But what availes unto the world to talke? 
      Wealth is a witch that hath a wicked charme,
      That in the minds of wicked men doth walke,
      Unto the heart and Soule’s eternal harme,
      Which is not kept by the Almighty arme: 
      O,’tis the strongest instrument of ill
      That ere was known to work the devill’s will.

      An honest man is held a good poore soule,
      And kindnesse counted but a weake conceite,
      And love writte up but in the woodcocke’s soule,
      While thriving Wat doth but on Wealth await: 
      He is a fore horse that goes ever streight: 
      And he but held a foole for all his Wit,
      That guides his braines but with a golden bit.

      A virgin is a vertuous kind of creature,
      But doth not coin command Virginitie? 
      And beautie hath a strange bewitching feature,
      But gold reads so much world’s divinitie,
      As with the Heavens hath no affinitie: 
      So that where Beauty doth with vertue dwell,
      If it want money, yet it will not sell.

Of the satiric forms peculiar to the Elizabethan epoch there is no great variety.  The Characters of Theophrastus supplied a model to some of the writers.  The close adherence also which the majority of them manifest to the broadly marked types of “Horatian” and “Juvenalian” satire, both in matter and manner, is not a little remarkable.  The genius for selecting from the classics those forms both of composition and metre best suited to become vehicles for satire, and adapting them thereto, did not begin to manifest itself in so pronounced a manner until after the Restoration.  The Elizabethan mind—­using the phrase of course in its broad sense as inclusive of the Jacobean and the early Caroline epochs—­was more engrossed with the matter than the manner of satire.  Perhaps the finest satire which distinguished this wonderful era was the Argenis of John Barclay, a politico-satiric romance, or, in other words, the adaptation of the “Milesian tale” of Petronius to state affairs.

During the Parliamentary War, satire was the only species of composition which did not suffer more or less eclipse, but its character underwent change.  It became to a large extent a medium for sectarian bitterness.  It lost its catholicity, and degenerated in great measure into the instrument of partisan antagonism, and a means of impaling the folly or fanaticism, real or imagined, of special individuals among the Cavaliers and Roundheads.[12] Of such a character was the bulk of the satires produced at that time.  In a few instances, however, a higher note was struck, as, for example, when “dignified political satire”, in the hands of Andrew Marvell, was utilized to fight the battle of freedom of conscience in the matter of the observances of external religion. The Rehearsal Transposed, Mr. Smirke, or the Divine in Mode, and