"Better be Cibber, I maintain it still,
Than ridicule all taste, blaspheme, quadrille."
"The Dunciad," as originally published in 1728, had Lewis Theobald for its hero. There was neither sense nor justice in the selection. Pope hated Theobald for presuming to edit the plays of Shakspeare with greatly more ability and acuteness than himself had brought to the task. His dislike had no better foundation. Neither the works, the character, nor the associations of the man authorized his elevation to the throne of dulness. The disproportion between the subject and the satire instantly impresses the reader. After the first explosion of his malice, it impressed Pope; and anxious to redeem his error, he sought diligently for some plan of dethroning Tibbald, and raising another to the vacant seat. Cibber, in the mean time, was elevated to the laurel, and that by statesmen whom it was the fate of Pope to detest in secret, and yet not dare to attack in print. The Fourth Book of the "Dunciad" appeared in 1742, and its attacks were mainly levelled at the Laureate. The Laureate replied in a pamphlet, deprecating the poet's injustice, and declaring his unconsciousness of any provocation for these reiterated assaults. At the same time he announced his determination to carry on the war in prose as long as the satirist should wage it in verse,—pamphlet for poem, world without end. Hostilities were now fairly established. Pope issued a fresh edition of his satire complete. The change he had long coveted he now made. The name of Cibber was substituted throughout for that of Theobald, the portraiture remaining the same. Johnson properly ridicules the absurdity of leaving the heavy traits of Theobald on the canvas, and simply affixing the name of his mercurial contemporary beneath; and, indeed, there is much reason to doubt whether the mean jealousy which inspired the first "Dunciad," or the blundering rage which disfigured the second, is in the worse taste. Cibber kept his engagement, replying in pamphlet. The immediate victory was unquestionably his. Morbidly sensitive to ridicule, Pope suffered acutely. Richardson, who found him once with the Cibberine leaves in his hand, declared his persuasion, from the spectacle of rage, vexation, and mortification he witnessed, that the poet's death resulted from the strokes of the Laureate. If so, we must concede him to have been the victor who laid his adversary at his feet on the field. Posterity, however, which listens only to the satirist, has judged differently and unjustly.[13] Theobald, though of no original talent, was certainly, in his generation, the most successful illustrator of Shakspeare, and the first, though Rowe and Pope had preceded him in the effort, who had brought a sound verbal criticism to bear on the text. It is to his credit, that many of the most ingenious emendations suggested in Mr. Collier's famous folio were anticipated by this "king of the dunces"; and it must be owned, that his edition is as far superior to Warburton's and Hanmer's, which were not long after brought out with a deafening flourish of trumpets, as the editions of Steevens and Malone are to his. Yet, prompted by the "Dunciad," it is the fashion of literature to regard Theobald with compassion, as a block-head and empiric. Cibber escapes but little better, and yet he was a man of respectable talent, and played no second-rate part in the literary history of the time.
As Laureate Cibber drew near the end of earthly things, a desire, common to poetical as well as political potentates, possessed him,—a desire to nominate a successor. In his case, indeed, the idea may have been borrowed from "MacFlecknoe" or the "Dunciad." The Earl of Chesterfield, during his administration in Ireland, had discovered a rival to Ben Jonson in the person of a poetical bricklayer, one Henry Jones, whom his Lordship carried with him to London, as a specimen of the indigenous tribes of Erin. It was easier for this Jones to rhyme in heroics than to handle a trowel or construct a chimney. He rhymed, therefore, for the amusement and in honor of the polite circle of which Stanhope was the centre; the fashionable world subscribed magnificently for his volume of "Poems upon Several Occasions";[14] his tragedy, "The Earl of Essex," in the composition of which his patron is said to have shared, was universally applauded. Its introduction to the stage was the work of Cibber; and Cibber, assisted by Chesterfield, labored zealously to secure the author a reversion of the laurel upon his own lamented demise.
The effort was unsuccessful. Cibber's death occurred in December, 1757. The administration of the elder Pitt, which had been restored six months before, was insensible to the merits of the prodigious bricklayer. The wreath was tendered to Thomas Gray. It would, no doubt, have proved a grateful relief to royalty, obliged for twenty-seven years to listen twice yearly, if not oftener, to the monotonous felicitations of Colley, to hear in his stead the author of the "Bard," of the "Progress of Poetry," of the "Ode at Eton College." But the relief was denied it. Gray, ambitious only of the historical chair at Cambridge, declined the laurel. In the mean time, the claims of William Whitehead were earnestly advocated with the Lord Chamberlain, by Lord and Lady Jersey, and by the Earl Harcourt. A large vote in the House of Commons might be affected by a refusal. Pitt, who cared nothing for the laurel, but much for the votes, gave his assent, and Whitehead was appointed. Whitehead was the son of a baker, and, as an eleëmosynary scholar at Winchester School, had won a poetical prize offered to the students by Alexander Pope. Obtaining a free scholarship at Cambridge, he became in due time a fellow of Clare Hall, and subsequently tutor to the sons of Lord Jersey and Lord Harcourt, with whom he made the tour of the Continent. Two of his tragedies, "The Roman Father," and "Creüsa," met with more success than they deserved. A volume of poems, not without merit, was given to the press in 1756, and met with unusual favor through the exertions of his two noble friends. That he was not a personal applicant for the laurel, nor conscious of the movement in his behalf, he takes occasion in one of his poems to state:—
"Howe'er unworthily I wear the crown, unasked it came, and from a hand unknown."[15]
From the warm championship of his friends, and the commendations of Mason, the friend of Gray, we infer that Whitehead was not destitute of fine social qualities. His verse, which is of the only type current a century ago, is elegantly smooth, and wearisomely tame,—nowhere rising into striking or original beauties. Among his merits as a poet modesty was not. His "Charge to the Poets," published in 1762, drew upon him the wrath and ridicule of his fellow-verse-wrights, and perhaps deservedly. Assuming, with amusing vanity, what, if ever true, was only so a century before or a half-century after, that the laurel was the emblem of supremacy in the realm of letters, and that it had been granted him as a token of his matchless merit,—
"Since my king and patron have thought fit
To place me on the throne of modern wit,—"
he proceeds to read the subject throng a saucy lecture on their vices and follies,—
"As bishops to their clergy give their charge."
A good-natured dogmatism is the tone of the whole; but presumption and dogmatism find no charity among the genus irritabile, and Whitehead received no quarter. Small wits and great levelled their strokes at a hide which self-conceit had happily rendered proof. The sturdiest assailant was Charles Churchill. He never spares him,—