Bard," of the "Progress of Poetry," of the "Ode at Eton College."
But the relief was denied it. Gray, ambitious only of the historical
chair at Ca