Page:The Dunciad - Alexander Pope (1743).djvu/62

Rh thing is to receive life and motion. For this subject being found, he is immediately ordained, or rather acknowledged, an Hero, and put upon such action as befitteth the dignity of his character.

But the Muse ceases not here her Eagle-flight. Sometimes, satiated with the contemplation of these Suns of glory, she turneth downward on her wing, and darts like lightning on the Goose and Serpent kind. For we may apply to the Muse in her various moods, what an ancient master of Wisdom affirmeth of the Gods in general: ''Si Dii non irascuntur impiis et injustis, nec pios utique justosque diligunt. In rebus enim diversis, aut in utramque partem moveri necesse est, aut in neutram. Itaque qui bonos diligit, & malos odit; & qui malos non odit, nec bonos diligit. Quia & diligere bonos ex odio malorum venit; & malos odisse ex bonorum caritate descendit''. Which in the vernacular idiom may be thus interpreted: "If the Gods be not provoked at evil men, neither are they delighted with the good and just. For contrary objects must either excite contrary affections, or no affections at all. So that he who loveth good men, must at the same time hate the bad; and he who hateth not bad men, cannot love the good; because to love good men proceedeth from an aversion to evil, and to hate evil men from a tenderness to the good." From this delicacy of the Muse arose the little Epic, (more lively and choleric than her elder sister, whose bulk and complexion incline her to the flegmatic) and for this some notorious Vehicle of vice and folly was sought out, to make thereof an example. An early instance of which (nor could it escape the accurate Scriblerus) the Father of Epic poem himself affordeth us. From him the practice descended to the Greek Dramatic poets, his offspring; who in the composition of their Tetralogy, or set of four pieces, were wont to make the last a Satyric Tragedy. Happily one of these ancient Dunciads (as we may well term it) is come down to us amongst the Tragedies of Euripides. And what doth the reader think may be the subject? Why truly, and it is worth his observation, the unequal Contention of an old, dull, debauched, buffoon Cyclops, with the heaven-directed Favourite of Minerva; who after having quietly born all the monster's obscene and impious ribaldry, endeth the farce in punishing him with the mark of an indelible brand in his forehead. May we not then be excused, if for the future we consider the Epics of Homer, Virgil, and Milton, together with this our poem, as a complete Tetralogy, in which the last worthily holdeth the place or station of the satyric piece?

Proceed we therefore in our subject. It hath been long, and alas for pity! still remaineth a question, whether the Hero of the greater Epic should be an honest man? or, as the French critics express it, un bonnété