MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE. 85 



of that aristocratic power, which had so long predominated in the British 

 government, had begun to bring obloquy on the monarchy itself; and 

 Mr. Burke wisely endeavoured to combine with the maintenance of an- 

 v cient institutions and established rights, the correction of real abuses, the 

 pure administration of public patronage, and a prudent management of 

 the public expenditure." 



The Works of Pope. Vol. IIT. Edited by the Rev. G. CROLY, 

 LL. D. A. J. Valpy, M.A., London. 



The third volume of this very elegant edition of Pope brings us to the 

 " Dunciad/' a work of singular force, but one exhibiting no slight want of 

 judgment. The " Wasp of Twickenham/' as Lady Mary Wortley Mon- 

 tague not unaptly styled Pope, should have had more mercy upon his 

 irritable temperament, than to have roused about him 'a whole nest of 

 hornets. Dr. Croly makes the following very pertinent and just intro- 

 ductory remarks on the " Dunciad." The notes accompanying the 

 poem are curious and highly interesting. 



" The direct origin of this longest and most laboured of Pope's poems 

 lias been already detailed in the Memoir of his life. The initials appended 

 to the * Treatise on the Art of Sinking in Poetry ' had excited universal 

 resentment : the writers, whose works had been held up to public con- 

 tempt, retorted in a body ; and, if their revenge was not classic, it was at 

 least keen. Libels, personalities, and threats filled the public ear; and 

 Pope declares that * for half a year and more, the common newspapers 

 were filled with the most abusive falsehoods and scurrilities that they 

 could possibly devise.' * A liberty/ he farther observes, * no way to be 

 wondered at in those people and in those papers, that, for many years, 

 during the uncontrolled license of the press, had aspersed almost all the 

 great characters of the age, and this with impunity, their own persons 

 'and names being utterly secret and obscure.' 



*' For those reasons which ought to have taught him the hopelessness 

 of attack, if not the dignity of silence, he resolved by one decisive blow 

 to extinguish the whole fraternity of the * scribblers/ The habitual failure 

 of his temperament was irritability, and in this instance it betrayed him 

 into warfare with a generation, whose obscurity he confesses to have 

 placed them beyond the reach of assault, if their callousness did not 

 render them insensible to his weapons. His knowledge of the world 

 ought also to have warned him, that the eminent are always losers in a 

 voluntary contest with the contemptible ; and his knowledge of the race 

 .with whom he had to deal, that the libeller may make up in virulence 

 what he wants in vigour ; that the public, with all their favouritism for 

 the man of genius, can laugh at seeing him entangled with the mean ; and, 

 that when abuse is to decide the battle, the mean are the natural masters 

 of the field. 



" The value of those maxims is proved, by the fact that, from the 

 commencement of the quarrel, Pope's life seems to have been one of per- 

 petual vexation : every newspaper that reached his hands teemed with 

 fresh insult ; he was pursued by ballads, stung by epigrams, burlesqued 

 by caricatures, and even menaced with those personal attacks, which to 

 his feebleness of frame, and consequent powerlessness of self-protection, 

 must have been matters of serious anxiety. The multitude of biting 

 pamphlets and furious paragraphs written against him perhaps outnumber 

 those which either party stimulants or popular rage called forth against 

 the most obnoxious public men of England." 



