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offended at what we find amiss: and the cause seems not to be the natural cause of any effect.

Moreover, laughing satire bids the fairest for success. The world is too proud to be fond of a serious tutor; and when the author is in a passion, the laugh generally, as in conversation, turns against him. This kind of satire only has any delicacy in it. Of this delicacy Horace is the best master. He appears in good humour while he censures; and therefore his censure has the more weight, as supposed to proceed from judgment, not from passion. Juvenal is ever in a passion: he has but little valuable but his eloquence and morality; the last of which I have had in my eye, but rather for emulation than imitation, through my whole work.

But though I comparatively condemn Juvenal, in part of the Sixth Satire, (where the occasion most required it) I endeavoured to touch on his manner, but was forced to quit it soon, as disagreeable to the writer and reader too. Boileau has joined both the Roman satirists with great success, but has too much of Juvenal in his very serious Satire on Woman, which should have been the gayest of all. An excellent critic of our own commends Boileau's closeness, or, as he calls it, pressness, particularly: whereas it appears to me that repetition is his fault, if any fault be imputed to him.

There are some prose satirists of the greatest delicacy and wit, the last of which can never, or should never, succeed without the former. An author, without it, betrays too great a contempt for mankind, and opinion of himself, which are bad arguments for reputation and success. What a difference is there between the merit, if not the wit, of Cervantes and Ra

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belais? The last has a particular art of throwing a great deal of genius and learning into frolic and jest, but the genius and the scholar is all you can admire: you want the gentleman to converse with in him: he is like a criminal who receives his life for some services; you commend, but you pardon too. Indecen

cy offends our pride as men, and our unaffected taste as judges of composition: Nature has wisely formed us with an aversion to it, and he that succeeds in spite of it is aliena venia, quam sua providentia tutior*.

Such wits, like false oracles of old, (which were wits and cheats) should set up for reputation among the weak in some Bæotia, which was the land of oracles, for the wise will hold them in contempt. Some wits, too, like oracles, deal in ambiguities, but not with equal success; for though ambiguities are the first excellence of an impostor, they are the last of a wit.

Some satirical wits and humourists, like their father Lucian, laugh at every thing indiscriminately, which betrays such a poverty of wit as cannot afford to part with any thing, and such a want of virtue as to postpone it to a jest. Such writers encourage vice and folly, which they pretend to combat, by setting them on an equal foot with better things; and while they labour to bring every thing into contempt how can they expect their own parts should escape? Some French writers, particularly, are guilty of this in matters of the last consequence, and some of our own: they that are for lessening the true dignity of mankind, are not sure of being successful, but with regard to one individual in it. It is this conduct that justly makes a wit a term of reproach.

* Val. Max.

Which puts me in mind of Plato's fable of the birth of Love, one of the prettiest fables of all Antiquity; which will hold likewise with regard to modern poetry. "Love (says he) is the son of the goddess Poverty and the god of Riches: he has from his father his daring genius, his elevation of thought, his building castles in the air, his prodigality, his neglect of things serious and useful, his vain opinion of his own merit, and his affectation of preference and distinction: from his mother he inherits his indigence, which makes him a constant beggar of favours, that importunity with which he begs, his flattery, his servility, his fear of being despised, which is inseparable from him. This addition may be made, viz. that Poetry, like Love, is a little subject to blindness, which makes her mistake her way to preferments and honours; that she has her satirical quiver; and, lastly, that she retains a dutiful admiration of her father's family, but divides her favours, and generally lives with her mother's relation.

However, this is not necessity, but choice: were Wisdom her governess she might have much more of the father than of the mother, especially in such an age as this, which shews a due passion for her charms

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MY verse is Satire; Dorset! lend your ear,
And patronise a Muse you cannot fear;
To poets sacred is a Dorset's name,

Their wonted passport thro' the gates of Fame:
It bribes the partial reader into praise,
And throws a glory round the shelter'd lays:
The dazzled judgment fewer faults can see,
And gives applause to B▬▬▬ -e, or to me,
But you decline the mistress we pursue;
Others are fond of Fame, but Fame of you.
Instructive Satire! true to Virtue's cause!
Thou shining supplement of public laws!
When flatter'd crimes of a licentious age
Reproach our silence, and demand our rage;
When purchas'd follies from each distant land,
Like arts, improve in Britain's skilful hand;

When the Law shews her teeth, but dares not bite,
And South-sea treasures are not brought to light;
When Churchmen Scripture for the Classics quit,
Polite apostates from God's grace to wit;
When men grow great from their revenue spent,
And fly from bailiffs into parliament;

When dying sinners, to blot out their score,
Bequeath the Church the leaving of a whore ;
To chafe our spleen, when themes like these increase,
Shall panegyric reign, and censure cease?
Shall poesy, like law, turn wrong to right,
And dedications wash an Ethiop white?
Set up each senseless wretch for Nature's boast,
On whom praise shines, as trophies on a post?
Shall fun❜ral Eloquence her colours spread,
And scatter roses on the wealthy dead ?
Shall authors smile on such illustrious days,
And satirize with nothing-but their praise?

Why slumbers Pope, who leads the tuneful train,
Nor hears that virtue which he loves complain?
Donne, Dorset, Dryden, Rochester, are dead,
And guilt's chief foe, in Addison is fled!
Congreve, who, crown'd with laurels fairly won,
Sits smiling at the goal while others run,
He will not write; and (more provoking still!)
Ye Gods! he will not write, and Mævius will.

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