The mock-heroic was exceedingly popular during the fifty years following the death of Pope. The satires of one group, following The Rape of the Lock, contain no personal invective, and are satiric only in the sense that any parody of a serious genre is satiric.[14] Another class of mock-heroics, modelled particularly on the Dunciad, make no pretence of refraining from personal satire, and are often violently scurrilous.[15] A large number of poems imitate the title of the Dunciad without necessarily having any mock-heroic characteristics.[16] In the field of personal, and especially of political, satire, are many poems not corresponding exactly to any of the above mentioned types.[17] The bitter party feeling aroused by the rise to power of Lord Bute and by the resulting protests of Wilkes in the North Briton was the occasion of many broadsides during the decade between 1760 and 1770.[18]
Several satires of the period, based particularly on Pope’s satiric epistles, seem to maintain a more elevated tone, although they also are frequently intemperate in their personalities.[19] An excellent example is the very severe Epistle to Curio by Akenside, praised for its literary merits by Macaulay.[20] A small, but rather important class of satires is made up of criticisms of literature or literary men in the manner of either the Essay on Criticism or the Dunciad.[21] Still another group deal, like Young’s Love of Fame, with the foibles and fads of society, using type figures and avoiding specific references.[22] It is necessary, finally, to include under satire many of the didactic and philosophic poems which seemed to infect the century.[23] These Ethic Epistles, as they are styled in Bell’s Fugitive Pieces, are often little more than verse sermons. Obviously many poems of this nature hardly come within the scope of true satire. Goldsmith’s Deserted Village (1770), for instance, has some satirical elements; yet it is, properly speaking, meditative and descriptive verse. The same may be said, perhaps, of the so-called satires of Cowper.
The body of work thus cursorily reviewed shows a wide diversity of subject-matter combined with a consistent and monotonous uniformity of style. In most of the material we find the same regular versification, the same stock epithets, and the same lack of distinctive qualities; indeed, were the respective writers unknown, it would be a difficult task to distinguish between the verse of two such satirists as James Scott and Soame Jenyns. During the fifty years between the death of Pope and the appearance of Gifford’s Baviad (1794) only four names stand out above the rest as important in the history of English satire in verse: Johnson, Churchill, Cowper, and Crabbe.
Of these writers, Johnson contributed but little to the mass of English satire. His London (1738) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) are imitations of Juvenal, characterized by stateliness, dignity, melancholy, and sonorous rhetoric, but with only a slight element of personal attack. The latter poem received high praise from Byron.[24]
Churchill and Byron, who have often been compared because of their quarrels with the reviewers and their denunciation of a conservative and reactionary government, were much alike in their arrogant independence, their fiery intensity, and their passionate liberalism. Churchill, however, unlike Byron, was always a satirist, and undertook no other species of poetry. In many respects he resembled Oldham, whose career, like his, was short and tumultuous, and whose wit, like his, usually shone “through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.”
All Churchill’s work is marked by vigor, effrontery, and earnestness, and the ferocity and vindictiveness of much of it give force to Gosse’s description of the author as “a very Caligula among men of letters.” However, although he was responsible for two of the most venomous literary assaults in English—that on Hogarth in the Epistle to William Hogarth (1763) and that on Lord Sandwich in The Candidate (1764)—he did not stab from behind or resort to underhand methods. Despite his obvious crudities, he is the most powerful figure in English satire between Pope and Byron.
Churchill employed two measures: the heroic couplet, in the Rosciad (1761) and several succeeding poems; and the octosyllabic couplet, in The Ghost (1763) and The Duellist (1764). His versification is seldom polished, but his lines have, at times, something of the robustness and impetuous disregard of regularity which lend strength to Dryden’s couplets. It was to Churchill that Byron attributed in part what he was pleased to term the “absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope,”[25] which, in his opinion, had been developing steadily towards the end of the eighteenth century. Churchill frankly acknowledged his preference of Dryden over Pope,[26] a partiality which he shared with Voltaire and Dr. Johnson. The fact is, however, that, despite his failure to attain smoothness and artistic finish, he owed more to Pope than he realized or cared to admit.[27]
With Cowper, Byron had temperamentally little in common; yet Cowper is interesting, if only for the reason that he proves, by contrast with Churchill, the range in manner of which the classical satire is capable. He was most successful in a kind of mildly moral reproof, which has often ease, humor, and apt sententiousness, although it rarely possesses energy enough to make it effective as satire. Cowper’s familiar verse, often satirical in tone, is almost wholly admirable, the best of its kind between Prior and Praed.
The satire of Crabbe is essentially realistic. It portrays things as they are, dwelling on each sordid detail and sweeping away all the illusions of romance. In The Village (1783), for instance, Crabbe describes life as he found it among the lower classes in a Suffolk coast town—a life barren, humdrum, and dismal: thus the poem is an antidote, possibly intentional, to the idyllic and sentimental picture drawn by Goldsmith in The Deserted Village. The ethical element is always present in Crabbe’s work, and thus he preserves the didacticism of Pope and Cawthorn; but his homely phraseology, his sombre portraiture, and his pitiless psychological analysis of character connect him with a novelist like Hardy. Possibly some of the realism of Don Juan may be traced to the example of Crabbe, for whom Byron had both respect and affection.[28]
Aside from that exercised by the work and heritage of Pope, the most definite influence upon Byron’s satiric verse came from the satires of William Gifford (1756–1826), which had appeared some years before Byron began to write. Gifford, who early became the young lord’s model and counsellor, and who later revised and corrected his poetry, continued to the end to be one of the few literary friends to whom Byron referred consistently with deference.[29]