has a similar effect. The greatest epic poets and satirists have always transcended rules to follow "Nature's light"; Pope, over-topping them all, has "still corrected Nature as she stray'd" (pp. 19, 21). But perhaps Harte's most successful attempt to elevate _The Dunciad_ comes in section two of his poem. Unlike Dryden, in whose _Discourse_ the account of the "progress" of satire is confined almost exclusively to a few Roman writers, Harte begins his account of its progress with Homer and brings it down to Pope. Deriving the ancestry of _The Dunciad_ from Homer, the greatest epic poet, obviously enhances Pope's satire. Perhaps less obviously, by extending Dryden's account to the present, Harte makes _The Dunciad_ not only a chronological _terminus ad quem_ but, far more important, the fruit of centuries of slowly accumulating mastery and wisdom. The strategies mentioned thus far constitute one series of answers to critics who charged Pope with debasing true epic. But Harte also addressed himself to such critics more directly. Although Aubrey Williams (p. 54) has clearly demonstrated Harte's awareness that the world of _The Dunciad_ does in one sense sully epic beauties, at the same time, I think, Harte knew that the epic poems to which _The Dunciad_ continually alludes remain fixed, unsullied polestars; otherwise the reader of the poem would lack a way of measuring the meanness of its characters and principles. The "charms of _Parody_" in _The Dunciad_ provide a contrast between its dark, fallen world and the undimmed luster of epic realms (p. 10). By using the ambiguous word _parody_, which in the eighteenth century could mean either ridicule or straight imitation,[23] Harte skillfully suggests the complex purpose of Pope's epic backdrop. The dunces, not Pope, ridicule the epic world by their words and deeds; but in turn, this world ridicules them simply by being "imitated" and incorporated in _The Dunciad_. And its incorporation is by no means equivalent to the pollution of epic. That, Harte hints, is the achievement of scribblers like Blackmore (p. 12). It is they who inadvertently write mock-epics, parodies which degrade their great models; Pope, nominally writing mock-epic, actually approaches epic achievement. Harte's reply to those who believed Pope had wasted his talent in attacking "the Refuse of the Town" centers in the stanza beginning on p. 24 but can be found elsewhere as well. Literary "Refuse," he realized, could not safely be ignored, for he at least came close to understanding that it was "the metaphor by which bigger deteriorations," social and moral, "are revealed" (Williams, p. 14). ... Rules, and Truth, and Order, Dunces strike; Of Arts, and Virtues, enemies alike. (p. 24)