" I
cannot give him up the manner of Horace in low satire so easily.
Let the chastisements of Juvenal be never so necessary for his new
kind of satire, let him declaim as wittily and sharply as he
pleases, yet still the nicest and most delicate touches of satire
consist in fine raillery. This, my lord, is your particular talent,
to which even Juvenal could not arrive. It is not reading, it is
not imitation of, an author which can produce this fineness; it must
be inborn; it must proceed from a genius, and particular way of
thinking, which is not to be taught, and therefore not to be
imitated by him who has it not from nature. How easy it is to call
rogue and villain, and that wittily! but how hard to make a man
appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of those
opprobrious terms! To spare the grossness of the names, and to do
the thing yet more severely, is to draw a full face and to make the
nose and cheeks stand out, and yet not to employ any depth of
shadowing. This is the mystery of that noble trade, which yet no
master can teach to his apprentice; he may give the rules, but the
scholar is never the nearer in his practice.
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