It was a time when satire flourished unrestrained, save by the fear of physical retaliation; and personalities were its choicest weapon. No age in our history was so prolific in satire, though this portion of our literature is the least te membered. Smollett and Fielding, with a host of writers whose names are known to-day only by the student, waged a fierce war of scurrilous abuse with little humour in it, from day to day and week to week, in newspaper and magazine. Foote and Woodward travestied public characters upon the stage; scores of incompetent poets like Paul Whitehead earned money and notoriety by ephemeral lampoons; and poets of genius like Gray and Cowper were wrung to out bursts of fiery sarcasm by the follies and depravity of the great. Charles Churchill, as suddenly as Byron, woke one morning to find himself famous, and able after years of poverty to command almost any price he wished for his furious pas quinades Hogarth was but the one true artist among a crowd of indifferent caricaturists, and Junius but the most pungent among an army of acrid critics in the press. Satire was the literary fashion, and clever personalities were a marketable commodity. The brilliant success of Chrysal (which ought to have made its author's fortune had he been fairly treated by his publisher), was due to the lifelikeness of the portraiture and the sprinkling in of well-known incidents. At any rate, the book ceased to be reprinted only when the last of the objects of its ridicule were in their (graves.

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