and its attacks were mainly levelled at the Laureate. The Laureate replied in a pamphlet, deprecating the poet's injustice, and declaring his unconsciousness of any provocation for these reiterated assaults. At the same time he announced his determination to carry on the war in prose as long as the satirist should wage it in verse,--pamphlet for poem, world without end. Hostilities were now fairly established. Pope issued a fresh edition of his satire complete. The change he had long coveted he now made. The name of Cibber was substituted throughout for that of Theobald, the portraiture remaining the same. Johnson properly ridicules the absurdity of leaving the heavy traits of Theobald on the canvas, and simply affixing the name of his mercurial contemporary beneath; and, indeed, there is much reason to doubt whether the mean jealousy which inspired the first "Dunciad," or the blundering rage which disfigured the second, is in the worse taste. Cibber kept his engagement, replying in pamphlet. The immediate victory was unquestionably his. Morbidly sensitive to ridicule, Pope suffered acutely. Richardson, who found him once with the Cibberine leaves in his hand, declared his persuasion, from the spectacle of rage, vexation, and mortification he witnessed, that the poet's death resulted from the strokes of the Laureate. If so, we must concede him to have been the victor who laid his adversary at his feet on the field. Posterity, however, which listens only to the satirist, has judged differently and unjustly.[13] Theobald, though of no original talent, was certainly, in his generation, the most successful illustrator of Shakspeare, and the first, though Rowe and Pope had preceded him in the effort, who had brought a sound verbal criticism to bear on the text. It is to his credit, that many of the most ingenious emendations suggested in Mr. Collier's famous folio were anticipated by this "king of the dunces"; and it must be owned, that his edition is as far superior to Warburton's and Hanmer's, which were not long after brought out with a deafening flourish of trumpets, as the editions of Steevens and Malone are to his. Yet, prompted by the "Dunciad," it is the fashion of literature to regard Theobald with compassion, as a block-head and empiric. Cibber escapes but little better, and yet he was a man of respectable talent, and played no second-rate part in the literary history of the time.
As Laureate Cibber drew near the end of earthly things, a desire, common to poetical as well as political potentates, possessed him,--a desire to nominate a successor. In his case, indeed, the idea may have been borrowed from "MacFlecknoe" or the "Dunciad." The Earl of Chesterfield, during his administration in Ireland, had discovered a rival to Ben Jonson in the person of a poetical bricklayer, one Henry Jones, whom his Lordship carried with him to London, as a specimen of the indigenous tribes of Erin. It was easier for this Jones to rhyme in heroics than to handle a trowel or construct a chimney. He rhymed, therefore, for the amusement and in honor of the polite circle of which Stanhope was the centre; the fashionable world subscribed magnificently for his volume of "Poems upon Several Occasions";[14] his tragedy, "The Earl of Essex," in the composition of which his patron is said to have shared, was universally applauded. Its introduction to the stage was the work of Cibber; and Cibber, assisted by Chesterfield, labored zealously to secure the author a reversion of the laurel upon his own lamented demise.
