compilations, who accused Atterbury of
falsifying Clarendon, and was accused of himself falsifying historical
documents in the interests of Whiggism; and Smedley, an Irish clergyman,
a special enemy of Swift's, who had just printed a collection of
assaults upon the miscellanies called Gulliveriana; and Concanen,
another Irishman, an ally of Theobald's, and (it may be noted) of
Warburton's, who attacked the _Bathos_, and received--of course, for the
worst services--an appointment in Jamaica; and Arnall, one of Walpole's
most favoured journalists, who was said to have received for himself or
others near 11,000_l._ in four years. Each dives in a way supposed to be
characteristic, Oldmixon with the pathetic exclamation,

And am I now threescore?
Ah, why, ye gods, should two and two make four?

Concanen, "a cold, long-winded native of the deep," dives perseveringly,
but without causing a ripple in the stream:

Not so bold Arnall--with a weight of skull
Furious he dives, precipitately dull,

and ultimately emerges to claim the prize, "with half the bottom on his
head." But Smedley, who has been given up for lost, comes up,

Shaking the horrors of his sable brows,

and relates how he has been sucked in by the mud-nymphs, and how they
have shown him a branch of Styx which here pours into the Thames, and
diffuses its soporific vapours over the Temple and its purlieus. He is
solemnly welcomed by Milbourn (a reverend antagonist of Dryden), who
tells him to "receive these robes which once were mine,"

Dulness is sacred in a sound divine.

The games are concluded in the second book; and in the third the hero,
sleeping in the Temple of Dulness, meets in a vision the ghost of
Settle, who reveals to him the future of his empire; tells how dulness
is to overspread the world, and revive the triumphs of Goths and monks;
how the hated Dennis, and Gildon, and others, are to overwhelm scorners,
and set up at court, and preside over arts and sciences, though a fit of
temporary sanity causes him to give a warning to the deists--

But learn ye dunces! not to scorn your God--

and how posterity is to witness the decay of the stage, under a deluge
of silly farce, opera, and sensation dramas; how bad architects are to
deface the works of Wren and Inigo Jones; whilst the universities and
public schools are to be given up to games and idleness, and the birch
is to be abolished.