reform, and not to chastise;" that is, not to spare the vice,
but the person. It is said, Pope answered, that, to correct
the world with due effect, they become inseparable; and that,
deciding by his own experience, he was justified in his
opinion. Perhaps, at first, he himself wavered; but he strikes
bolder as he gathers strength. The two first editions of the
_Dunciad_, now before me, could hardly be intelligible: they
exhibit lines after lines gaping with an hiatus, or obscured
with initial letters: in subsequent editions, the names stole
into their places. We are told, that the personalities in his
satires quickened the sale: the portraits of Sporus, Bufo,
Clodius, Timon, and Atossa, were purchased by everybody; but
when he once declared, respecting the _characters_ of one of
his best satires, that no real persons were intended, it
checked public curiosity, which was felt in the sale of that
edition. Personality in his satires, no doubt, accorded with
the temper and the talent of Pope; and the malice of mankind
afforded him all the conviction necessary to indulge it. Yet
Young could depend solely on abstract characters and pure wit;
and I believe that his "Love of Fame" was a series of
admirable satires, which did not obtain less popularity than
Pope's. Cartwright, one of the poetical sons of Ben Jonson,
describes, by a beautiful and original image, the office of
the satirist, though he praises Jonson for exercising a virtue
he did not always practise; as Swift celebrates Pope with the
same truth, when he sings:--

"Yet malice never was his aim;
He lash'd the vice, but spared the name."

Cartwright's lines are:--

"--------'tis thy skill
To strike the vice, and spare the person still;
As he who, when he saw the serpent wreath'd
About his sleeping son, and as he breathed,
Drink in his soul, did so the shot contrive,
To kill the beast, but keep the child alive."

[200] Cooke, the translator of Hesiod, published a letter in Mist's
Journal, insisting that Pope had _mistaken the whole character
of Thersites_, from ignorance of the language. I regret I have
not drawn some notes from that e