The action is slight and its setting vague. Sometimes we are in a brothel, crowded with bullies, punks, lords, draymen and linkboys, and managed by Cibber (pp. 11-12) or by Dulness (p. 10). This setting, together with the claim that Cibber's own muse is a prostitute (p. 8), serves as a retort to the Tom-Tit in the brothel story in Cibber's _Letter to Pope_ and to emphasize the element of literary prostitution in the activities of Cibber and his like. At other times the setting is a regular dunces' club (pp. 9, 16) of the type chronicled in the pages of _The Grub Street Journal_. Towards the end of the poem it is an Assembly Room (p. 19) presided over by the Goddess of Puffs (a happy development of that more commonplace mythical figure "Fame," Dulness' handmaiden in _The New Dunciad_) who sets a test for the dunces and judges their performance. Only in this concluding episode can this rather shapeless poem (which certainly is neither the mock epic nor the epistle that its title-page promises) be assigned to any regular literary "kind." This "kind" is that favorite of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the "Sessions Poem."[4] "Scriblerus'" account of the sessions of the dunces is more allusive and particularized than the rest of the poem and consequently calls for somewhat more detailed comment. The chief cases at the sessions embrace the pamphlet battle of summer 1742 and theatrical rivalry in the 1741-42 London season. Cibber's contribution to the paper-war, the _Letter to Pope_ (written according to Cibber "At the Desire of several Persons of Quality"), is introduced at page 17 and consigned on page 19 to William Lewis its printer. Hervey stalks in "under VIRTUE's Name" in a "borrow'd Shape" (p. 24), an allusion to the suggestion in the prefatory epistle to _The Difference between Verbal and Practical Virtue_ that the poem was Cibber's work. (The "horse him" on 25 of _The Scribleriad_ refers to Cibber's adaptation of Shakespeare's _Richard III._) Other pamphlets issued in August 1742 are mentioned on page 24--_Sawney and Colley_,[5] which "Scriblerus" calls "CLODDY's Dialogue," and _A Blast upon Bays_.[6]