an easy-going man of the world whose unfailing gaieté
du cœur sustained him through years of hope deferred,
followed by years of persecution and ill-natured criticism.
For twenty years Cibber was the butt of the scurrilous
press of his day, and had arrayed against him such men
as Pope, Swift, Johnson, Warburton, Fielding, Dennis;
not to mention the pack of obscure pamphleteers who
attacked him under the shield of their mean anonymity.
Vain, insouciant, impenetrable, Cibber laughed at them
all and seldom lost his temper or his sense of humour.
Like Peter Pan, he never grew up though he grew very
old. It seems almost incredible that he who as a child
watched the Merry Monarch feeding his ducks in St.
James's Park, should have lived to hear of Surajah
Dowlah's atrocities, and of the horrors of the Black
Hole of Calcutta. Yet it was so.

Edmund Bellchambers, who in 1822 edited Cibber
Apology for his Own Life, ¹ seems to have set about his
task in a thoroughly jaundiced mood, prejudiced
against the actor-Laureate from the start, ready to believe
all that his enemies wrote about him, disinclined to
hear a word in his defence -- of all moods the one least
favourable to biographical truth. There is only one
mood more fatal, and that is the one which insists on
seeing nothing but good in one's subject. Since Bell-
chambers (or Burn) admitted himself to be "neither able
nor willing" to authenticate what he evidently believed
to be the truth, namely that Cibber did become "in the
zenith of his notoriety a drunkard, a fornicator, and an
atheist," why did he essay to edit the man's life? Mine
had been an easier task had I followed Bellchambers'
(or Burn's) method and accepted unquestioningly all
that Pope in his ungovernable rage and Warburton in
his sycophantic prurience wrote. But Pope in a temper

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