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 satires delivered merely in the poet’s own person must want, and with which the satirists of antiquity were wholly unacquainted; for the Batrachomuomachia of Homer cannot be considered as the model of these admirable pieces.

Lucian is the greatest master of Burlesque among the ancients:  but the travels of Gulliver, though indeed evidently copied from his true history, do as evidently excel it.  Lucian sets out with informing his readers, that he is in jest, and intends to ridicule some of the incredible stories in Ctesias and Herodotus:  this introduction surely enfeebles his satire, and defeats his purpose.  The true history consists only of the most wild, monstrous, and miraculous persons and accidents:  Gulliver has a concealed meaning, and his dwarfs and giants convey tacitly some moral or political instruction.  The Charon, or the