Harte also rejected the critical habit of giving satire a relatively low rank in the scale of literary genres. This habit can be traced to Horace, who belittled the literary status of his own satires,[8] and it was prominent in the Renaissance. The place of satire in a hierarchical list of Julius Caesar Scaliger is perhaps typical: "'And the most noble, of course, are hymns and paeans. In the second place are songs and odes and scolia, which are concerned with the praises of brave men. In the third place the epic, in which there are heroes and other lesser personages. Tragedy together with comedy follows this order; nevertheless comedy will hold the fourth place apart by itself. After these, satires, then exodia, lusus, nuptial songs, elegies, monodia, songs, epigrams.'"[9] Similar rankings of satire frequently recurred in the neo-classical period,[10] as did the Renaissance supposition that each genre has a style and subject matter appropriate to it. This supposition discouraged any "mixing" of the genres: in Richard Blackmore's words, "all comick Manners, witty Conceits and Ridicule" should be barred from heroic poetry.[11] The influence of the genres theories even after Pope's death may be shown by the fact that Pope, for the very reason that he had failed to work in the major genres, was often ranked below such epic or tragic poets as Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.[12] One senses the foregoing critical assumptions about satire behind much of the early comment on _The Dunciad_. Most of the critics, to be sure, were anything but impartial; in many instances they were smarting from Pope's satire and sought any critical weapons available for retaliation. But it will not do to dismiss these men or their responses to _The Dunciad_ as inconsequential; they had the weight of numbers on their side and, more important, the authority of long-established attitudes toward satire. Although it is frequently impossible to determine exactly which critics Harte was answering in his _Essay_, brief illustration of two prominent types of attack can indicate what he had to vindicate _The Dunciad_ against. One of those types resembled Blackmore's objection to a mixing of genres. If satire should be barred from heroic poetry, the reverse, for some critics, was also true, and Pope should not have used epic allusions and devices in _The Dunciad_. Edward Ward, for one, thought the poem an incongruous mixture "against all rule."[13] Pope's violation of "rule" seemed almost a desecration of epic to Thomas Cooke; of the mock-heroic games in Book II of _The Dunciad_, he complained that "to imitate _Virgil_ is not to have Games, and those beastly and unnatural, because _Virgil_ has noble and reasonable Games, but to preserve a Purity of Manners, Propriety of Conduct founded on Nature, a Beauty and Exactness of Stile, and continued Harmony of Verse concording with the Sense."[14]