Byron’s candid acknowledgment that, in _English Bards_, he was venturing “o’er the path which Pope and Gifford trod before” suggests at once a comparison of his work with that of the two earlier authors. Although the _Dunciad_ and _English Bards_ are alike in that they are in the same metre and actuated by much the same motive, there are many differences in execution between the poems. The _Dunciad_ is, as the Preface of “Martinus Scriblerus” states, a true mock-heroic, with a fable “one and entire” dealing with the Empire and the Goddess of Dulness, with machinery setting forth a “continued chain of allegories,” and with a succession of incidents and episodes imitated from epic writers. _English Bards_, beginning as a paraphrase of Juvenal, has no real action and is composed of a series of descriptions and characterizations, joined by some necessary connective material. Pope’s method of satire is frequently indirect: he involves his victims in the plot, making them ridiculous through the situations in which he places them. Instead of inveighing against Blackmore, Pope pictures him as victor in a braying contest. Byron, on the other hand, uses this method only once in _English Bards_--in burlesquing the duel between Jeffrey and Moore. Instinctively he prefers taking up his adversaries one by one and covering each with abuse. The _Dunciad_, with rare exceptions, assails only personal enemies of the satirist, and these, for the most part, men already despised and defenceless; Byron attacks many prominent writers of whom he knows nothing except their work, and against whom he has no grievance of a private nature. Thus in plan and operation the two satires present some striking divergences.