Martinus Scriblerus

Martinus Scriblerus. Son of pedant Cornelius Scriblerus, the German scholar Martinus Scriblerus is a fictional character and pseudonym used occasionally by Alexander Pope and his collaborators in the Scriblerus Club (Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, and Thomas Parnell). The character was to exhibit “all the false tastes in learning, under the character of a man of capacity enough; but that had dipped into every art and science, but injudiciously in each” (Spence's Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men. In 1727 Scriblerus appears as the author of Pope's parodic essay Peri Bathous: or, Martinus Scriblerus His Treatise of the Art of Sinking in Poetry, supposedly a serious imitation of the Peri hypsous (On the Sublime) ascribed to Longinus, in which Scriblerus champions the Moderns who "infinitely excel" the Ancients. Immediately following this work, Scriblerus authors the mock scholarly apparatus of Pope's The Dunciad Variorum (1729). The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, which had begun as early as 1713 as a collaboration of the Scriblerians, appeared in 1741. Henry Fielding, Richard Owen Cambridge, and George Crabbe later used variants of this pseudonym.

—Allison Muri