ran high with regard to the principles enunciated by the so-called "friends of freedom". The sentiments of the "Constitutional Tories" found expression in the bitter, sardonic, vitriolic mockery visible in the pages of the Anti-Jacobin, which did more to check the progress of nascent Radicalism and the movement in favour of political reform than any other means employed. Chief-justice Mansfield's strictures and Lord Braxfield's diatribes alike paled into insignificance beside these deadly, scorching bombs of Juvenal-like vituperation, which have remained unapproached in their specific line. As an example take Ellis's Ode to Jacobinism, of which I quote two stanzas: "Daughter of Hell, insatiate power! Whose iron scourge and maddening hour When first to scourge the sons of earth, Thy sire his darling child designed, And statesmen, princes, leagued with their inveterate foe. Scared at thy frown terrific, fly The morals (antiquated brood), Swift they disperse and with them go The friend sincere, the generous foe Traitors to God, to man avowed, By thee now raised aloft, now crushed beneath the crowd." The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin-Carisbrooke Library, 1890. Space only remains for a single word upon the satire of the nineteenth century. In this category would be included the Bæviad and the Maviad by William Gifford (editor of the Anti-Jacobin), which, though first printed in the closing years of the eighteenth century, were issued in volume form in 1800. Written as they are in avowed imitation of Juvenal, Persius, and Horace, they out-Juvenal Juvenal by the violence of the language, besides descending to a depth of personal scurrility as foreign to the nature of true satire as abuse is alien to wit. They have long since been consigned to merited oblivion, though in their day, from the useful and able work done by their author in other fields of literature, they enjoyed no inconsiderable amount of fame. Two or three lines from the Bæviad will give a specimen of its quality:— "For mark, to what 'tis given, and then declare, The early years of the present century still felt the influence of the sardonic ridicule which prevailed during the closing years of the previous one, and the satirists who appeared during the first decades of the former belonged to the robust or energetic order. Their names and their works are well-nigh forgotten. 1 The Baviad and the Mæviad, by W. Gifford, Esq., 1800. We now reach the last of the greater satirists that have adorned our literature, one who is in many respects a worthy peer of Dryden, Swift, and Pope. Lord Byron's fame as a satirist rests on three great works, each of them illustrative of a distinct type of composition. Other satires he has written, nay, the satiric quality is present more or less in nearly all he produced; but The Vision of Judgment, Beppo, and Don Juan are his three masterpieces in this style of literature. They are wonderful compositions in every sense of the word. The sparkling wit, the ready raillery, the cutting irony, the biting sarcasm, and the sardonic cynicism which characterize almost every line of them are united to a brilliancy of imagination, a swiftness as well as a felicity of thought, and an epigrammatic terseness of phrase which even Byron himself has equalled nowhere else in his works. The Vision of Judgment is an example in the first instance of parody, and, in the second, but not by any means so distinctly, of allegory. Its savage ferocity of sarcasm crucified Southey upon the cross of scornful contempt. Byron is not as good a metrist as a satirist, and the Ottava rima in his hands sometimes halts a little; still, the poem is a notable example of a satiric parody written with such distinguished success in a measure of great technical difficulty. It is somewhat curious that all three of Byron's great satiric poems should be written in the same measure. Yet so it is, for the poet, having become enamoured of the metre after reading Frere's clever satire, Whistlecraft, ever afterwards had a peculiar fondness for it. Both Beppo and Don Juan are also excellent examples of the metrical" satiric tale". The former, being the earlier satire of the two, was Byron's first essay in this new type of satiric composition. His success therein stimulated him to attempt another "tale” which in some respects presents features that ally it to the mock-epic. Beppo is a perfect storehouse of well-rounded satirical phrases that cleave to the memory, such as "the deep damnation of his 'bah"" and the description of the "budding miss", "So much alarmed that she is quite alarming, Beppo leads up to Don Juan, and it is hard to say Byron was succeeded by Praed, whose social pictures are instinct with the most refined and polished raillery, with the true Attic salt of wit united to a metrical deftness as graceful as it was artistic. During Praed's lifetime, Lamb with his inimitable Essays of Elia, Southey, Barham with the everpopular Ingoldsby Legends, James and Horace Smith with the Rejected Addresses, Disraeli, Leigh Hunt, Tom Hood, and Landor had been winning (M 569) D laurels in various branches of social satire which, consequent upon the influence of Byron and then of his disciple, Praed, became the current mode. A favourable example of that style is found in Leigh Hunt's Feast of the Poets and in Edward FitzGerald's Chivalry at a Discount. Other writers of satire in the earlier decades of the present century were Peacock, who in his novels (Crotchet Castle, &c.) evolved an original type of satire based upon the Athenian New Comedy. Miss Austen in her English novels and Miss Edgeworth in her Irish tales employed satire to impeach certain crying social abuses, as also did Dickens in Oliver Twist and others of his books. Douglas Jerrold's comedies and sketches are full of titbits of gay and brilliant banter and biting irony. If Sartor Resartus could be regarded as a satire, as Dr. Garnett says, Carlyle would be the first of satirists, with his thundering invective, grand rhetoric, indignant scorn, grim humour, and satiric gloom in denouncing the shams of human society and of human nature. An admirable American school of satire was founded by Washington Irving, of which Judge Haliburton (Sam Slick), Paulding, Holmes, Artemus Ward, and Dudley Warner are the chief names. Since the third and fourth decades of our century, in other words, since the epoch of the Reform Bill and the Chartist agitation, satire has more and more tended to lose its acid and its venom, to slough the dark sardonic sarcasm of past days and to don the light sportive garb of the social humorist and epigrammist. Robustious bludgeoning has gone out of fashion, and in its place we |