It is impossible in this brief survey to discuss at large the vast chaotic epoch in the history of satire which lies between the end of the ancient world and the dawn of humanism.  For satire, as a literary genre, belongs to these two.  The mediaeval world, inexhaustible in its capacity and relish for abuse, full of rude laughter and drastic humour—­prompt, for all its superstition, to make a jest of the priest, and, for all its chivalry, to catalogue the foibles of women—­had the satirical animus in abundance, and satirical songs, visions, fables, fabliaux, ballads, epics, in legion, but no definite and recognised school of satire.  It is sufficient to name, as examples of the extraordinary range of the mediaeval satiric genius, the farce of Pathelin, the beast-epic of Renart, the rhymes of Walter Map, and the Inferno of Dante.

Of these satirists before the rise of “satire”, mediaeval England produced two great examples in Chaucer and Langland.  They typify at the outset the two classes into which Dryden divided English satirists—­the followers of Horace’s way and the followers of Juvenal’s—­the men of the world, who assail the enemies of common-sense with the weapons of humour and sarcasm; and the prophets, who assail vice and crime with passionate indignation and invective scorn.  Since Dryden’s time neither line has died out, and it is still possible, with all reserves, to recognise the two strains through the whole course of English literature:  the one represented in Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Addison, Arbuthnot, Swift, Young, Goldsmith, Canning, Thackeray, and Tennyson; the others in Langland, Skelton, Lyndsay, Nash, Marston, Dryden, Pope, Churchill, Johnson, Junius, Burns, and Browning.

Langland was a naive mediaeval Juvenal.  The sad-visaged, world-weary dreamer of the Malvern hills, sorrowing over the vice, the abuses, and the social misery of his time, finding, as he tells us, no comfort in any of the established institutions of his day, because confronted with the fraud and falsehood that infected them all, is one of the most pathetic figures in literature.  As Skeat suggests, the object of his great poem was to secure, through the latitude afforded by allegory, opportunities of describing the life and manners of the poorer classes, of inveighing against clerical abuses and the rapacity of the friars, of representing the miseries caused by the great pestilences then prevalent, and by the hasty and ill-advised marriages consequent thereon; of denouncing lazy workmen and sham beggars, the corruption and bribery then too common in the law-courts—­in a word, to lash all the numerous forms of falsehood, which are at all times the fit subjects for satire and indignant exposure.  Amid many essential differences, is there not here a striking likeness to the work of the Roman Juvenal?  Langland’s satire is not so fiery nor so rhetorically intense as that of his prototype, but it is less profoundly despairing.