experienced by Dryden as well as Milton; he lived to see his writings, together with his politics, quite out of fashion. But even in the days of his highest prosperity, when the generality of the people admired his Almanzor, and thought his Indian Emperor the perfection of tragedy, the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Rochester, the two wittiest noblemen our country has produced, attacked his fame, and turned the rants of his heroes, the jargon of his spirits, and the absurdity of his plots into just ridicule.
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.