conquest we have got firmly rooted in our minds the idea (an idea fit for the philosophers of Bedlam) that we can best trample on a people by ignoring all the particular merits which give them a chance of trampling upon us.  It has become a breach of etiquette to praise the enemy; whereas, when the enemy is strong, every honest scout ought to praise the enemy.  It is impossible to vanquish an army without having a full account of its strength.  It is impossible to satirise a man without having a full account of his virtues.  It is too much the custom in politics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhuman, as utterly careless of his country, as utterly cynical, which no man ever was since the beginning of the world.  This kind of invective may often have a great superficial success:  it may hit the mood of the moment; it may raise excitement and applause; it may impress millions.  But there is one man among all those millions whom it does not impress, whom it hardly ever touches; that is the man against whom it is directed.  The one person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the man whom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach.  He knows that such a description of him is not true.  He knows that he is not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly self-seeking, or utterly barbarous and revengeful.  He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he can count as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many hours of decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man.  But behind all this he has his real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul:  behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the craven silences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanly visions of revenge.  It is to these that satire should reach if it is to touch the man at whom it is aimed.  And to reach these it must pass and salute a whole army of virtues.

If we turn to the great English satirists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, we find that they had this rough, but firm, grasp of the size and strength, the value and the best points of their adversary.  Dryden, before hewing Ahitophel in pieces, gives a splendid and spirited account of the insane valour and inspired cunning of the

  “daring pilot in extremity,”

who was more untrustworthy in calm than in storm, and

  “Steered too near the rocks to boast his wit.”

The whole is, so far as it goes, a sound and picturesque version of the great Shaftesbury.  It would, in many ways, serve as a very sound and picturesque account of Lord Randolph Churchill.  But here comes in very pointedly the difference between our modern attempts at satire and the ancient achievement of it.  The opponents of Lord Randolph Churchill, both Liberal and Conservative, did not satirise him nobly and honestly, as one of those great wits to madness near allied.  They represented him as a mere puppy, a silly and