The third of the great series, MacFlecknoe, is Dryden’s masterpiece of satiric irony; a purely personal attack upon his rival, Shadwell, “Crowned King of Dulness, and in all the realms of nonsense absolute”.  Finally, the Hind and the Panther represents a new development of the “satiric fable”.  Dryden gave to British satire the impulse towards that final form of development which it received from the great satirists of the next century.  There is little that appears in Swift, Addison, Arbuthnot, Pope, or even Byron, for which the way was not prepared by the genius of “Glorious John”.

Of the famous group which adorned the reign of Queen Anne, Steele lives above all in his Isaac Bickerstaff Essays, the vehicle of admirably pithy and trenchant prose satire upon current political abuses.  But, unfortunately for his own fame, his lot was to be associated with the greatest master of this form of composition that has appeared in literature, and the celebrity of the greater writer dimmed that of the lesser.  Addison in his papers in the Tatler and the Spectator has brought what may be styled the Essay of Satiric Portraiture—­in after days to be developed along other lines by Praed, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and R.L.  Stevenson—­to an unsurpassed standard of excellence.  Such character studies as those of Sir Roger de Coverley, his household and friends, Will Honeycomb, Sir Andrew Freeport, Ned Softly, and others, possess an endless charm for us in the sobriety and moderation of the colours, the truth to nature, the delicate raillery, and the polished sarcasm of their satiric animadversions.  Addison has studied his Horace to advantage, and to the great Roman’s attributes has added other virtues distinctly English.

Arbuthnot, the celebrated physician of Queen Anne, takes rank among the best of English satirists by virtue of his famous work The History of John Bull.  The special mode or type employed was the “allegorical political tale”, of which the plot was the historic sequence of events in connection with the war with Louis XIV. of France.  The object of the fictitious narrative was to throw ridicule on the Duke of Marlborough, and to excite among the people a feeling of disgust at the protracted hostilities.  The nations involved are represented as tradesmen implicated in a lawsuit, the origin of the dispute being traced to their narrow and selfish views.  The national characteristics of each individual are skilfully hit off, and the various events of the war, with the accompanying political intrigues, are symbolized by the stages in the progress of the suit, the tricks of the lawyers, and the devices of the principal attorney, Humphrey Hocus (Marlborough), to prolong the struggle.  His Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus—­a satire on the abuses of human learning,—­in which the type of the fictitious biography is adopted, is exceedingly clever.