Beppo, and Don Juan are his three masterpieces in this style of literature.  They are wonderful compositions in every sense of the word.  The sparkling wit, the ready raillery, the cutting irony, the biting sarcasm, and the sardonic cynicism which characterize almost every line of them are united to a brilliancy of imagination, a swiftness as well as a felicity of thought, and an epigrammatic terseness of phrase which even Byron himself has equalled nowhere else in his works. The Vision of Judgment is an example in the first instance of parody, and, in the second, but not by any means so distinctly, of allegory.  Its savage ferocity of sarcasm crucified Southey upon the cross of scornful contempt.  Byron is not as good a metrist as a satirist, and the Ottava rima in his hands sometimes halts a little; still, the poem is a notable example of a satiric parody written with such distinguished success in a measure of great technical difficulty.

It is somewhat curious that all three of Byron’s great satiric poems should be written in the same measure.  Yet so it is, for the poet, having become enamoured of the metre after reading Frere’s clever satire, Whistlecraft, ever afterwards had a peculiar fondness for it.  Both Beppo and Don Juan are also excellent examples of the metrical “satiric tale”.  The former, being the earlier satire of the two, was Byron’s first essay in this new type of satiric composition.  His success therein stimulated him to attempt another “tale” which in some respects presents features that ally it to the mock-epic. Beppo is a perfect storehouse of well-rounded satirical phrases that cleave to the memory, such as “the deep damnation of his ‘bah’” and the description of the “budding miss”,

     “So much alarmed that she is quite alarming,
      All giggle, blush, half pertness and half pout”.

Beppo leads up to Don Juan, and it is hard to say which is the cleverer satire of the two.  In both, the wit is so unforced and natural, the fun so sparkling, the banter and the persiflage so bright and scintillating, that they seem, as Sir Walter Scott said, to be the natural outflow from the fountain of humour.  Byron’s earliest satire, English Bards and Scots Reviewers, is a clever piece of work, but compared with the great trio above-named is a production of his nonage.

Byron was succeeded by Praed, whose social pictures are instinct with the most refined and polished raillery, with the true Attic salt of wit united to a metrical deftness as graceful as it was artistic.  During Praed’s lifetime, Lamb with his inimitable Essays of Elia, Southey, Barham with the ever-popular Ingoldsby Legends, James and Horace Smith with the Rejected Addresses, Disraeli, Leigh Hunt, Tom Hood, and Landor had been winning laurels in various branches of social satire which, consequent upon the influence of Byron and then of his disciple, Praed,