Would not this be a miserable distribution for the poor dunces?

They freed their minds, as Cicero did to Atticus; they said things to each other which they might have hesitated to say in public, or among fools and dunces.

Such freedoms in your works are shown They can't enjoy what's not their own; All dunces too, in church and state, In frothy nonsense show their hate; With all the petty scribbling crew, (And those pert sots are not a few,) 20 'Gainst you and Pope their envy spurt, The booksellers alone are hurt.

" An eight page verse satire entitled The Female Dunces.

The scourge of dunces had, as we have seen, a legitimate cause to resent the licentious attack upon certain court ladies, especially his friend Mrs. Howard, in a scandalous fiction of which Eliza Haywood was the reputed author.

In the universal howl raised against the persecutor by the afflicted dunces the treble part was but weakly sustained.

Pope's jackal directed against the members of a supposed club of dunces, presided over by James Moore-Smith and including Theobald, Welsted, Curll, Dennis, Cooke, and Bezaleel Morris, a tirade of abuse, in which "the divine Eliza" came in for her full share of vituperation.

The supposed writer, Iscariot Hackney, in stating his qualifications for membership in the Dunces' Club, claims to be "very deeply read in all Pieces of Scandal, Obscenity, and Prophaneness, particularly in the Writings of Mrs. Haywood, Henley, Welsted, Morley, Foxton, Cooke, D'Foe, Norton, Woolston, Dennis, Nedward, Concanen, Journalist-Pit, and the Author of the Rival Modes.

But there is no evidence to show that Eliza took any part in the War of the Dunces.

I must confess it, with a melancholy Amazement, I see so wonderful a Genius laid aside, and the late Slaves of the Stage now become its Masters, Dunces that will be sure to suppress all Theatrical Entertainments and Activities that they are not able themselves to shine in!

And as to those who tell us, with an air of seeming wisdom, that it is men, and not books, that we must study to become knowing; this I have always remarked, from repeated experience, to be the common consolation and language of dunces."

Are slaveholders dunces, or do they take all the rest of the world to be, that they think to bandage our eyes with such thin gauzes?

To be sure, other public servants were in the same category, all they did being wrong; but he had the means of telling his own story, and a large number of gaping dunces were ever ready to believe him.

With such encouragement, nonsense wrestles for the seat of learning, exploded errors are republished as novelties, original writers are plundered by dunces, and men that understand nothing well, profess to teach all sciences!

Many of these inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope and others of their more successful rivals called out Pope's Dunciad, or epic of the dunces, by way of retaliation.

The throne of the dunces, which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his Dunciad, passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and Colley Cibber.

Much of the satire was bestowed on Dryden, whom Rochester for the first time distinguishes by a ridiculous nickname, which was afterwards echoed by imitating dunces in all their lampoons.

Mr. Ozell is severely touched by Mr. Pope in the first book of the Dunciad, on what account we cannot determine; perhaps that satyrist has only introduced him to grace the train of his Dunces.

I must confess it, with a melancholy Amazement, I see so wonderful a Genius laid aside, and the late Slaves of the Stage now become its Masters, Dunces that will be sure to suppress all Theatrical Entertainments and Activities that they are not able themselves to shine in!

Dull fellows 43 Dullness, goddess of 63 Dumb conjurer, the 560 Dunces 17 (Fn. 3)

While Mr. Pope enjoyed any leisure from severer applications to study, his friends were continually solliciting him to turn his thoughts towards something that might be of lasting use to the world, and engage no more in a war with dunces who were now effectually humbled.

This evil fortune, which generally attends extraordinary men in the management of great affairs, has been imputed to divers causes that need not be here set down, when so obvious a one occurs, if what a certain writer observes be true, that when a great genius appears in the world, the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

He was a thousand times recommended by his poetical friends to great persons, as a young man of excellent parts who deserved encouragement, and received a thousand promises; but his modesty, and a generous spirit, which disdained the slavery of continual application and attendance, always disappointed him, making room for vigilant dunces, who were sure to be never out of sight.

"Come," cried the patroon, "read your lessons and get out, you young dunces!

"Tristram and I were at Eton together in the same house, and we were both dunces; but he did rather well at Oxford, and I went straight into the Guards.