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While that Bombast Poet Alpinus, murders Memnon in his Poem, and bemires himself in his description of the Rhine, I divert my self in these Satires.‘Tis plain from hence, that Alpinus liv’d in the time when Horace writ these Satires: and suppose Alpinus was an imaginary Name, cou’d the Author of the Poem of Memnon be taken for another? Horace, they may say, liv’d under the reign of the most Polite of all the Emperors; but do we live under a Reign less polite? and would they have a Prince who has so many Qualities in common with Augustus, either less disgusted than he at bad Books, or more rigorous towards those who blame them?

Let us next examine Persius, who writ in the time of Nero : He not only Raillies the Works of the Poets of his days, but attacks the Verses of the Emperor himself: For all the World knows, and all the Court of Nero well knew, that those four lines,

Torva Mimalloneis
, etc.

which Persius so bitterly ridicules in his first Satire, were Nero‘s own Verses; and yet we have no account that Nero (so much a Tyrant as he was) caus’d Persius to be punish’d; Enemy as he was to Reason, and fond as every one knows of his own Works, he was gallant enough to take this Raillery on his Verses, and did not think that the Emperor on this occasion should assert the Character of the Poet.

Juvenal, who flourish’d under Trajan, shews a little more respect towards the great Men of his age; and was contented to sprinkle the gall of his Satire on those of the precedent reign. But as for the Writers, he never look’d for them further than his own time. At the very beginning of his Work you find him in a very bad humor against all his cotemporary Scriblers : ask Juvenal what oblig’d him to take up his Pen? he was weary of hearing the Theseide of Codrus, the Orestes of this man, and the Telephus of that, and all the Poets (as he elsewhere says) who recited their Verses in the Month of August,

—-&
Augusto
recitantes Mense Poetas.

So true it is that the right of blaming bad Authors, is an ancient Right, pass’d into a Custom, among all the Satirists, and allow’d in all ages.

* * * * *

To come from the Ancients to the Moderns. Regnier who is almost the only Satirical Poet we have, has in truth been a little more discreet than the rest; nevertheless he speaks very freely of Gallet the famous Gamester, who paid his Creditors with Sept and Quatorze, and of the Sieur de Provins who chang’d his long Cloak into a Doublet, and of Cousin who run from his house for fear of repairing it, and of Pierre de Puis, and many others.

What will my Critics say to this? When they are ever so little touch’d, they wou’d drive from the Republick of Letters all the Satirical Poets, as so many disturbers of the Peace of the Nation. But what will they say of Virgil ; the wise, the discreet Virgil ? who in an Eclog where he has nothing to do with Satire, has made in one Line two Poets for ever ridiculous.

Qui
Bavium
non odit, amet tua carmina
Moevi.