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ENGLISH SATIRES

WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
OLIPHANT SMEATON

LONDON
THE GRESHAM PUBLISHING COMPANY
34 SOUTHAMPTON STREET
STRAND

TO THE MEMORY OF
ALEXANDER BALLOCH GROSART
D.D., LL.D., F.S.A.
WITH A GRATEFUL SENSE OF ALL IT OWES TO
HIS TEACHING
THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED BY
THE AUTHOR

PREFACE.

In the compilation of this volume my aim has been to furnish a work that would be representative in character rather than exhaustive. The restrictions of space imposed by the limits of such a series as this have necessitated the omission of many pieces that readers might expect to see included. As far as possible, however, the most typical satires of the successive eras have been selected, so as to throw into relief the special literary characteristics of each, and to manifest the trend of satiric development during the centuries elapsing between Langland and Lowell.

Acknowledgment is due, and is gratefully rendered, to Mrs. C.S. Calverley for permission to print the verses which close this book; and to Messrs. Macmillan & Co. for permission to print A.H. Clough's "Spectator ab Extra".

To Professor C.H. Herford my warmest thanks are due for his careful revision of the Introduction, and for many valuable hints which have been adopted in the course of the work; also to Mr. W. Keith Leask, M.A.(Oxon.), and the librarians of the Edinburgh University and Advocates' Libraries.

OLIPHANT SMEATON.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

Satire and the satirist have been in evidence in well-nigh all ages of the world's history. The chief instruments of the satirist's equipment are irony, sarcasm, invective, wit, and humour. The satiric denunciation of a writer burning with indignation at some social wrong or abuse, is capable of reaching the very highest level of literature. The writings of a satirist of this type, and to some extent of every satirist who touches on the social aspects of life, present a picture more or less vivid, though not of course complete and impartial, of the age to which he belongs, of the men, their manners, fashions, tastes, and prevalent opinions. Thus they have a historical as well as a literary and an ethical value. And Thackeray, in speaking of the office of the humorist or satirist, for to him they were one, says, "He professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture, your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and passions of life almost."[1]

Satire has, in consequence, always ranked as one of the cardinal divisions of literature. Its position as such, however, is due rather to the fact of it having been so regarded among the Romans, than from its own intrinsic importance among us to-day. Until the closing decades of the eighteenth century—so long, in fact, as the classics were esteemed of paramount authority as models—satire proper was accorded a definite place in letters, and was distinctively cultivated by men of genius as a branch of literature. But with the rise of the true national spirit in the various literatures of Europe, and notably in that of England, satire has gradually given place to other types of composition. Slowly but surely it has been edged out of its prominent position as a separate department, and has been relegated to the position of a quality of style, important, beyond doubt, yet no longer to be considered as a prime division of letters.[2]

Rome rather than Greece must be esteemed the home of ancient satire. Quintilian, indeed, claims it altogether for his countrymen in the words, Satira tota nostra est; while Horace styles it Græcis intactum carmen. But this claim must be accepted with many reservations. It does not imply that we do not discover the existence of satire, together with favourable examples of it, long anterior to the oldest extant works in either Grecian or Latin literature. The use of what are called "personalities" in everyday speech was the probable origin of satire. Conversely, also, satire, in the majority of those earlier types current at various periods in the history of literature, has shown an inclination to be personal in its character. De Quincey, accordingly, has argued that the more personal it became in its allusions, the more it fulfilled its specific function. But such a view is based on the supposition that satire has no other mission than to lash the vices of our neighbours, without recalling the fact that the satirist has a reformative as well as a punitive duty to discharge. The further we revert into the "deep backward and abysm of time" towards the early history of the world, the more pronounced and overt is this indulgence in broad personal invective and sarcastic strictures.

The earliest cultivators of the art were probably the men with a grievance, or, as Dr. Garnett says, "the carpers and fault-finders of the clan". Their first attempts were, as has been conjectured, merely personal lampoons against those they disliked or differed from, and were perhaps of a type cognate with the Homeric Margites. Homer's character of Thersites is mayhap a lifelike portrait of some contemporary satirist who made himself dreaded by his personalities. But even in Thersites we see the germs of transition from merely personal invective to satire directed against a class; and Greek satire, though on the whole more personal than Roman, achieved brilliant results. It is enough to name Archilochus, whom Mahaffy terms the Swift of Greek Literature, Simonides of Amorgos (circ. 660 B.C.), the author of the famous Satire on Women, and Hipponax of Ephesus, reputed the inventor of the Scazon or halting iambic.

But the lasting significance of Greek satire is mainly derived from its surpassing distinction in two domains—in the comico-satiric drama of Aristophanes, and in the Beast Fables of 'Æsop'. In later Greek literature it lost its robustness and became trivial and effeminate through expending itself on unworthy objects.

It is amongst the Romans, with their deeper ethical convictions and more powerful social sense, that we must look for the true home of ancient satire. The germ of Roman satire is undoubtedly to be found in the rude Fescennine verses, the rough and licentious jests and buffoonery of the harvest-home and the vintage thrown into quasi-lyrical form. These songs gradually developed a concomitant form of dialogue styled saturæ, a term denoting "miscellany", and derived perhaps from the Satura lanx, a charger filled with the first-fruits of the year's produce, which was offered to Bacchus and Ceres.[3] In Ennius, the "father of Roman satire", and Varro, the word still retained this old Roman sense.

Lucilius was the first Roman writer who made "censorious criticism" the prevailing tone of satire, and his work, the parent of the satire of Horace, of Persius, of Juvenal, and through that of the poetical satire of modern times, was the principal agent in fixing its present polemical and urban associations upon a term originally steeped in the savour of rustic revelry. In the hands of Horace, Roman satire was to be moulded into a new type that was not only to be a thing of beauty, but, as far as one can yet see, to remain a joy for ever. The great Venusian, as he informs us, set before himself the task of adapting the satire of Lucilius to the special circumstances, the manners, the literary modes and tastes of the Augustan age. Horace's Satires conform to Addison's great rule, which he lays down in the Spectator, that the satire which only seeks to wound is as dangerous as arrows that fly in the dark. There is always an ethical undercurrent running beneath the polished raillery and the good-natured satire. His genial bonhomie prevents him from ever becoming ill-natured in his animadversions.

Of those manifold, kaleidoscopically-varied types of human nature which in the Augustan age flocked to Rome as the centre of the known world, he was a keen and a close observer. Jealously he noted the deteriorating influence these foreign elements were exercising on the grand old Roman character, and some of the bitterest home-thrusts he ever delivered were directed against this alien invasion.[4] In those brilliant pictures wherewith his satires are replete, Horace finds a place for all. Sometimes he criticises as a far-off observer, gazing with a sort of cynical amusement at this human raree-show; at others he speaks as though he himself were in the very midst of the bustling frivolity of the Roman Vanity Fair, and a sufferer from its follies. Then his tone seems to deepen into a grave intensity of remonstrance, as he exposes its hollowness, its heartlessness, and its blindness to the absorbing problems of existence.

After the death of Horace (B.C. 8) no names of note occur in the domain of satire until we reach that famous trio, contemporary with one another, who adorned the concluding half of the first century of our era, viz.:—Juvenal, Persius, and Martial. They are severally representative of distinct modes or types of satire. Juvenal illustrates rhetorical or tragic satire, of which he is at once the inventor and the most distinguished master—that form of composition, in other words, which attacks vice, wrongs, or abuses in a high-pitched strain of impassioned, declamatory eloquence. In this type of satire, evil is designedly painted in exaggerated colours, that disgust may more readily be aroused by the loathsomeness of the picture. As a natural consequence, sobriety, moderation, and truth to nature no longer are esteemed so indispensable. In this style Juvenal has had many imitators, but no superiors. His satires represent the final development the form underwent in achieving the definite purpose of exposing and chastising in a systematic manner the entire catalogue of vices, public and private, which were assailing the welfare of the state. They constitute luridly powerful pictures of a debased and shamelessly corrupt condition of society. Keen contemptuous ridicule, a sardonic irony that held nothing in reverence, a caustic sarcasm that burned like an acid, and a vituperative invective that ransacked the language for phrases of opprobrium—these were the agents enlisted by Juvenal into the service of purging society of its evil.

Persius, on the other hand, was the philosophic satirist, whose devotion to Stoicism caused him to see in it a panacea for all the evils which Nero brought on the empire. The shortness of his life, his studious tastes, and his exceptional moral purity all contributed to keep him ignorant of that world of evil which, as Professor Sellar has pithily remarked, it is the business of the satirist to know. Hence he is purely a philosophic or didactic satirist. Only one of his poems, the first, fulfils the special end of satire by representing any phase whatever of the life of his time, and pointing its moral.

Finally, Martial exchanged the epic tirade for the epigram as the vehicle of his satire, and handled this lighter missile with unsurpassed brilliance and verve. Despite his sycophancy and his fulsome flattery of prospective benefactors, he displays more of the sober moderation and sane common-sense of Horace than either of his contemporaries. There are few better satirists of social and literary pretenders either in ancient or modern times. No ancient has more vividly painted the manners of antiquity. If Juvenal enforces the lesson of that time, and has penetrated more deeply into the heart of society, Martial has sketched its external aspect with a much fairer pencil, and from a much more intimate contact with it.

In the first and second centuries of our era two other forms of satire took their rise, viz.:—the Milesian or "Satiric Tale" of Petronius and Apuleius, and the "Satiric Dialogue" of Lucian. Both are admirable pictures of their respective periods. The Tales of the two first are conceived with great force of imagination, and executed with a happy blending of humour, wit, and cynical irony that suggests Gil Blas or Barry Lyndon. The Supper of Trimalchio, by Petronius, reproduces with unsparing hand the gluttony and the blatant vice of the Neronic epoch. The Golden Ass of Apuleius is a clever sketch of contemporary manners in the second century, painting in vivid colours the reaction that had set in against scepticism, and the general appetite that prevailed for miracles and magic.

Finally, ancient satire may be said to close with the famous Dialogues of Lucian, which, although written in Greek, exhibited all the best features of Roman satire. Certainly the ethical purpose and the reformative element are rather implied than insistently expressed in Lucian; but he affords in his satiric sketches a capital glimpse of the ludicrous perplexity into which the pagan mind was plunged when it had lost faith in its mythology, and when a callous indifference towards the Pantheon left the Roman world literally without a rational creed. As a satire on the old Hellenic religion nothing could be racier than The Dialogues of the Gods and The Dialogues of the Dead.

It is impossible in this brief survey to discuss at large the vast chaotic epoch in the history of satire which lies between the end of the ancient world and the dawn of humanism. For satire, as a literary genre, belongs to these two. The mediæval world, inexhaustible in its capacity and relish for abuse, full of rude laughter and drastic humour—prompt, for all its superstition, to make a jest of the priest, and, for all its chivalry, to catalogue the foibles of women—had the satirical animus in abundance, and satirical songs, visions, fables, fabliaux, ballads, epics, in legion, but no definite and recognised school of satire. It is sufficient to name, as examples of the extraordinary range of the mediæval satiric genius, the farce of Pathelin, the beast-epic of Renart, the rhymes of Walter Map, and the Inferno of Dante.

