World of the Dunciad

BOOK THE SECOND

And now the victor stretch'd his eager hand
Where the tall Nothing stood, or seem'd to stand;
A shapeless shade, it melted from his sight,
Like forms in clouds, or visions of the night.
To seize his papers, Curll, was next thy care;
His papers light, fly diverse, toss'd in air;
Songs, sonnets, epigrams the winds uplift,
And whisk them back to Evans, Young, and Swift.
The embroider'd suit at least he deem'd his prey,
That suit an unpaid tailor snatch'd away.
No rag, no scrap, of all the beau, or wit,
That once so flutter'd, and that once so writ.

Heaven rings with laughter: of the laughter vain,
Dulness, good queen, repeats the jest again.
Three wicked imps, of her own Grub Street choir,
She deck'd like Congreve, Addison, and Prior;
Mears, Warner, Wilkins run: delusive thought!
Breval, Bond, Bezaleel, the varlets caught.
Curll stretches after Gay, but Gay is gone,
He grasps an empty Joseph for a John:
So Proteus, hunted in a nobler shape,
Became, when seized, a puppy, or an ape.

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V. The Prize Disappears

     Just as in the Aeneid when the poet's father disappears before him here the poet's effigy vanishes before Curll's eyes.  Curll then tooses out his papers in angry in lines that echo Milton's description of the spreading of sin and death through chaos.   
     Dullness's laughter is vain because she is repeating the laughter of the gods at Haephestus in the Iliad.  The theme of plagiarism is continued with Dulness dressing up her Grub street hacks like these more successful writers just as the actual Grub street writers would claim their names as pseudonyms.