n, personal anger and
offence, belonged to the day. The poet gives it up to the day. He uses
his poetical machinery to grace and point a ridicule that is to tell
home to the breasts of living men--that is to be felt tingling by living
flesh--that is to tinge living cheeks, if they can still redden, with
blushes.

Yet, for all that, the Dunciad still lives; ay, in spite of seeming
inconsistency, we declare it to be immortal. For, build with what
materials she may, the works of genius that stand in the world of
thought survive all time's mutations, cemented by a spirit she alone can
interfuse. It must not be said that a poem shelved is dead and buried.
Open it at midnight, and the morning is in your chamber.

We love to commune with the rising and new-risen generations; elderly
people we do not much affect; and, for that we are old ourselves, we are
averse from the old. Now, of our well-beloved rising and new-risen
generations, how many thousands may there be in these islands who have
read the Dunciad? Not so many as to make needless in our pages a few
explanatory sentences respecting its first appearance, and the not
inconsiderable changes of form it was afterwards made to assume. At the
head of the Dunces at first stood one Theobald, who, with some of the
requisite knowledge and aptitude for a reviser of the text of
Shakspeare, was a poor creature, and a dishonest one, but too feeble and
too obscure for the place. Fifteen years afterwards, (1742,) at the
instigation of Warburton, Pope added to the Dunciad a Fourth Book. In it
there was _one line, and one line only_, about Colley Cibber.

"She mounts the throne: her head a cloud conceal'd,
In broad effulgence all below reveal'd,
('Tis thus aspiring Dulness ever shines,)
_Soft on her lap her Laureate Son reclines._"

Dr Johnson calls that an acrimonious attack! "to which the provocation
is not easily discoverable;" and says, "that the severity of this satire
left Cibber no longer any patience." The Doctor speaks, too, of the
"incessant and unappeasable malignity" of Pope towards Cibber, and takes
the part of that worthy in the quarrel. Colley was absolutely
poet-laureate of England; and having no longer any patience in his
pride, "gave the town" an abusive pamphlet, in which he swore that he
would no longer tamely submit to such insults, but fight Pope with his
own weapons. Dr Johnson says--"Pope had now been enough acquainted with
human life to know, _if his passion