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BOOK THE FOURTH.

ARGUMENT.

The Poet being, in this Book, to declare the Completion of the Prophecies mentioned at the end of the former, makes a new Invocation; as the greater Poets are wont when some high and worthy matter is to be sung. He shews the Goddess coming in her Majesty, to destroy Order and Science, and to substitute the Kingdom of the Dull upon earth. How she leads captive. the Sciences, and silenceth the Muses; and what they be who succeed in their stead. All her Children, by a wonderful attraction, are drawn about her, and bear along with them divers others, who promote her Empire by connivance, weak resistance, or discouragement of Arts; such as Half-wits, tasteless Admirers, vain Pretenders, the Flatterers of Dunces, or the Patrons of them. All these crowd round her; one of them, offering to approach her, is driven back by a Rival, but she commends and encourages both. The first who speak in form are the Geniuses of the Schools, who assure her of their care to advance her Cause, by confining Youth to Words, and keeping them out of the way of real Knowledge. Their Address, and her gracious Answer; with her Charge to them and the Universities. The Universities appear by their proper Deputies, and assure her that the same method is observed in the progress of Education. The speech of Aristarchus on this subject. They are driven off by a band of young gentlemen returned from Travel with their Tutors: one of whom delivers to the Goddess, in a polite oration, an account of the whole Conduct and Fruits of their Travels: presenting to her at the same time a young Nobleman perfectly accomplished. She receives him graciously, and endues him with the happy quality of Want of Shame. She sees loitering about her a number of Indolent Persons, abandoning all business and duty, and dying with laziness: To these approaches the Antiquary Annius, intreating her to make them Virtuosos, and assign them over to him: But Mummius, another Antiquary, complaining

of his fraudulent proceeding, she finds a method to reconcile their difference. Then enter a Troop of people fantastically adorned, offering her strange and exotic presents: Amongst them, one stands forth and demands justice on another, who had deprived him of one of the greatest Curiosities in nature: but he justifies himself so well, that the Goddess gives them both her approbation. She recommends to them to find proper employment for the Indolents before mentioned, in the study of Butterflies, Shells, Birds'nests, Moss, &c., but with particular caution not to proceed beyond Trifles, to any useful or extensive views of Nature, or of the Author of Nature. Against the last of these apprehensions, she is secured by a hearty Address from the Minute Philosophers and Free-thinkers, one of whom speaks in the name of the rest. The Youth, thus instructed and principled, are delivered to her in a body by the hands of Silenus: and then admitted to taste the Cup of the Magus, her High Priest, which causes a total oblivion of all Obligations, divine, civil, moral, or rational. To these her Adepts she sends Priests, Attendants, and Comforters, of various kinds; confers on them Orders and Degrees; and then, dismissing them with a speech, confirming to each his Privileges, and telling what she expects from each, concludes with a Yawn of extraordinary virtue; The Progress and Effects whereof on all Orders of men, and the Consummation of all, in the Restoration of Night and Chaos, conIclude the Poem.

BOOK IV.1

YET, yet a moment, one dim Ray of Light
Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night!'
Of darkness visible so much be lent,

As half to shew, half veil the deep Intent.3
Ye Powers! whose Mysteries restored I sing, 5
To whom Time bears me on his rapid wing,
Suspend a while your Force inertly strong,"
Then take at once the Poet and the Song.

Now flamed the Dog-star's unpropitious ray, Smote every Brain, and withered every Bay; 10

This book may properly be distinguished from the former, by the name of the GREATER DUNCIAD, not so indeed in size, but in subject; and so far contrary to the distinction anciently made of the Greater and Lesser Iliad. But much are they mistaken who imagine this Work in any wise inferior to the former, or of any other hand than of our Poet; of which I am much more certain than that the Iliad itself was the work of Solomon, or the Batrachomuomachia of Homer, as Barnes hath affirmed.-Bentley.-P. W.

