PIECES RELATING TO THE DUNCIAD. 263 The last days of Major Cleland seem to have been unhappy. He had for twenty years, Pope says, shown himself to be diligent, punctual, and incorruptible in his office of Commissioner of Taxes, and he had no other assistance of fortune; yet he was suddenly displaced by the Minister, and died two months afterwards. This harshness or injustice on the part of Walpole must, we suppose, be ascribed to politics. In May, 1741, a general Parliamentary election took place; the representation of Westminster was contested with extraordinary keenness; and, though the Court candidates were returned by a small majority, the election was afterwards, on petition, declared void, and the high bailiff was censured for calling in the military and arbitrarily closing the poll-books. Cleland, we suspect, would, as an elector, be found on the side of the country party. He was, no doubt, known to be opposed to the administration, and such an act of contumacy in a government official, at a time when Walpole was making his last great struggle to retain office, constituted an unforgivable offence. A few more months redressed the wrong of the Westminster electors, and annihilated the power of the Minister; but, ere this time arrived, William Cleland was no more.6 An account of the circumstances attending the publication of the Dunciad was published in the name of Savage. This was prefixed to a collection of pieces relating to the poem, and was in the form of a dedication to the Earl of Middlesex. Both the unpublished pieces and the dedication were undoubtedly the work of Pope himself. Indeed, he afterwards claimed and adopted parts of them in the later editions of his works. Savage one would have expected to have found among the poets of the Bathos or the Dunciad. His dissipated life, his absurd pride, alternating with meanness, and On Monday last died, after a short illness, at his house in St. James'splace, Major Cleland, who for many years was one of the Commissioners of the Land Tax, &c.-Daily Post of Tuesday, September 22, 1741. Administration to his effects was granted to Lucy Cleland, his widow, October 29th. The son, we suppose, was then abroad, having gone to Smyrna, it is said, on some mercantile adventure, and afterwards to the East Indies. We find that he was a Westminster scholar, having been elected in 1722, but he left the same year. One Henry Cleland-probably another son of the major'swas elected in 1725. his flattery of the King, of Sir Robert Walpole, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, would seem to have marked him out peculiarly for castigation. But Savage had attached himself to Pope, and furnished him with small personal details for his satire. Among those who were attacked by the poet he was considered as a kind of confederate of Pope's, and suspected, as Johnson says, "of supplying him with private intelligence and secret incidents; so that the ignominy of an informer was added to the terror of a satirist." Curll, Theophilus Cibber, and others, make similar statements-Savage was the active spy and secret negotiator. In this dedication to Lord Middlesex it was asserted that the initial letters in the treatise on the Bathos were prefixed, for the greater part, at random; and that the newspapers had for six months been filled with scurrilities against Pope and his friends, which gave birth to the Dunciad. Savage acknowledged that he had put his name to the statement without thinking; but, stranger still, Pope incorporated it among the notes to the Dunciad, dropping Savage's name; so that in one page we are told that the poem was written in 1726, and in another that it originated in, and was given birth to, by attacks not made until half a year or more after May, 1727. The correspondence published by the poet himself also disproved his Dunciad statements; and it is clear, that in altering, explaining, or mystifying, Pope had fallen into palpable blunders. He was too stately and precise in his moral pretensions to have adopted Prior's witty plea: "Odd's life! must one swear to the truth of a song?" But he evidently considered himself and his brother wits as placed "beyond the fixed and settled rules" in all such public appearances. Savage, or rather Pope, gives a lively account of the interest excited by the Dunciad, and this part of the story Savage said was true: "On the day the book was first vended, a crowd of authors besieged the shop; entreaties, advices, threats of law and battery, nay, cries of treason were all employed to hinder the coming out of the Dunciad. On the other side, the booksellers and hawkers made as great an effort to procure it. What could a few poor authors do against so great a CHARACTER OF THE DUNCIAD. 265 majority as the public? There was no stopping a torrent with a finger, so out it came. Many ludicrous circumstances attended it. The Dunces (for by this name they were called) held weekly clubs to consult of hostilities against the author. One wrote a letter to a great Minister, Mr. Pope was the greatest enemy the Government had; and another bought his image in clay, to execute him in effigy; with which sad sort of satisfactions the gentlemen were a little comforted. Some false editions of the book having an owl in their frontispiece; the true one, to distinguish it, fixed in its stead an ass laden with authors. Then another surreptitious one being printed with the same ass, the new edition in octavo returned for distinction to the owl again. Hence arose a great contest of booksellers against booksellers, and advertisements against advertisements; for some recommending the edition of the owl, and others the edition of the ass, by which names they came to be distinguished, to the great honour also of the gentlemen of the Dunciad." All this machinery of the owl and the ass, of false and true editions, like the Complete Key to the Dunciad, was, of course, part of the poet's stratagem; and he appears, as Johnson remarks, to have contemplated his victory over the dunces with great exultation. To add to the triumph, the poem had been presented to the King and Queen at St. James's by Walpole, and his Majesty, upon perusal of the satire, was pleased to declare, as Arbuthnot relates, that Mr. Pope was a very honest man! The Dunciad is the greatest of Pope's satires-the greatest in our language, with the exception of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel. The Mac Flecknoe of Dryden suggested Pope's subject, and furnished an outline of his plan, and many of the details; but the variety of incidents and characters in the Dunciad, with the richness of its illustrations (especially the diving scene), and the playful ease and spirited vigour of its versification, entitle the poet to the honours of originality. The object of the satire (which was chiefly to expose authors unworthy of exposure) is undignified, and in many parts is effected at the sacrifice of decency and propriety. Swift has been accused of familiarising Pope with images physically disgusting and impure, which most men instinctively shun. This indelicacy, however, was apparent before the acquaintance of the two wits commenced. It is seen in Pope's boyish lines on Elkanah Settle, and in subsequent productions, especially his imitations of Chaucer and |