Learning” to which the authors referred in their dedication to Lord Talbot, was not a mere form of speech, for the enterprise does not seem to have met with sufficient encouragement to justify its continuance, and this special rendering has long since been supplanted by the more modern versions of Mitchell, Frere, and others. Whether Fielding took any large share in it is not now discernible. It is most likely, however, that the bulk of the work was Young’s, and that his colleague did little more than furnish the Preface, which is partly written in the first person, and betrays its origin by a sudden and not very relevant attack upon the “pretty, dapper, brisk, smart, pert Dialogue” of Modern Comedy into which the “infinite Wit” of Wycherley had degenerated under Cibber. It also contains a compliment to the numbers of the “inimitable Author” of the Essay on Man.
This is the second compliment which Fielding had paid to Pope within a brief period, the first having been that in the Champion respecting the translation of the Iliad. What his exact relations with the author of the Dunciad were, has never been divulged. At first they seem to have been rather hostile than friendly. Fielding had ridiculed the Romish Church in the Old Debauchees, a course which Pope could scarcely have approved; and he was, moreover, the cousin of Lady Mary, now no longer throned in the Twickenham Temple. Pope had commented upon a passage in Tom Thumb, and Fielding had indirectly referred to Pope in the Covent Garden Tragedy. When it had been reported that Pope had gone to see Pasquin, the statement had been at once contradicted. But
