ARGUMENT OF BOOK IV.

The poet being, in this book, to declare the completion of the prophecies mentioned at the end of the former, makes a new invocation, as the greater poets are wont, when some high and worthy matter is to be sung. He shows the goddess coming in her majesty, to destroy order and science, and to substitute the kingdom of the dull on earth; how she leads captive the sciences, and silenceth the Muses; and what they be who succeed in their stead. All her children, by a wonderful attraction, are drawn about her, and bear along with them divers others, who promote her empire by connivance, weak resistance, or discouragement of arts; such as half-wits, tasteless admirers, vain pretenders, the flatterers of dunces, or the patrons of them: all these crowd around her; one of them, offering to approach her, is driven back by a rival; but she commends and encourages both. The first who speak in form are the geniuses of the schools, who assure her of their care to advance her cause by confining youth to words, and keeping them out of the way of real knowlege: their address, and her gracious answer; with her charge to them and the universities. The universities appear by their proper deputies, and assure her that the same method is observed in the progress of education: the speech of Aristarchus on this subject. They are driven off by a band of young gentlemen returned from travel with their tutors; one of whom delivers to the goddess, in a polite oration, an account of the whole conduct and fruits of their travels; presenting to her at the same time a young nobleman perfectly accomplished: she receives him graciously, and endues him with the happy quality of want of shame. She sees loitering about her a number of indolent persons abandoning all business and duty, and dying with laziness: to these approaches the antiquary Annius, entreating her to make them virtuosos, and assign them over to him; but Mummius, another antiquary, complaining of his fraudulent proceed

ing, she finds a method to reconcile their difference. Then enter a troop of people fantastically adorned, offering her strange and exotic presents: among them, one stands forth and demands justice on another, who had deprived him of one of the greatest curiosities in nature; but he justifies himself so well, that the goddess gives them both her approbation; she recommends to them to find proper employment for the indolents before-mentioned, in the study of butterflies, shells, birds-nests, moss, &c. but with particular caution, not to proceed beyond trifles, to any useful or extensive views of nature, or of the Author of nature. Against the last of these apprehensions, she is secured by a hearty address from the minute philosophers and freethinkers, one of whom speaks in the name of the rest. The youth, thus instructed and principled, are delivered to her in a body by the hands of Silenus; and then admitted to taste the cup of the Magus her high priest, which causes a total oblivion of all obligations, divine, civil, moral, or rational to these, her adepts, she sends priests, attendants, and comforters of various kinds; confers on them orders and degrees; and then dismissing them with a speech, confirming to each his privileges, and telling what she expects from each, concludes with a yawn of extraordinary virtue; the progress and effects whereof on all orders of men, and the consummation of all, in the restoration of Night and Chaos, conclude the poem.

THE DUNCIAD.

BOOK IV.

YET, yet a moment, one dim ray of light
Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night!
Of darkness visible so much be lent,
As half to show, half veil the deep intent.
Ye powers, whose mysteries restored I sing,
To whom Time bears me on his rapid wing,
Suspend awhile your force inertly strong,
Then take at once the poet and the song.

Now flamed the dog-star's unpropitious ray,
Smote every brain, and wither'd every bay:
Sick was the sun, the owl forsook his bower,
The moon-struck prophet felt the madding hour:
Then rose the seed of Chaos and of Night,
To blot out order, and extinguish light;
Of dull and venal a new world to mould,
And bring Saturnian days of lead and gold:

10

15

2 Dread Chaos, and eternal Night. Invoked, as the restoration of their empire is the action of the poem.-P. W.

4 Half to show, half veil the deep intent. This is a great propriety, for a dull poet can never express himself otherwise than by halves. Scriblerus.-P. W.

7 Force inertly strong. Alluding to the vis inertia of matter, which, though it really be no power, is yet the foundation of all the qualities and attributes of that sluggish substance.P. W.

She mounts the throne; her head a cloud con

ceal'd;

In broad effulgence all below reveal'd: (Tis thus aspiring Dulness ever shines)

Soft on her lap her laureat son reclines.

20

Beneath her footstool, Science groans in chains,

And Wit dreads exile, penalties, and pains: There foam'd rebellious Logic, gagg'd and bound; There, stripp'd, fair Rhetoric languish'd on the ground;

25

His blunted arms by Sophistry are borne,
And shameless Billingsgate her robes adorn;
Morality, by her false guardians drawn ;
Chicane in furs, and Casuistry in lawn,
Gasps, as they straiten at each end the cord,
And dies, when Dulness gives her page the word.
Mad Mathesis alone was unconfined,

Too mad for mere material chains to bind;

31

20 Her laureat son reclines. 'When I find my name in the satirical works of this poet, I never look on it as any malice meant to me, but profit to himself: for he considers that my face is more known than most in the nation; and therefore a lick at the laureat will be a sure bait ad captandum vulgus, to catch little readers.'-Life of Colley Cibber, c. ii.-P.+

30 Gives her page the word. There was a judge of this name, always ready to hang any man that came in his way; of which he was suffered to give a hundred miserable examples during a long life, even to his dotage. Though the candid Scriblerus imagined 'page' here to mean no more than a page or mute, and to allude to the custom of strangling state criminals in Turkey by mutes or pages; a practice more decent than that of our Page, who, before he hanged any one, loaded him with reproachful language. Scriblerus.-P. W.

31 Mad Mathesis. Alluding to the strange conclusions some mathematicians have deduced from their principles, concerning the real quantity of matter, the reality of space, &c.— P. W. The quantity of Mathesis' is wrong.