It is
curious to note how the satirical succession (if the phrase be
permitted) is maintained uninterruptedly from Bishop Hall down to the
death of Pope--nay, we may even say down to the age of Byron, to whose
epoch one may trace something like a continuous tradition. Hall did
not die until Dryden was twenty-seven years of age. Pope delighted to
record that, when a boy of twelve years of age, he had met "Glorious
John", though the succession could be passed on otherwise through
Congreve, one of the most polished of English satirical writers, whom
Dryden complimented as "one whom every muse and grace adorn", while to
him also Pope dedicated his translation of the _Iliad_.[14] Bolingbroke,
furthermore, was the friend and patron of Pope, while the witty St.
John, in turn, was bound by ties of friendship to Mallet, who passed on
the succession to Goldsmith, Sheridan, Ellis, Canning, Moore, and
Byron. Thereafter satire begins to fall upon evil days, and the
tradition cannot be so clearly traced.
But satire, during this "succession", did not remain absolutely the
same. She changed her garb with her epoch. Thus the robust bludgeoning
of Dryden and Shadwell, of Defoe, Steele, D'Urfey, and Tom Brown, gave
place to the sardonic ridicule of Swift, the polished raillery of
Arbuthnot, and the double-distilled essence of acidulous sarcasm
present in the _Satires_ of Pope. There is as marked a difference
between the Drydenic and the Swiftian types of satire, between that of
Cleiveland and that of Pope, as between the diverse schools known as
the "Horatian" and the "Juvenalian".
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