ADVERTISEMENT.
IT will be sufficient to say of this Edition, that the reader has here a much more correct and compleat copy of the Dunciad, than has hitherto appeared: I cannot answer but some mistakes may have slipt into it, but a vast number of others will be prevented, by the Names being now not only set at length, but justified by the authorities and reasons given. I make no doubt, the Author’s own motive to use real rather than feign’d names, was his care to preserve the Innocent from any false Applications; whereas in the former editions which had no more than the Initial letters, he was made, by Keys printed here, to hurt the inoffensive; and (what was worse) to abuse his friends, by an impression at Dublin.
The Commentary which attends this Poem was sent me from several hands, and consequently must be unequally written; yet will it have one advantage over most Commentaries, that it is not made upon conjectures, or at a remote distance of time: and the reader cannot but derive one pleasure from the very Obscurity of the persons it treats of, that it partakes of the nature of a Secret, which most people love to be let into, tho’ the Men or the Things be ever so inconsiderable or trivial.
Of the Persons it was judg’d proper to give some account: for since it is only in this monument that they must expect to survive, (and here survive they will, as long as the English tongue shall remain such as it was in the reigns of Queen Anne and King George)