though each of those nations produced one of the greatest wits and greatest generals of the age. [This note was displaced in the edition of 1743. The character of Boeotia was certainly redeemed by Pindar and Epaminondas; and Plutarch might also have been cited. The latter imputes the stupidity of the Boeotians to a cause never urged against the Irish-to their gross indulgence in animal food. The Irish wit, of course, was Swift; the general, the Earl of Ossory. Ireland has since, in Moore and Wellington, gained a glorious addition! The affair of Wood's half-pence, alluded to by Pope, was a simple but successful party movement. The copper coinage was wanted for Ireland. Wood, in 1724, obtained a patent for coining half-pence and farthings to the value of £108,000. Sir Isaac Newton had reported favourably on the coins as to quality; but Swift, from hatred to Walpole's government, especially the administration of Irish affairs by Primate Boulter, and his secretary, Ambrose Philips, roused up a spirit of discontent and resistance among the people, and by his Drapier letters ultimately compelled government to abandon the scheme. The national pride was touched by the fact that neither the Lord-lieutenant nor the privy council of Ireland had been consulted on the subject; and Wood, it was reported, had obtained his patent by a bribe given to the king's mistress, the Duchess of Kendal. The contract itself was both just and legal, and Wood might have pleaded the precedent of the royal mint, for the moneyers there also contracted with the government for the coinage. But Swift's object stretched far beyond the " copper chains" of Ireland. His country was neglected and oppressed under the British sway, and he burned to emancipate it-to let the British rulers see "that by the laws of God, of nature, and of nations, the Irish were and ought to be as free a people as their brethren in England." Pope alludes to Rabelais as the prototype of Swift. Voltaire said that, in the Tale of a Tub, Swift was Rabelais in his senses. Coleridge more happily characterises him as anima Rabelaisiì habitans in sicco— the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. Yet how marvellous is Swift in his insight into human nature—in the various and grotesque combinations of his wit--and in the tremendous power of his irony and invective!] BETHLEHEM HOSPITAL. Ver. 31. Where o'er the gates, by his famed brother's hand, Mr. Caius Gabriel Cibber, father of the poet laureate. The two statues of the lunatics over the gates of Bedlam Hospital were done by him, and (as the son justly says of them) are no ill monuments of his fame as an artist. [The statues by Cibber are now in the hall of Bethlehem Hospital in St. George's Fields. One represents raving and the other melancholy madness. On the removal of the hospital to the present building, about 1815, the statues (which are not of brass, but stone painted,) were repaired by Bacon the sculptor. The conception and execution of the figures attest Cibber's genius CIBBER'S MADMEN. and knowledge of art. It may illustrate the state of manners in Pope's time to mention here, that the old Bedlam was then a place of common resort. visited by the idle, the gay, and the curious, who paid a penny or twopence each for admission, and from this source a sum of about £400 per annum was derived. The "Tatler" classes Bedlam with the Lions in the Tower, the Tombs (Westminster Abbey), and the other places which are entertainments to raw minds. Pepys has an entry in his diary which might have served Pope: -"Stept into Bedlam, when I saw several poor miserable creatures in chains: one of them was mad with making verses."] . THE CAVE OF POVERTY AND POETRY. Ver. 33. One cell there is, conceal'd from vulgar eye, Hence bards, like Proteus, long in vain tied down,3 1 The cell of poor Poetry is here very properly represented as a little unendowed hall in the neighbourhood of the magnific college of Bedlam, and as the surest seminary to supply those learned walls with professors; for there cannot be a plainer indication of madness than in men persisting to starve themselves and offend the public by scribbling, Escape in monsters, and amaze the town; when they might have benefited themselves and others in profitable and onest employments. The qualities and productions of the students of this rivate academy are afterwards described in this first book, as are also their ctions throughout the second, by which it appears, how near allied dulness s to madness. This naturally prepares us for the subject of the third book, here we find them in union and acting in conjunction, to produce the catatrophe of the fourth; a mad poetical sibyl leading our hero through the egions of vision, to animate him in the present undertaking, by a view of the ast triumphs of barbarism over science. 2 I cannot here omit a remark that will greatly endear our author to every ne, who shall attentively observe that humanity and candour, which everyhere appears in him towards those unhappy objects of the ridicule of all jankind, the bad poets. He here imputes all scandalous rhymes, scurrilous eekly papers, base flatteries, wretched elegies, songs, and verses (even from lose sung at court to ballads in the streets) not so much to malice or serility as to dulness, and not so much to dulness as to necessity: and thus, at he very commencement of his satire, makes an apology for all that are to be atirised. 