been the manager, time out of mind, of Drury-Lane Theatre; and if now and then he had failed to recognize the exact direction of popular taste,—­as in the instance of the “Beggar’s Opera,” which he rejected, and which, being accepted by Manager Rich of Covent Garden, made Rich gay and Gay rich,—­he was generally a sound stage-tactician and judicious caterer.  His career, however, had not been so profitable that an additional hundred pounds should be a thing of indifference; in fact, the sum seemed to be just what was needed to enable him to forsake active duty on the stage,—­for the patent was no sooner signed than the veteran retired upon his laurels.

The annals of the Laureateship, during Cibber’s reign, are without incident.[10] 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:—­