the more it fulfilled its specific function.  But such a view is based on the supposition that satire has no other mission than to lash the vices of our neighbours, without recalling the fact that the satirist has a reformative as well as a punitive duty to discharge.  The further we revert into the “deep backward and abysm of time” towards the early history of the world, the more pronounced and overt is this indulgence in broad personal invective and sarcastic strictures.

The earliest cultivators of the art were probably the men with a grievance, or, as Dr. Garnett says, “the carpers and fault-finders of the clan”.  Their first attempts were, as has been conjectured, merely personal lampoons against those they disliked or differed from, and were perhaps of a type cognate with the Homeric Margites.  Homer’s character of Thersites is mayhap a lifelike portrait of some contemporary satirist who made himself dreaded by his personalities.  But even in Thersites we see the germs of transition from merely personal invective to satire directed against a class; and Greek satire, though on the whole more personal than Roman, achieved brilliant results.  It is enough to name Archilochus, whom Mahaffy terms the Swift of Greek Literature, Simonides of Amorgos (circ. 660 B.C.), the author of the famous Satire on Women, and Hipponax of Ephesus, reputed the inventor of the Scazon or halting iambic.

But the lasting significance of Greek satire is mainly derived from its surpassing distinction in two domains—­in the comico-satiric drama of Aristophanes, and in the Beast Fables of ‘AEsop’.  In later Greek literature it lost its robustness and became trivial and effeminate through expending itself on unworthy objects.

It is amongst the Romans, with their deeper ethical convictions and more powerful social sense, that we must look for the true home of ancient satire.  The germ of Roman satire is undoubtedly to be found in the rude Fescennine verses, the rough and licentious jests and buffoonery of the harvest-home and the vintage thrown into quasi-lyrical form.  These songs gradually developed a concomitant form of dialogue styled saturae, a term denoting “miscellany”, and derived perhaps from the Satura lanx, a charger filled with the first-fruits of the year’s produce, which was offered to Bacchus and Ceres.[3] In Ennius, the “father of Roman satire”, and Varro, the word still retained this old Roman sense.

Lucilius was the first Roman writer who made “censorious criticism” the prevailing tone of satire, and his work, the parent of the satire of Horace, of Persius, of Juvenal, and through that of the poetical satire of modern times, was the principal agent in fixing its present polemical and urban associations upon a term originally steeped in the savour of rustic revelry.  In the hands of Horace, Roman satire was to be moulded into a new type that was not only to be a thing of beauty, but, as far as one can yet