3 Sunt quibus in plures jus est transire figuras : Ut tibi, complexi terram maris incola, Proteu; Neither Palæphatus, Phurnutus, nor Heraclides gives us any steady light If I may pect thanks of the learned world for this discovery, I would by no means prive that excellent critic of his share, who discovered before me, that in e character of Proteus was designed sophistam, magum, politicum, præsertim bus sese accommodantem: which in English is, a political writer, a libeller, and disputer, writing indifferently for or against every party in the state, every et in religion, and every character in private life. See my Fables of Ovid plained.-ABBE BANIER. CURLL AND LINTOT. Ver. 40. Curll's chaste press and Lintot's rubric post. Two booksellers, of whom see book ii. The former was fined by the Court of King's Bench for publishing obscene books; the latter usually adorned his shop with titles in red letters. [Bernard Lintot was Pope's principal publisher, and displayed his favourite red lines on the title-pages of the Iliad and Odyssey, and on those of various editions of the poet's works. He was the Longman or Murray of his day, and having made a handsome fortune, and left his business to his son, he died high sheriff of Sussex, in 1736, aged sixty-cne. Edmund Curll was of a different stamp. He was audacious, unscrupulous, and shameless. In his reply to the Dunciad, he admitted the above offences, but attempted to defend his indecent publications by stating that they were medical treatises. He was confined five months in the King's Bench prison. He was also fined twenty marks, and set in the pillory for publishing a volume of Memoirs and Negotiations at the Courts of England, Vienna, Hanover, &c., which he had obtained, he said, from a fellow-prisoner in the King's Bench, John Kerr, Esq., of Kerrsland. This was in 1726. The readiness and alacrity with which Curll met Pope's repeated attacks, or threw out occasion for new ones, would suggest the idea that he enjoyed the conflict, and thought himself benefited by the notoriety which such warfare brought him. He considered himself quite a match for Pope in prose, and hurled at him his favourite motto, the Scotch proverb, Nemo me impune lacesset. The affair of the correspondence he looked upon as a complete triumph, and he occasionally sported with his formidable antagonist. In one of his impudent addresses, we find this ridiculous story: "The New Year's Gift, I sent by a special messenger to Mr. Pope at Twickenham, was a little book neatly bound in red Turkey leather, ruled, and the capital letters illuminated with gold and various colours), entitled Heures des Prières : dédie à Madame la Duchesse de Char tres. Avec les Sept. Pseaumes Pénitentieux. A Paris, 1696. This manual was likewise illustrated with four beautiful prints, one in particular representing David prostrate; in which part of the book, upon a label, was wrote the following lines :- ""As friends who of a criminal take leave, Curll died December 11, 1747, aged 72. His business had for some years before been carried on by his son, Henry Curll, whom Pope also attacked in a note, which he afterwards suppressed. In a letter to Martha Blount, Pope alludes to "Mr. Edmund Curll having been exercised in a blanket, and whipped at Westminster school by the boys, whereof (he adds), the common prints have given some account." The following letter in the St. James's Chronicle records the famous exploit: "King's College, Westminster, August 3, 1716. "Sir,-You are desired to acquaint the public that a certain bookseller near Temple Bar, not taking warning by the frequent drubs that he has undergone for his often pirating other men's copies, did lately, without the consent of Mr. John Barber, present captain of Westminster school, publish the scraps of a funeral oration, spoken by him over the corpse of the Rev. Dr. South. And being on Thursday last fortunately nabbed within the limits of Dean's Yard, by the king's scholars there, he met with a college salutation; for he was first presented with the ceremony of the blanket, in which, when the skeleton had been well shook, he was carried in triumph to the school; and after receiving a grammatical construction for his false coneords, he was reconducted to Dean's Yard, and on his knees asking pardon of the aforesaid Mr. Barber for his offence, he was kicked out of the Yard, and left to the huzzas of the rabble. I am, Sir, yours, &c. "T.A."] TYBURN. Ver. 41. Hence hymning Tyburn's elegiac lines.] It is an ancient English custom for the malefactors to sing a psalm at their execution at Tyburn; and no less customary to print elegies on their deaths, at the same time, or before. [Shakspeare has alluded, in Love's Labour Lost, to the gallows at Tyburn, and it existed as early as the time of Henry IV. A few years before the date of the Dunciad, Jack Sheppard was executed there, in the presence, is said, of about 200,000 persons. The last execution that took place at Tyburn was in 1783.] JOURNALS, MAGAZINES, &c. Ver. 42. Hence Journals, Medleys, Mercuries, Magazines.] New-born nonsense first is taught to cry; These were at others dead-born Dulness appears in a thousand shapes. thrown out weekly and monthly by every miserable scribbler, or picked up piecemeal and stolen from anybody, under the title of papers, essays, queries, verses, epigrams, riddles, &c., equally the disgrace of human wit, morality, and decency. [Edit. 1743.] Magazines. The common name of those upstart collections in prose and verse; where Dulness assumes all the various shapes of folly to draw in and cajole the rabble. The eruption of every miserable scribbler; the dirty scum every stagnant newspaper; the rags of worn-out nonsense and scandal, picked up from every dunghill; under the title of "Essays, Reflections, of |