admirable characters, excellently, supported and
displayed; for Shakespear has contrived all the incidents to
illustrate the gluttony, lewdness, cowardice, and boastfulness of the
fat old knight: and Jonson, has, with equal art, displayed the oddity
of a wimsical humourist, who could endure no kind of noise.

Will it be deemed a paradox, to assert, that Congreve's dramatic
persons have no striking and natural characteristic? His Fondlewife
and Foresight are but faint portraits of common characters, and Ben is
a forced and unnatural caricatura. His plays appear not to be
legitimate comedies, but strings of repartees and sallies of wit, the
most poignant and polite indeed, but unnatural and ill placed. The
trite and trivial character of a fop, hath strangely engrossed the
English stage, and given an insipid similiarity to our best comic
pieces: originals can never be wanting in such a kingdom as this,
where each man follows his natural inclinations and propensities, if
our writers would really contemplate nature, and endeavour to open
those mines of humour which have been so long and so unaccountably
neglected.

If we proceed to consider the Satirists of antiquity, I shall not
scruple to prefer Boileau and Pope to Horace and Juvenal; the arrows
of whose ridicule are more sharp, in proportion as they are more
polished. That reformers should abound in obscenities, as is the case
of the two Roman poets, is surely an impropriety of the most
extraordinary kind; the courtly Horace also sometimes sinks into mean
and farcical abuse, as in the first lines of the seventh satire of the
first book; but Boileau and Pope have given to their Satire the Cestus
of Venus: their ridicule is concealed and oblique; that of the Romans
direct and open. The tenth satire of Bioleau on women is more bitter,
and more decent and elegant, than the sixth of Juvenal on the same
subject; and Pope's epistle to Mrs. Blount far excels them both, in
the artfulness and delicacy with which it touches female foibles. I
may add, that the imitations of Horace by Pope, and of Juvenal by
Johnson, are preferable to their originals in the appositeness of
their examples, and in the poignancy of their ridicule. Above all, the
Lutrin, the Rape of the Lock, the Dispensary and the Dunciad, cannot
be parallelled by any works that the wittiest of the ancients can
boast of: for, by assuming the form of the epopea, they have acquired
a dignity and gracefulness, which all s