Boileau.—­You have made him good amends by the praise you have given him in some of your writings.

Pope.—­I owed him that praise as my master in the art of versification, yet I subscribe to the censures which have been passed by other writers on many of his works.  They are good critics, but he is still a great poet.  You, sir, I am sure, must particularly admire him as an excellent satirist; his “Absalom and Achitophel” is a masterpiece in that way of writing, and his “Mac Flecno” is, I think, inferior to it in nothing but the meanness of the subject.

Boileau.—­Did not you take the model of your “Dunciad” from the latter of those very ingenious satires?

Pope.—­I did; but my work is more extensive than his, and my imagination has taken in it a greater scope.

Boileau.—­Some critics may doubt whether the length of your poem was so properly suited to the meanness of the subject as the brevity of his.  Three cantos to expose a dunce crowned with laurel!  I have not given above three lines to the author of the “Pucelle.”

Pope.—­My intention was to expose, not one author alone, but all the dulness and false taste of the English nation in my times.  Could such a design be contracted into a narrower compass?

Boileau.—­We will not dispute on this point, nor whether the hero of your “Dunciad” was really a dunce.  But has not Dryden been accused of immorality and profaneness in some of his writings?

Pope.—­He has, with too much reason:  and I am sorry to say that all our best comic writers after Shakespeare and Johnson, except Addison and Steele, are as liable as he to that heavy charge.  Fletcher is shocking.  Etheridge, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar have painted the manners of the times in which they wrote with a masterly hand; but they are too often such manners that a virtuous man, and much more a virtuous woman, must be greatly offended at the representation.

Boileau.—­In this respect our stage is far preferable to yours.  It is a school of morality.  Vice is exposed to contempt and to hatred.  No false colours are laid on to conceal its deformity, but those with which it paints itself are there taken off.

Pope.—­It is a wonderful thing that in France the comic Muse should be the gravest lady in the nation.  Of late she is so grave, that one might almost mistake her for her sister Melpomene.  Moliere made her indeed a good moral philosopher; but then she philosophised, like Democritus, with a merry, laughing face.  Now she weeps over vice instead of showing it to mankind, as I think she generally ought to do, in ridiculous lights.

Boileau.—­Her business is more with folly than with vice, and when she attacks the latter, it should be rather with ridicule than invective.  But sometimes she may be allowed to raise her voice, and change her usual smile into a frown of just indignation.