uld, for this single virtue,
prefer her influence to Apollo and the Nine Muses. Is there no bastard
virtue in the peace of which the poet makes her the author?--'The
goddess bade Britannia sleep.' Is she not celebrated for her beauty,
another bastard virtue?--'Fate this _fair_ idol gave.' One bastard
virtue the poet hath given her; which, with these sort of critics, might
make her pass for a wit; and that is, her love of a joke--'For gentle
Dulness ever loved a joke.' Her delight in games and races is another of
her bastard virtues, which would captivate her nobler sons, and draw
them to her shrine; not to speak of her indulgence to young travellers,
whom she accompanies as Minerva did Telemachus. But of all her bastard
virtues, her FREE-THINKING, the virtue which she anxiously propagates
amongst her followers in the Fourth Book, might, one would think, have
been sufficient to have covered the poet from this censure. But had Mr
Pope drawn her without the least disguise, it had not signified a rush.
Disguised or undisguised, the poem had been neither better nor worse,
and he has secured it from being rejected as unnatural by ten thousand
beauties of nature." This is too Warburtonian--and Lord Kames must be
answered after another fashion, by Christopher North.

What would his lordship have? That she should be called by some other
more specious name? By that of some quality to which writers and other
men do aspire, and under the semblance of which Dulness is actually
found to mask itself--as Gravity, Dignity, Solemnity? Why, two losses
would thus be incurred. First, the whole mirth of the poem, or the
greater part of it, would be gone. Secondly, the comprehensiveness of
the present name would be forfeited, and a more partial quality taken.

The vigour and strength of the fiction requires exactly what Pope has
done--the barefaced acceptance of Dulness as the imperial power. The
poet acts, in fact, under a logical necessity. She is really the goddess
under whose influence and virtue they, her subjects, live; whose
inspiration sustains and governs their actions. But it would be against
all manners that a goddess should not be known and worshipped under her
own authentic denomination. To cheat her followers out of their worship,
by showing herself to them under a diversity of false appearances, would
have been unworthy of her divinity.

As to the probability of the fiction, the answer is plain and ready.
Nobody asks for prob