Landor[46] has Lucian say:
“I have ridiculed the puppets of all features, all colours, all sizes, by which an impudent and audacious set of impostors have been gaining an easy livelihood these two thousand years. * * *
“The falsehood that the tongue commits is slight in comparison with what is conceived by the heart, and executed by the whole man, throughout life.”
Meredith’s portrait of The Comic Spirit is applicable to satire, for throughout the essay he gives to the term comic the connotation generally allowed to the term satiric:
“Men’s future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning short-sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, * * * whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, * * * they are detected and ridiculed.”
Meredith[47] also reiterates the distinction made by Swift and Fielding in regard to misfortune:
“Poverty, says the satirist, has nothing harder in itself than that it makes men ridiculous. But poverty is never ridiculous to Comic perception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its bareness in a forlorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival ostentation.”
And he remarks of Molière:
“He strips Folly to the skin, displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her better clothing.”
Of the two forms of affectation, Fielding chooses hypocrisy as better satirical game, but Bergson[48] votes for the other: