The fable of Dumpling, in the true spirit of lanx satura, allows Carey to attack by indirection a complete spectrum of traditional eighteenth-century targets. Like the musician and the satirist that he is, he builds up to a magnificent crescendo (pp. 19-24 of his “Dumpleid”) which results in one of the finest displays of sustained virtuosity in early eighteenth-century pamphlet writing.
The notes which follow the texts point to a number of the contemporary allusions, but the reader will surely wish to recognize some of the references and the more delicate ironies for himself. As the author puts it on page 17 of Dumpling:
O wou’d to Heav’n this little Attempt of Mine may stir up some Pudding-headed Antiquary to dig his Way through all the mouldy Records of Antiquity, and bring to Light the Noble Actions of Sir John!
What scholar could refuse?
University of Victoria
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1.] “An Eighteenth-Century Original for Lamb,” RES, V (1929), 447.
[2.] An exception is Henry J. Dane who denies the relationship in “The Life and Works of Henry Carey,” unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of Pennsylvania, 1967), pp. xxix-xxx, and passim.
[3.] Poems, ed. F. T. Wood (London, 1930).
[4.] “Henry Carey (1687-1743) and Some Troublesome Attributions,” BNYPL, LXII (1968), 372-377.