[Satanic School], name applied by Southey to a class of writers headed by Byron and Shelley, because, according to him, their productions were "characterised by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety," and who, according to Carlyle, wasted their breath in a fierce wrangle with the devil, and had not the courage to fairly face and honestly fight him.
[Satellites] (lit. attendants), name given to the secondary bodies which revolve round the planets of the solar system, of which the Earth has one, Mars two, Jupiter four, Saturn eight, Uranus four, and Neptune is known to have at least one, as Venus is surmised to have.
[Satire], a species of poetry or prose writing in which the vice or folly of the times is held up to ridicule, a species in which Horace and Juvenal excelled among the Romans, and Dryden, Pope, and Swift among us.
[Satrap], a governor of a province under the ancient Persian monarchy, with large military and civil powers; when the central authority began to wane, some of them set up as independent rulers.
[Saturn], in the Roman mythology a primitive god of agriculture in Italy, often confounded with the Greek Kronos, the father of Zeus, and sovereign of the Golden Age; was represented as an old man bearing a sickle.
[Saturn], the planet of the solar system whose orbit is outside that of Jupiter, is 880 millions of miles from the sun, round which it takes 10,759 days or nearly 30 years to revolve, revolving on its own axis in about 10½ hours; its diameter is nine times greater than that of the earth; it is surrounded by bright rings that appear as three, and is accompanied by eight moons; the rings are solid, and are supposed to consist of a continuous belt of moons.
[Saturnalia], a festival in ancient Rome in honour of Saturn, in which all classes, free and bond, and young and old, enjoyed and indulged in all kinds of merriment without restraint.
[Satyrs], in the Greek mythology semi-animal woodland deities who roamed the hills generally in the train of [Dionysus] (q. v.), dancing to rustic music; represented with long pointed ears, flat noses, short horns, and a hair-clad man's body, with the legs and hoofs of a goat; they are of lustful nature, and fond of sensual pleasure generally.
[Sauerkraut], a favourite article of food in Germany and elsewhere in North Europe; formed of thinly sliced young cabbage laid in layers, with salt and spice-seeds, pressed in casks and allowed to ferment.
[Sauerteig] (i. e. leaven), an imaginary authority alive to the "celestial infernal" fermentation that goes on in the world, who has an eye specially to the evil elements at work, and to whose opinion Carlyle frequently appeals in his condemnatory verdict on sublunary things.