any gentleman in that manner, &c. Now let the reader judge by this concern who was the true mother of the child! When he was almost choked with the foam of his passion, I was enough recovered from my amazement to make him, as near as I can remember, this reply: 'Mr. Pope, you are so particular (distinguished) a man, that I must be ashamed to return your language as I ought to do; but since you have attacked me in so monstrous a manner, this you may depend upon, that as long as the play continues to be acted, I will never fail to repeat the same words over and over again.' Now, as he accordingly found I kept my word for several days following, I am afraid that he has since thought that his pen was a sharper weapon than his tongue to trust his revenge with; and however just cause this may be for his so doing, it is, at least, the only cause my conscience can charge me with."
The play thus glanced at with such fatal effect, was a miserable performance, the joint production, as it was surmised, of Gay, Arbuthnot and Pope, which deservedly failed on the first night of representation. Pope, however, had previously sneered at Cibber in his epistle to Arbuthnot, and in the First Part of "The Dunciad." In 1740, when Cibber published his apology, he made the following characteristic allusion to the attacks of the satirist: "When," says he, "I find my name in the satirical works of this poet, I never look upon 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 Laureate will be a sure bait, ad captandum vulgus, to catch little readers." The passage nettled Pope, and he attacked Cibber again in the Fourth Book of "The Dunciad," representing him as the darling of the Goddess of Dulness.
"Soft in her lap her Laureate son reclines."
