The political enmity
existing between the Jacobites and the Hanoverians continued to afford
occasion for the exchange of party squibs and lampoons. The lengthened
popularity of Gay's _Beggars' Opera_, a composition wherein a new mode
was created, viz. the satiric opera (the prototype of the comic opera
of later days), affords an index to the temper of the time. It was the
age of England's lethargy.
After the defeat of Culloden, satire languished for a while, to revive
again during the ministry of the Earl of Bute, when everything Scots
came in for condemnation, and when Smollett and John Wilkes belaboured
each other in the _Briton_ and the _North Briton_, in pamphlet,
pasquinade, and parody, until at last Lord Bute withdrew from the
contest in disgust, and suspended the organ over which the author of
_Roderick Random_ presided. The satirical effusions of this epoch are
almost entirely worthless, the only redeeming feature being the fact
that Goldsmith was at that very moment engaged in throwing off those
delicious _morceaux_ of social satire contained in _The Citizen of the
World_. Johnson, a few years before, had set the fashion for some time
with his two satires written in free imitation of Juvenal--_London_,
and _The Vanity of Human Wishes_. But from 1760 onward until the close
of the century, when Ellis, Canning, and Frere opened what may be
termed the modern epoch of satire, the influence paramount was that of
Goldsmith. Fielding and Smollett were both satirists of powerful and
original stamp, but they were so much else besides that their influence
was lost in that of the genial author of the _Deserted Village_ and
_Retaliation_.
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