[12] Two examples from the Birth-day Odes will give some idea of the Cibberian quality:
Her Fleets, that now the Seas command,
Were late upon her Forests growing;
Her wholesome Stores, for every Band,
As late within her Fields were sowing. (1741)
Behold! in clouds of fire serene,
The royal hero heads his pow’rs:
Alike to fame, with raptures seen,
His younger hope, the eaglet soars.
Fortune, to grace her fav’rite son,
Stamps on his bleeding form renown. (1743)
[13] James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), I, 402.
[14] Boswell, II, 92-93.
[15] Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq. (London, 1780), II, 202.
[16] In the Twickenham Edition of The Dunciad (London: Methuen, 2nd ed. rev., 1953, pp. xxxiii-xxxiv and (B) 341), James Sutherland refers to line 20 (“Soft on her lap her Laureat son reclines”) and holds that Cibber’s answer may have been less a protest than a warning. In The New Dunciad (1742), however, the footnote to this line expands the satire, quotes from the Apology and is a sharper attack than the line itself.
[17] Paston, I, 687.
[18] Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), I, 110 (no. 251).
[19] Alexander Pope, Correspondence, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), IV, 415.
[20] Spence, I, 148-149 (no. 331).