his Political Satires are masterpieces of lofty indignation mingled with grave and ironical banter.  Among many others Edmund Waller showed himself an apt disciple of Horace, and produced charming social satires marked by delicate wit and raillery in the true Horatian mode; while the Duke of Buckingham, in the Rehearsal, utilized the dramatic parody to travesty the plays of Dryden.  Abraham Cowley, in the Mistress, also imitated Horace, and in his play Cutter of Coleman Street satirized the Puritans’ affectation of superior sanctity and their affected style of conversation.  Then came John Oldham and John Cleiveland, who both accepted Juvenal as their model.  Cleiveland’s antipathy towards Cromwell and the Scots was on a par with that of John Wilkes towards the latter, and was just as unreasonable, while the language he employed in his diatribes against both was so extravagant as to lose its sarcastic point in mere vulgar abuse.  In like manner Oldham’s Satires on the Jesuits afford as disgraceful a specimen of sectarian bigotry as the language contains.  Only their pungency and wit render them readable.  He displays Juvenal’s violence of invective without his other redeeming qualities.  All these, however, were entirely eclipsed in reputation by a writer who made the mock-epic the medium through which the bitterest onslaught on the anti-royalist party and its principles was delivered by one who, as a “king’s man”, was almost as extreme a bigot as those he satirized.  The Hudibras of Samuel Butler, in its mingling of broad, almost extravagant, humour and sneering mockery has no parallel in our literature.  Butler’s characters are rather mere “humours” or qualities than real personages.  There is no attempt made to observe the modesty of nature. Hudibras, therefore, is an example not so much of satire, though satire is present in rich measure also, as of burlesque.  The poem is genuinely satirical only in those parts where the author steps in as the chorus, so to speak, and offers pithy moralizings on what is taking place in the action of the story.  There is visible throughout the poem, however, a lack of restraint that causes him to overdo his part.  Were Hudibras shorter, the satire would be more effective.  Though in parts often as terse in style as Pope’s best work, still the poem is too long, and it undoes the force of its attack on the Puritans by its exaggeration.

All these writers, even Butler himself, simply prepared the way for the man who is justly regarded as England’s greatest satirist.  The epoch of John Dryden has been fittingly styled the “Golden Age of English Satire".[13] To warrant this description, however, it must be held to include the writers of the reign of Queen Anne.  The Elizabethan period was perhaps richer, numerically speaking, in representatives of certain types of satirical composition, but the true perfection, the efflorescence of the long-growing