href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@34821@[email protected]#Page_17" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">17) and the dunces, Belial-like, agree “they’re better in a cursed State,/Than to be totally annihilate” (p. 5). But “Scriblerus’” use of Virgil and Milton, unlike Pope’s, does not import some graver meaning into his poem; it provides him with neither a framework of moral symbols nor a continuous narrative thread.

The action is slight and its setting vague. Sometimes we are in a brothel, crowded with bullies, punks, lords, draymen and linkboys, and managed by Cibber (pp. 11-12) or by Dulness (p. 10). This setting, together with the claim that Cibber’s own muse is a prostitute (p. 8), serves as a retort to the Tom-Tit in the brothel story in Cibber’s Letter to Pope and to emphasize the element of literary prostitution in the activities of Cibber and his like. At other times the setting is a regular dunces’ club (pp. 9, 16) of the type chronicled in the pages of The Grub Street Journal. Towards the end of the poem it is an Assembly Room (p. 19) presided over by the Goddess of Puffs (a happy development of that more commonplace mythical figure “Fame,” Dulness’ handmaiden in The New Dunciad) who sets a test for the dunces and judges their performance. Only in this concluding episode can this rather shapeless poem (which certainly is neither the mock epic nor the epistle that its title-page promises) be assigned to any regular literary “kind.” This “kind” is that favorite of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the “Sessions Poem.”[4]

“Scriblerus’” account of the sessions of the dunces is more allusive and particularized than the rest of the poem and consequently calls for somewhat more detailed comment. The chief cases at the sessions embrace the pamphlet battle of summer 1742 and theatrical rivalry in the 1741-42 London season. Cibber’s contribution to the paper-war, the Letter to Pope (written according to Cibber “At the Desire of several Persons of Quality”), is introduced at page 17 and consigned on page 19 to William Lewis its printer. Hervey stalks in “under VIRTUE’s Name” in a “borrow’d Shape” (p. 24), an allusion to the suggestion in the prefatory epistle to The Difference between Verbal and Practical Virtue that the poem was Cibber’s work. (The “horse him” on 25 of The Scribleriad refers to Cibber’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III.) Other pamphlets issued in August 1742 are mentioned on page 24—Sawney and Colley,[5] which “Scriblerus” calls “CLODDY’s Dialogue,” and A Blast upon Bays.[6]

Turning to the theatre, “Scriblerus” attacks all three major companies of the 1741-42 London season. He first introduces the two patented theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, as rivals only in that debased dramatic form the pantomime. “The angry Quack” (p. 25) is John Weaver, dancing master at Drury Lane and author of Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing (1721), who claimed for himself[7] the credit of having originated pantomime upon the English stage. Weaver’s Orpheus and Eurydice at Drury Lane (1718) was hardly noticed, whereas John Rich had more recently bestowed “an ORPHEUS on the Town” (p. 25) to very different effect. Rich’s Orpheus and Eurydice: With the Metamorphoses of Harlequin had opened on 12 February 1740 at Covent Garden, where he was manager. With Rich himself as Harlequin, it was a wild success that season—remaining a regular and highly popular afterpiece through the 1741-42 season and later.

What The Scribleriad tells us of “Ambivius Turpio, the Stage ’Squire” (p. 26) suggests that he is to be identified with Charles Fleetwood, Esq.,[8] the wealthy, inexperienced amateur who managed Drury Lane (this even though the original Ambivius Turpio was an actor, while Fleetwood, apparently, was not). All managers were frequently involved in disputes over actors’ pay, but Fleetwood’s were the most notorious. It was the Drury Lane company that included “the contending POLLYS” (p. 27)—Mrs. Cibber and Mrs. Clive who had bitterly quarrelled in 1736 over who should play that role in The Beggar’s Opera. Fleetwood, like Rich, gave a play for the benefit of Shakespeare’s monument in Westminster Abbey.[9] What little that Fleetwood knew of management he might well have learned from his one-time under-manager Theophilus Cibber, the “young PTOLOMY” (p.