ffred's
nearly-forgotten treasures"O Cicero, Cicero! if to pun be a crime, 'tis a crime I have learned from thee: O Bias, Bias! if to pun be a crime, by thy example was I biased."
While transcribing Transmigration by Mortimer Collins, I encountered a reference to Martinus Scriblerus. Upon looking into it, I found it irresistible. This collaboration between Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Arbuthnot was surely a delightful lark at the time, but its satire relies to a great extent on historically inside humor, and so it comes as no surprise that it is very nearly forgotten. Nonetheless, I consider it as surely a relevant spoof of home education as anything written more recently.
The text was adapted from this etext at the University of Michigan, and compared to this scan of the 1741 edition and this scan of Volume III* of the 1778 edition of the Works of Alexander Pope. Obvious errors were corrected, including chapter numbers. Italics, small caps, and special characters were restored, and spelling and punctuation were standardized to some degree, The table of contents was moved from the end of the book to the beginning. Additional footnotes in the 1778 edition were converted to numbered endnotes in order to distinguish them from the originals.
[*Which also contains Peri Bathous, referred to in Chapter VII.]
So here it is: the master HTML version, the home-brew Kindle version, and the actual Amazon publication.
November 20, 2025