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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.


Page
INTRODUCTION xiii

WILLIAM LANGLAND
I. Pilgrimage in Search of Do-well 1

GEOFFREY CHAUCER
II. III. The Monk and the Friar 6

JOHN LYDGATE
IV. The London Lackpenny 10

WILLIAM DUNBAR
V. The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins 14

SIR DAVID LYNDSAY
VI. Satire on the Syde Taillis--Ane Supplicatioun
directit to the Kingis Grace--1538 19

BISHOP JOSEPH HALL
VII. On Simony 22
VIII. The Domestic Tutor's Position 23
IX. The Impecunious Fop 24

GEORGE CHAPMAN
X. An Invective written by Mr. George Chapman
against Mr. Ben Jonson 26

JOHN DONNE
XI. The Character of the Bore 29

BEN JONSON
XII. The New Cry 34
XIII. On Don Surly 35

SAMUEL BUTLER
XIV. The Character of Hudibras 36
XV. The Character of a Small Poet 43

ANDREW MARVELL
XVI. Nostradamus's Prophecy 45

JOHN CLEIVELAND
XVII. The Scots Apostasie 47

JOHN DRYDEN
XVIII. Satire on the Dutch 49
XIX. MacFlecknoe 50
XX. Epistle to the Whigs 57

DANIEL DEFOE
XXI. Introduction to the True born Englishman 63

THE EARL OF DORSET
XXII. Satire on a Conceited Playwright 65

JOHN ARBUTHNOT
XXIII. Preface to John Bull and his Law suit 66
XXIV. The History of John Bull 70
XXV. Epitaph upon Colonel Chartres 76

JONATHAN SWIFT
XXVI. Mrs Frances Harris' Petition 77
XXVII. Elegy on Partridge 81
XXVIII. A Meditation upon a Broom stick 85
XXIX. The Relations of Booksellers and Authors 86
XXX. The Epistle Dedicatory to His Royal Highness
Prince Posterity 91

SIR RICHARD STEELE
XXXI. The Commonwealth of Lunatics 97

JOSEPH ADDISON
XXXII. Sir Roger de Coverley's Sunday 101

EDWARD YOUNG
XXXIII. To the Right Hon. Mr. Dodington 105

JOHN GAY
XXXIV. The Quidnunckis 112

ALEXANDER POPE
XXXV. The Dunciad--The Description of Dulness 114
XXXVI. Sandys' Ghost; or, a proper new ballad of
the New Ovid's Metamorphoses, as it was
intended to be translated by persons of
quality 120
XXXVII. Satire on the Whig Poets 122
XXXVIII. Epilogue to the Satires 131

SAMUEL JOHNSON
XXXIX. The Vanity of Human Wishes 136
XL. Letter to the Earl of Chesterfield 147

OLIVER GOLDSMITH
XLI. The Retaliation 149
XLII. The Logicians Refuted 154
XLIII. Beau Tibbs, his Character and Family 156

CHARLES CHURCHILL
XLIV. The Journey 160

JUNIUS
XLV. To the King 164

ROBERT BURNS
XLVI. Address to the Unco Guid, or the Rigidly
Righteous 180
XLVII. Holy Willie's Prayer 182

CHARLES LAMB
XLVIII. A Farewell to Tobacco 186

THOMAS MOORE
XLIX. Lines on Leigh Hunt 191

GEORGE CANNING
L. Epistle from Lord Boringdon to Lord Granville 192
LI. Reformation of the Knave of Hearts 194

POETRY OF THE ANTI JACOBIN
LII. The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-grinder 203
LIII. Song by Rogero the Captive 205

COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY
LIV. The Devil's Walk 206

SYDNEY SMITH
LV. The Letters of Peter Plymley--on "No
Popery" 208

JAMES SMITH
LVI. The Poet of Fashion 216

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
LVII. Bossuet and the Duchess of Fontanges 218

LORD BYRON
LVIII. The Vision of Judgment 226
LIX. The Waltz 236
LX. "The Dedication" in Don Juan 243

THOMAS HOOD
LXI. Cockle _v._ Cackle 249

LORD MACAULAY
LXII. The Country Clergyman's Trip to Cambridge 253

WINTHROP MACKWORTH PRAED
LXIII. The Red Fisherman; or, The Devil's Decoy 257
LXIV. Mad--Quite Mad 264

BENJAMIN DISRAELI (LORD BEACONSFIELD)
LXV. Popanilla on Man 270

ROBERT BROWNING
LXVI. Cristina 277
LXVII. The Lost Leader 280

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
LXVIII. Piscator and Piscatrix 281
LXIX. On a Hundred Years Hence 283

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
LXX. Spectator Ab Extra 292

C.S. CALVERLEY
LXXI. "Hic Vir, Hic Est" 296




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 _Graecis
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 'AEsop'. 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 saturae, 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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", mediaeval 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 naive mediaeval 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 Maecenas, 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.

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