galaunt gentlemen, with their dauncing minions, and with their freshe companions, so that ploughing is set aside."[7]

But after Gascoigne’s Steel Glass was published, which professed to hold a mirror or “steel glass” up to the vices of the age, we reach that wonderful outburst of satiric, epigrammatic, and humorous composition which was one of the characteristics, and certainly not the least important, of the Elizabethan epoch.  Lodge’s Fig for Momus (1593) contains certain satires which rank with Gascoigne’s work as the earliest compositions of that type belonging to the period.  That they were of no mean reputation in their own day is evident from the testimony of Meres,[8] who says, “As Horace, Lucilius, Juvenal, Persius, and Lucullus are the best for satire among the Latins, so with us, in the same faculty, these are chiefe, Piers Plowman, Lodge, Hall of Emanuel College, Cambridge, the author of Pygmalion’s Image and Certain Satires[9] and the author of Skialethea”.  This contemporary opinion regarding the fact that The Vision of Piers Plowman was esteemed a satire of outstanding merit in those days, is a curious commentary on Hall’s boastful couplet describing himself as the earliest English satirist.

To name all the writers who, in this fruitful epoch of our literature, devoted themselves to this kind of composition would be impossible.  From 1598 until the death of James I. upwards of one hundred separate satirists can be named, both in verse and prose.  Of these Bishop Hall is one of the greatest, and I have chosen him as the leading representative of the period.  To the study of Horace and Juvenal he had devoted many years of his early manhood, and his imitation of these two great Romans is close and consistent.  Therefore, for vigour, grave dignity, and incisiveness of thought, united to graphic pictures of his age, Hall is undeniably the most important name in the history of the Elizabethan satire, strictly so called.  His exposures of the follies of his age were largely couched in the form, so much affected by Horace, of a familiar commentary on certain occurrences, addressed apparently to an anonymous correspondent.

Contemporary with Hall was Thomas Nash, whose Pierce Penilesse’s Supplication to the Devil was one of the most extraordinary onslaughts on the social vices of the metropolis that the period produced.  Written in close imitation of Juvenal’s earlier satires, he frequently approaches the standard of his master in graphic power of description, in scathing invective, and ironical mockery.  In Have with you to Saffron Walden he lashed Gabriel Harvey for his unworthy conduct towards the memory of Robert Greene.  Both satires are written in prose, as indeed are nearly all his works, inasmuch as Nash was more of a pamphleteer than anything else.  Other contemporaries of Hall were Thomas Dekker, whose fame as a dramatist has eclipsed his reputation as a satirist,