the most inoffensive to
man, woman, and child. The Dunces, however, swore that its wickedness
went beyond the Devil's, and besought the world to pay particular
attention to the sixth chapter as supra-Satanic. Therein Martinus ranges
"the confined and less copious geniuses under proper classes, and, the
better to give their pictures to the reader, under the name of animals."
The animals are Flying Fishes, Swallows, Ostriches, Parrots, Didappers,
Porpoises, Frogs, Eels, and Tortoises. Each animal is characterized in a
few words, that prove Pope to have been a most observant zoologist; and
some profundists, classified according to that arrangement, are
indicated by the initial letters of their names. The chapter is short,
and the style concise--consisting of but four pages. Some of the initial
letters had been set down at random; but profundists rose up, with loud
vociferation, to claim them for their own; and _gli animali parlanti_,
on foot, wing, fin, "or belly prone," peopled the booksellers' shops. C.
G., "perplexed in the extreme," was the cause of perplexity to others,
figuring now as a flying-fish, and now as a porpoise. While J. W. was
not less problematical--now an Eel, and now a Didapper.

"Threats of vengeance," says Roscoe, "resounded from all quarters, and
the press groaned under the various attempts at retaliation to which
this production gave rise. Before the publication of the _Dunciad_,
upwards of sixty different libels, books, papers, and copies of verses,
had been published against Pope." The allied forces--_vae
victis!_--published _a Popiad_. Threats of personal violence were
frequently held out--a story was circulated of his having been whipped
naked with rods; and, to extent the ridicule, an advertisement, with his
initials, was inserted in the _Daily Post_, giving the lie to the
scandal. Were such brutalities to be let pass unpunished? Dr Johnson
says that "Pope was by his own confession the aggressor"--and so say Dr
Warton and Mr Bowles. The aggressor! Why, the Dunces had been maligning
him all their days, long before the treatise on the _Profund_. And that
is bad law, indeed, that recognises a natural right in blockheads to be
blackguards, and gives unlimited license of brutality towards any man of
genius who may have been ironical on the tribe. But then, quoth some
hypocritical wiseacre, is not satire wicked? Pope was a Christian; and
should have learned to forgive. Stop a bit.

We talk of poets