ting word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal Darkness buries All."

Mr Bowles, himself a true poet, thinks the Fourth Book the best. "The
objects of satire," he says, "are more general and just: the one is
confined to persons, and those of the most insignificant sort; the other
is directed chiefly to things, such as faults of education, false
habits, and false taste. In polished and pointed satire, in richness of
versification and imagery, and in the happy introduction of characters,
speeches, figures, and every sort of poetical ornament adapted to the
subject, this Book yields, in my opinion, to none of Pope's writings of
the same kind." Excellently well said. But what inconsistency in saying,
at the same time, "These observations of Dr Warton are, in general, very
just and sensible." And again, "I by no means _think so meanly_ of it as
Dr Warton." Meanly, indeed! Why, he has just told us he thinks it equal
to any thing of the same kind Pope ever wrote. But the distinguished
Wintonian chose to speak nonsense, rather than speak harshly of old Joe.
What are Dr Warton's "in general very just and sensible observations?"
"Our poet was persuaded by Dr Warburton, unhappily enough, to add a
Fourth Book to his finished piece, of such a very different cast and
colour, as to render it at last one of the most motley compositions
there is, perhaps, any where to be found in the works of so exact a
writer as Pope. For one great purpose of this Fourth Book (where, by the
way, the hero does nothing at all) was to satirize and proscribe
infidels and freethinkers, to leave the ludicrous for the serious, Grub
Street for theology, the mock-heroic for metaphysics--which occasion a
marvellous mixture and jumble of images and sentiments, pantomime and
philosophy, journals and moral evidence, Fleet Ditch and the High Priori
road, Curl and Clarke." That reads like a bit of a prize-essay by a
bachelor of arts in the "College of the Goddess in the City." The
_Dunciad_ is rendered not only a motley, but, perhaps, the most motley
composition of an exact writer, by a Book added to it when it was in a
state of perfection--for as a Poem in Three Books, "it was clear,
consistent, and of a piece." This is not the way to make a poem motley,
nor a man. "Motley's the suit I wear," might have taught the Doctor
better. They who don't like the Fourth Book can stop at the end of the
Third, and then the Poem is motley no more. It