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

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Authors: Anonymous, Hervey, John Hervey, Baron, 1696-1743, Sambrook, James [Editor] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2011 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744 -- Poetry; Verse satire, English; Cibber, Colley, 1671-1757 -- Poetry; Literary quarrels -- Poetry Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 13,423

Reading time 59 min

Text sections 2

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Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744 -- Poetry,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #34821

Two 1742 verse satires from the Pope-Cibber quarrel: an anonymous mock-heroic featuring a goddess judging scribblers, and Lord Hervey's attack on Pope's gap between moral rhetoric and conduct.

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Hervey had suggested that there was a certain incongruity between Pope's true character and his assumed _persona_ of the "virtuous man," and this incongruity forms the main subject of his verse attack. Here Hervey finds examples of "the difference between verbal and practical virtue" in the lives of Horace, Seneca, and Sallust, before turning to lampoon Pope crossly and ineptly. The attack on Horace is well conceived for Hervey's purpose and calculated to damage Pope who was in so many eyes, including his own, the modern heir of that ancient poet, but the straight abuse directed against Pope's person is sad stuff. Such lines as those on the "yelping Mungril" (p. 6) serve only to show how squarely the "well-bred Spaniels" taunt in the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_ had hit its target. Hervey's poem carried a prefatory letter headed "Mr. C--b--er to Mr. P.," making out that Cibber had a hand in writing the poem itself. Coming so soon after Hervey's _Letter to Cibber_, which had carried the markedly intimate subscription "With the greatest Gratitude and Truth, most affectionately yours," this prefatory letter to the poem further emphasized Hervey's firm and deliberate alliance with Cibber.

Evidently it was the strangeness of this alliance between the two opponents of Pope that struck the fancy of that unidentified "Scriblerus" whose "Epistle to the Dunces," _The Scribleriad_, was published between 30 September and 2 October 1742. When Hervey was "affectionately yours" to Cibber, the two stood shoulder to shoulder so temptingly open to a single volley that the author of _The Scribleriad_ could fairly claim, as Pope had claimed in the appendix to _The Dunciad Variorum_ of 1729, that "the _Poem was not made for these Authors, but these Authors for the Poem_." Hervey appears as "Narcissus," the nickname Pope had used for him in _The New Dunciad_. A "late Vice-Chamberlain" (because he had been dismissed from that post in July 1742) still gorged with the fulsome dedication of Conyers Middleton's _Life of Cicero_ (1741), he is shown (pp. 11-13) rousing Cibber. Cibber's situation, reclining on the lap of Dulness where he is found by Hervey, is taken from _The New Dunciad_, while his general Satanic role parallels Theobald's in _The Dunciad Variorum_. This may reflect common knowledge that Pope was at work on revisions that would raise Cibber to the Dunces' throne, but the belief that Cibber was King of the Dunces had been widespread from the date of his appointment as Poet Laureate.[3] _The Scribleriad_ follows the general run of satires against Cibber--attacking his senile infatuation for Peg Woffington, his violently demagogic and chauvinistic _Nonjuror_ (first acted in 1717 but still drawing an audience in 1741), his laureate odes and his frank commercialization of art.

Although the writer of _The Scribleriad_ was obviously prompted by the example of _The Dunciad_ and borrows many details from Pope, his poem has very little of that mock-epic quality its title might lead a reader to expect. There are slight traces of parody of Virgil when, on page 16, Cibber appears as Aeneas (the character he was soon to assume in _The Dunciad in Four Books_) and the epicene Hervey is portrayed as a rejuvenated Sybil guiding the hero through a hell of duncery. There are hints of _Paradise Lost_ too, when Cibber, Satan-like, undertakes his mission (p. 17) and the dunces, Belial-like, agree "they're better in a cursed State,/Than to be totally annihilate" (p. 5). But "Scriblerus'" use of Virgil and Milton, unlike Pope's, does not import some graver meaning into his poem; it provides him with neither a framework of moral symbols nor a continuous narrative thread.

The action is slight and its setting vague. Sometimes we are in a brothel, crowded with bullies, punks, lords, draymen and linkboys, and managed by Cibber (pp. 11-12) or by Dulness (p. 10). This setting, together with the claim that Cibber's own muse is a prostitute (p. 8), serves as a retort to the Tom-Tit in the brothel story in Cibber's _Letter to Pope_ and to emphasize the element of literary prostitution in the activities of Cibber and his like. At other times the setting is a regular dunces' club (pp. 9, 16) of the type chronicled in the pages of _The Grub Street Journal_. Towards the end of the poem it is an Assembly Room (p. 19) presided over by the Goddess of Puffs (a happy development of that more commonplace mythical figure "Fame," Dulness' handmaiden in _The New Dunciad_) who sets a test for the dunces and judges their performance. Only in this concluding episode can this rather shapeless poem (which certainly is neither the mock epic nor the epistle that its title-page promises) be assigned to any regular literary "kind." This "kind" is that favorite of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the "Sessions Poem."[4]

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The two poems in this volume, both published in 1742, belong to the thicket of literary warfare that surrounded Alexander Pope in his later years. The anonymous Scribleriad adopts a mock-heroic frame: a goddess presides over a contest of scribblers, each claimant advancing his case in verse. Lord Hervey’s The Difference between Verbal and Practical Virtue takes a more direct satirical aim, charging Pope with hypocrisy by contrasting his moralizing poems with his reported behavior. Together they show how the same quarrel could be fought in two distinct registers—one allegorical and sprawling, the other pointed and personal.

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.