In Pope's mock epic, The Dunciad (1743 edition) the fact Colley Cibber was made poet laureate of England receives a contemptuous treatment. This excerpt is just one instance:
High on a gorgeous seat, ....
Great Cibber sat:[with]... proud Parnassian sneer.
The conscious simper, and the jealous leer...
.....
Thou Cibber I [,] thou, his laurel shall support,
Folly, my son, has still a friend at Court.
Lift up your gates, ye princes, see him come!
Sound, sound ye viols, be the cat-call dumb!
Bring, bring the madding bay, the drunken vine;
The creeping, dirty, courtly ivy join.
....
Of course little could guarantee immortality more reliably than to be the subject of Alexander Pope's poetry. We have some background on our topic; certainly I found it helpful.
According to William Forbes Gray, (The Poets Laureate of England: Their History and Their Odes, 1914)
..... Colley, it must be confessed, proved too easy a mark for the shafts which came from Pope's quiver, though the attempt to make him out a dunce totally failed. But of his coxcombry and plagiarisms, Pope makes excellent sport....
In the Augustan age of English letters, authors' quarrels, whatever else they might be, were usually obscure in origin, but extremely bitter and protracted in their outcome. The historic duel between Pope and Cibber affords a good example. What excited Pope's ire, according to Cibber, was his introducing while acting ...., a clever but mild impromptu ridiculing [of] Three Hours After Marriage, of which Pope was part author with Gay and Arbuthnot. At the conclusion of the performance, Pope, says Cibber, "came behind the scenes ... to call me to account for the insult. And accordingly fell upon me with all the foul language that a wit out of his senses would be capable of . . . choked with the foam of his passion.".....
A more plausible explanation [than the above] is that, after the failure of Three Hours After Marriage, Pope became jealous of Cibber's dramatic success, and that the jealousy was intensified by his receiving the laurel. Be that as it may, Cibber replied to Pope's onslaughts in two letters. The first appeared in 1742, and was entitled, "A Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope, inquiring into the motives that might induce him in his Satyrical Works, to be so frequently fond of Mr. Cibber's name." .... In 1744 Cibber replied in a second epistle, entitled "Another Occasional Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope. Wherein the New Hero's Preferment to his Throne, in The Dunciad, seems not to be Accepted. And the Author of that Poem His more rightful Claim to it, is Asserted. ..."
One cannot but admire the good sense, and the comparatively mild and equable spirit which pervades Cibber's epistles. Considering the provocation he had had, his treatment of his enemy may almost be said to be generous. Pope had taunted him with having failed in tragedy, and had set him down a dunce. To this, Cibber.... convincingly replied: "If I have made so many crowded theatres laugh, and in the right place, too, for above forty years together, am I to make up the number of your dunces because I have not the equal talent of making them cry too? . . . What mighty reason will the world have to laugh at my weakness in tragedy, more than at yours in comedy?"
Cibber had reason on his side, too, when he declared that Pope's portrait of him in The Dunciad savoured more of calumny than of satire. .....
Now, dulness could not justly be laid to Cibber's charge, whereas vanity and avarice could. But these foibles Pope can hardly be said to have touched.
And with good sense, Cibber combined good feeling. Pope was nothing if not savage, but there was more than a suggestion of magnanimity about his adversary. Wrote Cibber: "When ... I find my name at length in the satyrical works of our most celebrated living author, I never look upon those lines as malice meant to me (for he knows I never provoked it), but profit to himself. One of his points must be to have many readers; he considers that my face and name are more known than those of many thousands of more consequence in the kingdom; that, therefore, right or wrong, a lick at the Laureate will always be a sure bait... to catch him little readers."
Cibber said regarding this historic literary feud that he made Pope "as uneasy as a rat in a hot kettle for a twelvemonth together." There is a note of triumph about the observation, and it was justified. Pope's Dunciad will live as long as English literature. Nevertheless, the satire was unjust and malicious to Cibber— unjust because it ridiculed the Laureate instead of those who elevated him to a position for which he was totally unfit, malicious because it selected as objects of satire with a view to heightening the picture, foibles of which Cibber was hardly guilty.
Cibber's twelvemonth makes one nice day in the Almanac.
..... Colley, it must be confessed, proved too easy a mark for the shafts which came from Pope's quiver, though the attempt to make him out a dunce totally failed. But of his coxcombry and plagiarisms, Pope makes excellent sport....
In the Augustan age of English letters, authors' quarrels, whatever else they might be, were usually obscure in origin, but extremely bitter and protracted in their outcome. The historic duel between Pope and Cibber affords a good example. What excited Pope's ire, according to Cibber, was his introducing while acting ...., a clever but mild impromptu ridiculing [of] Three Hours After Marriage, of which Pope was part author with Gay and Arbuthnot. At the conclusion of the performance, Pope, says Cibber, "came behind the scenes ... to call me to account for the insult. And accordingly fell upon me with all the foul language that a wit out of his senses would be capable of . . . choked with the foam of his passion.".....
A more plausible explanation [than the above] is that, after the failure of Three Hours After Marriage, Pope became jealous of Cibber's dramatic success, and that the jealousy was intensified by his receiving the laurel. Be that as it may, Cibber replied to Pope's onslaughts in two letters. The first appeared in 1742, and was entitled, "A Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope, inquiring into the motives that might induce him in his Satyrical Works, to be so frequently fond of Mr. Cibber's name." .... In 1744 Cibber replied in a second epistle, entitled "Another Occasional Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope. Wherein the New Hero's Preferment to his Throne, in The Dunciad, seems not to be Accepted. And the Author of that Poem His more rightful Claim to it, is Asserted. ..."
One cannot but admire the good sense, and the comparatively mild and equable spirit which pervades Cibber's epistles. Considering the provocation he had had, his treatment of his enemy may almost be said to be generous. Pope had taunted him with having failed in tragedy, and had set him down a dunce. To this, Cibber.... convincingly replied: "If I have made so many crowded theatres laugh, and in the right place, too, for above forty years together, am I to make up the number of your dunces because I have not the equal talent of making them cry too? . . . What mighty reason will the world have to laugh at my weakness in tragedy, more than at yours in comedy?"
Cibber had reason on his side, too, when he declared that Pope's portrait of him in The Dunciad savoured more of calumny than of satire. .....
Now, dulness could not justly be laid to Cibber's charge, whereas vanity and avarice could. But these foibles Pope can hardly be said to have touched.
And with good sense, Cibber combined good feeling. Pope was nothing if not savage, but there was more than a suggestion of magnanimity about his adversary. Wrote Cibber: "When ... I find my name at length in the satyrical works of our most celebrated living author, I never look upon those lines as malice meant to me (for he knows I never provoked it), but profit to himself. One of his points must be to have many readers; he considers that my face and name are more known than those of many thousands of more consequence in the kingdom; that, therefore, right or wrong, a lick at the Laureate will always be a sure bait... to catch him little readers."
Cibber said regarding this historic literary feud that he made Pope "as uneasy as a rat in a hot kettle for a twelvemonth together." There is a note of triumph about the observation, and it was justified. Pope's Dunciad will live as long as English literature. Nevertheless, the satire was unjust and malicious to Cibber— unjust because it ridiculed the Laureate instead of those who elevated him to a position for which he was totally unfit, malicious because it selected as objects of satire with a view to heightening the picture, foibles of which Cibber was hardly guilty.
Cibber's twelvemonth makes one nice day in the Almanac.
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