te, then we exclaim with
impatience, all things are evil. But at length comes the calm hour,
when they who look beyond the superficies of things begin to discern
their true bearings; when the perception of evil, or sorrow, or sin,
brings also the perception of some opposite good, which awakens our
indulgence, or the knowledge of the cause which excites our pity. Thus
it is with me. I can smile,--nay, I can laugh still, to see folly,
vanity, absurdity, meanness, exposed by scornful wit, and depicted by
others in fictions light and brilliant. But these very things, when I
encounter the reality, rather make me sad than merry, and take away all
the inclination, if I had the power, to hold them up to derision.

MEDON.

Unless, by doing so, you might correct them.

ALDA.

Correct them! Show me that one human being who has been made essentially
better by satire! O no, no! there is something in human nature which
hardens itself against the lash--something in satire which excites only
the lowest and worst of our propensities. That avowal in Pope--

I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me!

--has ever filled me with terror and pity--

MEDON.

From its truth perhaps?

ALDA.

From its arrogance,--for the truth is, that a vice never corrected a
vice. Pope might be proud of the terror he inspired in those who feared
no God in whom vanity was stronger than conscience: but that terror made
no individual man better; and while he indulged his own besetting sin,
he administered to the malignity of others. Your professed satirists
always send me to think upon the opposite sentiment in Shakspeare, on
"the mischievous foul sin of chiding sin." I remember once hearing a
poem of Barry Cornwall's, (he read it to me,) about a strange winged
creature that, having the lineaments of a man, yet preyed on a man, and
afterwards coming to a stream to drink, and beholding his own face
therein, and that he had made his prey of a creature like himself, pined
away with repentance. So should those do, who having made themselves
mischievous mirth out of the sins and sorrows of others, remembering
their own humanity, and seeing within themselves the same lineaments--so
should _they_ grieve and pine away, self-punished.

MEDON.

'Tis an old allegory, and a sad one--and but too much to the purpose.