Discourses on Satire Epic Poetry | Page 5

it was but just shooting out
and beginning to travel upwards to the meridian. I made my early
addresses to your lordship in my "Essay of Dramatic Poetry," and
therein bespoke you to the world; wherein I have the right of a first
discoverer. When I was myself in the rudiments of my poetry, without
name or reputation in the world, having rather the ambition of a writer
than the skill; when I was drawing the outlines of an art, without any
living master to instruct me in it--an art which had been better praised
than studied here in England; wherein Shakespeare, who created the
stage among us, had rather written happily than knowingly and justly;
and Jonson, who, by studying Horace, had been acquainted with the
rules, yet seemed to envy to posterity that knowledge, and, like an
inventor of some useful art, to make a monopoly of his learning-- when
thus, as I may say, before the use of the loadstone or knowledge of the
compass, I was sailing in a vast ocean without other help than the
pole-star of the ancients and the rules of the French stage amongst the
moderns (which are extremely different from ours, by reason of their
opposite taste), yet even then I had the presumption to dedicate to your
lordship--a very unfinished piece, I must confess, and which only can
be excused by the little experience of the author and the modesty of the
title--"An Essay." Yet I was stronger in prophecy than I was in

criticism: I was inspired to foretell you to mankind as the restorer of
poetry, the greatest genius, the truest judge, and the best patron.
Good sense and good nature are never separated, though the ignorant
world has thought otherwise. Good nature, by which I mean

beneficence and candour, is the product of right reason; which of
necessity will give allowance to the failings of others by
considering
that there is nothing perfect in mankind; and by distinguishing that
which comes nearest to excellency, though not absolutely free from
faults, will certainly produce a candour in the judge. It is incident to an
elevated understanding like your lordship's to find out the errors of
other men; but it is your prerogative to pardon them; to look with
pleasure on those things which are somewhat congenial and of a remote
kindred to your own conceptions; and to forgive the many failings of
those who, with their wretched art, cannot arrive to those heights that
you possess from a happy, abundant, and native genius which are as
inborn to you as they were to Shakespeare, and, for aught I know, to
Homer; in either of whom we find all arts and sciences, all moral and
natural philosophy, without knowing that they ever studied them.
There is not an English writer this day living who is not perfectly
convinced that your lordship excels all others in all the several parts of
poetry which you have undertaken to adorn. The most vain and the
most ambitions of our age have not dared to assume so much as the
competitors of Themistocles: they have yielded the first place without
dispute; and have been arrogantly content to be esteemed as second to
your lordship, and even that also with a longo, sed proximi intervallo.
If there have been, or are, any who go farther in their self-conceit, they
must be very singular in their opinion; they must be like the officer in a
play who was called captain, lieutenant, and company. The world will
easily conclude whether such unattended generals can ever be capable
of making a revolution in Parnassus.
I will not attempt in this place to say anything particular of your lyric
poems, though they are the delight and wonder of the age, and will be
the envy of the next. The subject of this book confines me to satire; and
in that an author of your own quality, whose ashes I will not disturb,

has given you all the commendation which his selfsufficiency could
afford to any man--"The best good man, with the
worst-natured
muse." In that character, methinks, I am reading Jonson's verses to the
memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric:
where good nature--the most godlike commendation of a man--is only
attributed to your person, and denied to your writings; for they are
everywhere so full of candour, that, like Horace, you only expose the
follies of men without arraigning their vices; and in this excel him, that
you add that pointedness of thought which is visibly wanting in our
great Roman. There is more of salt in all your verses than I have seen in
any of the moderns, or even of the ancients: but you have been sparing
of the gall; by which means you have pleased all readers