Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/191

 of Navarre as was the battle of Ivry; and its real object was the eternal one of good satire. Says a historian,

"All the mean political rivalries which pretend to work only for the public good are exposed there; all those men who take God as a shield to hide their own personal baseness, pass before us."

So also was the Anti-Jacobin designed as an instrument for the public weal, though conceived in panic and brought forth in extravagance. Both these productions, moreover, illustrate the difficulty of distinguishing between personal and political or some sort of partisan satire. When Claudius was exposed on his bad eminence by Seneca, Nero, by Persius, Domitian, by Juvenal, Wolsey, by Skelton, Napoleon and George the Third, by Byron, and all four Georges, by Thackeray, it was in every case, not as a mere human Doctor Fell, but as a crafty tyrant or an incompetent mannikin made absurd by an incongruous position of power and authority; although at first the personal interest predominated over the political, the latter increasing with time.

In any case, what has preserved personal satire in literature has been the amber, not the flies. Such satiric portraits as are saved from oblivion,—as those in ''Absalom and Achitophel, Macflecknoe, The Dunciad, The Vision of Judgment'',—are spared, not for their subjects but for the wit in which they are dressed, irrespective of the justice or the slander stitched into the costume.

In the field of prose fiction we find a comparatively small amount of direct personal satire, and that modicum attached to the romantic or fantastic section rather than