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II. The Characters of the several Authors of Satire. 1. The Ancients; Homer, Simonides, Archilochus, Aristophanes, Menippus, Ennius, Lucilius, Varro, Horace, Persius, Petronius, Juvenal, Lucian, the Emperor Julian. 2. The Moderns; Tassone, Coccaius, Rabelais, Regnier, Boileau, Dryden, Garth, Pope.

III. From the Practice of all the best Writers and Men in every Age and Nation, the Moral Justice of Satire in General, and of this Sort in Particular, is Vindicated. The Necessity of it shewn in this Age more especially, and why bad Writers are at present the most proper Objects of Satire. The True Causes of bad Writers. Characters of several Sorts of them now abounding; Envious Critics, Furious Pedants, Secret Libellers, Obscene Poetesses, Advocates for Corruption, Scoffers at Religion, Writers for Deism, Deistical and Arrian- Clergymen.

Application of the Whole Discourse to the DUNCIAD concluding with an Address to the Author of it.

AN ESSAY ON SATIRE.

T’ Exalt the Soul, or make the Heart sincere,
To arm our Lives with honesty severe,
To shake the wretch beyond the reach of Law,
Deter the young, and touch the bold with awe,
To raise the fal’n, to hear the sufferer’s cries,
And sanctify the virtues of the wife,
Old Satire rose from Probity of mind,
The noblest Ethicks to reform mankind.

As Cynthia’s Orb excels the gems of night:
So Epic Satire shines distinctly bright.
Here Genius lives, and strength in every part,
And lights and shades, and fancy fix’d by art.
A second beauty in its nature lies,
It gives not Things, but Beings to our eyes,
Life, Substance, Spirit animate the whole;
Fiction and Fable are the Sense and Soul.
The common Dulness of mankind, array’d
In pomp, here lives and breathes, a wond’rous Maid :
The Poet decks her with each unknown Grace,
Clears her dull brain, and brightens her dark face:
See! Father Chaos o’er his First-born nods,
And Mother Night, in Majesty of Gods!
See Querno’s Throne, by hands Pontific rise,
And a Fool’s Pandaemonium strike our Eyes!
Ev’n what on C—-l the Publick bounteous pours,
Is sublimated here to Golden show’rs.

A Dunciad or a Lutrin is compleat,
And one in action; ludicrously great.
Each wheel rolls round in due degrees of force;
E’en Episodes are needful, or of course :
Of course, when things are virtually begun
E’er the first ends, the Father and the Son:
Or else so needful, and exactly grac’d,
That nothing is ill-suited, or ill-plac’d.

True Epic’s a vast World, and this a small;
One has its proper beauties, and one all.
Like Cynthia, one in thirty days appears,
Like Saturn one, rolls round in thirty years.
There opens a wide Tract, a length of Floods,
A height of Mountains, and a waste of Woods:
Here but one Spot; nor Leaf, nor Green depart
From Rules, e’en Nature seems the Child of Art.
As Unities in Epick works appear,
So must they shine in full distinction here.
Ev’n the warm Iliad moves with slower pow’rs:
That forty days demands, This forty hours.