tiresome, and will ever be a dangerous snare to meaner and less masterly imitators.
The Scotch, the Irish, the American Hudibras, and a host of other imitations, are hardly worth mentioning; they only prove the excitement which this new species of poetry had occasioned; the translation into French, by Mr Towneley, an Englishman, is curious, it preserves the sense, but cannot keep up the humour. Prior seems to have come nearest the original, though he is sensible of his own inferiority, and says,
But, like poor Andrew, I advance.
False mimic of my master's dance;
Around the cord awhile I sprawl,
And thence, tho' low, in earnest fall.
His Alma is neat and elegant, and his versification superior to Butler's; but his learning, knowledge, and wit by no means equal. The spangles of wit which he could afford, he knew how to polish, but he wanted the bullion of his master. Hudibras, then, may truly be said to be the first and last satire of the kind; for if we examine Lucian's Trago-podagra, and other dialogues, the Cæsars of Julian, Seneca's Apocolocyntosis, or the mock deification of Claudius, and some fragments of Varro, they will be found very different: the Batrachomyomachia, or battle of the frogs and mice, commonly ascribed to Homer, and the Margites, generally allowed to be his, prove this species of poetry to be of great antiquity.
The inventor of the modern mock heroic was Alessandro Tassoni, born at Modena 1565. His Secchia capita, or Rape of the Bucket, is founded on the popular account of the cause of the civil war between the inhabitants of Modena and Bologna, in the time of Frederick II. This bucket was long preserved, as a trophy, in the cathedral of Modena, suspended by the chain which fastened the gate of Bologna, through which the Modenese forced their passage, and seized the prize. It is written in the ottava rima, the solemn measure of the Italian heroic poets, and has considerable merit. The next successful imitators of the mock-heroic have been Boileau, Garth, and Pope, whose respective works are too generally known, and too justly admired, to require, at this time, description or encomium.
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