Prior is generally neat in his expression.

Horace is happy,--which is surely a great deal more.
All that is said of Gay, Pope, Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding is worth reading, and may be of great value both to those who have not time to study the authors, and to those who desire to have their own judgments somewhat guided, somewhat assisted.

That they were all men of humour there can be no doubt.

Whether either of them, except perhaps Gay, would have been specially ranked as a humorist among men of letters, may be a question.
Sterne was a humorist, and employed his pen in that line, if ever a writer did so, and so was Goldsmith.

Of the excellence and largeness of the disposition of the one, and the meanness and littleness of the other, it is not necessary that I should here say much.