m again, he believes that to fulfill this purpose satire must
not only lash vice but recommend virtue, at least by implication:

Blaspheming _Capaneus_ obliquely shows
T'adore those Gods _Aeneas_ fears and knows, (p. 10)[21]

But perhaps Harte's overriding concern was to do for satire (with _The
Dunciad_ as his focus) what Dryden's _Discourse_ had done: to reassert
its dignity and majesty.

Although Harte is quite careful to distinguish satire from epic
poetry, the total effect of his _Essay_ is to blur this distinction
and to raise _The Dunciad_ very nearly to the level of genuine epic.
The term "_Epic Satire_" (p. 6) certainly seems to refer to the
wedding of two disparate genres in _The Dunciad_, lifting it above
satire that is merely "rugged" or "mischievously gay" (p. 8). (The
epithet is also, perhaps, a thrust at Edward Ward, who had pinned it
on _The Dunciad_ with a sneer.)[22] Harte's claim that

_Books and the Man_ demands as much, or more,
Than _He who wander'd to the Latian shore_ (p. 9)

has a similar effect. The greatest epic poets and satirists have
always transcended rules to follow "Nature's light"; Pope,
over-topping them all, has "still corrected Nature as she stray'd"
(pp. 19, 21). But perhaps Harte's most successful attempt to elevate
_The Dunciad_ comes in section two of his poem. Unlike Dryden, in
whose _Discourse_ the account of the "progress" of satire is confined
almost exclusively to a few Roman writers, Harte begins his account of
its progress with Homer and brings it down to Pope. Deriving the
ancestry of _The Dunciad_ from Homer, the greatest epic poet,
obviously enhances Pope's satire. Perhaps less obviously, by extending
Dryden's account to the present, Harte makes _The Dunciad_ not only a
chronological _terminus ad quem_ but, far more important, the fruit of
centuries of slowly accumulating mastery and wisdom.

The strategies mentioned thus far constitute one series of answers to
critics who charged Pope with debasing true epic. But Harte also
addressed himself to such critics more directly. Although Aubrey
Williams (p. 54) has clearly demonstrated Harte's awareness that the
world of _The Dunciad_ does in one sense sully epic beauties, at the
same time, I think, Harte knew that the epic poems to which _The
Dunciad_ continually alludes remain fixed, unsullied polestars;
otherwise the reader of the poem would lack a way of measuring the
meanness of its characters and principl