make reprisals, we may at least in security bid them
kiss the tails we have turned to them. Who knows but, by this our
supine, or rather prone serenity, their disappointed valour may become
their own vexation? Or let us yet, at worst, but solidly stand our
ground, like so many defensive stone-posts, and we may defy the
proudest Jehu of them all to drive over us. Thus, gentlemen, you see
that Insensibility is not without its comforts; and as I give you no
worse advice than I have taken myself, and found my account in, I hope
you will have the hardness to follow it, for your own good and the
glory of

"Your impenetrable humble servant,
"C. C."

After all, one may perceive, that though the good-humour of poor
Cibber was real, still the immortal satire of Pope had injured his
higher feelings. He betrays his secret grief at his close, while he
seems to be sporting with his pen; and though he appears to confide in
the falsity of the satire as his best chance for saving him from it,
still he feels that the caustic ink of such a satirist must blister
and spot wherever it falls. The anger of Warburton, and the sternness
of Johnson, who seem always to have considered an actor as an inferior
being among men of genius, have degraded Cibber. They never suspected
that "a blockhead of his size could do what wiser men could not," and,
as a fine comic genius, command a whole province in human nature.

FOOTNOTES:

[212] Johnson says, that though "Pope attacked Cibber with acrimony,
the provocation is not easily discoverable." But the
statements of Cibber, which have never been contradicted,
show sufficient motives to excite the poetic irascibility. It
was Cibber's "fling" at the unowned and condemned comedy
of the triumvirate of wits, Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot,
_Three Hours after Marriage_, when he performed Bayes in the
_Rehearsal_, that incurred the immortal odium. There was no
malice on Cibber's side; for it was then the custom to restore
the zest of that obsolete dramatic satire, by introducing
allusions to any recent theatrical event. The plot of this
ridiculous comedy hinging on the deep contrivance of two
lovers getting access to the wife of a virtuoso, "one
curiously swathed up like an Egyptian mummy, and the other
slily covered in the pasteboard skin of a crocodile," was an
incident so _extremel