The Chiefs were sate, the Scriblers waited round
······
When he, the Master of the Seven-fold Face,
Rose gleaming thro’ his own Corinthian Brass.
Pope had written in The Dunciad Variorum, “The heroes sit; the vulgar form a ring” (II, 352), but one of the most memorable phrases in The Dunciad in Four Books of 1743—the ingeniously insolent “sev’nfold Face” (I, 244)—may well have been borrowed from The Scribleriad. “Corinthian Brass” is good also, economically combining as it does a hit against Cibber’s effrontery and a hint of his sexual irregularities. Such strokes of wit are rare; The Scribleriad is the work of a writer who in skill is far closer to Grub Street than to Pope, but it may serve as “a voice from the crowd” to remind us that Pope had his humbler literary supporters.
The University
Southampton
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1. ] The engravings are numbered 2571-2573 in F. G. Stephens, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Division 1—Satires (London, 1877), Vol. III, Part I. For lists of pamphlets attacking, and in some cases defending, Pope in 1742, see R. W. Rogers, The Major Satires of Alexander Pope (Urbana, 1955), pp. 150, 151 and C. D. Peavy, “The Pope-Cibber Controversy: A Bibliography,” in Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research, III (1964), 53, 54. For accounts of the Pope-Cibber quarrel see R. H. Barker, Mr. Cibber of Drury Lane (New York, 1939), pp. 204-220, and N. Ault, New Light on Pope (London, 1949), pp. 298-324.
[2.] Sawney and Colley and Blast upon Blast in Number 83 (1960), and The Blatant Beast in Number 114 (1965).
[3.] E.g., in The New Session of the Poets (The Universal Spectator, 6 Feb. 1731) the Goddess Dulness calls a session and awards the crown to Cibber.
[4.] See Hugh Macdonald, “Introduction,” A Journal from Parnassus (London, 1937) and A. L. Williams, “Literary Backgrounds to Book Four of the Dunciad,” PMLA, LXVIII (1953), 806-813.
[5.] See note 2 above.
[6.] An anti-Cibber work in prose. It is doubtful that “Scriblerus,” who thought this work did more harm than good to Pope’s cause, would have endorsed the British Museum catalogue’s attribution of it to Pope himself.