criticism," says he, "calls on us also to point out some of the passages
that appear exceptionable in the _Dunciad_. Such is the hero's first
speech, in which, contrary to all decorum and probability, he addresses
the goddess Dulness, without disguising her as a despicable being, and
even calls himself fool and blockhead. For a person to be introduced
speaking thus of himself, is in truth unnatural and out of character."
Would that the Doctor had been alive to be set at ease on this point by
our explanations--but he is dead. They would have quieted his mind, too,
about the celebrated speech of Aristarchus. "In Book IV.," he adds, "is
such another breach of truth and decorum, in making Aristarchus
(Bentley) abuse _himself_, and laugh at his _own_ labours.

"The mighty scholiast, whose unweary'd pains
Made Horace dull, and humbled Maro's strains,
Turn what they will to verse, their toil is vain,
Critics like me shall make it prose again.
For Attic phrase in Plato let them seek,
I poach in Suidas for unlicens'd Greek.
For thee we dim the eyes, and stuff the head
With all such reading as was never read:
For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it,
And write about it, Goddess, and about it."

If Bentley has turned Horace and Milton (Warton blunderingly reads Maro)
into prose by his emendations, (Milton assuredly he has--Pope may be
wrong about Horace?) he has rendered vast service to the empire of
Dulness; and it would be quite unreasonable that he should not claim of
the goddess all merited reward and honour, by announcing exactly this
achievement. With what face could he pretend to her favour by telling
her that he had restored the text of two great poets to its original
purity and lustre? She would have ordered him to instant execution or to
a perpetual dungeon.

Finally, how happened it that such perspicacious personages as Lord
Kames and Dr Warton, to say nothing of their hoodwinked followers,
should have thus objected to the passages and speeches singled out for
condemnation, as if they alone deserved it, without perceiving that the
whole poem, from the first line to the last, was, on their principle,
liable to the same fatal objection? And what, on their principle, would
they have thought, had they ever read it, of _Mac-Flecnoe_?

Pope takes the name Dulness largely, for the offuscation of heart and
head. He said, long before,

"Want of decency is want of _sense_;"

and he now seems