ellauri042.html on line 644: Part of Pope's bitter inspiration for the characters in the book come from his soured relationship with the royal court. The Princess of Wales Caroline of Ansbach, wife of George II, had supported Pope in her patronage of the arts. When she and her husband came to the throne in 1727 she had a much busier schedule and thus had less time for Pope who saw this oversight as a personal slight against him. When planning the Dunciad he based the character Dulness on Queen Caroline, as the fat, lazy and dull wife. Pope's bitterness against Caroline was a typical trait of his brilliant but unstable character. The King of the Dunces as the wife of Dulness was based on George II. Pope makes his views on the first two Georgian kings very clear in the Dunciad when he writes 'Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first'.
ellauri042.html on line 648: The plot of the poem is simple. Dulness, the goddess, appears at a Lord Mayor's Day in 1724 and notes that her king, Elkannah Settle, has died. She chooses Lewis Theobald as his successor. In honour of his coronation, she holds heroic games. He is then transported to the Temple of Dulness, where he has visions of the future. The poem has a consistent setting and time, as well. Book I covers the night after the Lord Mayor's Day, Book II the morning to dusk, and Book III the darkest night. Furthermore, the poem begins at the end of the Lord Mayor's procession, goes in Book II to the Strand, then to Fleet Street (where booksellers were), down by Bridewell Prison to the Fleet ditch, then to Ludgate at the end of Book II; in Book III, Dulness goes through Ludgate to the City of London to her temple.
ellauri099.html on line 71: Dulness and dirt are the chief features of Lippincott’s this month: The element that is unclean, though undeniably amusing, is furnished by Mr. Oscar Wilde’s story of The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents—a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction—a gloating study of the mental and physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden youth, which might be fascinating but for its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophizings. . . . Mr. Wilde says the book has “a moral.” The “moral,” so far as we can collect it, is that man’s chief end is to develop his nature to the fullest by “always searching for new sensations,” that when the soul gets sick the way to cure it is to deny the senses nothing.
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