to think himself warranted in attributing vices and
corruptions to a clouded understanding--so to Dulness. At least, the
darkness and weakness of the moral reason came under the protection of
the mighty mother--the daughter of Chaos and of Night. She fosters the
disorder and the darkness of the soul. Mere bluntness and inertness of
intellect, which the name would suggest, he never confines himself to.
Of sharp misused power of mind, too, she is the tutelary goddess. Errors
which mind arrives at by too much subtlety, by self-blinding activity,
serve her purpose and the poet's; and so some names of powerful
intellects are included, which, on a question of their merits, indeed,
had better been left out. So the science of mathematics, far
overstepping, as the poet conceives, the boundary of its legitimate
activity--

"Mad Mathesis alone----
Now running round the circle, finds it square."

The real foe of Dulness, then, is Truth--not simply wit or genius. The
night of mind is all that Dulness labours to produce. Misdirected wit
and genius help on this consummation, and therefore deserve her
smile--all the more that they are her born enemies, turned traitors to
their native cause; and most formidable enemies too, had they remained
faithful. Needs must she load them with dignity and emoluments. Trace
the thought. The poem begins from the real dull Dunces; and _their_
goddess is Dulness, inevitably: nothing can be gainsaid there. This is
the central origin. Go on. Pert or lively dunces, who are not real dull,
will come in of due course. And from that first foundation the poet may
lawfully go on to bring in perverted intelligence and moral vitiation of
the soul. Reclining on our swing-chair--and waiting for the devil--with
the _AEneid_ in the one hand and the _Dunciad_ in the other, we have this
moment made a remarkable discovery in ancient and in modern classic
poetry. Virgil, in his eighth book, tells us that the pious AEneas,
handling and examining with delight the glorious shield which the Sire
of the Forge has fabricated for him, wonders to peruse, storied there in
prophetical sculptures, the fates and exploits, and renown, of his
earth-subduing descendants. In one of these fore-shadowing
representations--that of the decisive sea-fight off the promontory of
Actium--you might believe that, under the similitude of the conflict and
victory which delivered the sovereignty of the Roman world into the hand
of Augustus,