assages, and adopts the general design.
Though he does not equal the vigour of some of Dryden's lines, and wages
war in a more ungenerous spirit, the Dunciad has a wider scope than its
original, and shows Pope's command of his weapons in occasional
felicitous phrases, in the vigour of the versification, and in the
general sense of form and clear presentation of the scene imagined. For
a successor to the great empire of dulness he chose (in the original
form of the poem) the unlucky Theobald, a writer to whom the merit is
attributed of having first illustrated Shakspeare by a study of the
contemporary literature. In doing this he had fallen foul of Pope, who
could claim no such merit for his own editorial work, and Pope therefore
regarded him as a grovelling antiquarian. As such, he was a fit
pretender enough to the throne once occupied by Settle. The Dunciad
begins by a spirited description of the goddess brooding in her cell
upon the eve of a Lord Mayor's day, when the proud scene was o'er,

But lived in Settle's numbers one day more.

The predestined hero is meanwhile musing in his Gothic library, and
addresses a solemn invocation to Dulness, who accepts his sacrifice--a
pile of his own works--transports him to her temple, and declares him to
be the legitimate successor to the former rulers of her kingdom. The
second book describes the games held in honour of the new ruler. Some of
them are, as a frank critic observes, "beastly;" but a brief report of
the least objectionable may serve as a specimen of the whole
performance. Dulness, with her court descends

To where Fleet Ditch with disemboguing streams
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames,
The king of dykes than whom no sluice of mud
With deeper sable blots the silver flood.--
Here strip, my children, here at once leap in;
Here prove who best can dash through thick and thin,
And who the most in love of dirt excel.

And, certainly by the poet's account, they all love it as well as their
betters. The competitors in this contest are drawn from the unfortunates
immersed in what Warburton calls "the common sink of all such writers
(as Ralph)--a political newspaper." They were all hateful, partly
because they were on the side of Walpole, and therefore, by Pope's
logic, unprincipled hirelings, and more, because in that cause, as
others, they had assaulted Pope and his friend. There is Oldmixon, a
hack writer employed in