But what more need be said of an introductory character to these selections that are now placed before the reader?  English satire, though perhaps less in evidence to-day as a separate department in letters, is still as cardinal a quality as ever in the productions of our leading authors.  If satires are no longer in fashion, satire is perennial as an attribute in literature, and we have every reason to cherish it and welcome it as warmly as of old.  The novels of Thackeray, as I have already said, contain some of the most delicately incisive shafts of satire that have been barbed by any writer of the present century.  “George Eliot”, also, though in a less degree, has shown herself a satirist of much power and pungency, while others of our latter-day novelists manifest themselves as possessed of a faculty of satire both virile and trenchant.  It is one of the indispensable qualities of a great writer’s style, because its quarry is one of the most widely diffused of existing things on the face of the globe.  There is no age without its folly, no epoch without its faults.  So long, therefore, as man and his works are imperfect, so long shall there be existent among us abuses, social, political, professional, and ecclesiastical, and so long, too, shall it be the province and the privilege of those who feel themselves called upon to play the difficult part of censor morum, to prick the bubbles of falsehood, vanity, and vice with the shafts of ridicule and raillery.

[Footnote 1:  The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century.]

[Footnote 2:  Cf.  Lenient, History of French Satire.]

[Footnote 3:  Thomson’s Ante-Augustan Latin Poetry.]

[Footnote 4:  Cf.  Mackail; Paten, Etudes sur la Poesie latine.]

[Footnote 5:  See Skeat’s “Langland” in Encyclop.  Brit.]

[Footnote 6:  See Arber’s Reprints for 1868.]

[Footnote 7:  Arber’s Select Reprints.]

[Footnote 8:  Palladis Tamia:  Wits Treasury.]

[Footnote 9:  This, of course, was Marston.]

[Footnote 10:  From the Fifth Satire in The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image and Certain Satyres, by John Marston. 1598.]

[Footnote 11:  Pasquil’s Madcappe:  Thrown at the Corruption of these Times—­1626.  Breton, to be read at all, ought to be studied in the two noble volumes edited by Dr. A.B.  Grosart.  From his edition I quote.]

[Footnote 12:  English Literature, by Prof.  Craik.  Hannay’s Satires and Satirists.]

[Footnote 13:  Life of Dryden, by Sir Walter Scott.  Saintsbury’s Life of Dryden.]

[Footnote 14:  Thackeray’s English Humorists.  Hannay’s Satires and Satirists.]

[Footnote 15:  Satire and Satirists, by James Hannay.  Lecture III.]

[Footnote 16:  Dowden’s French Literature.]

[Footnote 17:  Minto’s Characteristics of English Poets.]