Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/360

344 or comprehensiveness in all the functions of satire, to include in himself, like the Trojan horse, many different fighting men. Churchill's is called a famous name, dimmed, but still hanging up, and looking like the V. R.'s, and other letters, the day after an illumination,—distinguishable to read, though the glory of the light has gone from it. And, to give a concluding illustration, and a choice one withal, of Mr. Hannay's imagery, our old English satires he describes as being of a very fossilised appearance, just now, affecting you as old spear-heads dug up from a moss do. "What old rusty nails are these, which once made the blood spurt from the crucified malefactor! …. We can approach these terrible libellers of old days now, as we look at the wasps and deadly insects in a museum, fingering them without the least fear of that sting which set the flesh quivering two hundred years ago. Here lies, for instance, poor John Cleveland, pinned to his card, with a little memorandum, 'Royalist Satirist; old specimen; presented by the seventeenth century.' A touch of fancy, however, and we see the purpled and dyed wings flutter, and the active body moving again."

In the earlier lectures Mr. Hannay makes it his business to choose his Satirists for their relation to history, and their influence on mankind—showing how Roman society had its Horace and Juvenal; mediæval corruption its Erasmus, its Lindsay, and its Buchanan; the Ego et Rex Meus Cardinalate its Skelton; the absurdities of French taste their Boileau; and some of the bad men of Charles II.'s time their Dryden. Horace is hit off with a few happy strokes, and we see him strolling along the Sacred Way, "a little pudgy dark man, with somewhat weak eyes, and a slovenly, sauntering, abstracted gait"—and we get the character of him as a good-natured elegant-minded man of the world, with no very high views of nature or life, but quite free from cant. Juvenal is duly accredited with a fund of "poetic pathos, and moral reflections, worthy of the gravest and purest souls"as a satirist unsurpassed by any in sheer wit, brave manliness, hot eloquence and energy—by no means so polite as Horace, but with a deeper laugh—relieving and redeeming his coarse sallies and his fierce jests by the sudden utterance of "quite startling moral aphorisms; while at times there comes from him a kind of prophetic wail, that touches the heart more than any laughter." The base of Erasmus's character is defined to be "worldly good sense"—his soul dwelt "in a mild, healthy, classic region of good sense and cheerfulness"—and we are treated to more than one of the familiar specimens of the "sharp rays of witty light he threw out aslant the clouds in those troublous and stormy times." Then comes Buchanan with his more peremptory scorn and his deeper moral nature, and his compatriot"a warm-hearted, truth-loving gentleman, who took up Satire half as an amateur," yet did yeoman's service with it in his day and generation. And then we have the great Monsieur Boileau, who is characterised as a satirist of society, and a brilliant wit, rather than a satirical reformer or a deep-hearted humorist—his epigrams gleaming among common-place