Swift had written to Pope in 1725: "Take care that the bad poets do not outwit you, as they have served the good ones in every age, whom they have provoked to transmit their names to posterity;" and the Dunciad has been generally censured from Swift's point of view.
Satire, it is said, is wasted upon such insignificant persons.

To this Pope might have replied, with some plausibility, that the interest of satire must always depend upon its internal qualities, not upon our independent knowledge of its object.

Though Gildon and Arnall are forgotten, the type "dunce" is eternal.

The warfare, however, was demoralizing in another sense.

Whatever may have been the injustice of Pope's attacks upon individuals, the moral standard of the Grub Street population was far from exalted.