Of these satirists before the rise of "satire", mediæval England produced two great examples in Chaucer and Langland. They typify at the outset the two classes into which Dryden divided English satirists—the followers of Horace's way and the followers of Juvenal's—the men of the world, who assail the enemies of common-sense with the weapons of humour and sarcasm; and the prophets, who assail vice and crime with passionate indignation and invective scorn. Since Dryden's time neither line has died out, and it is still possible, with all reserves, to recognise the two strains through the whole course of English literature: the one represented in Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Addison, Arbuthnot, Swift, Young, Goldsmith, Canning, Thackeray, and Tennyson; the others in Langland, Skelton, Lyndsay, Nash, Marston, Dryden, Pope, Churchill, Johnson, Junius, Burns, and Browning.

Langland was a naïve mediæval Juvenal. The sad-visaged, world-weary dreamer of the Malvern hills, sorrowing over the vice, the abuses, and the social misery of his time, finding, as he tells us, no comfort in any of the established institutions of his day, because confronted with the fraud and falsehood that infected them all, is one of the most pathetic figures in literature. As Skeat suggests, the object of his great poem was to secure, through the latitude afforded by allegory, opportunities of describing the life and manners of the poorer classes, of inveighing against clerical abuses and the rapacity of the friars, of representing the miseries caused by the great pestilences then prevalent, and by the hasty and ill-advised marriages consequent thereon; of denouncing lazy workmen and sham beggars, the corruption and bribery then too common in the law-courts—in a word, to lash all the numerous forms of falsehood, which are at all times the fit subjects for satire and indignant exposure. Amid many essential differences, is there not here a striking likeness to the work of the Roman Juvenal? Langland's satire is not so fiery nor so rhetorically intense as that of his prototype, but it is less profoundly despairing. He satirizes evil rather by exposing it and contrasting it with good, than by vehemently denouncing it. The colours of the pictures are sombre, and the gloom is almost overwhelming, but still it is illumined from time to time with the hope of coming amendment, when the great reformer Piers the Plowman, by which is typified Christ,[5] should appear, who was to remedy all abuses and restore the world to a right condition. In this sustaining hope he differs from Juvenal, the funereal gloom of whose satires is relieved by no gleam of hope for the future.

Contrast with this the humorous brightness, the laughter, and the light of the surroundings associated with his great contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer. His very satire is kindly and quaint, like that of Horace, rather than bitterly acidulous. He raps his age over the knuckles, it is true, for its faults and foibles, but the censor's face wears a genial smile. One of his chief attractions for us lies in his bright objectivity. He never wears his heart on his sleeve like Langland. He has touches of rare and profound pathos, but these notes of pain are only like undertones of discord to throw the harmony into stronger relief, only like little cloudlets momentarily flitting across the golden sunshine of his humour.

We read Chaucer, as we read Horace, from love of his piquant Epicureanism, and the scintillating satire wherewith he enlivens those matchless pictures of his epoch which he has handed down to us. Chaucer, as Professor Minto puts it, wrote largely for the court circle. His verses were first read in tapestried chambers, and to the gracious ear of stately lords and ladies. It was because he wrote for such an audience that he avoids the introduction of any discordant element in the shape of the deeper and darker social problems of the time. The same reticence occurs in Horace, writing as he did for the ear of Augustus and Mæcenas, and of the fashionable circle thronging the great palace of his patron on the Esquiline. Is not the historic parallel between the two pairs of writers still further verified? Chaucer wisely chose the epic form for his greatest poem, because he could introduce thereinto so many distinct qualities of composition, and the woof of racy humour as well as of sprightly satire which he introduces with such consummate art into the texture of his verse is of as fine a character as any in our literature. In Langland's great allegory, the satire is earnest, grave and solemn, as though with a sense of deep responsibility; that in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—nay, in all his poems—is genial, laughing, and good-natured; tolerant, like Horace's of human weaknesses, because the author is so keenly conscious of his own.

Langland and Chaucer both died about the beginning of the fifteenth century. But from that date until 1576—when Gascoigne's Steel Glass, the first verse satire of the Elizabethan age, was published—we must look mainly to Scotland and the poems of William Dunbar, Sir David Lyndsay, and others, to preserve the apostolic succession of satire. William Dunbar is one of the greatest of British satirists. His Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, in which the popular poetic form of the age—allegory—is utilized with remarkable skill as the vehicle for a scathing satire on the headlong sensuality of his time, produces by its startling realism and terrible intensity an effect not unlike that exercised by the overpowering creations of Salvator Rosa. The poem is a bitter indictment of the utter corruption of all classes in the society of his period. Like Juvenal, to whose school he belongs, he softens nothing, tones down nothing. The evil is presented in all its native hideousness. Lyndsay, on the other hand, would have been more vigorous had he been less diffuse, and used the pruning-knife more unsparingly. His finest satiric pictures often lose their point by verbosity and tediousness. Brevity is the soul of satire as well as of wit.

The most vigorous English satire of this entire period was that which we owe to the scurrilous pen of Skelton and the provocative personality of Wolsey. With his work may be mentioned the rude and unpolished, yet vigorous, piece bearing the rhyming title,

"Rede me and be nott wrothe,

For I saye no thing but trothe",

written by two English Observantine Franciscan friars, William Roy and Jerome Barlowe;[6] a satire which stung the great cardinal so sharply that he commissioned Hermann Rynck to buy up every available copy. Alexander Barclay's imitation, in his Ship of Fools, of Sebastian Brandt's Narrenschiff, was only remarkable for the novel satirical device of the plan.

Bishop Latimer in his sermons is a vigorous satirist, particularly in that discourse upon "The Ploughers" (1547). His fearlessness is very conspicuous, and his attacks on the bishops who proved untrue to their trust and allowed their dioceses to go to wreck and ruin, are outspoken and trenchant:

"They that be lords will ill go to plough. It is no meet office for them. It is not seeming for their state. Thus came up lording loiterers; Thus crept in unprechinge prelates, and so have they long continued. For how many unlearned prelates have we now at this day? And no marvel; For if the ploughmen that now be, were made lordes, they would clean give over ploughing, they would leave of theyr labour and fall to lording outright and let the plough stand. For ever since the Prelates were made lords and nobles, the plough standeth, there is no work done, the people starve. They hawke, they hunte, they carde, they dyce, they pastime in their prelacies with galaunt gentlemen, with their dauncing minions, and with their freshe companions, so that ploughing is set aside."[7]

But after Gascoigne's Steel Glass was published, which professed to hold a mirror or "steel glass" up to the vices of the age, we reach that wonderful outburst of satiric, epigrammatic, and humorous composition which was one of the characteristics, and certainly not the least important, of the Elizabethan epoch. Lodge's Fig for Momus (1593) contains certain satires which rank with Gascoigne's work as the earliest compositions of that type belonging to the period. That they were of no mean reputation in their own day is evident from the testimony of Meres,[8] who says, "As Horace, Lucilius, Juvenal, Persius, and Lucullus are the best for satire among the Latins, so with us, in the same faculty, these are chiefe, Piers Plowman, Lodge, Hall of Emanuel College, Cambridge, the author of Pygmalion's Image and Certain Satires[9] and the author of Skialethea". This contemporary opinion regarding the fact that The Vision of Piers Plowman was esteemed a satire of outstanding merit in those days, is a curious commentary on Hall's boastful couplet describing himself as the earliest English satirist.

To name all the writers who, in this fruitful epoch of our literature, devoted themselves to this kind of composition would be impossible. From 1598 until the death of James I. upwards of one hundred separate satirists can be named, both in verse and prose. Of these Bishop Hall is one of the greatest, and I have chosen him as the leading representative of the period. To the study of Horace and Juvenal he had devoted many years of his early manhood, and his imitation of these two great Romans is close and consistent. Therefore, for vigour, grave dignity, and incisiveness of thought, united to graphic pictures of his age, Hall is undeniably the most important name in the history of the Elizabethan satire, strictly so called. His exposures of the follies of his age were largely couched in the form, so much affected by Horace, of a familiar commentary on certain occurrences, addressed apparently to an anonymous correspondent.

Contemporary with Hall was Thomas Nash, whose Pierce Penilesse's Supplication to the Devil was one of the most extraordinary onslaughts on the social vices of the metropolis that the period produced. Written in close imitation of Juvenal's earlier satires, he frequently approaches the standard of his master in graphic power of description, in scathing invective, and ironical mockery. In Have with you to Saffron Walden he lashed Gabriel Harvey for his unworthy conduct towards the memory of Robert Greene. Both satires are written in prose, as indeed are nearly all his works, inasmuch as Nash was more of a pamphleteer than anything else. Other contemporaries of Hall were Thomas Dekker, whose fame as a dramatist has eclipsed his reputation as a satirist, but whose Bachelor's Banquet—pleasantly discoursing the variable humours of Women, their quickness of wits and unsearchable deceits, is a sarcastic impeachment of the gentler sex, while his Gull's Hornbook must be ranked with Nash's work as one of the most unsparing castigations of social life in London. The latter is a volume of fictitious maxims for the use of youths desirous of being considered "pretty fellows". Other contemporaries were John Donne, John Marston, Jonson, George Chapman, and Nicholas Breton—all names of men who were conspicuous inheritors of the true Elizabethan spirit, and who united virility of thought to robustness and trenchancy of sarcasm.

Marston and Breton were amongst the best of the group, though they are not represented in these pages owing to the unsuitability of their writings for extract. Here is a picture from one of the satires of Marston which is instinct with satiric power. It is a portrait of a love-sick swain, and runs as follows:—

"For when my ears received a fearful sound

That he was sick, I went, and there I found,

Him laid of love and newly brought to bed

Of monstrous folly, and a franticke head:

His chamber hanged about with elegies,

With sad complaints of his love's miseries,

His windows strow'd with sonnets and the glasse

Drawn full of love-knots. I approach'd the asse,

And straight he weepes, and sighes some Sonnet out

To his fair love! and then he goes about,

For to perfume her rare perfection,

With some sweet smelling pink epitheton.

Then with a melting looke he writhes his head,

And straight in passion, riseth in his bed,

And having kist his hand, strok'd up his haire,

Made a French congé, cryes 'O cruall Faire!'

To th' antique bed-post."[10]

Marston manifests more vigour and nervous force in his satires than Hall, but exhibits less elegance and ease in versification. In Charles Fitz-geoffrey's Affaniæ, a set of Latin epigrams, printed at Oxford in 1601, Marston is complimented as the "Second English Satirist", or rather as dividing the palm of priority and excellence in English satire with Hall. The individual characteristics of the various leading Elizabethan satirists,—the vitriolic bitterness of Nash, the sententious profundity of Donne, the happy-go-lucky "slogging" of genial Dekker, the sledge-hammer blows of Jonson, the turgid malevolence of Chapman, and the stiletto-like thrusts of George Buchanan are worthy of closer and more detailed study than can be devoted to them in a sketch such as this. I regret that Nicolas Breton's Pasquil's Madcappe proved too long for quotation in its entirety,[11] but the man who could pen such lines as these was, of a truth, a satirist of a high order:—

But what availes unto the world to talke?

Wealth is a witch that hath a wicked charme,

That in the minds of wicked men doth walke,

Unto the heart and Soule's eternal harme,

Which is not kept by the Almighty arme:

O,'tis the strongest instrument of ill

That ere was known to work the devill's will.

