rose, Which Have Been Publish'd on Occasion of
the Dunciad_ (1732), and the _Essay_ is also found in at least three
late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century collections of poetry.[2]
For several reasons, however, it makes sense to reprint the _Essay_
again. The three collections are scarce and have forbiddingly small
type; I know of no other twentieth-century reprinting; and, perhaps
most important, Aubrey Williams claims that "the critical value for
the _Dunciad_ of Harte's poem has not been fully appreciated."[3] Its
value can best be substantiated, or disputed, if it is rescued from
its typographical limbo in the collections and reprinted from its more
attractive first edition.

Probably the immediate reason for the _Essay_ was Harte's admiration
for Pope, which arose in part from personal gratitude. On 9 February
1727, Harte wrote an unidentified correspondent that "Mr. Pope was
pleased to correct every page" of his forthcoming _Poems on Several
Occasions_ "with his own hand." Furthermore, Harte may have learned
that Pope had petitioned Lady Sarah Cowper, in 1728, to use her
influence to obtain him a fellowship in Exeter College, Oxford.[4]

But however appealing the _Essay_ may be as an installment on Harte's
debt to Pope, there must obviously be better reasons for reprinting
it. Harte himself doubtless had additional reasons for writing it. To
understand them and the poem, we must also understand, at least in
broad outline, the two traditional ways of evaluating satire which
Harte and others of his age had inherited. One of them was distinctly
at odds with Harte's aims; to the other he gave his support and made
his own contribution.

One tradition stressed the "lowness" of satire, in itself and compared
with other genres. This tradition, moreover, had at least two sources:
the practice of Elizabethan satirists and the critical custom of
assigning satire to a middle or low position in the hierarchy of
genres.

From the time of _Piers Plowman_, it was characteristic of English
satirists "to taxe the common abuses and vice of the people in rough
and bitter speaches."[5] This native character was reenforced by the
Elizabethan assumption that there should be similarities between
satire and its supposed etymological forebears--the satyrs, legendary
half men, half goats of ancient Greece. Believing that the Roman
satirists Persius and Juvenal had imitated the uncouth manners and
vituperative diction of the satyr