2 Invoked, as the Restoration of their Empire is the Action of the Poem.-P. W.

This is a great propriety, for a dull Poet can never express himself otherwise than by halves, or imperfectly.-Scriblerus.-P. W.

I understand it very differently; the Author in this work had indeed a deep intent; there were in it Mysteries or áróрдηта which he durst not fully reveal, and doubtless in divers verses (according to Milton)

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more is meant than meets the ear." -Bentley.-P. W.

Alluding to the Vis inertia of Matter, which, though it really be no Power, is yet the fountain of all the qualities and attributes of that sluggish Substance.-P. W.

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Sick was the Sun, the Owl forsook his bower, The moon-struck Prophet felt the madding hour:

Then rose the Seed of Chaos, and of Night,
To blot out Order, and extinguish Light,'
Of dull and venal' a new World to mould,3 15
And bring Saturnian days of Lead and Gold.*
She mounts the Throne: her head a Cloud

concealed,

In broad Effulgence all below revealed;
('Tis thus aspiring Dulness ever shines)
Soft on her lap her Laureate son reclines."
Beneath her footstool, Science groans in
Chains,

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The two great ends of her mission; the one in quality of daughter of Chaos, the other as daughter of Night. Order here is to be understood extensively, both as civil and moral; the distinctions between high and low in Society, and true and false in Individuals: Light, as intellectual only, Wit, Science, Arts.-P. W.

The Allegory continued; dull referring to the extinction of light or Science; venal, to the destruction of Order, or the truth of things.-P. W.

3 In allusion to the Epicurean opinion, that from the dissolution of the natural World into Night and Chaos, a new one should arise; this the Poet alluding to, in the production of a new moral World, makes it partake of its original Principles.-P. W.

4 i. e. dull and venal.-P. W.

5 With great judgment it is imagined by the Poet, that such a colleague as Dulness had elected, should sleep on the Throne, and have very little share in the Action of the Poem. Accordingly, he hath done little or nothing from the day of his anointing; having passed through the second book without taking part in anything that was transacted about him; and through the third in profound sleep. Nor ought this, well considered, to seem strange in our days, when so many King-consorts have done the like.-Scriblerus. -P. W.

We are next presented with the pictures of those

And Wit dreads Exile, Penalties, and Pains. There foamed rebellious Logic, gagged and bound,

There, stripped, fair Rhetoric languished on the ground;

His blunted Arms by Sophistry are borne, 25
And shameless Billingsgate her Robes adorn.
Morality, by her false Guardians, drawn,
Chicane in Furs, and Casuistry in Lawn,
Gasps, as they straiten at each end the cord,
And dies, when Dulness gives her Page the
word.1

Mad Máthesis 2 alone was unconfined,

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Too mad for mere material chains to bind, Now to pure Space lifts her ecstatic stare, Now running round the Circle, finds it square.3 But held in ten-fold bonds the Muses lie, Watched both by Envy's and by Flattery's eye:

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4

whom the Goddess leads in captivity. Science is only depressed and confined so as to be rendered useless; but Wit or Genius, as a more dangerous and active enemy, punished, or driven away: Dulness being often reconciled in some degree with Learning, but never upon any terms with Wit. And accordingly it will be seen that she admits something like each Science, as Casuistry, Sophistry, &c., but nothing like Wit, Opera alone supplying its place.-P. W.

There was a Judge of this name, always ready to hang any man that came before him, of which he was suffered to give a hundred miserable examples during a long life, even to his dotage.-P. W.

See Imitations of Horace, Book ii. Sat. i. 82, and Epilogue to Satires ii. 159.

2 Alluding to the strange Conclusions some Mathematicians have deduced from their principles, concerning the real Quantity of Matter, the Reality of Space, &c.-P. W.

3 Regards the wild and fruitless attempts of squaring the circle.-P. W.

One of the misfortunes falling on Authors, from

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