nd continuity than most of his
other poetry. The 'Dunciad' often flows in a continuous stream of
eloquence, instead of dribbling out in little jets of epigram. If there
are fewer points, there are more frequent gushes of sustained rhetoric.
Even when Pope condescends--and he condescends much too often--to pelt
his antagonists with mere filth, he does it with a touch of boisterous
vigour. He laughs out. He catches something from his patron Swift when
he

Laughs and shakes in Rabelais's easy chair.

His lungs seem to be fuller and his voice to lose for the time its
tricks of mincing affectation. Here, indeed, there can be no question of
insincerity. Pope's scorn of folly is to be condemned only so far as it
was connected with too bitter a hatred of fools. He has suffered, as
Swift foretold, by the insignificance of the enemies against whom he
rages with superfluous vehemence. But for Pope, no one in this
generation would have heard of Arnall and Moore and Breval and Bezaleel
Morris and fifty more ephemeral denizens of Grub Street. The fault is,
indeed, inherent in the plan. It is in some degree creditable to Pope
that his satire was on the whole justified, so far as it could be
justified, by the correctness of his judgment. The only great man whom
he has seriously assaulted is Bentley; and to Pope, Bentley was of
necessity not the greatest of classical critics, but the tasteless
mutilator of Milton, and, as we must perhaps add, the object of the
hatred of Pope's particular friends, Atterbury and Warburton. The
misfortune is that the more just his satire, the more perishable is its
interest; and if we regard the 'Dunciad' simply as an assault upon the
vermin who then infested literature, we must consider him as a man who
should use a steam-hammer to crack a flea. Unluckily for ourselves,
however, it cannot be admitted so easily that Curll and Dennis and the
rest had a merely temporary interest. Regarded as types of literary
nuisances--and Pope does not condescend in his poetry, though the want
is partly supplied in the notes, to indulge in much personal
detail--they may be said by cynics to have a more enduring vitality. Of
course there is at the present day no such bookseller as Curll, living
by piratical invasions of established rights, and pandering to the worst
passions of ignorant readers; no writer who could be fitly called, like
Concanen,

A cold, long-winded native of the deep,

and fitly sentenced to