An honest man is held a good poore soule,

And kindnesse counted but a weake conceite,

And love writte up but in the woodcocke's soule,

While thriving Wat doth but on Wealth await:

He is a fore horse that goes ever streight:

And he but held a foole for all his Wit,

That guides his braines but with a golden bit.

A virgin is a vertuous kind of creature,

But doth not coin command Virginitie?

And beautie hath a strange bewitching feature,

But gold reads so much world's divinitie,

As with the Heavens hath no affinitie:

So that where Beauty doth with vertue dwell,

If it want money, yet it will not sell.

Of the satiric forms peculiar to the Elizabethan epoch there is no great variety. The Characters of Theophrastus supplied a model to some of the writers. The close adherence also which the majority of them manifest to the broadly marked types of "Horatian" and "Juvenalian" satire, both in matter and manner, is not a little remarkable. The genius for selecting from the classics those forms both of composition and metre best suited to become vehicles for satire, and adapting them thereto, did not begin to manifest itself in so pronounced a manner until after the Restoration. The Elizabethan mind—using the phrase of course in its broad sense as inclusive of the Jacobean and the early Caroline epochs—was more engrossed with the matter than the manner of satire. Perhaps the finest satire which distinguished this wonderful era was the Argenis of John Barclay, a politico-satiric romance, or, in other words, the adaptation of the "Milesian tale" of Petronius to state affairs.

During the Parliamentary War, satire was the only species of composition which did not suffer more or less eclipse, but its character underwent change. It became to a large extent a medium for sectarian bitterness. It lost its catholicity, and degenerated in great measure into the instrument of partisan antagonism, and a means of impaling the folly or fanaticism, real or imagined, of special individuals among the Cavaliers and Roundheads.[12] Of such a character was the bulk of the satires produced at that time. In a few instances, however, a higher note was struck, as, for example, when "dignified political satire", in the hands of Andrew Marvell, was utilized to fight the battle of freedom of conscience in the matter of the observances of external religion. The Rehearsal Transposed, Mr. Smirke, or the Divine in Mode, and his Political Satires are masterpieces of lofty indignation mingled with grave and ironical banter. Among many others Edmund Waller showed himself an apt disciple of Horace, and produced charming social satires marked by delicate wit and raillery in the true Horatian mode; while the Duke of Buckingham, in the Rehearsal, utilized the dramatic parody to travesty the plays of Dryden. Abraham Cowley, in the Mistress, also imitated Horace, and in his play Cutter of Coleman Street satirized the Puritans' affectation of superior sanctity and their affected style of conversation. Then came John Oldham and John Cleiveland, who both accepted Juvenal as their model. Cleiveland's antipathy towards Cromwell and the Scots was on a par with that of John Wilkes towards the latter, and was just as unreasonable, while the language he employed in his diatribes against both was so extravagant as to lose its sarcastic point in mere vulgar abuse. In like manner Oldham's Satires on the Jesuits afford as disgraceful a specimen of sectarian bigotry as the language contains. Only their pungency and wit render them readable. He displays Juvenal's violence of invective without his other redeeming qualities. All these, however, were entirely eclipsed in reputation by a writer who made the mock-epic the medium through which the bitterest onslaught on the anti-royalist party and its principles was delivered by one who, as a "king's man", was almost as extreme a bigot as those he satirized. The Hudibras of Samuel Butler, in its mingling of broad, almost extravagant, humour and sneering mockery has no parallel in our literature. Butler's characters are rather mere "humours" or qualities than real personages. There is no attempt made to observe the modesty of nature. Hudibras, therefore, is an example not so much of satire, though satire is present in rich measure also, as of burlesque. The poem is genuinely satirical only in those parts where the author steps in as the chorus, so to speak, and offers pithy moralizings on what is taking place in the action of the story. There is visible throughout the poem, however, a lack of restraint that causes him to overdo his part. Were Hudibras shorter, the satire would be more effective. Though in parts often as terse in style as Pope's best work, still the poem is too long, and it undoes the force of its attack on the Puritans by its exaggeration.

All these writers, even Butler himself, simply prepared the way for the man who is justly regarded as England's greatest satirist. The epoch of John Dryden has been fittingly styled the "Golden Age of English Satire".[13] To warrant this description, however, it must be held to include the writers of the reign of Queen Anne. The Elizabethan period was perhaps richer, numerically speaking, in representatives of certain types of satirical composition, but the true perfection, the efflorescence of the long-growing plant, was reached in that era which extended from the publication of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (Part I.) in 1681 to the issue of Pope's Dunciad in its final form in 1742. During these sixty years appeared the choicest of English satires, to wit, all Dryden's finest pieces, the Medal, MacFlecknoe, and Absalom and Achitophel, Swift's Tale of a Tub, and his Miscellanies—among which his best metrical satires appeared; all Defoe's work, too, as well as Steele's in the Tatler, and Addison's in the Spectator, Arbuthnot's History of John Bull, Churchill's Rosciad, and finally all Pope's poems, including the famous "Prologue" as well as the "Epilogue" to the Satires. It is curious to note how the satirical succession (if the phrase be permitted) is maintained uninterruptedly from Bishop Hall down to the death of Pope—nay, we may even say down to the age of Byron, to whose epoch one may trace something like a continuous tradition. Hall did not die until Dryden was twenty-seven years of age. Pope delighted to record that, when a boy of twelve years of age, he had met "Glorious John", though the succession could be passed on otherwise through Congreve, one of the most polished of English satirical writers, whom Dryden complimented as "one whom every muse and grace adorn", while to him also Pope dedicated his translation of the Iliad.[14] Bolingbroke, furthermore, was the friend and patron of Pope, while the witty St. John, in turn, was bound by ties of friendship to Mallet, who passed on the succession to Goldsmith, Sheridan, Ellis, Canning, Moore, and Byron. Thereafter satire begins to fall upon evil days, and the tradition cannot be so clearly traced.

But satire, during this "succession", did not remain absolutely the same. She changed her garb with her epoch. Thus the robust bludgeoning of Dryden and Shadwell, of Defoe, Steele, D'Urfey, and Tom Brown, gave place to the sardonic ridicule of Swift, the polished raillery of Arbuthnot, and the double-distilled essence of acidulous sarcasm present in the Satires of Pope. There is as marked a difference between the Drydenic and the Swiftian types of satire, between that of Cleiveland and that of Pope, as between the diverse schools known as the "Horatian" and the "Juvenalian". The cause of this, over and above the effect produced by prolonged study of these two classical models, was the overwhelming influence exercised on his age by the great French critic and satirist, Boileau. Difficult indeed it is for us at the present day to understand the European homage paid to Boileau. As Hannay says, "He was a dignified classic figure supposed to be the model of fine taste",[15] His word was law in the realm of criticism, and for many years he was known, not alone in France, but throughout a large portion of Europe, as "The Lawgiver of Parnassus". Prof. Dowden, referring to his critical authority, remarks:—

"The genius of Boileau was in a high degree intellectual, animated by ideas. As a moralist he is not searching or profound; he saw too little of the inner world of the heart, and knew too imperfectly its agitations. When, however, he deals with literature—and a just judgment in letters may almost be called an element in morals—all his penetration and power become apparent. To clear the ground for the new school of nature, truth, and reason was Boileau's first task. It was a task which called for courage and skill ... he struck at the follies and affectations of the world of letters, and he struck with force. It was a needful duty, and one most effectively performed.... Boileau's influence as a critic of literature can hardly be overrated; it has much in common with the influence of Pope on English literature, beneficial as regards his own time, somewhat restrictive and even tyrannical upon later generations."[16]

Owing to the predominance of French literary modes in England, this was the man whose influence, until nearly the close of last century, was paramount in England even when it was most bitterly disclaimed. Boileau's Satires were published during 1660-70, and he himself died in 1711; but, though dead, he still ruled for many a decade to come. This then was the literary censor to whom English satire of the post-Drydenic epochs owed so much. Neither Swift nor Pope was ashamed to confess his literary indebtedness to the great Frenchman; nay, Dryden himself has confessed his obligations to Boileau, and in his Discourse on Satire has quoted his authority as absolute. Before pointing out the differences between the Drydenic and post-Drydenic satire let us note very briefly the special characteristics of the former. Apart from the "matter" of his satire, Dryden laid this department of letters under a mighty obligation through the splendid service he rendered by the first successful application of the heroic couplet to satire. Of itself this was a great boon; but his good deeds as regards the "matter" of satiric composition have entirely obscured the benefit he conferred on its manner or technical form. Dryden's four great satires, Absalom and Achitophel, The Medal, MacFlecknoe, and the Hind and the Panther, each exemplify a distinct and important type of satire. The first named is the classical instance of the use of "historic parallels" as applied to the impeachment of the vices or abuses of any age. With matchless skill the story of Absalom is employed not merely to typify, but actually to represent, the designs of Monmouth and his Achitophel—Shaftesbury. The Medal reverts to the type of the classic satire of the Juvenalian order. It is slightly more rhetorical in style, and is partly devoted to a bitter invective against Shaftesbury, partly to an argument as to the unfitness of republican institutions for England, partly to a satiric address to the Whigs. The third of the great series, MacFlecknoe, is Dryden's masterpiece of satiric irony; a purely personal attack upon his rival, Shadwell, "Crowned King of Dulness, and in all the realms of nonsense absolute". Finally, the Hind and the Panther represents a new development of the "satiric fable". Dryden gave to British satire the impulse towards that final form of development which it received from the great satirists of the next century. There is little that appears in Swift, Addison, Arbuthnot, Pope, or even Byron, for which the way was not prepared by the genius of "Glorious John".

Of the famous group which adorned the reign of Queen Anne, Steele lives above all in his Isaac Bickerstaff Essays, the vehicle of admirably pithy and trenchant prose satire upon current political abuses. But, unfortunately for his own fame, his lot was to be associated with the greatest master of this form of composition that has appeared in literature, and the celebrity of the greater writer dimmed that of the lesser. Addison in his papers in the Tatler and the Spectator has brought what may be styled the Essay of Satiric Portraiture—in after days to be developed along other lines by Praed, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and R.L. Stevenson—to an unsurpassed standard of excellence. Such character studies as those of Sir Roger de Coverley, his household and friends, Will Honeycomb, Sir Andrew Freeport, Ned Softly, and others, possess an endless charm for us in the sobriety and moderation of the colours, the truth to nature, the delicate raillery, and the polished sarcasm of their satiric animadversions. Addison has studied his Horace to advantage, and to the great Roman's attributes has added other virtues distinctly English.

Arbuthnot, the celebrated physician of Queen Anne, takes rank among the best of English satirists by virtue of his famous work The History of John Bull. The special mode or type employed was the "allegorical political tale", of which the plot was the historic sequence of events in connection with the war with Louis XIV. of France. The object of the fictitious narrative was to throw ridicule on the Duke of Marlborough, and to excite among the people a feeling of disgust at the protracted hostilities. The nations involved are represented as tradesmen implicated in a lawsuit, the origin of the dispute being traced to their narrow and selfish views. The national characteristics of each individual are skilfully hit off, and the various events of the war, with the accompanying political intrigues, are symbolized by the stages in the progress of the suit, the tricks of the lawyers, and the devices of the principal attorney, Humphrey Hocus (Marlborough), to prolong the struggle. His Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus—a satire on the abuses of human learning,—in which the type of the fictitious biography is adopted, is exceedingly clever.

