Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/193

 Satire's View of Sentimentalism 187 include the principal satirical estimates of the best known ad- vocates of "sensibility" and to portray with some degree of clearness the typical judgments of verse-satire about Sensibility alone and Sensibility in alliance with revolutionary ideas. To the objection that the Bluestockings were not sentimental, the most convenient answer is that the satirists attacked them for being -sentimental. Our interest is in satire's view of sentimen- talism rather than in its view of any small group of writers. The Bath-easton salon of Lady Miller, with its bouts rimees and its volumes of verses, was a thoroughly sentimental institu- tion, charitable and quite moral. Instead of gambling or dancing all night, the nobility and gentry who were members of Mrs. Miller's coterie spent their evenings in making, reading, and discussing verses, abominably mechanical verses for the most part, with some thing of wit and more of refined sentiment. 82 Of course the Bath-easton poetry was early derided by satirists. At first, when the poets' celebrity was still chiefly local, the attacks appeared only in the newspapers of Bath. It was against several such versified animadversions upon Lady Miller's circle that Christopher Anstey fought in his virulent verse-satire, The Priest Dissected (1774), 83 for the author of The New Bath Guide was the principal poet and the controversial champion of the group. His forceful but badly aimed sally, however, was quite insufficient to protect the coterie from fur- ther attacks. One moderately conspicuous piece of anti-Bath- easton mockery was The Sentence of Momus on the Poetical Amusements at a Villa near Bath (1775), to which an anonymous friend of Lady Miller replied with Charity; or, Momus' Reward 82 For further information concerning Lady Miller and her circle, see: The Works of Christopher Anstey, xlii, 227, etc.; Maier, Christopher Anstey u. der "New Bath Guide" (Munich, 1914); Letters of Horace Walpole, IX, 8-10, 134-135, X, 361; Tinker, C. B., The Salon and English Letters (New York, 1915), 117-122, etc. 83 The Priest Dissected; a Poem, addressed to the Rei. Mr., author of Regidus, Toby, Caesar, and other satirical pieces in the public papers. (Bath, [1774].) William Mason in his Epistle to Dr. Shebbeare took occasion to ridicule this lampoon.