Perhaps only Browning would ever have
thought of undertaking a poetical parley with Bubb Dodington. Dodington
is now largely, and not undeservedly forgotten. His dinners and his
dresses, his poems and his pamphlets, his plays and his passions--the
wind has carried them all away. If Pope had not nicknamed him Bubo, if
Foote had not caricatured him in "The Patron," if Churchill had not
lampooned him in "The Rosciad," he would scarcely have earned in his own
day the notoriety which the publication of his "Diary" had in a manner
preserved to later days. If he was hardly worth a corner in the
Whartons' picture-gallery he was certainly scarcely deserving of the
attention of Browning. Even his ineptitude was hardly important enough
to have twenty pages of Browning's genius wasted upon it, twenty pages
ending with the sting about
The scoff
That greets your very name: folks see but one
Fool more, as well as knave, in Dodington.
Dodington has been occasionally classed with Lord Hervey but the
classification is scarcely fair. With all his faults--and he had them in
abundance--Lord Hervey was a better creature than Bubb Dodington.
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