Finally, we reach the pair of satirists who, next to Dryden, must be regarded as the writers whose influence has been greatest in determining the character of British satire. Pope is the disciple of Dryden, and the best qualities of the Drydenic satire, in both form and matter, are reproduced in his works accompanied by special attributes of his own. Owing to the extravagant admiration professed by Byron for the author of the Rape of the Lock, and his repeated assurances of his literary indebtedness to him, we are apt to overlook the fact that the noble lord was under obligations to Dryden of a character quite as weighty as those he was so ready to acknowledge to Pope. But the latter, like Shakespeare, so improved all he borrowed that he has in some instances actually received credit for inventing what he only took from his great master. Pope was more of a refiner and polisher of telling satiric forms which Dryden had in the first instance employed, than an original inventor.

To mention all the types of satire affected by this marvellously acute and variously cultured poet would be a task of some difficulty. There are few amongst the principal forms which he has not essayed. In spirit he is more pungent and sarcastic, more acidulous and malicious, than the large-hearted and generous-souled Dryden. Into his satire, therefore, enters a greater amount of the element of personal dislike and contempt than in the case of the other. While satire is present more or less in nearly all Pope's verse, there are certain compositions where it may be said to be the outstanding quality. These are his Satires, among which should of course be included "The Prologue" and "The Epilogue" to them, as well as the Moral Essays, and finally the Dunciad. These comprise the best of his professed satires. His Satires and Epistles of Horace Imitated are just what they claim to be—an adaptation to English scenes, sympathies, sentiments, and surroundings of the Roman poet's characteristic style. Though Pope has quite as many points of affinity with Juvenal as with Horace, the adaptation and transference of the local atmosphere from Tiber to Thames is managed with extraordinary skill. The historic parallels, too, of the personages in the respective poems are made to accord and harmonize with the spirit of the time. The Satires are written from the point of view of opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, the great Whig minister. They display the concentrated essence of bitterness towards the ministerial policy. As Minto tersely puts it, we see gathered up in them the worst that was thought and said about the government and court party when men's minds were heated almost to the point of civil war.[17] In the "Prologue" and the "Epilogue" are contained some of the most finished satiric portraits drawn by Pope in any of his works. For caustic bitterness, sustained but polished irony, and merciless sarcastic malice, the characters of Atticus (Addison), Bufo, and Sporus have never been surpassed in the literature of political or social criticism.[18]

The Dunciad is an instance of the mock-epic utilized for the purposes of satire. Here Pope, as regards theme, possibly had the idea suggested to him by Dryden's MacFlecknoe, but undoubtedly the heroic couplet, which the latter had first applied to satire and used with such conspicuous success, was still further polished and improved by Pope until, as Mr. Courthope says, "it became in his hands a rapier of perfect flexibility and temper". From the time of Pope until that of Byron this stately measure has been regarded as the metre best suited par excellence for the display of satiric point and brilliancy, and as the medium best calculated to confer dignity on political satire. The Dunciad, while personal malice enters into it, must not be regarded as, properly speaking, a malicious satire. From a literary censor's point of view almost every lash Pope administered was richly deserved. In this respect Pope has all Horace's fairness and moderation, while at the same time he exhibits not a little of Juvenal's depth of conviction that desperate diseases demand radical remedies.[19]

By the side of Pope stands an impressive but a mournful figure, one of the most tragic in our literature, to think of whom, as Thackeray says, "is like thinking of the ruin of a great empire". As an all-round satirist Jonathan Swift has no superior save Dryden, and he only by virtue of his broader human sympathies. In the works of the great Dean we have many distinct forms of satire. Scarce anything he wrote, with the exception of his unfortunate History of the Last Four Years of Queen Anne, but is marked by satiric touches that relieve the tedium of even its dullest pages. He has utilized nearly all the recognized modes of satiric composition throughout the range of his long list of works. In the Tale of a Tub he employed the vehicle of the satiric tale to lash the Dissenters, the Papists, and even the Church of England; in a word, the cant of religion as well as the pretensions of letters and the shams of the world. In the Battle of the Books the parody or travesty of the Romances of Chivalry is used to ridicule the controversy raging between Temple, Wotton, Boyle, and Bentley, regarding the comparative merits of ancient and modern writers. In Gulliver's Travels the fictitious narrative or mock journal is impressed into the service, the method consisting in adopting an absurd supposition at the outset and then gravely deducing the logical effects which follow. These three form the trio of great prose satires which from the epoch of their publication until now have remained the wonder and the delight of successive generations. Their realism, humorous invention, ready wit, unsparing irony, and keen ridicule have exercised as potent an attraction as their gloomy misanthropy has repelled. Among minor satires are his scathing attacks in prose and verse on the war party as a ring of Whig stock-jobbers, such as Advice to the October Club, Public Spirit of the Whigs, &c., the Virtues of Sid Hamet, The Magician's Wand (directed against Godolphin); his Polite Conversations and Directions to Servants are savage attacks on the inanity of society small-talk and the greed of the menials of the period. But why prolong the list? From the Drapier's Letters, directed against a supposed fraudulent introduction of a copper currency known as "Wood's Halfpence", to his skit on The Furniture of a Woman's Mind, there were few topics current in his day, whether in politics, theology, economics, or social gossip, which he did not attack with the artillery of his wit and satire. Had he been less sardonic, had he possessed even a modicum of the bonhomie of his friend Arbuthnot, Swift's satire would have exercised even more potent an influence than it has been its fortune to achieve.

Pope died in 1744, Swift in 1745. During their last years there were signs that the literary modes of the epoch of Queen Anne, which had maintained their ascendency so long, were rapidly losing their hold on the popular mind. A new literary period was about to open wherein new literary ideals and new models would prevail. Satire, in common with literature as a whole, felt the influence of the transitional era. As we have seen, it concerned itself largely with ridiculing the follies and eccentricities of men of letters and foolish pretenders to the title; also in lashing social vices and abuses. The political enmity existing between the Jacobites and the Hanoverians continued to afford occasion for the exchange of party squibs and lampoons. The lengthened popularity of Gay's Beggars' Opera, a composition wherein a new mode was created, viz. the satiric opera (the prototype of the comic opera of later days), affords an index to the temper of the time. It was the age of England's lethargy.

After the defeat of Culloden, satire languished for a while, to revive again during the ministry of the Earl of Bute, when everything Scots came in for condemnation, and when Smollett and John Wilkes belaboured each other in the Briton and the North Briton, in pamphlet, pasquinade, and parody, until at last Lord Bute withdrew from the contest in disgust, and suspended the organ over which the author of Roderick Random presided. The satirical effusions of this epoch are almost entirely worthless, the only redeeming feature being the fact that Goldsmith was at that very moment engaged in throwing off those delicious morceaux of social satire contained in The Citizen of the World. Johnson, a few years before, had set the fashion for some time with his two satires written in free imitation of Juvenal—London, and The Vanity of Human Wishes. But from 1760 onward until the close of the century, when Ellis, Canning, and Frere opened what may be termed the modern epoch of satire, the influence paramount was that of Goldsmith. Fielding and Smollett were both satirists of powerful and original stamp, but they were so much else besides that their influence was lost in that of the genial author of the Deserted Village and Retaliation. His Vicar of Wakefield is a satire, upon sober, moderate principles, against the vice of the upper classes, as typified in the character of Mr. Thornhill, while the sketch of Beau Tibbs in The Citizen of the World is a racy picture of the out-at-elbows, would-be man of fashion, who seeks to pose as a social leader and arbiter of taste when he had better have been following a trade.

The next revival of the popularity of satire takes place towards the commencement of the third last decade of the eighteenth century, when, using the vehicle of the epistolary mode, an anonymous writer, whose identity is still in dispute, attacked the monarch, the government, and the judicature of the country, in a series of letters in which scathing invective, merciless ridicule, and lofty scorn were united to vigour and polish of style, as well as undeniable literary taste.

After the appearance of the Letters of Junius, which, perhaps, have owed the permanence of their popularity as much to the interest attaching to the mystery of their authorship as to their intrinsic merits, political satire may be said to have once more slumbered awhile. The impression produced by the studied malice of the Letters, and the epigrammatic suggestiveness which appeared to leave as much unsaid as was said, was enormous, yet, strangely enough, they were unable to check the growing influence of the school of satire whereof Goldsmith was the chief founder, and from which the fashionable jeux d'esprit, the sparkling persiflage of the society flâneurs of the nineteenth century are the legitimate descendants.[20] The decade 1768-78, therefore—that decade when the plays of Goldsmith and Sheridan were appearing,—witnessed the rise and the development of that genial, humorous raillery, in prose and verse, of personal foibles and of social abuses, of which the Retaliation and the Beau Tibbs papers are favourable examples. These were the distinguishing characteristics of our satiric literature during the closing decade of the eighteenth century until the horrors of the French Revolution, and the sympathy with it which was apparently being aroused in England, called political satire into requisition once more. Party feeling 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,[21] 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!

Destroyer of the human race,

Whose iron scourge and maddening hour

Exalt the bad, the good debase;

When first to scourge the sons of earth,

Thy sire his darling child designed,

Gallia received the monstrous birth,

Voltaire informed thine infant mind.

Well-chosen nurse, his sophist lore,

He bade thee many a year explore,

He marked thy progress firm though slow,

And statesmen, princes, leagued with their inveterate foe.

Scared at thy frown terrific, fly

The morals (antiquated brood),

Domestic virtue, social joy,

And faith that has for ages stood;

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."

Space only remains for a single word upon the satire of the nineteenth century. In this category would be included the Bæviad and the Mæviad 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,

Mean though I am, if it be worth my care.

Is it not given to Este's unmeaning dash,

To Topham's fustian, Reynold's flippant trash,

To Andrews' doggerel where three wits combine,

To Morton's catchword, Greathead's idiot line,

And Holcroft's Shug-lane cant and Merry's Moorfields Whine?"[22]

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.

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,

All giggle, blush, half pertness and half pout".

Beppo leads up to Don Juan, and it is hard to say which is the cleverer satire of the two. In both, the wit is so unforced and natural, the fun so sparkling, the banter and the persiflage so bright and scintillating, that they seem, as Sir Walter Scott said, to be the natural outflow from the fountain of humour. Byron's earliest satire, English Bards and Scots Reviewers, is a clever piece of work, but compared with the great trio above-named is a production of his nonage.

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 ever-popular Ingoldsby Legends, James and Horace Smith with the Rejected Addresses, Disraeli, Leigh Hunt, Tom Hood, and Landor had been winning 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 Fitz-Gerald'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 have the playful satiric wit, sparkling as of well-drawn Moet or Clicquot, of Mortimer Collins, H.S. Leigh, Arthur Locker and Frederick Locker-Lampson, W.S. Gilbert, Austin Dobson, Bret Harte, F. Anstey, Dr. Walter C. Smith, and many other graceful and delightful social satirists whose verses are household words amongst us. From week to week also there appear in the pages of that trenchant social censor, Punch, and the other high-class comico-satiric journals, many pieces of genuine and witty social satire. Every year the demand seems increasing, and yet the supply shows no signs of running dry.

