Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/161

 SATIRE'S VIEW OF SENTIMENTALISM IN THE DAYS OF GEORGE THE THIRD In England, the last third of the eighteenth century was an age encouraging to the satire which criticizes writers and their work. For it was a period when verse-satire, the most persistent of classical kinds and by nature conservatively cen- sorious, was still vigorous and eager for combat, while creative writing, in the novel, poetry, and the drama, represented a rebellion from the old and a turning to the new. Wolcot, Tickell, Gifford, and Mathias, the principal writers of literary satire between Churchill and Byron, had the model and precedent of Pope for literary satire, but not his difficulties. Even Pope's enemies were, for the most part, in agreement with him on fundamental principles of writing; he had only Dulness to rebuke. These later satirists, on the other hand, though less inspired were more fortunate in their objects of attack, for they met much of mere Dulness, when old forms persisted without taste or talent, and also much of radical dis- sension from literary laws established. They had another advantage in the fact that the romantic spirit had not yet won a complete victory over thoughtful English readers; the satirists found a ready hearing for their mockery of the new glorification of individuality and emotion. Their time, because it was a time of revolutionary ideas in letters as in society, was favorable not only to political satire but to literary satire as well. 1 The 1 Literary historians recogniae the element of criticism in the satire of the late eighteenth century. Professor Oliver Elton in his Survey of English Litera- ture 1780-1830 (I, 37), declares the "literary views" of Mathias refreshing because they represent "an appeal from the false to the truer romanticism." Professor Courthope in his History of English Poetry (VI, 127), finds in Gifford's two most famous satires a "reaction against the dilettantism of the time." Professor Saintsbury devotes two pages of his History of Criticism (III, 286- 288), to the satirists, Gifford, Mathias, Wolcot, and the poets of the Anti- Jacobin] their works he considers "among the lightest and best examples of the critical souffle, well cheesed and peppered."