“Daughter of Hell, insatiate power! 
      Destroyer of the human race,
      Whose iron scourge and maddening hour
      Exalt the bad, the good debase;
      When first to scourge the sons of earth,
      Thy sire his darling child designed,
      Gallia received the monstrous birth,
      Voltaire informed thine infant mind. 
      Well-chosen nurse, his sophist lore,
      He bade thee many a year explore,
      He marked thy progress firm though slow,
      And statesmen, princes, leagued with their inveterate foe. 
      Scared at thy frown terrific, fly
      The morals (antiquated brood),
      Domestic virtue, social joy,
      And faith that has for ages stood;
      Swift they disperse and with them go
      The friend sincere, the generous foe—­
      Traitors to God, to man avowed,
      By thee now raised aloft, now crushed beneath the crowd.”

Space only remains for a single word upon the satire of the nineteenth century.  In this category would be included the Baeviad and the Maeviad by William Gifford (editor of the Anti-Jacobin), which, though first printed in the closing years of the eighteenth century, were issued in volume form in 1800.  Written as they are in avowed imitation of Juvenal, Persius, and Horace, they out-Juvenal Juvenal by the violence of the language, besides descending to a depth of personal scurrility as foreign to the nature of true satire as abuse is alien to wit.  They have long since been consigned to merited oblivion, though in their day, from the useful and able work done by their author in other fields of literature, they enjoyed no inconsiderable amount of fame.  Two or three lines from the Baeviad will give a specimen of its quality:—­

     “For mark, to what ’tis given, and then declare,
      Mean though I am, if it be worth my care. 
      Is it not given to Este’s unmeaning dash,
      To Topham’s fustian, Reynold’s flippant trash,
      To Andrews’ doggerel where three wits combine,
      To Morton’s catchword, Greathead’s idiot line,
      And Holcroft’s Shug-lane cant and Merry’s Moorfields Whine?"[22]

The early years of the present century still felt the influence of the sardonic ridicule which prevailed during the closing years of the previous one, and the satirists who appeared during the first decades of the former belonged to the robust or energetic order.  Their names and their works are well-nigh forgotten.

We now reach the last of the greater satirists that have adorned our literature, one who is in many respects a worthy peer of Dryden, Swift, and Pope.  Lord Byron’s fame as a satirist rests on three great works, each of them illustrative of a distinct type of composition.  Other satires he has written, nay, the satiric quality is present more or less in nearly all he produced; but The Vision of Judgment,