became the current mode.  A favourable example of that style is found in Leigh Hunt’s Feast of the Poets and in Edward Fitz-Gerald’s Chivalry at a Discount.  Other writers of satire in the earlier decades of the present century were Peacock, who in his novels (Crotchet Castle, &c.) evolved an original type of satire based upon the Athenian New Comedy.  Miss Austen in her English novels and Miss Edgeworth in her Irish tales employed satire to impeach certain crying social abuses, as also did Dickens in Oliver Twist and others of his books.  Douglas Jerrold’s comedies and sketches are full of titbits of gay and brilliant banter and biting irony.  If Sartor Resartus could be regarded as a satire, as Dr. Garnett says, Carlyle would be the first of satirists, with his thundering invective, grand rhetoric, indignant scorn, grim humour, and satiric gloom in denouncing the shams of human society and of human nature.  An admirable American school of satire was founded by Washington Irving, of which Judge Haliburton (Sam Slick), Paulding, Holmes, Artemus Ward, and Dudley Warner are the chief names.

Since the third and fourth decades of our century, in other words, since the epoch of the Reform Bill and the Chartist agitation, satire has more and more tended to lose its acid and its venom, to slough the dark sardonic sarcasm of past days and to don the light sportive garb of the social humorist and epigrammist.  Robustious bludgeoning has gone out of fashion, and in its place we have the playful satiric wit, sparkling as of well-drawn Moet or Clicquot, of Mortimer Collins, H.S.  Leigh, Arthur Locker and Frederick Locker-Lampson, W.S.  Gilbert, Austin Dobson, Bret Harte, F. Anstey, Dr. Walter C. Smith, and many other graceful and delightful social satirists whose verses are household words amongst us.  From week to week also there appear in the pages of that trenchant social censor, Punch, and the other high-class comico-satiric journals, many pieces of genuine and witty social satire.  Every year the demand seems increasing, and yet the supply shows no signs of running dry.

Political satire, in its metrical form, has had from time to time a temporary revival of popularity in such compositions as James Russell Lowell’s inimitable Biglow Papers, as well as in more recent volumes, of which Mr. Owen Seaman’s verse is an example; while are not its prose forms legion in the pages of our periodical press?  It has, however, now lost that vitriolic quality which made it so scorching and offensively personal.  The man who wrote nowadays as did Dryden, and Junius, and Canning, or, in social satire, as did Peter Pindar and Byron, would be forthwith ostracized from literary fellowship.