The Dunciad is an instance of the mock-epic utilized for the purposes of satire.  Here Pope, as regards theme, possibly had the idea suggested to him by Dryden’s MacFlecknoe, but undoubtedly the heroic couplet, which the latter had first applied to satire and used with such conspicuous success, was still further polished and improved by Pope until, as Mr. Courthope says, “it became in his hands a rapier of perfect flexibility and temper”.  From the time of Pope until that of Byron this stately measure has been regarded as the metre best suited par excellence for the display of satiric point and brilliancy, and as the medium best calculated to confer dignity on political satire.  The Dunciad, while personal malice enters into it, must not be regarded as, properly speaking, a malicious satire.  From a literary censor’s point of view almost every lash Pope administered was richly deserved.  In this respect Pope has all Horace’s fairness and moderation, while at the same time he exhibits not a little of Juvenal’s depth of conviction that desperate diseases demand radical remedies.[19]

By the side of Pope stands an impressive but a mournful figure, one of the most tragic in our literature, to think of whom, as Thackeray says, “is like thinking of the ruin of a great empire”.  As an all-round satirist Jonathan Swift has no superior save Dryden, and he only by virtue of his broader human sympathies.  In the works of the great Dean we have many distinct forms of satire.  Scarce anything he wrote, with the exception of his unfortunate History of the Last Four Years of Queen Anne, but is marked by satiric touches that relieve the tedium of even its dullest pages.  He has utilized nearly all the recognized modes of satiric composition throughout the range of his long list of works.  In the Tale of a Tub he employed the vehicle of the satiric tale to lash the Dissenters, the Papists, and even the Church of England; in a word, the cant of religion as well as the pretensions of letters and the shams of the world.  In the Battle of the Books the parody or travesty of the Romances of Chivalry is used to ridicule the controversy raging between Temple, Wotton, Boyle, and Bentley, regarding the comparative merits of ancient and modern writers.  In Gulliver’s Travels the fictitious narrative or mock journal is impressed into the service, the method consisting in adopting an absurd supposition at the outset and then gravely deducing the logical effects which follow.  These three form the trio of great prose satires which from the epoch of their publication until now have remained the wonder and the delight of successive generations.  Their realism, humorous invention, ready wit, unsparing irony, and keen ridicule have exercised as potent an attraction as their gloomy misanthropy has repelled.  Among minor satires are his scathing attacks in prose and verse on the war party as a ring of Whig stock-jobbers,