Every critic has concurred with Pope in finding the play plotless. The short first scene establishes the premise: that the Master of the shop is "a general Satyrist, yet not rude nor ill-natur'd," who moralizes "upon every Trifle he sells, and will strike a Lesson of Instruction out of a Snuff-box, a Thimble, or a Cockle-shell" (p. 10). Working within a tradition that includes Lucian's sale of philosophers and, just after _The Toy-Shop_, Fielding's auction in _The Historical Register, For the Year 1736_ (1737), Dodsley acknowledged that his premise was adopted directly from Thomas Randolph's _Conceited Pedlar_ (1630). His metaphor of the world as "a great Toy-shop, and all it's [_sic_] Inhabitants run mad for Rattles" (p. 45) recalls the brilliant penultimate verse paragraph of "Epistle II" of Pope's _Essay on Man_, wherein mankind is shown as eternally addicted to "toys" of one kind or another: Pleas'd with this bauble still, as that before; Till tir'd he sleeps, and Life's poor play is o'er! (Lines 281-82) With so many unmistakable resemblances to Pope in Dodsley's play, it is not surprising that some spectators thought they detected the hand of the author of _The Rape of the Lock_. Following a hint from Pope that the strength of his afterpiece lay in its mixture of morality and satire, Dodsley titled his work "A Dramatick Satire" and begged indulgence in the epilogue for his "dull grave Sermon" (p. 5). In fact, the merit of the work is the wit with which the Master of the shop extemporizes over each sale. "Why, Sir," one character says, "methinks you are a new Kind of a Satirical Parson, your Shop is your Scripture, and every piece of Goods a different Text, from which you expose the Vices and Follies of Mankind in a very fine allegorical Sermon" (p. 17). Jean Kern lists the satiric allegory as one of the five major forms of dramatic satire during this period, but judges _The Toy-Shop_ a failure in that genre because, instead of a sustained allegory, Dodsley provides "a jumble of annotated sales of abstractions with no controlling metaphor. The toys for sale are interesting only for the value which the characters assign to them; the result is a miscellany of characters assigning a miscellany of values."[5] Thus, the problematic nature of a genre that attempts to dramatize satire with no more than perfunctory recourse to plot or characterization and Dodsley's failure to sustain consistently his comparison between those objects that mankind values and mere toys both contribute to the play's lack of "Theatrical Merit." It may also suggest why _The Toy-Shop_ was even more popular in print than on the stage. Nevertheless, even with all its dramatic inadequacies acknowledged, the play retains a charming Tatler-esque ingenuity that still amuses.