Will it be deemed a paradox, to assert, that Congreve's dramatic
persons have no striking and natural characteristic? His Fondlewife
and Foresight are but faint portraits of common characters, and Ben is
a forced and unnatural caricatura. His plays appear not to be
legitimate comedies, but strings of repartees and sallies of wit, the
most poignant and polite indeed, but unnatural and ill placed. The
trite and trivial character of a fop, hath strangely engrossed the
English stage, and given an insipid similiarity to our best comic
pieces: originals can never be wanting in such a kingdom as this,
where each man follows his natural inclinations and propensities, if
our writers would really contemplate nature, and endeavour to open
those mines of humour which have been so long and so unaccountably
neglected.
If we proceed to consider the Satirists of antiquity, I shall not
scruple to prefer Boileau and Pope to Horace and Juvenal; the arrows
of whose ridicule are more sharp, in proportion as they are more
polished. That reformers should abound in obscenities, as is the case
of the two Roman poets, is surely an impropriety of the most
extraordinary kind; the courtly Horace also sometimes sinks into mean
and farcical abuse, as in the first lines of the seventh satire of the
first book; but Boileau and Pope have given to their Satire the Cestus
of Venus: their ridicule is concealed and oblique; that of the Romans
direct and open.
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