and their resentment, the "Dunciad" might have made its way very
slowly in the world. This, however, was not to be expected: every
man is of importance to himself, and therefore, in his own opinion,
to others; and, supposing the world already acquainted with all his
pleasures and his pains, is perhaps the first to publish injuries or
misfortunes, which had never been known unless related by himself,
and at which those that hear them will only laugh, for no man
sympathises with the sorrows of vanity.

The history of the "Dunciad" is very minutely related by Pope
himself in a dedication which he wrote to Lord Middlesex in the name
of Savage.

"I will relate the war of the 'Dunces' (for so it has been commonly
called), which began in the year 1727, and ended in 1730

"When Dr. Swift and Mr. Pope thought it proper, for reasons
specified in the preface to their 'Miscellanies,' to publish such
little pieces of theirs as had occasionally got abroad, there was
added to them the 'Treatise of the Bathos, or the Art of Sinking in
Poetry.' It happened that in one chapter of this piece the several
species of bad poets were ranged in classes, to which were prefixed
almost all the letters of the alphabet (the greatest part of them at
random); but such was the number of poets eminent in that art, that
some one or other took every letter to himself. All fell into so
violent a fury, that, for half a year or more, the common newspapers
(in most of which they had some property, as being hired writers)
were filled with the most abusive falsehoods and scurrilities they
could possibly devise, a liberty no way to be wondered at in those
people, and in those papers, that, for many years during the