Political satire, in its metrical form, has had from time to time a temporary revival of popularity in such compositions as James Russell Lowell's inimitable Biglow Papers, as well as in more recent volumes, of which Mr. Owen Seaman's verse is an example; while are not its prose forms legion in the pages of our periodical press? It has, however, now lost that vitriolic quality which made it so scorching and offensively personal. The man who wrote nowadays as did Dryden, and Junius, and Canning, or, in social satire, as did Peter Pindar and Byron, would be forthwith ostracized from literary fellowship.

But what more need be said of an introductory character to these selections that are now placed before the reader? English satire, though perhaps less in evidence to-day as a separate department in letters, is still as cardinal a quality as ever in the productions of our leading authors. If satires are no longer in fashion, satire is perennial as an attribute in literature, and we have every reason to cherish it and welcome it as warmly as of old. The novels of Thackeray, as I have already said, contain some of the most delicately incisive shafts of satire that have been barbed by any writer of the present century. "George Eliot", also, though in a less degree, has shown herself a satirist of much power and pungency, while others of our latter-day novelists manifest themselves as possessed of a faculty of satire both virile and trenchant. It is one of the indispensable qualities of a great writer's style, because its quarry is one of the most widely diffused of existing things on the face of the globe. There is no age without its folly, no epoch without its faults. So long, therefore, as man and his works are imperfect, so long shall there be existent among us abuses, social, political, professional, and ecclesiastical, and so long, too, shall it be the province and the privilege of those who feel themselves called upon to play the difficult part of censor morum, to prick the bubbles of falsehood, vanity, and vice with the shafts of ridicule and raillery.

[1] The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century.
[2] Cf. Lenient, History of French Satire.
[3] Thomson's Ante-Augustan Latin Poetry.
[4] Cf. Mackail; Paten, Études sur la Poésie latine.
[5] See Skeat's "Langland" in Encyclop. Brit.
[6] See Arber's Reprints for 1868.
[7] Arber's Select Reprints.
[8] Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury.
[9] This, of course, was Marston.
[10] From the Fifth Satire in The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image and Certain Satyres, by John Marston. 1598.
[11] Pasquil's Madcappe: Thrown at the Corruption of these Times—1626. Breton, to be read at all, ought to be studied in the two noble volumes edited by Dr. A.B. Grosart. From his edition I quote.
[12] English Literature, by Prof. Craik. Hannay's Satires and Satirists.
[13] Life of Dryden, by Sir Walter Scott. Saintsbury's Life of Dryden.
[14] Thackeray's English Humorists. Hannay's Satires and Satirists.
[15] Satire and Satirists, by James Hannay. Lecture III.
[16] Dowden's French Literature.
[17] Minto's Characteristics of English Poets.
[18] Cf. Saintsbury's Life of Dryden.
[19] Cf. Gosse, Eighteenth Century Literature.
[20] Thackeray's English Humorists.
[21] The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin—Carisbrooke Library, 1890.
[22] The Bæviad and the Mæviad, by W. Gifford, Esq., 1800.]

ENGLISH SATIRES.

WILLIAM LANGLAND.

(1330?-1400?)

[I.] PILGRIMAGE IN SEARCH OF DO-WELL.

This opening satire constitutes the whole of the Eighth Passus of Piers Plowman's Vision and the First of Do-Wel. The "Dreamer" here sets off on a new pilgrimage in search of a person who has not appeared in the poem before—Do-Well. The following is the argument of the Passus.—"All Piers Plowman's inquiries after Do-Well are fruitless. Even the friars to whom he addresses himself give but a confused account; and weary with wandering about, the dreamer is again overtaken by slumber. Thought now appears to him, and recommends him to Wit, who describes to him the residence of Do-Well, Do-Bet, Do-Best, and enumerates their companions and attendants."

Thus y-robed in russet · romed I aboute

Al in a somer seson · for to seke Do-wel;

And frayned[23] full ofte · of folk that I mette

If any wight wiste · wher Do-wel was at inne;

And what man he myghte be · of many man I asked.

Was nevere wight, as I wente · that me wisse kouthe[24]

Where this leode lenged,[25] · lasse ne moore.[26]

Til it bifel on a Friday · two freres I mette

Maisters of the Menours[27] · men of grete witte.

I hailsed them hendely,[28] · as I hadde y-lerned.

And preède them par charité, · er thei passed ferther,

If thei knew any contree · or costes as thei wente,

"Where that Do-wel dwelleth · dooth me to witene".

For thei be men of this moolde · that moost wide walken,

And knowen contrees and courtes, · and many kynnes places,

Bothe princes paleises · and povere mennes cotes,[29]

And Do-wel and Do-yvele · where thei dwelle bothe.

"Amonges us" quod the Menours, · "that man is dwellynge,

And evere hath as I hope, · and evere shal herafter."

"Contra", quod I as a clerc, · and comsed to disputen,

And seide hem soothly, · "Septies in die cadit justus".

"Sevene sithes,[30] seeth the book · synneth the rightfulle;

And who so synneth," I seide, · "dooth yvele, as me thynketh;

And Do-wel and Do-yvele · mowe noght dwelle togideres.

Ergo he nis noght alway · among you freres:

He is outher while ellis where · to wisse the peple."

"I shal seye thee, my sone" · seide the frere thanne,

"How seven sithes the sadde man, · on a day synneth;

By a forbisne"[31] quod the frere, · "I shal thee faire showe.

Lat brynge a man in a boot, · amydde the brode watre;

The wynd and the water · and the boot waggyng,

Maketh the man many a tyme · to falle and to stonde;

For stonde he never so stif, · he stumbleth if he meve,

Ac yet is he saaf and sound, · and so hym bihoveth;

For if he ne arise the rather, · and raughte to the steere,

The wynd wolde with the water · the boot over throwe;

And thanne were his lif lost, · thorough lackesse of hymselve[32].

And thus it falleth," quod the frere, · "by folk here on erthe;

The water is likned to the world · that wanyeth and wexeth;

The goodes of this grounde arn like · to the grete wawes,

That as wyndes and wedres · walketh aboute;

The boot is likned to oure body · that brotel[33] is of kynde,

That thorough the fend and the flesshe · and the frele worlde

Synneth the sadde man · a day seven sithes.

Ac[34] dedly synne doth he noght, · for Do-wel hym kepeth;

And that is Charité the champion, · chief help ayein Synne;

For he strengtheth men to stonde, · and steereth mannes soule,

And though the body bowe · as boot dooth in the watre,

Ay is thi soul saaf, · but if thou wole thiselve

Do a deedly synne, · and drenche so thi soule,

God wole suffre wel thi sleuthe[35] · if thiself liketh.

For he yaf thee a yeres-gyve,[36] · to yeme[37] wel thiselve,

And that is wit and free-wil, · to every wight a porcion,

To fleynge foweles, · to fisshes and to beastes:

Ac man hath moost thereof, · and moost is to blame,

But if he werch wel therwith, · as Do-wel hym techeth."

"I have no kynde knowyng,"[38] quod I, · "to conceyven alle your wordes:

Ac if I may lyve and loke, · I shall go lerne bettre."

"I bikenne thee Christ,"[39] quod he, · "that on cros deyde!"

And I seide "the same · save you fro myschaunce,

And gyve you grace on this grounde · goode men to worthe!"[40]

And thus I wente wide wher · walkyng myn one,[41]

By a wilderness, · and by a wodes side:

Blisse of the briddes.[42] · Broughte me a-slepe,

And under a lynde upon a launde[43] · lened I a stounde[44],

To lythe the layes · the lovely foweles made,

Murthe of hire mowthes · made me ther to slepe;

The merveillouseste metels[45] · mette me[46] thanne

That ever dremed wight · in worlde, as I wene.

A muche man, as me thoughte · and like to myselve,

Cam and called me · by my kynde name.

"What artow," quod I tho, · "that thow my name knowest."

"That woost wel," quod he, · "and no wight bettre."

"Woot I what thou art?" · "Thought," seide he thanne;

"I have sued[47] thee this seven yeer, · seye[48] thou me no rather."[49]

"Artow Thought," quod I thoo, · "thow koudest me wisse,

Where that Do-wel dwelleth, · and do me that to knowe."

"Do-wel and Do-bet, · and Do-best the thridde," quod he,

"Arn thre fair vertues, · and ben noght fer to fynde.

Who so is trewe of his tunge, · and of his two handes,

And thorugh his labour or thorugh his land, · his liflode wynneth,[50]

And is trusty of his tailende, · taketh but his owene,

And is noght dronklewe[51] ne dedeynous,[52] · Do-wel hym folweth.

Do-bet dooth ryght thus; · ac he dooth much more;

He is as lowe as a lomb, · and lovelich of speche,

And helpeth alle men · after that hem nedeth.

The bagges and the bigirdles, · he hath to-broke hem alle

That the Erl Avarous · heeld and hise heires.

And thus with Mammonaes moneie · he hath maad hym frendes,

And is ronne to religion, · and hath rendred the Bible,

And precheth to the peple · Seint Poules wordes:

Libenter suffertis insipientes, cum sitis ipsi sapientes:

'And suffreth the unwise' · with you for to libbe

And with glad will dooth hem good · and so God you hoteth.

Do-best is above bothe, · and bereth a bisshopes crosse,

Is hoked on that oon ende · to halie men fro helle;

A pik is on that potente,[53] · to putte a-down the wikked

That waiten any wikkednesse · Do-wel to tene.[54]

And Do-wel and Do-bet · amonges hem han ordeyned,

To crowne oon to be kyng · to rulen hem bothe;

That if Do-wel or Do-bet · dide ayein Do-best,

Thanne shal the kyng come · and casten hem in irens,

And but if Do-best bede[55] for hem, · thei to be there for evere.

Thus Do-wel and Do-bet, · and Do-best the thridde,

Crouned oon to the kyng · to kepen hem alle,

And to rule the reme · by hire thre wittes,

And noon oother wise, · but as thei thre assented."

I thonked Thoght tho, · that he me thus taughte.

"Ac yet savoreth me noght thi seying. · I coveit to lerne

How Do-wel, Do-bet, and Do-best · doon among the peple."

"But Wit konne wisse thee," quod Thoght, · "Where tho thre dwelle,

Ellis woot I noon that kan · that now is alyve."

Thoght and I thus · thre daies we yeden,[56]

Disputyng upon Do-wel · day after oother;

And er we were war, · with Wit gonne we mete.[57]

He was long and lene, · lik to noon other;

Was no pride on his apparaille · ne poverte neither;

Sad of his semblaunt, · and of softe chere,

I dorste meve no matere · to maken hym to jangle,

But as I bad Thoght thoo · be mene bitwene,

And pute forth som purpos · to preven his wittes,

What was Do-wel fro Do-bet, · and Do-best from hem bothe.

