The Augustan Reprint Society

THE SCRIBLERIAD

(Anonymous)
(1742)

LORD HERVEY

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
VERBAL AND PRACTICAL VIRTUE

(1742)

Introduction byA. J. SAMBROOK

PUBLICATION NUMBER 125
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1967

GENERAL EDITORS

George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles
Earl Miner, University of California, Los Angeles
Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

ADVISORY EDITORS

Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles
Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles
Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
James Sutherland, University College, London
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

INTRODUCTION

Though they are never particularly edifying, literary quarrels may at times be educative. Always savage, attacks on Pope reached their lowest depths of scurrility in 1742, when, in addition to the usual prose and doggerel verse pamphlets, engravings were being circulated portraying Pope in a brothel—this on the basis of the story told in the notorious Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope, dated 7 July 1742.[1] The Augustan Reprint Society has already reissued three of the anonymous Grub Street attacks made upon Pope in this busy year,[2] but the present volume is intended to complete the picture of the battle-lines by reprinting a verse attack launched from the court—by Hervey presenting himself as Cibber’s ally—and a verse defence that comes, in point of artistry, clearly from or near Grub Street itself.

Lord Hervey’s verses, The Difference between Verbal and Practical Virtue, were published between 21 and 24 August 1742, less than a week after the same author’s prose pamphlet (A Letter to Mr. C—b—r, On his Letter to Mr. P——.) which had compared the art of Pope and Cibber to Cibber’s advantage, and had roundly concluded that Pope was “a second-rate Poet, a bad Companion, a dangerous Acquaintance, an inveterate, implacable Enemy, nobody’s Friend, a noxious Member of Society, and a thorough bad Man.” In the course of the prose pamphlet Hervey had suggested that there was a certain incongruity between Pope’s true character and his assumed persona of the “virtuous man,” and this incongruity forms the main subject of his verse attack. Here Hervey finds examples of “the difference between verbal and practical virtue” in the lives of Horace, Seneca, and Sallust, before turning to lampoon Pope crossly and ineptly. The attack on Horace is well conceived for Hervey’s purpose and calculated to damage Pope who was in so many eyes, including his own, the modern heir of that ancient poet, but the straight abuse directed against Pope’s person is sad stuff. Such lines as those on the “yelping Mungril” (p. 6) serve only to show how squarely the “well-bred Spaniels” taunt in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot had hit its target. Hervey’s poem carried a prefatory letter headed “Mr. C—b—er to Mr. P.,” making out that Cibber had a hand in writing the poem itself. Coming so soon after Hervey’s Letter to Cibber, which had carried the markedly intimate subscription “With the greatest Gratitude and Truth, most affectionately yours,” this prefatory letter to the poem further emphasized Hervey’s firm and deliberate alliance with Cibber.

Evidently it was the strangeness of this alliance between the two opponents of Pope that struck the fancy of that unidentified “Scriblerus” whose “Epistle to the Dunces,” The Scribleriad, was published between 30 September and 2 October 1742. When Hervey was “affectionately yours” to Cibber, the two stood shoulder to shoulder so temptingly open to a single volley that the author of The Scribleriad could fairly claim, as Pope had claimed in the appendix to The Dunciad Variorum of 1729, that “the Poem was not made for these Authors, but these Authors for the Poem.” Hervey appears as “Narcissus,” the nickname Pope had used for him in The New Dunciad. A “late Vice-Chamberlain” (because he had been dismissed from that post in July 1742) still gorged with the fulsome dedication of Conyers Middleton’s Life of Cicero (1741), he is shown (pp. 11-13) rousing Cibber. Cibber’s situation, reclining on the lap of Dulness where he is found by Hervey, is taken from The New Dunciad, while his general Satanic role parallels Theobald’s in The Dunciad Variorum. This may reflect common knowledge that Pope was at work on revisions that would raise Cibber to the Dunces’ throne, but the belief that Cibber was King of the Dunces had been widespread from the date of his appointment as Poet Laureate.[3] The Scribleriad follows the general run of satires against Cibber—attacking his senile infatuation for Peg Woffington, his violently demagogic and chauvinistic Nonjuror (first acted in 1717 but still drawing an audience in 1741), his laureate odes and his frank commercialization of art.

Although the writer of The Scribleriad was obviously prompted by the example of The Dunciad and borrows many details from Pope, his poem has very little of that mock-epic quality its title might lead a reader to expect. There are slight traces of parody of Virgil when, on page 16, Cibber appears as Aeneas (the character he was soon to assume in The Dunciad in Four Books) and the epicene Hervey is portrayed as a rejuvenated Sybil guiding the hero through a hell of duncery. There are hints of Paradise Lost too, when Cibber, Satan-like, undertakes his mission (p.