him to make a happy parody of court procedure, and Mr. Lawrence says that this particular “jeu d’esprit obtained great celebrity.” But the happiest stroke in the controversy— as it seems to us—is one which escaped Mr. Lawrence, and occurs in the paper already referred to, where Charon and Mercury are shown denuding the luckless passengers by the Styx of their surplus impedimenta. Among the rest, approaches “an elderly Gentleman with a Piece of wither’d Laurel on his head.” From a little book, which he is discovered (when stripped) to have bound close to his heart, and which bears the title of Love in a Riddle—an unsuccessful pastoral produced by Cibber at Drury Lane in 1729—it is clear that this personage is intended for none other than the Apologist, who, after many entreaties, is finally compelled to part with his treasure. “I was surprized,” continues Fielding, “to see him pass Examination with his Laurel on, and was assured by the Standers by, that Mercury would have taken it off, if he had seen it.”
These attacks in the Champion do not appear to have received any direct response from Cibber. But they were reprinted in a rambling production issued from “Curll’s chaste press” in 1740, and entitled the Tryal of Colley Cibber, Comedian, &c. At the end of this there is a short address to “the Self-dubb’d Captain Hercules Vinegar, alias Buffoon,” to the effect that “the malevolent Flings exhibited by him and his Man Ralph,” have been faithfully reproduced. Then comes the following curious and not very intelligible “Advertisement:”—
“If the Ingenious Henry Fielding Esq.; (Son of the Hon. Lieut. General Fielding, who upon his Return from his Travels entered himself of the Temple in order to study the