Thanne Thoght in that tyme · seide these wordes:

"Where Do-wel, Do-bet, · and Do-best ben in londe,

Here is Wil wolde wite, · if Wit koude teche him;

And whether he be man or woman · this man fayn wolde aspie,

And werchen[58] as thei thre wolde, · thus is his entente"

[23] questioned.
[24] could tell me.
[25] Where this man dwelt.
[26] mean or gentle.
[27] of the Minorite order.
[28] I saluted them courteously.
[29] and poor men's cots.
[30] times.
[31] example.
[32] through his own negligence.
[33] weak, unstable.
[34] But.
[35] sloth.
[36] a year's-gift.
[37] to rule, guide, govern.
[38] mother-wit.
[39] I commit thee to Christ.
[40] to become.
[41] by myself.
[42] The charm of the birds.
[43] under a linden-tree on a plain.
[44] a short time.
[45] a most wonderful dream.
[46] I dreamed.
[47] followed.
[48] sawest.
[49] sooner.
[50] gains his livelihood.
[51] drunken.
[52] disdainful.
[53] club staff.
[54] to injure.
[55] pray.
[56] journeyed.
[57] we met Wit.
[58] work.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

(1340?-1400.)

PORTRAITS FROM THE CANTERBURY TALES.

II. AND III. THE MONK AND THE FRIAR.

The following complete portraits of two of the characters in Chaucer's matchless picture of the Canterbury Pilgrims are taken from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

[II.]

A monk ther was, a fayre for the maistríe,[59]

An outrider, that loved venerie;[60]

A manly man, to ben an abbot able.

Ful many a deintè[61] hors hadde he in stable:

And whan he rode, men might his bridel here

Gingeling in a whistling wind as clere,

And eke as loude, as doth the chapell belle,

Ther as this lord was keeper of the celle.

The reule of Seint Maure and of Seint Beneit,

Because that it was olde and somdele streit,

This ilkè monk lette oldè thingès pace,[62]

And held after the newè world the space.

He yaf not of the text a pulled hen,[63]

That saith, that hunters ben not holy men;

Ne that a monk, whan he is reckèles,[64]

Is like to a fish that is waterles;

That is to say, a monk out of his cloistre.

This ilkè text held he not worth an oistre.

And I say his opinion was good.

What? shulde he studie, and make himselven wood[65]

Upon a book in cloistre alway to pore,

Or swinken[66] with his hondès, and laboùre,

As Austin bit?[67] how shal the world be served?

Let Austin have his swink to him reserved.

Therfore he was a prickasoure[68] a right:

Greihoundes he hadde as swift as foul of flight:

Of pricking[69] and of hunting for the hare

Was all his lust, for no cost wolde he spare.

I saw his sleves purfiled[70] at the hond

With gris,[71] and that the finest of the lond.

And for to fasten his hood under his chinne,

He hadde of gold ywrought a curious pinne;

A love-knotte in the greter end ther was.

His hed was balled,[72] and shone as any glas,

And eke his face, as it hadde ben anoint.

He was a lord ful fat and in good point.

His eyen stepe,[73] and rolling in his hed,

That stemed as a forneis of led.[74]

His bootès souple, his hors in gret estat:

Now certainly he was a fayre prelát.

He was not pale as a forpined[75] gost.

A fat swan loved he best of any rost,

His palfrey was as broune as is a bery.

[III.]

A Frere[76] ther was, a wanton and a mery,

A Limitour,[77] a ful solempnè man.

In all the ordres foure is none that can

So muche of daliance and fayre langáge.

He hadde ymade ful many a mariáge

Of yongè wimmen, at his owen cost.

Until[78] his ordre he was a noble post.

Ful wel beloved, and familier was he

With frankeleins[79] over all in his contrèe,

And eke with worthy wimmen of the toun:

For he had power of confessioun,

As saide himselfè, more than a curát,

For of his ordre he was a licenciat.

Ful swetely herde he confession,

And plesant was his absolution.

He was an esy man to give penaunce,

Ther as he wiste[80] to han[81] a good pitaunce:

For unto a poure[82] ordre for to give

Is signè that a man is wel yshrive.[83]

For if he gaf, he dorstè make avaunt,[84]

He wistè that a man was repentaunt.

For many a man so hard is of his herte,

He may not wepe although him sorè smerte.

Therfore in stede of weping and praieres,

Men mote[85] give silver to the pourè freres.

His tippet was ay farsed[86] ful of knives,

And pinnès, for to given fayrè wives.

And certainly he hadde a mery note.

Wel coude he singe and plaien on a rote.[87]

Of yeddinges[88] he bar utterly the pris.

His nekke was white as the flour de lis.

Therto he strong was as a champioun,

And knew wel the tavérnes in every toun,

And every hosteler and tappestere,

Better than a lazar or a beggestere,

For unto swiche a worthy man as he

Accordeth not, as by his facultè,

To haven[89] with sike lazars acquaintànce.

It is not honest, it may not avànce,[90]

As for to delen with no swiche pouràille,[91]

But all with riche, and sellers of vitàille.

And over all, ther as profit shuld arise,

Curteis he was, and lowly of servise.

Ther nas no man no wher so vertuous.

He was the beste begger in his hous:

[And gave a certain fermè[92] for the grant,

Non of his bretheren came in his haunt.]

For though a widewe haddè but a shoo,

(So plesant was his in principio)

Yet wold he have a ferthing or[93] he went.

His pourchas was wel better than his rent.[94]

And rage he coude as it hadde ben a whelp,

In lovèdayes,[95] ther coude he mochel help.

For ther he was nat like a cloisterere,

With thredbare cope, as is a poure scolere,

But he was like a maister or a pope.

Of double worsted was his semicope,[96]

That round was as a belle out of the presse.

Somwhat he lisped, for his wantonnesse,

To make his English swete upon his tonge;

And in his harping, whan that he hadde songe,

His eyen twinkeled in his hed aright,

As don the sterrès in a frosty night.

This worthy limitour was cleped Hubèrd.

[59] a fair one for the mastership.
[60] hunting.
[61] dainty.
[62] pass.
[63] did not care a plucked hen for the text.
[64] careless; removed from the restraints of his order and vows.
[65] mad.
[66] toil.
[67] biddeth.
[68] hard rider.
[69] spurring.
[70] wrought on the edge.
[71] a fine kind of fur.
[72] bald.
[73] bright.
[74] Shone like a furnace under a cauldron.
[75] tormented.
[76] Friar.
[77] A friar with a licence to beg within certain limits.
[78] Unto.
[79] country gentlemen.
[80] knew.
[81] have.
[82] poor.
[83] shriven.
[84] durst make a boast.
[85] must.
[86] stuffed.
[87] a stringed instrument.
[88] story telling.
[89] have.
[90] profit.
[91] poor people.
[92] farm. This couplet only appears in the Hengwrt MS. As Mr. Pollard says, it is probably Chaucer's, but may have been omitted by him as it interrupts the sentence. Cf. Globe Chaucer.
[93] ere.
[94] The proceeds of his begging exceeded his fixed income.
[95] Days appointed for the amicable settlement of differences.
[96] half cloak.

JOHN LYDGATE.

(1373?-1460.)

[IV.] THE LONDON LACKPENNY.

This is an admirable picture of London life early in the fifteenth century. The poem first appeared among Lydgate's fugitive pieces, and has been preserved in the Harleian MSS.

To London once my steps I bent,

Where truth in no wise should be faint;

To Westminster-ward I forthwith went,

To a man of Law to make complaint.

I said, "For Mary's love, that holy saint,

Pity the poor that would proceed!"[97]

But for lack of money, I could not speed.

And, as I thrust the press among,

By froward chance my hood was gone;

Yet for all that I stayed not long

Till to the King's Bench I was come.

Before the Judge I kneeled anon

And prayed him for God's sake take heed.

But for lack of money, I might not speed.

Beneath them sat clerks a great rout,[98]

Which fast did write by one assent;

There stood up one and cried about

"Richard, Robert, and John of Kent!"

I wist not well what this man meant,

He cried so thickly there indeed.

But he that lacked money might not speed.

To the Common Pleas I yode tho,[99]

There sat one with a silken hood:

I 'gan him reverence for to do,

And told my case as well as I could;

How my goods were defrauded me by falsehood;

I got not a mum of his mouth for my meed,[100]

And for lack of money I might not speed.

Unto the Rolls I gat me from thence,

Before the clerks of the Chancery;

Where many I found earning of pence;

But none at all once regarded me.

I gave them my plaint upon my knee;

They liked it well when they had it read;

But, lacking money, I could not be sped.

In Westminster Hall I found out one,

Which went in a long gown of ray;[101]

I crouched and knelt before him; anon,

For Mary's love, for help I him pray.

"I wot not what thou mean'st", 'gan he say;

To get me thence he did me bid,

For lack of money I could not speed.

Within this Hall, neither rich nor yet poor

Would do for me aught although I should die;

Which seing, I gat me out of the door;

Where Flemings began on me for to cry,—

"Master, what will you copen[102] or buy?

Fine felt hats, or spectacles to read?

Lay down your silver, and here you may speed."

To Westminster Gate I presently went,

When the sun was at high prime;

Cooks to me they took good intent,[103]

And proffered me bread, with ale and wine,

Ribs of beef, both fat and full fine;

A fairé cloth they 'gan for to spread,

But, wanting money, I might not then speed.

Then unto London I did me hie,

Of all the land it beareth the prize;

"Hot peascodes!" one began to cry;

"Strawberries ripe!" and "Cherries in the rise!"[104]

One bade me come near and buy some spice;

Pepper and saffrone they 'gan me bede;[105]

But, for lack of money, I might not speed.

Then to the Cheap I 'gan me drawn,[106]

Where much people I saw for to stand;

One offered me velvet, silk, and lawn;

Another he taketh me by the hand,

"Here is Paris thread, the finest in the land";

I never was used to such things indeed;

And, wanting money, I might not speed.

Then went I forth by London stone,

Throughout all the Canwick Street;

Drapers much cloth me offered anon;

Then comes me one cried, "Hot sheep's feet!"

One cried, "Mackarel!" "Rushes green!" another 'gan greet;[107]

One bade me buy a hood to cover my head;

But for want of money I might not be sped.

Then I hied me into East Cheap:

One cries "Ribs of beef and many a pie!"

Pewter pots they clattered on a heap;

There was harpé, pipe, and minstrelsy:

"Yea, by cock!" "Nay, by cock!" some began cry;

Some sung of "Jenkin and Julian" for their meed;

But, for lack of money, I might not speed.

Then into Cornhill anon I yode

Where there was much stolen gear among;

I saw where hung my owné hood,

That I had lost among the throng:

To buy my own hood I thought it wrong;

I knew it as well as I did my creed;

But, for lack of money, I could not speed.

The Taverner took me by the sleeve;

"Sir," saith he, "will you our wine assay?"

I answered, "That cannot much me grieve;

A penny can do no more than it may."

I drank a pint, and for it did pay;

Yet, sore a-hungered from thence I yede;

And, wanting money, I could not speed.

Then hied I me to Billings-gate,

And one cried, "Ho! go we hence!"

I prayed a bargeman, for God's sake,

That he would spare me my expense.

"Thou 'scap'st not here," quoth he, "under twopence;

I list not yet bestow any almsdeed."

Thus, lacking money, I could not speed.

Then I conveyed me into Kent;

For of the law would I meddle no more.

Because no man to me took intent,

I dight[108] me to do as I did before.

Now Jesus that in Bethlehem was bore[109],

Save London and send true lawyers their meed!

For whoso wants money with them shall not speed.

