He is
solemnly welcomed by Milbourn (a reverend antagonist of Dryden), who
tells him to "receive these robes which once were mine,"
Dulness is sacred in a sound divine.
The games are concluded in the second book; and in the third the hero,
sleeping in the Temple of Dulness, meets in a vision the ghost of
Settle, who reveals to him the future of his empire; tells how dulness
is to overspread the world, and revive the triumphs of Goths and monks;
how the hated Dennis, and Gildon, and others, are to overwhelm scorners,
and set up at court, and preside over arts and sciences, though a fit of
temporary sanity causes him to give a warning to the deists--
But learn ye dunces! not to scorn your God--
and how posterity is to witness the decay of the stage, under a deluge
of silly farce, opera, and sensation dramas; how bad architects are to
deface the works of Wren and Inigo Jones; whilst the universities and
public schools are to be given up to games and idleness, and the birch
is to be abolished.
Fragments of the prediction have not been entirely falsified, though the
last couplet intimates a hope.
Enough! enough! the raptured monarch cries,
And through the ivory gate the vision flies.
The Dunciad was thus a declaration of war against the whole tribe of
scribblers; and, like other such declarations, it brought more
consequences than Pope foresaw. It introduced Pope to a very dangerous
line of conduct. Swift had written to Pope in 1725: "Take care that the
bad poets do not outwit you, as they have served the good ones in every
age, whom they have provoked to transmit their names to posterity;" and
the Dunciad has been generally censured from Swift's point of view.
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