_Yours_, when you call me _impudent_;
_mine_, when I call you _modest_, &c. While my superiors
suffer me occasionally to sit down with them, I hope it will
be thought that rather the _Papal_ than the _Cibberian_
forehead ought to be out of countenance." I give this as a
specimen of Cibber's serious reasonings--they are poor; and
they had been so from a greater genius; for ridicule and
satire, being only a mere abuse of eloquence, can never be
effectually opposed by truisms. Satire must be repelled by
satire; and Cibber's _sarcasms_ obtained what Cibber's
_reasonings_ failed in.

[217] Vain as Cibber has been called, and vain as he affects to be, he
has spoken of his own merits as a comic writer,--and he was a
very great one,--with a manly moderation, very surprising
indeed in a vain man. Pope has sung in his _Dunciad_, most
harmoniously inhuman,

"How, with less reading than makes felons scape,
Less human genius than God gives an ape,
Small thanks to France, and none to Rome or Greece,
A patch'd, vamp'd, future, old, revived new piece;
'Twixt Plautus, Fletcher, Congreve, and Corneille,
Can make a CIBBER, JOHNSON, and OZELL."

Blasting as was this criticism, it could not raise the anger
of the gay and careless Cibber. Yet what could have put it to
a sharper test? Johnson and Ozell are names which have long
disappeared from the dramatic annals, and could only have been
coupled with Cibber to give an idea of what the satirist meant
by "the human genius of an ape." But listen to the mild, yet
the firm tone of Cibber--he talks like injured innocence, and
he triumphs over Pope, in all the dignity of truth.--I appeal
to Cibber's posterity!

"And pray, sir, why my name under this scurvy picture? I
flatter myself, that if you had not put it there, nobody else
would have thought it like me; nor can I easily believe that
you yourself do: but perhaps you imagined it would be a
laughing ornament to your verse, and had a mind to divert
other people's spleen with it as well as your own. Now let me
hold up my head a little, and then we shall see how the
features hit me." He proceeds to relate, how "many of those
play