soon as she mentions them, the professors of Cambridge and Oxford (except for Christ Church college) rush to her, "Each fierce Logician, still expelling Locke" (B IV 196). (John Locke had been censured by Oxford University in 1703, and his Essay on Human Understanding had been banned.) These professors give way to their greatest figure, Richard Bentley, who appears with his Quaker hat on and refuses to bow to Dulness. Bentley tells Dulness that he and critics like him are her true champions, for he had "made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains" (B IV 212) and, no matter what her enemies do, critics will always serve Dulness, for "Turn what they will to Verse, their toil is vain,/ Critics like me shall make it Prose again" (B IV 213–214). Picking fine arguments on letters and single textual variants and correcting authors, he will make all wits useless, and clerics, he says, are the purely dull, though the works of Isaac Barrow and Francis Atterbury might argue otherwise. He says that it is "For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it,/ And write about it, Goddess, and about it" (B IV 251–252). They cement over all wit, throwing stone back onto the figures that authors had chiselled out of marble. As he makes his boast, he sees a whore, a pupil, and a French governor come forward, and the devout Bentley skulks away. The French governor attempts to speak to Dulness but cannot be heard over the French horn sound that emerges, so the pupil tells his story. The "governor" is an English nobleman who went to school and college without learning anything, then went abroad on the Grand Tour, on which "Europe he saw, and Europe saw him too" (B IV 294). He went to Paris and Rome and "he saunter'd Europe round, / And gather'd ev'ry Vice on Christian ground" (B IV 311–312). At the end of his travels, he is "perfectly well-bred, / With nothing but a Solo in his head" (B IV 323–324), and he has returned to England with a despoiled nun following him. She is pregnant with his child (or the student's) and destined for the life of a prostitute (a kept woman), and the lord is going to run for Parliament so that he can avoid arrest. Dulness welcomes the three—the devious student, the brainless lord, and the spoiled nun—and spreads