In fact, Pope knows in his better moments that a man is not
necessarily wicked because he sleeps on a bulk, or writes verses in a
garret; but he also knows that to mention those facts will give his
enemies pain, and he cannot refrain from the use of so handy a weapon.
Such faults make one half ashamed of confessing to reading the Dunciad
with pleasure; and yet it is frequently written with such force and
freedom that we half pardon the cruel little persecutor, and admire the
vigour with which he throws down the gauntlet to the natural enemies of
genius. The Dunciad is modelled upon the Mac Flecknoe, in which Dryden
celebrates the appointment of Elkanah Shadwell to succeed Flecknoe as
monarch of the realms of Dulness, and describes the coronation
ceremonies. Pope imitates many passages, and adopts the general design.
Though he does not equal the vigour of some of Dryden's lines, and wages
war in a more ungenerous spirit, the Dunciad has a wider scope than its
original, and shows Pope's command of his weapons in occasional
felicitous phrases, in the vigour of the versification, and in the
general sense of form and clear presentation of the scene imagined. For
a successor to the great empire of dulness he chose (in the original
form of the poem) the unlucky Theobald, a writer to whom the merit is
attributed of having first illustrated Shakspeare by a study of the
contemporary literature. In doing this he had fallen foul of Pope, who
could claim no such merit for his own editorial work, and Pope therefore
regarded him as a grovelling antiquarian.
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