such as Advice to the October Club, Public Spirit of the Whigs, &c., the Virtues of Sid Hamet, The Magician’s Wand (directed against Godolphin); his Polite Conversations and Directions to Servants are savage attacks on the inanity of society small-talk and the greed of the menials of the period.  But why prolong the list?  From the Drapier’s Letters, directed against a supposed fraudulent introduction of a copper currency known as “Wood’s Halfpence”, to his skit on The Furniture of a Woman’s Mind, there were few topics current in his day, whether in politics, theology, economics, or social gossip, which he did not attack with the artillery of his wit and satire.  Had he been less sardonic, had he possessed even a modicum of the bonhomie of his friend Arbuthnot, Swift’s satire would have exercised even more potent an influence than it has been its fortune to achieve.

Pope died in 1744, Swift in 1745.  During their last years there were signs that the literary modes of the epoch of Queen Anne, which had maintained their ascendency so long, were rapidly losing their hold on the popular mind.  A new literary period was about to open wherein new literary ideals and new models would prevail.  Satire, in common with literature as a whole, felt the influence of the transitional era.  As we have seen, it concerned itself largely with ridiculing the follies and eccentricities of men of letters and foolish pretenders to the title; also in lashing social vices and abuses.  The political enmity existing between the Jacobites and the Hanoverians continued to afford occasion for the exchange of party squibs and lampoons.  The lengthened popularity of Gay’s Beggars’ Opera, a composition wherein a new mode was created, viz. the satiric opera (the prototype of the comic opera of later days), affords an index to the temper of the time.  It was the age of England’s lethargy.

After the defeat of Culloden, satire languished for a while, to revive again during the ministry of the Earl of Bute, when everything Scots came in for condemnation, and when Smollett and John Wilkes belaboured each other in the Briton and the North Briton, in pamphlet, pasquinade, and parody, until at last Lord Bute withdrew from the contest in disgust, and suspended the organ over which the author of Roderick Random presided.  The satirical effusions of this epoch are almost entirely worthless, the only redeeming feature being the fact that Goldsmith was at that very moment engaged in throwing off those delicious morceaux of social satire contained in The Citizen of the World.  Johnson, a few years before, had set the fashion for some time with his two satires written in free imitation of Juvenal—­London, and The Vanity of Human Wishes.  But from 1760 onward until the close of the century, when Ellis, Canning, and Frere opened what may be termed the modern