I am not, like other men, to envy or undervalue the talents I cannot
reach, for which reason I must needs bear a true honour to this
large eminent sect of our British writers. And I hope this little
panegyric will not be offensive to their ears, since it has the
advantage of being only designed for themselves. Indeed, Nature
herself has taken order that fame and honour should be purchased at
a better pennyworth by satire than by any other productions of the
brain, the world being soonest provoked to praise by lashes, as men
are to love. There is a problem in an ancient author why
dedications and other bundles of flattery run all upon stale musty
topics, without the smallest tincture of anything new, not only to
the torment and nauseating of the Christian reader, but, if not
suddenly prevented, to the universal spreading of that pestilent
disease the lethargy in this island, whereas there is very little
satire which has not something in it untouched before. The defects
of the former are usually imputed to the want of invention among
those who are dealers in that kind; but I think with a great deal of
injustice, the solution being easy and natural, for the materials of
panegyric, being very few in number, have been long since exhausted;
for as health is but one thing, and has been always the same,
whereas diseases are by thousands, besides new and daily additions,
so all the virtues that have been ever in mankind are to be counted
upon a few fingers, but his follies and vices are innumerable, and
time adds hourly to the heap. Now the utmost a poor poet can do is
to get by heart a list of the cardinal virtues and deal them with
his utmost liberality to his hero or his patron. He may ring the
changes as far as it will go, and vary his phrase till he has talked
round, but the reader quickly finds it is all pork, {56a} with a
little variety of sauce, for there is no inventing terms of art