“If my countrymen would take the hint and grow better-natured from my ill-natured poem, as some call it, I would say this of it, that though it is far from the best satire that ever was written, it would do the most good that ever satire did.”
Gifford[25] also, though a believer in the mission of satire, admits that “to laugh at fools is superfluous, and at the vicious unwise.”
Cowper[26] allows minor accomplishments:
“Yet what can satire, whether grave or gay?
It may correct a foible, may chastise
The freaks of fashion, regulate the dress,
Retrench a sword-blade, or displace a patch;
But where are its sublimer trophies found?
What vice has it subdu’d? whose heart reclaim’d
By rigour, or whom laugh’d into reform?