Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

ADVERTISEMENT

TO THE

FIFTH AND SIXTH VOLUMES.-1736.

As most of this Author's Writings have been already published in "The Drapier's Letters," "Gulliver's Travels," and the four volumes of "Miscellanies," printed for Messieurs Motte and Gulliver, it would have been injurious to the English buyer, as well as proprietor, to have reprinted here the Dublin edition of his Works. We are therefore only to assure both that these two volumes consist of such pieces as are NOT in the fore-mentioned volumes, but, excepting three Tatlers, contain every thing in the Dublin edition besides.

[ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors]

MARTINUS SCRIBLERUS

ΠΕΡΙ ΒΑΘΟΥΣ:

OR,

THE ART

OF

SINKING IN POETRY.

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1727.

ADVERTISEMENT.

THE pieces which have been published under the name of Martinus Scriblerus, are fragments of an extensive plan, contrived, but only partly executed, by Swift, Arbuthnot, Pope, Lord Oxford, and others, members of a literary society, which they called the Scriblerus Club. The general purpose was, to make the life and works of a pedantic and Quixotic scholar, the vehicle of satire against those extravagant pursuits, on which learning, talent, and perseverance are often wasted, with as little advantage to sound literature, as to the student himself. The first book of the Memoirs (to which Sterne has been incalculably indebted), is employed in ridiculing the absurd passion for antiquities in Corne lius Scriblerus, and the metaphysical studies of his son. written chiefly by Arbuthnot, whose extensive research into antiquities, upon more liberal and enlarged motives, had possessed him with the various knowledge, necessary to equip the bigotted antiquary. The task of satirising court intrigues, and the arts of statesmen, would probably have devolved upon the Dean, and Pope might have ridiculed in prose, the pursuits of those who

See Nature in some narrow partial shape,
And let the author of the whole escape;

It was

but which were reserved for the inimitable numbers of the fourth Book of the Dunciad. The death of Queen Anne, however, which disconcerted more important schemes, scattered this club of philosophical satirists. The Memoirs of Scriblerus remained half-finished among Arbuthnot's papers, who could not suppress a characteristic wish, that they had been found in the custody of the Earl of Oxford, to afford speculation to his prosecutors.*

London, 7th Sept. 1714. Arbuthnot to Pope." This blow has so roused Scriblerus, that he has recovered his senses, and thinks and talks like other men. His lucubrations he neglected among old newspapers, cases, peti. tions, and abundance of unanswerable letters. I wish to God they had been among the papers of a noble Lord sealed up. Then might Scriblerus have passed for the Pretender, and it would have been an excellent and most laborious work for the Flying Post, or some such author, to have allegorized all his adventures into a plot, and found out mysterious something, like the Key to

the Lock."

VOL. XIII.

« AnteriorContinuar »