resemblance of the Faery Queene.

In his preface to the Scribleriad, which betrays great solicitude to
explain and vindicate the plan of the poem, he declares that his
intention is "to shew the vanity and uselessness of many studies, reduce
them to a less formidable appearance, and invite our youth to
application, by letting them see that a less degree of it than they
apprehend, judiciously directed, and a very few books indeed, well
recommended, will give them all the real information which they are to
expect from human science." The design was a laudable one. In the poem
itself we feel the want of some principal event, on the development and
issue of which the interest of the whole may turn; as in those patterns
of the mock-heroic, the Secchia Rapita, the Lutrin, and the Rape of the
Lock; an advantage, which these poems in some measure derive from having
been founded in fact; for however trifling the incident by which the
imagination of the poet may have been first excited, when once known or
believed to be true, it communicates something of its own reality to all
the fictions that grow out of it. The hero too is one of the [Greek:
amenaena karaena]; or rather is but the shadow of a shade; for he has
taken the character of Martinus Scriblerus, as he found it in the
memoirs of that unsubstantial personage. The adventures indeed in which
the author has engaged him, though they did not require much power of
invention, are yet sufficiently ludicrous; and we join, perhaps, more
willingly in the laugh, as it is aimed at general folly and not at
individual weakness. The wit is not condensed and sparkling as in the
Dunciad; the writer's chief resource consisting in an adaptation of
passages from writers, ancient and modern, to the purposes of a grave
burlesque; and for the application of these, by a contrivance not very
artificial, it is sometimes necessary to recur to the notes. The style,
if it be not distinguished by any remarkable strength or elegance, is at