ation is, the catch-phrases extracted from Pope's most popular
work become the touchstones of post-Augustan satire.

The problem that the satirist faced in the sixties was, then,
formidable. The country was in upheaval but the conventions demanded
that the satirist say everything was nearly perfect. As a result, satire
tended toward personal whines, like _The Curate_, toward attacking
tiresomely obvious objects, like the superficial chit-chat of Lloyd's
_Conversation_, toward trivial quarrels, like Churchill's _Rosciad_,
toward broadly unimpeachable morals, like Johnson's _The Vanity of Human
Wishes_. It is understandable that many writers, such as Joseph Warton
and Christopher Smart, abandoned satire for various kinds of enthusiasm.

Methodism lent itself to such satire. Methodists could be described as
unfortunate aberrants from an essentially good world, typical of those
bothersome fanatics and deviants at the fringe of society who keep this
world from being perfect. They were also logical heirs to the satire once
visited upon Dissenters but which diminished when Dissenters became more
restrained in their style of worship. (The Preface to one anti-Methodist
satire even takes pains to exclude "rational Dissenters" from its
target.) Many Methodists were followers of Calvin. These Methodists
brought out the old antagonisms against the Calvinist doctrine of
Election (or the popular version of it), directed against its severity,
its apparent encouragement of pride, and its antinomian implications. The
mass displays of emotion at Methodist meetings would be distasteful to
many people in most periods and probably were especially so in an age in
which rational behavior was particularly valued. And there were those
people who believed that Methodism, in spite of Wesley's arguments to the
contrary, led good members of the Church of England astray and threatened
religious stability.

Yet all these causes do not explain the harshness of anti-Methodist
satire. No other subject during this period received such severe
condemnation. Wesley and Whitefield were accused of seducing their
female converts, of fleecing all their converts of money, of making
trouble solely out of envy or pride. Evan Lloyd is not so harsh nor
so implacably bigoted about any other subject as he is about Methodism.
He was an intimate friend of John Wilkes, the least bigoted of men.
Also, there are essential differences between the Dissenters of the
Restorat