High characters (cries one), and he would see
Things that ne’er were, nor are, nor ne’er will be.

The speaker mocks someone who calls for “high characters”—i.e., lofty moral exemplars, elevated rhetoric, or grandly “heroic” writing—and suggests that such a demand leads to delusion: the person would “see / Things that ne’er were, nor are, nor ne’er will be.” The lines satirize pretension and the appetite for idealized, unreal representations, implying that the pursuit of the “high” can detach judgment from experience and truth. In Suckling’s characteristic Cavalier mode, the jab favors wit, worldly sense, and a suspicion of moral or aesthetic grandstanding over solemn elevation.