its early stages. O thou, exclaims the poet,--

O thou, whatever title please thine ear,
Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver!
Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air,
Or laugh and shake in Rabelais's easy chair,--

And we feel that Swift is present in spirit throughout the composition.
"The great fault of the Dunciad," says Warton, an intelligent and
certainly not an over-severe critic, "is the excessive vehemence of the
satire. It has been compared," he adds, "to the geysers propelling a
vast column of boiling water by the force of subterranean fire;" and he
speaks of some one who after reading a book of the Dunciad, always
soothes himself by a canto of the Faery Queen. Certainly a greater
contrast could not easily be suggested; and yet, I think, that the
remark requires at least modification. The Dunciad, indeed, is beyond
all question full of coarse abuse. The second book, in particular,
illustrates that strange delight in the physically disgusting which
Johnson notices as characteristic of Pope and his master, Swift. In the
letter prefixed to the Dunciad, Pope tries to justify his abuse of his
enemies by the example of Boileau, whom he appears to have considered as
his great prototype. But Boileau would have been revolted by the brutal
images which Pope does not hesitate to introduce; and it is a curious
phenomenon that the poet who is pre-eminently the representative of
polished society should openly take such pleasure in unmixed filth.
Polish is sometimes very thin. It has been suggested that Swift, who was
with Pope during the composition, may have been directly responsible for
some of these brutalities. At any rate, as I have said, Pope has here
been working in the Swift spirit, and this gives, I think, the keynote
of his Dunciad.

The geyser comparison is so far misleading that Pope is not in his most
spiteful mood. There is not that infusion of personal venom which
appears so strongly in the character of Sporus and similar passages. In
reading them we feel that the poet is writhing under some bitter
mortification, and trying with concentrated malice to sting his
adversary in the tenderest places. We hear a tortured victim screaming
out the shrillest taunts at his tormentor. The abuse in the Dunciad is
by comparison broad and even jovial. The tone at which Pope is aiming is
that suggested by the "laughing and shaking in Rabelais' easy chair." It
is meant to be a boisterous guffaw