orian or the moralist seeks an illustration of the coarseness and
brutality of their style, he finds it only too easily, not in the works
of the dead dunces, but in the pages of their persecutor. Pope had none
of the grave purpose which makes us, at all events, partially sympathize
with Ben Jonson in his quarrels with the poetasters of his day. It is a
mere toss-up whose name you may find in the _Dunciad_--a miserable
scribbler's or a resplendent scholar's; a tasteless critic's or an
immortal wit's. A satirist who places Richard Bentley and Daniel Defoe
amongst the Dunces must be content to abate his pretensions to be
regarded as a social purge.

Men and women, we can well believe, went in terror of little Mr. Pope.
Well they might, for he made small concealment of their names, and even
such as had the luck to escape obvious recognition have been hoisted into
infamy by the untiring labours of subsequent commentators. It may,
perhaps, be still open to doubt who was the Florid Youth referred to in
the Epilogue to the _Satires_:

'And how did, pray, the Florid Youth offend
Whose speech you took and gave it to a friend?'

Bowles said it was Lord Hervey, and that the adjective is due to his
lordship's well-known practice of painting himself; but Mr. Croker, who
knew everything, and was in the habit of contradicting the Duke of
Wellington about the battle of Waterloo, says, 'Certainly not. The
Florid Youth was young Henry Fox.'

Sometimes, indeed, in our hours of languor and dejection, when

'The heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow,'

the question forces itself upon us, What can it matter who the Florid
Youth was, and who cares how he offended? But this questioning spirit
must be checked. 'The proper study of mankind is man,' and that title
cannot be denied even to a florid youth. Still, as I was saying, people
did not like it at the time, and the then Duke of Argyll said, in his
place in the House of Lords, that if anybody so much as named him in an
invective, he would first run him through the body, and then throw
himself--not out of the window, as one was charitably hoping--but on a
much softer place--the consideration of their Lordship's House. Some
persons of quality, of less truculent aspect than McCallum More, thought
to enlist the poet's services, and the Duchess of Buckingham got him to
write an epitaph on her deceased son--a feeble lad--to which transaction
the poet is thou