Page:The venture; an annual of art and literature.djvu/59



For ten years (1715-1725) after the Rape of the Lock, Pope was busy with his great work of translation; and during all these years he accumulated grudges against men who had vexed him by criticism a successful rivalry. Once his hands were free, he turned to a sweeping revenge, and, after three years polishing published The Dunciad, perhaps the greatest monument that a man ever erected to his petty personal resentment. It is characteristic of him, both as artist and man, that he was not content with the first publication, but issued a revised version twelve years later, when Colley Cibber, displacing Theobalds on the throne of Dulness, showed for a second time that Pope's notion of the arch-dunce was a potential rival. But most of his victims, competitors in the trial games instituted by the presiding goddess of Stupidity, are only remembered by his allusions; the work cannot be read without detailed commentary; and, like all satires applied to trivial dislikes and insignificant persons, the Dunciad has passed out of general knowledge. Yet it abounds in superb passages, of which one may be cited, describing a new labour of the competitors after the trial by braying: