Eighteenth-century writers tended to present a confident front when dealing with madness. Pope's lines near the beginning of the 1743 Dunciad are representative of the assertiveness of at least the early half of the period, with madness firmly in its place, coerced into serving as a figure in the same agenda that obligates the construction of the poetic argument. Close to those walls where Folly holds her throne, And laughs to think Monroe would take her down, Where o'er the gates, by his fam'd father's hand Great Cibber's brazen, brainless brothers stand; One Cell there is, conceal'd from vulgar eye, The Cave of Poverty and Poetry. (I, 29)[1] Here is Bedlam as every Londoner knew it, its magnificent frontage dominating Moorfields, and replete with its traditional stereotypes, the megalomaniac with his regalia, laughing, and the twin statues, melancholy and raving madness, sentinel above the gates.[2] While structurally Bedlam is held in place as a topographical indicator, located within a series of relative clauses on the way to where Dulness is found 'in clouded Majesty' (I, 45), and on the way, therefore, to the enthronement of Cibber himself as hero of the poem, nevertheless Bedlam's significance as the true home of Dulness and as giving birth to the chains of insanity-driven images that cross and recross the poem, is proudly and resonantly asserted. Pope's Bedlam is unassailably present, from its current physician, James Monro, to the verbal forms that 'laugh' at any prospect of future cure at his hands, and that diminish thereby the force of other tenses, tentatively represented here by the timidity of 'would take'. In Bedlam, now is supreme: madness, triumphantly assuming the regalia of the present, will not allow a time when the poet laureate's 'brazen, brainless brothers' will not 'stand' setting the cultural forms to be occupied by insanity. In Pope's Bedlam, madness is visible, its cells can be visited, its meanings are open to social (and satiric) understanding: it is here and it is now. It is a public place. What Pope's assertiveness masks, of course, is the 1728 Dunciad,when a different present made for a different thing visible, and for differently resonanced assertions. The first published version of the lines ran elsewhere in London: Where wave the tatter'd ensigns of Rag-Fair, A yawning ruin hangs and nods in air; Keen, hollow winds howl thro' the bleak recess, Emblem of Music caus'd by Emptiness: Here in one bed two shiv'ring sisters lye, The Cave of Poverty and Poetry. (I, 27)[3] Pope is still on his way to the 'Cave', and to where Dulness 'shone' in 'clouded majesty' (I, 43), but this time it is to the enthronement of Theobald as hero, and Pope goes via the Tower. Pat Rogers has written of the particular resonances of Rag Fair, and indeed of the impact of Pope's change of scene for the 1743 Dunciad.[4] What should also be emphasized, however, is how far the superior focus of the later version is a consequence of Pope's sharpened use of verbal tense. The earlier lines suffer from a mixing of kinds of visual effect (the waving of the 'tatter'd ensigns' that are up for sale standing uneasily alongside the 'yawning ruin') and of the effects of sound, resulting in the portrayal of movement and flux, not inappropriate for a context in which cheap literary ephemera is to be dealt with, but unable to match, all the same, the manic stability of Bedlam. That mixing of effect, however, is further weakened by a less considered mixing of tenses: 'wave' with the past participle 'tatter'd', 'howl' with 'caus'd' in the next line (these two lines preserved in 1743, of course, but transferred more appropriately to the confines of the 'Cave' itself, rather than the vastness of the 'yawning ruin'), and beyond that the almost replication of 'hangs' and 'nods'. Pope's verbal forms deny that resolution of here and now, enjoyed by Bedlam, because part of their energies is directed to then, when the 'ensigns' first became 'tatter'd', and part, notably the 'ruin' that 'hangs and nods', gestures towards a desolation to come. …