The Dunciad Appendix III. Advertisement to the First Edition
by Alexander Pope
IN QUARTO, 1729.
It will be sufficient to say of this edition, that the reader has here a
much more correct and complete copy of the Dunciad than has hitherto
appeared. I cannot answer but some mistakes may have slipped into it,
but a vast number of others will be prevented by the names being now not
only set at length, but justified by the authorities and reasons given.
I make no doubt the author's own motive to use real rather than feigned
names, was his care to preserve the innocent from any false application;
whereas, in the former editions, which had no more than the initial
letters, he was made, by Keys printed here, to hurt the inoffensive, and
(what was worse) to abuse his friends, by an impression at Dublin.
The commentary which attends this poem was sent me from several hands,
and consequently must be unequally written; yet will have one advantage
over most commentaries, that it is not made upon conjectures, or at a
remote distance of time: and the reader cannot but derive one pleasure
from the very obscurity of the persons it treats of, that it partakes of
the nature of a secret, which most people love to be let into, though
the men or the things be ever so inconsiderable or trivial.
Of the persons it was judged proper to give some account; for since it
is only in this monument that they must expect to survive (and here
survive they will, as long as the English tongue shall remain such as it
was in the reigns of Queen Anne and King George), it seemed but humanity
to bestow a word or two upon each, just to tell what he was, what he
writ, when he lived, and when he died.
If a word or two more are added upon the chief offenders, it is only as
a paper pinned upon the breast, to mark the enormities for which they
suffered; lest the correction only should be remembered, and the crime
forgotten. In some articles it was thought sufficient barely to
transcribe from Jacob, Curll, and other writers of their own rank, who
were much better acquainted with them than any of the authors of this
comment can pretend to be. Most of them had drawn each other's
characters on certain occasions; but the few here inserted are all that
could be saved from the general destruction of such works.
Of the part of Scriblerus, I need say nothing; his manner is well enough
known, and approved by all but those who are too much concerned to be
judges.
The Imitations of the Ancients are added, to gratify those who either
never read, or may have forgotten them; together with some of the
parodies and allusions to the most excellent of the Moderns. If, from
the frequency of the former, any man think the poem too much a Cento,
our poet will but appear to have done the same thing in jest which
Boileau did in earnest; and upon which Vida, Fracastorius, and many of
the most eminent Latin poets, professedly valued themselves.