To oppose another
obstacle to prosecutors, he assigned the Dunciad to three
noblemen--Lords Bathurst, Burlington, and Oxford--who transferred their
right to Pope's publisher. Pope would be sheltered behind these
responsible persons, and an aggrieved person might be slower to attack
persons of high position and property. By yet another device Pope
applied for an injunction in Chancery to suppress a piratical London
edition; but ensured the failure of his application by not supplying the
necessary proofs of property. This trick, repeated, as we shall see, on
another occasion, was intended either to shirk responsibility or to
increase the notoriety of the book. A further mystification was equally
characteristic. To the Dunciad in its enlarged form is prefixed a
letter, really written by Pope himself, but praising his morality and
genius, and justifying his satire in terms which would have been absurd
in Pope's own mouth. He therefore induced a Major Cleland, a retired
officer of some position, to put his name to the letter, which it is
possible that he may have partly written. The device was transparent,
and only brought ridicule upon its author. Finally, Pope published an
account of the publication in the name of Savage, known by Johnson's
biography, who seems to have been a humble ally of the great man--at
once a convenient source of information and a tool for carrying on this
underground warfare. Pope afterwards incorporated this statement--which
was meant to prove, by some palpable falsehoods, that the dunces had
not been the aggressors--in his own notes, without Savage's name.
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