[97] go to law.
[98] crowd.
[99] went then.
[100] reward.
[101] striped stuff.
[102] exchange.
[103] notice.
[104] on the bough.
[105] offer.
[106] approach.
[107] call.
[108] set.
[109] born.

WILLIAM DUNBAR.

(1460-1520?)

[V.] THE DANCE OF THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS.

One of Dunbar's most telling satires, as well as one of the most powerful in the language.

I.

Of Februar the fiftene nicht

Full lang before the dayis licht

I lay intill a trance

And then I saw baith Heaven and Hell

Me thocht, amang the fiendis fell

Mahoun gart cry ane dance

Of shrews that were never shriven,[110]

Agains the feast of Fastern's even,[111]

To mak their observance.

He bad gallants gae graith a gyis,[112]

And cast up gamountis[113] in the skies,

As varlets do in France.

II.

Helie harlots on hawtane wise,[114]

Come in with mony sundry guise,

But yet leuch never Mahoun,

While priests come in with bare shaven necks;

Then all the fiends leuch, and made gecks,

Black-Belly and Bawsy Brown.[115]

III.

Let see, quoth he, now wha begins:

With that the foul Seven Deadly Sins

Begoud to leap at anis.

And first of all in Dance was Pride,

With hair wyld back, and bonnet on side,

Like to make vaistie wanis;[116]

And round about him, as a wheel,

Hang all in rumples to the heel

His kethat for the nanis:[117]

Mony proud trumpour[118] with him trippit;

Through scalding fire, aye as they skippit

They girned with hideous granis.[119]

IV.

Then Ire came in with sturt and strife;

His hand was aye upon his knife,

He brandished like a beir:[120]

Boasters, braggars, and bargainers,[121]

After him passit in to pairs,

All bodin in feir of weir;[122]

In jacks, and scryppis, and bonnets of steel,

Their legs were chainit to the heel,[123]

Frawart was their affeir:[124]

Some upon other with brands beft,[125]

Some jaggit others to the heft,

With knives that sharp could shear.

V.

Next in the Dance followit Envy,

Filled full of feud and felony,

Hid malice and despite:

For privy hatred that traitor tremlit;

Him followit mony freik dissemlit,[126]

With fenyeit wordis quhyte:[127]

And flatterers in to men's faces;

And backbiters in secret places,

To lie that had delight;

And rownaris of false lesings,[128]

Alace! that courts of noble kings

Of them can never be quit.

VI.

Next him in Dance came Covetyce,

Root of all evil, and ground of vice,

That never could be content:

Catives, wretches, and ockeraris,[129]

Hudpikes,[130] hoarders, gatheraris,

All with that warlock went:

Out of their throats they shot on other

Het, molten gold, me thocht, a futher[131]

As fire-flaucht maist fervent;

Aye as they toomit them of shot,

Fiends filled them new up to the throat

With gold of all kind prent.[132]

VII.

Syne Sweirness, at the second bidding,

Came like a sow out of a midding,

Full sleepy was his grunyie:[133]

Mony swear bumbard belly huddroun,[134]

Mony slut, daw, and sleepy duddroun,

Him servit aye with sonnyie;[135]

He drew them furth intill a chain,

And Belial with a bridle rein

Ever lashed them on the lunyie:[136]

In Daunce they were so slaw of feet,

They gave them in the fire a heat,

And made them quicker of cunyie.[137]

VIII.

Then Lechery, that laithly corpse,

Came berand like ane baggit horse,[138]

And Idleness did him lead;

There was with him ane ugly sort,

And mony stinking foul tramort,[139]

That had in sin been dead:

When they were enterit in the Dance,

They were full strange of countenance,

Like torches burning red.

IX.

Then the foul monster, Gluttony,

Of wame insatiable and greedy,

To Dance he did him dress:

Him followit mony foul drunkart,

With can and collop, cup and quart,

In surfit and excess;

Full mony a waistless wally-drag,

With wames unweildable, did furth wag,

In creesh[140] that did incress:

Drink! aye they cried, with mony a gaip,

The fiends gave them het lead to laip,

Their leveray was na less.[141]

X.

Nae minstrels played to them but doubt,[142]

For gleemen there were halden out,

Be day, and eke by nicht;

Except a minstrel that slew a man,

So to his heritage he wan,

And enterit by brieve of richt.[143]

Then cried Mahoun for a Hieland Padyane:[144]

Syne ran a fiend to fetch Makfadyane,

Far northwast in a neuck;

Be he the coronach[145] had done shout,

Ersche men so gatherit him about,

In hell great room they took:

Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter,

Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter,

And roup like raven and rook.[146]

The Devil sae deaved[147] was with their yell;

That in the deepest pot of hell

He smorit[148] them with smoke!

[110] Mahoun, or the devil, proclaimed a dance of sinners that had not received absolution.
[111] The evening before Lent, usually a festival at the Scottish court.
[112] go prepare a show in character.
[113] gambols.
[114] Holy harlots (hypocrites), in a haughty manner. The term harlot was applied indiscriminately to both sexes.
[115] Names of spirits, like Robin Goodfellow in England, and Brownie in Scotland.
[116] Pride, with hair artfully put back, and bonnet on side: "vaistie wanis" is now unintelligible; some interpret the phrase as meaning "wasteful wants", but this seems improbable, considering the locality or scene of the poem.
[117] His cassock for the nonce or occasion.
[118] a cheat or impostor.
[119] groans.
[120] bear.
[121] Boasters, braggarts, and bullies.
[122] Arrayed in the accoutrements of war.
[123] In coats of armour, and covered with iron network to the heel.
[124] Wild was their aspect.
[125] brands beat.
[126] many strong dissemblers.
[127] With feigned words fair or white.
[128] spreaders of false reports.
[129] usurers.
[130] Misers.
[131] a great quantity.
[132] gold of every coinage.
[133] his grunt.
[134] Many a lazy glutton.
[135] served with care.
[136] loins.
[137] quicker of apprehension.
[138] neighing like an entire horse.
[139] corpse.
[140] grease.
[141] Their reward, or their desire not diminished.
[142] No minstrels without doubt—a compliment to the poetical profession: there were no gleemen or minstrels in the infernal regions.
[143] letter of right.
[144] Pageant.
[145] By the time he had done shouting the coronach or cry of help, the Highlanders speaking Erse or Gaelic gathered about him.
[146] croaked like ravens and rooks.
[147] deafened.
[148] smothered.

SIR DAVID LYNDSAY.

(1490-1555.)

[VI.] SATIRE ON THE SYDE TAILLIS—ANE SUPPLICATIOUN
DIRECTIT TO THE KINGIS GRACE—1538.

The specimen of Lyndsay cited below—this satire on long trains—is by no means the most favourable that could be desired, but it is the only one that lent itself readily to quotation. The archaic spelling is slightly modernized.

Schir! though your Grace has put gret order

Baith in the Hieland and the Border

Yet mak I supplicatioun

Till have some reformatioun

Of ane small falt, whilk is nocht treason

Though it be contrarie to reason.

Because the matter been so vile,

It may nocht have ane ornate style;

Wherefore I pray your Excellence

To hear me with great patience:

Of stinking weedis maculate

No man nay mak ane rose-chaplet.

Sovereign, I mean of thir syde tails,

Whilk through the dust and dubis trails

Three quarters lang behind their heels,

Express again' all commonweals.

Though bishops, in their pontificals,

Have men for to bear up their tails,

For dignity of their office;

Richt so ane queen or ane empress;

Howbeit they use sic gravity,

Conformand to their majesty,

Though their robe-royals be upborne,

I think it is ane very scorn,

That every lady of the land

Should have her tail so syde trailand;

Howbeit they been of high estate,

The queen they should nocht counterfeit.

Wherever they may go it may be seen

How kirk and causay they soop[149] clean.

The images into the kirk

May think of their syde taillis irk;[150]

For when the weather been maist fair,

The dust flies highest in the air,

And all their faces does begarie.

Gif they could speak, they wald them warie...[151]

But I have maist into despite

Poor claggocks[152] clad in raploch-white,

Whilk has scant twa merks for their fees,

Will have twa ells beneath their knees.

Kittock that cleckit[153] was yestreen,

The morn, will counterfeit the queen:

And Moorland Meg, that milked the yowes,

Claggit with clay aboon the hows,[154]

In barn nor byre she will not bide,

Without her kirtle tail be syde.

In burghs, wanton burgess wives

Wha may have sydest tailis strives,

Weel borderéd with velvet fine,

But followand them it is ane pyne:

In summer, when the streetis dries,

They raise the dust aboon the skies;

Nane may gae near them at their ease,

Without they cover mouth and neese...

I think maist pane after ane rain,

To see them tuckit up again;

Then when they step furth through the street,

Their fauldings flaps about their feet;

They waste mair claith, within few years,

Nor wald cleid fifty score of freirs...

Of tails I will no more indite,

For dread some duddron[155] me despite:

Notwithstanding, I will conclude,

That of syde tails can come nae gude,

Sider nor may their ankles hide,

The remanent proceeds of pride,

And pride proceeds of the devil,

Thus alway they proceed of evil.

Ane other fault, sir, may be seen—

They hide their face all but the een;

When gentlemen bid them gude-day,

Without reverence they slide away...

Without their faults be soon amended,

My flyting,[156] sir, shall never be ended;

But wald your Grace my counsel tak,

Ane proclamation ye should mak,

Baith through the land and burrowstouns,[157]

To shaw their face and cut their gowns.

Women will say this is nae bourds,[158]

To write sic vile and filthy words.

But wald they clenge[159] their filthy tails

Whilk over the mires and middens trails,

Then should my writing clengit be;

None other mends they get of me.

[149] sweep.
[150] be annoyed.
[151] curse or cry out.
[152] draggle-tails.
[153] hatched.
[154] houghs.
[155] slut.
[156] scolding, brawling.
[157] burgh towns.
[158] scoffs.
[159] cleanse.

BISHOP JOSEPH HALL.

(1574-1656.)

[VII.] ON SIMONY.

This satire levels a rebuke at the Simoniacal traffic in livings, then openly practised by public advertisement affixed to the door of St. Paul's. "Si Quis" (if anyone) was the first word of these advertisements. Dekker, in the Gull's Hornbook, speaks of the "Siquis door of Paules", and in Wroth's Epigrams (1620) we read, "A Merry Greek set up a Siquis late". This satire forms the Fifth of the Second Book of the Virgidemiarum.

Saw'st thou ever Siquis patcht on Pauls Church door

To seek some vacant vicarage before?

Who wants a churchman that can service say,

Read fast and fair his monthly homily?

And wed and bury and make Christen-souls?[160]

Come to the left-side alley of St. Paules.

Thou servile fool, why could'st thou not repair

To buy a benefice at Steeple-Fair?

There moughtest thou, for but a slendid price,

Advowson thee with some fat benefice:

Or if thee list not wait for dead mens shoon,

Nor pray each morn the incumbents days were doone:

A thousand patrons thither ready bring,

Their new-fall'n[161] churches, to the chaffering;

Stake three years stipend: no man asketh more.

Go, take possession of the Church porch door,

And ring thy bells; luck stroken in thy fist

The parsonage is thine, or ere thou wist.

Saint Fool's of Gotam[162] mought thy parish be

For this thy base and servile Simony.

