epoch of satire, the influence paramount was that of Goldsmith.  Fielding and Smollett were both satirists of powerful and original stamp, but they were so much else besides that their influence was lost in that of the genial author of the Deserted Village and Retaliation.  His Vicar of Wakefield is a satire, upon sober, moderate principles, against the vice of the upper classes, as typified in the character of Mr. Thornhill, while the sketch of Beau Tibbs in The Citizen of the World is a racy picture of the out-at-elbows, would-be man of fashion, who seeks to pose as a social leader and arbiter of taste when he had better have been following a trade.

The next revival of the popularity of satire takes place towards the commencement of the third last decade of the eighteenth century, when, using the vehicle of the epistolary mode, an anonymous writer, whose identity is still in dispute, attacked the monarch, the government, and the judicature of the country, in a series of letters in which scathing invective, merciless ridicule, and lofty scorn were united to vigour and polish of style, as well as undeniable literary taste.

After the appearance of the Letters of Junius, which, perhaps, have owed the permanence of their popularity as much to the interest attaching to the mystery of their authorship as to their intrinsic merits, political satire may be said to have once more slumbered awhile.  The impression produced by the studied malice of the Letters, and the epigrammatic suggestiveness which appeared to leave as much unsaid as was said, was enormous, yet, strangely enough, they were unable to check the growing influence of the school of satire whereof Goldsmith was the chief founder, and from which the fashionable jeux d’esprit, the sparkling persiflage of the society flaneurs of the nineteenth century are the legitimate descendants.[20] The decade 1768-78, therefore—­that decade when the plays of Goldsmith and Sheridan were appearing,—­witnessed the rise and the development of that genial, humorous raillery, in prose and verse, of personal foibles and of social abuses, of which the Retaliation and the Beau Tibbs papers are favourable examples.  These were the distinguishing characteristics of our satiric literature during the closing decade of the eighteenth century until the horrors of the French Revolution, and the sympathy with it which was apparently being aroused in England, called political satire into requisition once more.  Party feeling ran high with regard to the principles enunciated by the so-called “friends of freedom”.  The sentiments of the “Constitutional Tories” found expression in the bitter, sardonic, vitriolic mockery visible in the pages of the Anti-Jacobin,[21] which did more to check the progress of nascent Radicalism and the movement in favour of political reform than any other means employed.  Chief-justice Mansfield’s strictures and Lord Braxfield’s diatribes alike paled into insignificance beside these deadly, scorching bombs of Juvenal-like vituperation, which have remained unapproached in their specific line.  As an example take Ellis’s Ode to Jacobinism, of which I quote two stanzas:—­