ABSTRACT
verbal quibbling, to arbitrary monarchy (135-88). This rouses the intellectual reactionaries of Oxford and Cambridge, led by Aristarchus, who boasts of his service to Dulness in textual criticism and in educating the young in such a way as to prevent them from understanding anything important; but he falls silent when he sees the young traveller returning from the Grand Tour (189-274). The traveller’s tutor presents his pupil and his foreign whore, describing the experiences abroad that have improved the pupil’s capacity to serve Dulness (275-336). She notices Paridel among an apathetic group of idlers: her favour only makes him sleepier (336-46). Annius prays to be allowed to cheat by trading in fake antiquities, and when challenged by Mummius to produce medals which he has paid for but which Annius has swallowed, suggests that they dine with Pollio with a view to recovering the treasure (347-97). From a crowd of virtuosi in natural history emerge a horticulturalist and a butterfly collector who argue over a carnation damaged by the collector in his eagerness to capture a butterfly: Dulness commends both and exhorts them to interest others in such hobbies in order to distract them from the worship of the God who creates the objects of their obsessions (397-458). A clergyman of deist leanings with a taste for a priori argument promises to take care of the latter project (459-92). Silenus, mentioned at the end of the clergyman’s speech, wakes up and explains to Dulness that the returned traveller is the finished product of the education she sponsors: devoid of religious awe and skilled only in empty words, he is ready to submit to arbitrary authority (493-516). The Wizard offers the young a potion which turns them into mere dilettanti, obsessed with distractions from horseracing and hunting, through varieties of self-obsession, to opera and gastronomy (517-64). Dulness confers titles and degrees on her disciples (565-78). She instructs them to cultivate pride, selfishness and dullness, suggests hobbies to distract the ruling class from public responsibilities, and looks forward to the ambition of one of her servants who, by daring to make the monarch his puppet, will bring the whole country under her control (579-604). She is prevented from saying more by a yawn which puts to sleep the church, educational institutions, parliament, government and the armed forces (605-18). The speaker implores the muse to list the victims of the yawn, but his speech lapses into asterisks (619-26). Even the muse succumbs as Dulness arrives in triumph, extinguishing intellectual light and putting to flight the personifications of moral and religious principle: she restores the chaos which existed before the creation, and shuts the curtain on a darkened universe (627-56).
