The Scribleriad, and The Difference Between Verbal and Practical Virtue — A Closer Reading

The Goddess’s Judgment Hall

The Scribleriad opens with a goddess receiving a procession of literary claimants. Each petitioner speaks in a distinctive voice: one boasts he has “study’d Swift with so much Pains”; another, a theatrical figure, claims to have revived “the Arts of Rome and Greece” by giving “for Shakespear’s Monument I gave a Play.” The goddess’s responses are terse and dismissive. To one she retorts, “Obscenity, when dull, is always scorn’d.” The poem’s structure is a series of such encounters, each a miniature character sketch. The setting—a supernatural court where “Fantoms hover round the Place” and “shew their Crimes in Mirrors to their Face”—allows the poet to catalogue abuses without narrative continuity. The effect is less a story than a satirical gallery.

Hervey’s Accusation of Hypocrisy

Lord Hervey’s poem is more tightly focused. Its title announces the theme: the gap between what a person professes and what he does. Hervey applies this to Pope directly, drawing examples from the lives of Horace, Seneca, and Sallust to argue that moral writing does not guarantee moral living. The poem’s tone is cooler than the Scribleriad’s burlesque, relying on antithesis and epigram. Hervey had already made the same case in a prose pamphlet, where he called Pope “a second-rate Poet, a bad Companion, a dangerous Acquaintance.” The verse version condenses the attack into a series of pointed contrasts. The reader should note that the excerpts do not include the poem’s full argument, only its framing.

Paper Wars and Theatrical Rivalries

Both poems are embedded in a specific historical moment: the 1742 escalation of the Pope-Cibber quarrel, which also involved engravings, prose pamphlets, and stage politics. The Scribleriad alludes to contemporary theatrical figures—“Ambivius Turpia, the Stage ’Squire”—and to specific productions, such as “R—ch bestows an Orpheus on the Town.” Hervey’s poem, meanwhile, was published less than a week after his own prose pamphlet on the same subject. The introduction by James Sambrook notes that the Scribleriad comes “from or near Grub Street itself,” while Hervey writes from the court. This social contrast—Grub Street versus aristocracy—adds another layer to the quarrel, visible in the poems’ different manners of attack.

Readers coming to these poems for the first time may find it useful to know that both are occasional works, written to wound specific opponents in a quarrel now two and a half centuries old. The notes in this edition supply the names behind the initials and allusions. Neither poem aspires to the formal finish of Pope’s own satires; their interest lies in the raw energy of literary combat and the period’s willingness to turn personal animosity into public verse.

There’s something almost tender about watching two poets in 1742 fight over what virtue truly means, especially when I recall sitting with Poe’s raven years later, both of them circling the same quiet gap between what we say and what we do. The Raven Illustrated — A Reader’s Guide brings that old ache back, gently.