The Scribleriad, and The Difference Between Verbal and Practical Virtue

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.

7. In The History of the Mimes and Pantomimes (1728).

8. Some account of Fleetwood may be found in R. W. Buss, Charles Fleetwood, Holder of the Drury Lane Theatre Patent (privately printed, 1915). There are hostile contemporary accounts of Fleetwood in Henry Carey's epistle Of Stage Tyrants [(1735) reprinted in The Poems of Henry Carey, ed. F. T. Wood (1930)], in Charlotte Charke's The Art of Management (1735), and in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, Youngest Daughter of Colley Cibber, Written by Herself (1735).

9. Julius Caesar, on 28 April 1738. Rich offered Hamlet on 10 April 1739.

10. A lady once asked Foote, "Pray, Sir, are your puppets to be as large as life?" "Oh dear, Madam, no: not much above the size of Garrick." See William Cooke, Memoirs of Samuel Foote (1805), II, 58.

11. Theobald never published his long promised translation of Aeschylus; but, by bracketing it with Cooke's musical farce from Terence, The Eunuch, which was performed (Drury Lane, 17 May 1737), "Scriblerus" seems to imply that he did complete it.

12. The immediate target of this shaft was the waxwork show kept by Mrs. Salmon near St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet Street, but the original "Merlin's Cave" built for Queen Caroline in 1735 remained a standing jest into the 1740's.

13. "Consedere duces et vulgi stante corona surgit ad hos clipei dominus septemplicis" (Met., XIII, 1-2). Dryden translates:

The Chiefs were set; the Soldiers crown'd the Field: To these the Master of the seven-fold Shield Upstarted fierce.