h is now become a proverb in those
parts."--"Confusion Worse Confounded," p. 75.

POPE,

AND HIS MISCELLANEOUS QUARRELS.

POPE adopted a system of literary politics--collected with
extraordinary care everything relative to his Quarrels--no
politician ever studied to obtain his purposes by more oblique
directions and intricate stratagems--some of his manoeuvres--his
systematic hostility not practised with impunity--his claim to his
own works contested--CIBBER'S facetious description of POPE'S
feelings, and WELSTED'S elegant satire on his genius--DENNIS'S
account of POPE'S Introduction to him--his political prudence
further discovered in the Collection of all the Pieces relative to
the _Dunciad_, in which he employed SAVAGE--the THEOBALDIANS and
the POPEIANS; an attack by a Theobaldian--The _Dunciad_
ingeniously defended, for the grossness of its imagery, and its
reproach of the poverty of the authors, supposed by POPE himself,
with some curious specimens of literary personalities--the
Literary Quarrel between AARON HILL and POPE distinguished for its
romantic cast--a Narrative of the extraordinary transactions
respecting the publication of POPE'S Letters; an example of
Stratagem and Conspiracy, illustrative of his character.

POPE has proudly perpetuated the history of his Literary Quarrels; and
he appears to have been among those authors, surely not forming the
majority, who have delighted in, or have not been averse to provoke,
hostility. He has registered the titles of every book, even to a
single paper, or a copy of verses, in which their authors had
committed treason against his poetical sovereignty.[192] His ambition
seemed gratified in heaping these trophies to his genius, while his
meaner passions could compile one of the most voluminous of the
scandalous chronicles of literature. We are mortified on discovering
so fine a genius in the text humbling itself through all the depravity
of a commentary full of spleen, and not without the fictions of
satire. The unhappy influence his _Literary Quarrels_ had on this
great poet's life remains to be traced. He adopted a system of
literary politics abounding with stratagems, conspiracies, manoeuvres,
and factions.

Pope's literary quarrels were the wars of his poetical ambition, more
perhaps than of the petulance and strong irritability of his
character. They were some of the artifices he adopted from the
peculiar