Cank. Why Gentlemen, it is a Common Cause, and requires an active Opposition. We must try fairly to hunt it down by Journals, Epigrams and Pamphlets;—you must attack the Characters,—you the Sentiments and Dialogue, while I expose the Moral and the Fable.
Plag. With all my Heart.
Grub. Agreed. And now let us join the Company and try if we can't bring them over to our Party; for tho' the most of them are Idiots, yet they will serve to fill up the Cry, which you know is the present Test of Right and Wrong.(Exit)
Plag. Pray did you ever read his Mask?
Cank. I attempted to read it several times but could never get through it.
Plag. It is the vilest Thing sure that ever dullness produced. And yet the Fools are as fond of it as if Apollo and the Nine had approved it. Amazing that Men can be so blind to their own Foibles. (Exit)
Cank. I am sure if you were not as great a Stranger to your own Dullness as you are to Apollo and the Nine, as you quaintly call them, you would never think of writing a Tragedy. But most Writers are such vain, envious Coxcombs, and busy themselves so continually in the pleasing Search of other People's Faults, that they never have time to look into their own. For this Blockhead now, who has no more Imagination than a Dutch Burgomaster, because he can common place Corneille and Racine, sets up for the Euripides of the Age, and has the Vanity to prefer his sleepy, lumpish Tragedy to my Comedy which has that Viscomica, that fine Ridiculum of Human Nature which Caesar so lauded in the Greek and so regretted the Want of in the Roman Poet. (Exit)
(Enter HARRIET and HEARTLY)
Har. O I have teazed the Wretch 'till his Envy shook him like the Ague fit.
Heart. And I have praised the Play and flattered my Lady's Judgment to such a Degree of Pride and Obstinancy as will never bear Contradiction again. No successful Poet after his Ninth Night was ever so brimfull of Vanity as I have made her Ladyship. She run over with folly.