tionable may serve as a specimen of the whole performance. Dulness, with her court descends
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames,
The king of dykes than whom no sluice of mud
With deeper sable blots the silver flood.—
Here strip, my children, here at once leap in;
Here prove who best can dash through thick and thin,
And who the most in love of dirt excel.
And, certainly by the poet's account, they all love it as well as their betters. The competitors in this contest are drawn from the unfortunates immersed in what Warburton calls "the common sink of all such writers (as Ralph)—a political newspaper." They were all hateful, partly because they were on the side of Walpole, and therefore, by Pope's logic, unprincipled hirelings, and more, because in that cause, as others, they had assaulted Pope and his friend. There is Oldmixon, a hack writer employed in compilations, who accused Atterbury of falsifying Clarendon, and was accused of himself falsifying historical documents in the interests of Whiggism; and Smedley, an Irish clergyman, a special enemy of Swift's, who had just printed a collection of assaults upon the miscellanies called Gulliveriana; and Concanen, another Irishman, an ally of Theobald's, and (it may be noted) of Warburton's, who attacked the Bathos, and received—of course, for the worst services—an appointment in Jamaica; and Arnall, one of Walpole's most favoured journalists who was said to have received for himself or others near 11,000l. in four years. Each dives in a way supposed to be characteristic, Oldmixon with the pathetic exclamation,
Ah, why, ye gods, should two and two make four?
