Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/49

 Taine would find both easy to account for, on racial grounds:

"The first-fruits of English society is hypocrisy. It ripens here under the double breath of religion and morality; we know their popularity and sway across the channel. * * * This vice is therefore English. Mr. Pecksniff is not found in France. * * * Since Voltaire, Tartuffe is impossible."

Landor has Lucian say:

"I have ridiculed the puppets of all features, all colours, all sizes, by which an impudent and audacious set of impostors have been gaining an easy livelihood these two thousand years. * * *

"The falsehood that the tongue commits is slight in comparison with what is conceived by the heart, and executed by the whole man, throughout life."

Meredith's portrait of The Comic Spirit is applicable to satire, for throughout the essay he gives to the term comic the connotation generally allowed to the term satiric:

"Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical,