The duties remained unchanged, and were performed, there is no reason to doubt, to the contentment of the King and court.[11] But the Laureate himself was peculiarly the object of sarcastic satire. The standing causes were of course in operation: the envy of rival poetasters, the dislike of political opponents, the enmities originating in professional disputes and jealousies. Cibber's manners had not been studied in the school of Chesterfield, although that school was then open and flourishing. He was rude, presumptuous, dogmatic. To superiors in rank he was grudgingly respectful; to equals and inferiors, insupportably insolent. But when to these aggravating traits he added the vanity of printing an autobiography, exposing a thousand assailable points in his life and character, the temptation was irresistible, and the whole population of Grub Street enlisted in a crusade against him.[12] Fortunately, beneath the crust of insolence and vanity, there was a substratum of genuine power in the Laureate's make, which rendered him not only a match for these, but for even a greater than these, the author of the "Dunciad." Pope's antipathy for the truculent actor dated some distance back.
Back to the 'Devil,' the last echoes roll,
And 'Coll!' each butcher roars at Hockley-hole.
The latter accounts for it by telling, that at the first representation of Gay's "Three Hours after Marriage," in 1717, where one of the scenes was violently hissed, some angry words passed between the irritated manager and Pope, who was behind the scenes, and was erroneously supposed to have aided in the authorship. The odds of a scolding match must have been all in favor of the blustering Cibber, rather than of the nervous and timid Pope; but then the latter had a faculty of hate, which his antagonist had not, and he exercised it vigorously. The allusions to Cibber in his later poems are frequent. Thus, in the "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot":--
"And has not Colley still his Lord and whore?
His butchers Henley? his freemasons Moore?"
And again:--
"So humble he has knocked at Tibbald's door,
Has drunk with Colley, nay, has rhymed for Moore."
And in the "Imitation of Horace," addressed to Lord Fortescue:--
"Better be Cibber, I maintain it still,
Than ridicule all taste, blaspheme, quadrille."
"The Dunciad," as originally published in 1728, had Lewis Theobald for its hero. There was neither sense nor justice in the selection. Pope hated Theobald for presuming to edit the plays of Shakspeare with greatly more ability and acuteness than himself had brought to the task. His dislike had no better foundation. Neither the works, the character, nor the associations of the man authorized his elevation to the throne of dulness. The disproportion between the subject and the satire instantly impresses the reader. After the first explosion of his malice, it impressed Pope; and anxious to redeem his error, he sought diligently for some plan of dethroning Tibbald, and raising another to the vacant seat. Cibber, in the mean time, was elevated to the laurel, and that by statesmen whom it was the fate of Pope to detest in secret, and yet not dare to attack in print. The Fourth Book of the "Dunciad" appeared in 1742,
