“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, and its attacks were mainly levelled at the Laureate.  The Laureate replied in a pamphlet, deprecating the poet’s injustice, and declaring his unconsciousness of any provocation for these reiterated assaults.  At the same time he announced his determination to carry on the war in prose as long as the satirist should wage it in verse,—­pamphlet for poem, world without end.  Hostilities were now fairly established.  Pope issued a fresh edition of his satire complete.  The change he had long coveted he now made.  The name of Cibber was substituted throughout for that of Theobald, the portraiture remaining the same.  Johnson properly ridicules the absurdity of leaving the heavy traits of Theobald on the canvas, and simply affixing the name of his mercurial contemporary beneath; and, indeed, there is much reason to doubt whether the mean jealousy which inspired the first “Dunciad,” or the blundering rage which disfigured the second, is in the worse taste.  Cibber kept his engagement, replying in pamphlet.  The immediate victory was unquestionably his.  Morbidly sensitive to ridicule, Pope suffered acutely.  Richardson, who found him once with the Cibberine leaves in his hand, declared his persuasion, from the spectacle of rage, vexation, and mortification he witnessed, that the poet’s death resulted from the strokes of the Laureate.  If so, we must concede him to have been the victor who laid his adversary at his feet on the field.  Posterity, however, which listens only to the satirist, has judged differently and unjustly.[13] Theobald, though of no original talent, was certainly, in his generation, the most successful illustrator of Shakspeare, and the first, though Rowe and Pope had preceded him in the effort, who had brought a sound verbal criticism to bear on the text.  It is to his credit, that many of the most ingenious emendations suggested in Mr. Collier’s famous folio were anticipated by this “king of the dunces”; and it must be owned, that his