porary poetaster. The classification was rather vague, but seems to have given special offence.
Meanwhile Pope was planning a more elaborate campaign against his adversaries. He now appeared for the first time as a formal satirist, and the Dunciad, in which he came forward as the champion of Wit, taken in its broad sense, against its natural antithesis, Dulness, is in some respect his masterpiece. It is addressed to Swift, who probably assisted at some of its early stages. thou, exclaims the poet,—
Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver!
Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air,
Or laugh and shake in Rabelais's easy chair,—
And we feel that Swift is present in spirit throughout the composition. "The great fault of the Dunciad," says Warton, an intelligent and certainly not an over-severe critic, "is the excessive vehemence of the satire. It has been compared," he adds, "to the geysers propelling a vast column of boiling water by the force of subterranean fire;" and he speaks of some one who after reading a book of the Dunciad, always soothes himself by a canto of the Faery Queen. Certainly a greater contrast could not easily be suggested; and yet, I think, that the remark requires at least modification. The Dunciad, indeed, is beyond all question full of coarse abuse. The second book, in particular, illustrates that strange delight in the physically disgusting which Johnson notices as characteristic of Pope and his master, Swift. In the letter prefixed to the Dunciad, Pope tries to justify his abuse of his enemies by the example of Boileau, whom he appears to have considered as his great prototype. But Boileau
