Scriblerus club.

Scriblerus was a short-lived club formed by literary men who were opposed to some "modern" tendencies in public taste. Founded in 1713, the club disbanded the next year when the Tory government fell from power and the club members became somewhat dispersed. Members included Dr. John Arbuthnot, John Gay, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Thomas Parnell, They created the persona of a dull modern scholar, Martinus Scriblerus, to whom they attributed various dull and absurd works of literary scholarship and criticism. The club was important as the origin of satiric ideas that later were developed in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, in Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and in Pope's Dunciad.