“But while I hold the pen, it will be a maxim with me, that vice can never be too great to be lashed, nor virtue too obscure to be commended; in other words, that satire can never rise too high, nor panegyric stoop too low.”
He also makes the same point in a historical review:[36]
“In ancient Greece, the infant muses’ school,
Where Vice first felt the pen of ridicule,
With honest freedom and impartial blows
The Muse attacked each Vice as it arose:
No grandeur could the mighty villain screen
From the just satire of the comic scene.”
Although vice is now too powerful for such censure, he dares the lion in his den, and comforts the virtuous with reassurances:
“And while these scenes the conscious knave displease,