“Can Satire want a subject, where Disdain,
By virtue fired, may point her sharpest strain?
Where, clothed in thunder, Truth may roll along,
And Candour justify the rage of song?”
But in The Candidate, he announces reform of his former practices, in a series of rhetorical “Enoughs,” coming to a climax in—
“Enough of Satire—in less hardened times
Great was her force, and mighty were her rhymes.”
In his own degenerate days, however,—
“Satire throws by her arrows on the ground,
And if she cannot cure, she will not wound.