Note 217 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS;

Vain as Cibber has been called, and vain as he affects to be, he has spoken of his own merits as a comic writer,—and he was a very great one,—with a manly moderation, very surprising indeed in a vain man. Pope has sung in his Dunciad, most harmoniously inhuman,

“How, with less reading than makes felons scape, Less human genius than God gives an ape, Small thanks to France, and none to Rome or Greece, A patch’d, vamp’d, future, old, revived new piece; ’Twixt Plautus, Fletcher, Congreve, and Corneille, Can make a Cibber, Johnson, and Ozell.”

Blasting as was this criticism, it could not raise the anger of the gay and careless Cibber. Yet what could have put it to a sharper test? Johnson and Ozell are names which have long disappeared from the dramatic annals, and could only have been coupled with Cibber to give an idea of what the satirist meant by “the human genius of an ape.” But listen to the mild, yet the firm tone of Cibber—he talks like injured innocence, and he triumphs over Pope, in all the dignity of truth.—I appeal to Cibber’s posterity!

“And pray, sir, why my name under this scurvy picture? I flatter myself, that if you had not put it there, nobody else would have thought it like me; nor can I easily believe that you yourself do: but perhaps you imagined it would be a laughing ornament to your verse, and had a mind to divert other people’s spleen with it as well as your own. Now let me hold up my head a little, and then we shall see how the features hit me.” He proceeds to relate, how “many of those plays have lived the longer for my meddling with them.” He mentions several, which “had been dead to the stage out of all memory, which have since been in a constant course of acting above these thirty or forty years.” And then he adds: “Do those altered plays at all take from the merit of those more successful pieces, which were entirely my own?—When a man is abused, he has a right to speak even laudable truths of himself, to confront his slanderer. Let me therefore add, that my first Comedy of The Fool in Fashion was as much (though not so valuable) an original, as any work Mr. Pope himself has produced. It is now forty-seven years since its first appearance on the stage, where it has kept its station, to this very day, without ever lying one winter dormant. Nine years after this, I brought on The Careless Husband, with still greater success; and was that too

‘A patch’d, vamp’d, future, old, revived new piece?’

Let the many living spectators of these plays, then, judge between us, whether the above verses came from the honesty of a satirist, who would be thought, like you, the upright censor of mankind. Sir, this libel was below you! Satire, without truth, recoils upon its author, and must, at other times, render him suspected of prejudice, even where he may be just; as frauds, in religion, make more atheists than converts; and the bad heart, Mr. Pope, that points an injury with verse, makes it the more unpardonable, as it is not the result of sudden passion, but of an indulged and slowly-meditating ill-nature. What a merry mixed mortal has nature made you, that can debase that strength and excellence of genius to the lowest human weakness, that of offering unprovoked injuries, at the hazard of your being ridiculous too, when the venom you spit falls short of your aim!” I have quoted largely, to show that Cibber was capable of exerting a dignified remonstrance, as well as pointing the lightest, yet keenest, shafts of sarcastic wit.