ularly 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, an