[160] baptize.
[161] newly fallen in, through the death of the incumbent.
[162] Referring to Andrew Borde's book, The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham.

[VIII.] THE DOMESTIC TUTOR'S POSITION.

This satire forms the Sixth of Book II. of the Virgidemiarum, and is regarded as one of Bishop Hall's best. See the Return from Parnassus and Parrot's Springes for Woodcocks (1613) for analogous references to those occurring in this piece.

A gentle squire would gladly entertain

Into his house some trencher chapelain;

Some willing man that might instruct his sons,

And that would stand to good conditions.

First, that he lie upon the truckle-bed

Whiles his young master lieth o'er his head.

Second that he do on no default

Ever presume to sit above the salt.

Third that he never change his trencher twice.

Fourth that he use all common courtesies:

Sit bare at meals and one half rise and wait.

Last, that he never his young master beat,

But he must ask his mother to define,

How many jerks she would his breech should line.

All these observed, he could contented be,

To give five marks and winter livery.

[IX.] THE IMPECUNIOUS FOP.

This satire constitutes Satire Seven of Book III. The phrase of dining with Duke Humphrey, which is still occasionally heard, originated in the following manner:—In the body of old St. Paul's was a huge and conspicuous monument of Sir John Beauchamp, buried in 1358, son of Guy, and brother of Thomas, Earl of Warwick. This by vulgar mistake was called the tomb of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who was really buried at St. Alban's. The middle aisle of St. Paul's was therefore called "The Duke's Gallery". In Dekker's Dead Terme we have the phrase used and a full explanation of it given; also in Sam Speed's Legend of His Grace Humphrey, Duke of St. Paul's Cathedral Walk (1674).

See'st thou how gaily my young master goes,

Vaunting himself upon his rising toes;

And pranks his hand upon his dagger's side;

And picks his glutted teeth since late noon-tide?

'Tis Ruffio: Trow'st thou where he dined to-day?

In sooth I saw him sit with Duke Humphrey.

Many good welcomes, and much gratis cheer,

Keeps he for every straggling cavalier;

An open house, haunted with great resort;

Long service mixt with musical disport.

Many fair younker with a feathered crest,

Chooses much rather be his shot-free guest,

To fare so freely with so little cost,

Than stake his twelvepence to a meaner host.

Hadst thou not told me, I should surely say

He touched no meat of all this livelong day;

For sure methought, yet that was but a guess,

His eyes seemed sunk for very hollowness,

But could he have—as I did it mistake—

So little in his purse, so much upon his back?

So nothing in his maw? yet seemeth by his belt

That his gaunt gut no too much stuffing felt.

See'st thou how side[163] it hangs beneath his hip?

Hunger and heavy iron makes girdles slip.

Yet for all that, how stiffly struts he by,

All trapped in the new-found bravery.

The nuns of new-won Calais his bonnet lent,

In lieu of their so kind a conquerment.

What needed he fetch that from farthest Spain,

His grandame could have lent with lesser pain?

Though he perhaps ne'er passed the English shore,

Yet fain would counted be a conqueror.

His hair, French-like, stares on his frighted head,

One lock[164] Amazon-like dishevelled,

As if he meant to wear a native cord,

If chance his fates should him that bane afford.

All British bare upon the bristled skin,

Close notched is his beard, both lip and chin;

His linen collar labyrinthian set,

Whose thousand double turnings never met:

His sleeves half hid with elbow pinionings,

As if he meant to fly with linen wings.

But when I look, and cast mine eyes below,

What monster meets mine eyes in human show?

So slender waist with such an abbot's loin,

Did never sober nature sure conjoin.

Lik'st a strawn scarecrow in a new-sown field,

Reared on some stick, the tender corn to shield,

Or, if that semblance suit not every deal,

Like a broad shake-fork with a slender steel.

Despised nature suit them once aright,

Their body to their coat both now disdight.

Their body to their clothes might shapen be,

That will their clothës shape to their bodie.

Meanwhile I wonder at so proud a back,

Whiles the empty guts loud rumblen for long lack.

[163] long.
[164] the love-locks which were so condemned by the Puritan Prynne. Cf. Lyly's Midas and Sir John Davies' Epigram 22, In Ciprum.

GEORGE CHAPMAN.

(1559-1634.)

[X.] AN INVECTIVE WRITTEN BY MR. GEORGE CHAPMAN
AGAINST MR. BEN JONSON.

This satire was discovered in a "Common-place Book" belonging to Chapman, preserved among the Ashmole MSS. in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Great, learned, witty Ben, be pleased to light

The world with that three-forked fire; nor fright

All us, thy sublearned, with luciferous boast

That thou art most great, most learn'd, witty most

Of all the kingdom, nay of all the earth;

As being a thing betwixt a human birth

And an infernal; no humanity

Of the divine soul shewing man in thee.

. . . . . . . . . .

Though thy play genius hang his broken wings

Full of sick feathers, and with forced things,

Imp thy scenes, labour'd and unnatural,

And nothing good comes with thy thrice-vex'd call,

Comest thou not yet, nor yet? O no, nor yet;

Yet are thy learn'd admirers so deep set

In thy preferment above all that cite

The sun in challenge for the heat and light

Of heaven's influences which of you two knew

And have most power in them; Great Ben, 'tis you.

Examine him, some truly-judging spirit,

That pride nor fortune hath to blind his merit,

He match'd with all book-fires, he ever read

His dusk poor candle-rents; his own fat head

With all the learn'd world's, Alexander's flame

That Cæsar's conquest cow'd, and stript his fame,

He shames not to give reckoning in with his;

As if the king pardoning his petulancies

Should pay his huge loss too in such a score

As all earth's learned fires he gather'd for.

What think'st thou, just friend? equall'd not this pride

All yet that ever Hell or Heaven defied?

And yet for all this, this club will inflict

His faultful pain, and him enough convict

He only reading show'd; learning, nor wit;

Only Dame Gilian's fire his desk will fit.

But for his shift by fire to save the loss

Of his vast learning, this may prove it gross:

True Muses ever vent breaths mixt with fire

Which, form'd in numbers, they in flames expire

Not only flames kindled with their own bless'd breath

That gave th' unborn life, and eternize death.

Great Ben, I know that this is in thy hand

And how thou fix'd in heaven's fix'd star dost stand

In all men's admirations and command;

For all that can be scribbled 'gainst the sorter

Of thy dead repercussions and reporter.

The kingdom yields not such another man;

Wonder of men he is; the player can

And bookseller prove true, if they could know

Only one drop, that drives in such a flow.

Are they not learned beasts, the better far

Their drossy exhalations a star

Their brainless admirations may render;

For learning in the wise sort is but lender

Of men's prime notion's doctrine; their own way

Of all skills' perceptible forms a key

Forging to wealth, and honour-soothed sense,

Never exploring truth or consequence,

Informing any virtue or good life;

And therefore Player, Bookseller, or Wife

Of either, (needing no such curious key)

All men and things, may know their own rude way.

Imagination and our appetite

Forming our speech no easier than they light

All letterless companions; t' all they know

Here or hereafter that like earth's sons plough

All under-worlds and ever downwards grow,

Nor let your learning think, egregious Ben,

These letterless companions are not men

With all the arts and sciences indued,

If of man's true and worthiest knowledge rude,

Which is to know and be one complete man,

And that not all the swelling ocean

Of arts and sciences, can pour both in:

If that brave skill then when thou didst begin

To study letters, thy great wit had plied,

Freely and only thy disease of pride

In vulgar praise had never bound thy [hide].

JOHN DONNE.

(1573-1631.)

[XI.] THE CHARACTER OF THE BORE.

From Donne's Satires, No. IV.; first published in the quarto edition of the "Poems" in 1633. See Dr. Grosart's interesting Essay on the Life and Writings of Donne, prefixed to Vol. II. of that scholar's excellent edition.

Well; I may now receive and die. My sin

Indeed is great, but yet I have been in

A purgatory, such as fear'd hell is

A recreation, and scant map of this.

My mind neither with pride's itch, nor yet hath been

Poison'd with love to see or to be seen.

I had no suit there, nor new suit to shew,

Yet went to court: but as Glare, which did go

To mass in jest, catch'd, was fain to disburse

The hundred marks, which is the statute's curse,

Before he 'scap'd; so't pleas'd my Destiny

(Guilty of my sin of going) to think me

As prone to all ill, and of good as forget-

Ful, as proud, lustful, and as much in debt,

As vain, as witless, and as false as they

Which dwell in court, for once going that way,

Therefore I suffer'd this: Towards me did run

A thing more strange than on Nile's slime the sun

E'er bred, or all which into Noah's ark came;

A thing which would have pos'd Adam to name:

Stranger than seven antiquaries' studies,

Than Afric's monsters, Guiana's rarities;

Stranger than strangers; one who for a Dane

In the Danes' massacre had sure been slain,

If he had liv'd then, and without help dies

When next the 'prentices 'gainst strangers rise;

One whom the watch at noon lets scarce go by;

One t' whom th' examining justice sure would cry,

Sir, by your priesthood, tell me what you are.

His clothes were strange, though coarse, and black, though bare;

Sleeveless his jerkin was, and it had been

Velvet, but 'twas now (so much ground was seen)

Become tufftaffaty; and our children shall

See it plain rash a while, then nought at all.

The thing hath travail'd, and, faith, speaks all tongues,

And only knoweth what t' all states belongs.

Made of th' accents and best phrase of all these,

He speaks one language. If strange meats displease,

Art can deceive, or hunger force my taste;

But pedant's motley tongue, soldier's bombast,

Mountebank's drug-tongue, nor the terms of law,

Are strong enough preparatives to draw

Me to hear this, yet I must be content

With his tongue, in his tongue call'd Compliment;

In which he can win widows, and pay scores,

Make men speak treason, cozen subtlest whores,

Outflatter favourites, or outlie either

Jovius or Surius, or both together.

He names me, and comes to me; I whisper, God!

How have I sinn'd, that thy wrath's furious rod,

This fellow, chooseth me? He saith, Sir,

I love your judgment; whom do you prefer

For the best linguist? and I sillily

Said, that I thought Calepine's Dictionary.

Nay, but of men? Most sweet Sir! Beza, then

Some Jesuits, and two reverend men

Of our two academies, I nam'd. Here

He stopt me, and said; Nay, your apostles were

Good pretty linguists; so Panurgus was,

Yet a poor gentleman; all these may pass

By travel. Then, as if he would have sold

His tongue, he prais'd it, and such wonders told,

That I was fain to say, If you had liv'd, Sir,

Time enough to have been interpreter

To Babel's bricklayers, sure the tower had stood.

He adds, If of court-life you knew the good,

You would leave loneness. I said, Not alone

My loneness is, but Spartan's fashion,

To teach by painting drunkards, doth not last

Now; Aretine's pictures have made few chaste;

No more can princes' courts, though there be few

Better pictures of vice, teach me virtue.

He, like to a high-stretch'd lute-string, squeakt, O, Sir!

'Tis sweet to talk of kings! At Westminster,

Said I, the man that keeps the Abbey-tombs,

And for his price doth, with who ever comes,

Of all our Harrys and our Edwards talk,

From king to king, and all their kin can walk:

Your ears shall hear naught but kings; your eyes meet