Lund, 'From Oblivion to
Dulness: Pope and the Poetics of Appropriation', British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 14 (1991), 171-89.
Nevertheless, the Puritan's love for his adopted boy charges his "state of religious
dulness" with a "longing for a more fervid faith." This, in turn, engenders within him "an incipient love for the child's whole sect."
In another letter she writes that "The
dulness of the book is such that any indecency may lurk there--one simply can't keep one's eyes on the page" (Letters 556); in her diary at the same time she calls the novel "the pale tepid vapid book which lay damp and slab all about the [magistrate's] court" (Diary 207).
Tynan is more sweepingly critical, refusing "to represent an illustrious name by many pages of
dulness" (I, i).
although my lord bear with my
dulness, and take pains himself to teach me.
As Percy Lindley had it (in 1879), In the modest compass of this 'Guide' no attempt has been made to embody the minute first-to-the-right-and-second-to-the left detail of the German 'Baedeker,' or the historical amplitude of the insular 'Murray,' or the Scotch
dulness of the blue-bond 'Black.' It has been prepared for the especial use of those seeking rest or recreation by the Harwich route to the Continent.
Almost four decades later in 1889 Lowell referred to 'the
dulness of the average English mind.
Here is Bedlam as every Londoner knew it, its magnificent frontage dominating Moorfields, and replete with its traditional stereotypes, the megalomaniac with his regalia, laughing, and the twin statues, melancholy and raving madness, sentinel above the gates.[2] While structurally Bedlam is held in place as a topographical indicator, located within a series of relative clauses on the way to where
Dulness is found 'in clouded Majesty' (I, 45), and on the way, therefore, to the enthronement of Cibber himself as hero of the poem, nevertheless Bedlam's significance as the true home of
Dulness and as giving birth to the chains of insanity-driven images that cross and recross the poem, is proudly and resonantly asserted.
Forrester was,
dulness was impossible, Niel believed." She is vivid and witty and has an artist's keen powers of attention and self-projection.
IF Vandal Ears with native
Dulness curst, Damn the best Musick, and applaud the worst; If thou to dull P -- -- ti quit the Field, And Bards(*) inspir'd, to duller C -- -- i yield; Repine not but attend the sure Event, And with the pleasing Prospect rest content.
781-6) Similarly, an overweening desire for an achieved vision might lead back to The Dunciad's `Mount of Vision', from whence Pope shows Swift the past triumphs of the `Empire of
Dulness'; in other words
After returning to America in his teens, he met the Connecticut poet John Trumbull, author of the mock-epical M'Fingal, a work, Adams admiringly said, "in which Americans have endeavored to soar as high as European bards." Bored with studying law after graduating from Harvard College, he experimented with different verse forms and indited his first sustained poem, a satirical portrait of nine young women entitled "A Vision," influenced by Trumbull's Progress of
Dulness.
Allen, The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836; Everyman edn, London, 1908), 337, 359, for the widespread `habit of regulating their motions, and relieving the
dulness of their occupations ...
