great quantity of birch been better employed, in scourging away his ill-nature, he would not have exposed it in endeavouring to cavil at the first performance of one, whose sex and age entitle her to the gentlest criticism, while her merit, of an infinitely higher kind, may defy the severest. But I believe the warmth of ray friendship hath led me to engage a critick of my own imagination only, for I should be sorry to conceive such a one had any real existence. If, however, any such composition of folly, meanness, and malevolence, should actually exist, he must be as incapable of conviction, as unworthy of an answer. I shall, therefore, proceed to the more pleasing task of pointing out some of the beauties of this little work.
I have attempted, in my preface to Joseph Andrews, to prove, that every work of this kind is in its nature a comick epick poem, of which Homer left us a precedent, though it be unhappily lost.
The two great originals of a serious air, which we have derived from that mighty genius, differ principally in the action, which in the Iliad is entire and uniform; in the Odyssey, is rather a series of actions, all tending to produce one great end. Virgil and Milton are, I think, the only pure imitators of the former: most of the other Latin, as well as Italian, French, and English epick poets, chusing rather the history of some war, as Lucan, and Silius Italicus; or a series of adventures, as Ariosto, etc, for the subject of their poems.
In the same manner, the comick writer may either fix on one action, as the authors of Le Lutrin, the Dunciad, etc., or on a series, as Butler in verse, and Cervantes in prose, have done.
Of this latter kind is the book now before us; where the fable consists of a series of separate adventures, detached from and independent on each other, yet all tending to one great end: so that
