world literally without a rational
creed. As a satire on the old Hellenic religion nothing could be racier
than _The Dialogues of the Gods_ and _The Dialogues of the Dead_.

It is impossible in this brief survey to discuss at large the vast
chaotic epoch in the history of satire which lies between the end of
the ancient world and the dawn of humanism. For satire, as a literary
genre, belongs to these two. The mediaeval world, inexhaustible in its
capacity and relish for abuse, full of rude laughter and drastic
humour--prompt, for all its superstition, to make a jest of the priest,
and, for all its chivalry, to catalogue the foibles of women--had the
satirical animus in abundance, and satirical songs, visions, fables,
fabliaux, ballads, epics, in legion, but no definite and recognised
school of satire. It is sufficient to name, as examples of the
extraordinary range of the mediaeval satiric genius, the farce of
_Pathelin_, the beast-epic of _Renart_, the rhymes of Walter Map, and
the _Inferno_ of Dante.

Of these satirists before the rise of "satire", mediaeval England
produced two great examples in Chaucer and Langland. They typify at the
outset the two classes into which Dryden divided English satirists--the
followers of Horace's way and the followers of Juvenal's--the men of
the world, who assail the enemies of common-sense with the weapons of
humour and sarcasm; and the prophets, who assail vice and crime with
passionate indignation and invective scorn. Since Dryden's time neither
line has died out, and it is still possible, with all reserves, to
recognise the two strains through the whole course of English
literature: the one represented in Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Addison,
Arbuthnot, Swift, Young, Goldsmith, Canning, Thackeray, and Tennyson;
the others in Langland, Skelton, Lyndsay, Nash, Marston, Dryden, Pope,
Churchill, Johnson, Junius, Burns, and Browning.

Langland was a naive mediaeval Juvenal. The sad-visaged, world-weary
dreamer of the Malvern hills, sorrowing over the vice, the abuses, and
the social misery of his time, finding, as he tells us, no comfort in
any of the established institutions of his day, because confronted with
the fraud and falsehood that infected them all, is one of the most
pathetic figures in literature. As Skeat suggests, the object of his
great poem was to secure, through the latitude afforded by allegory,
opportunities of describing the life and manners of the poorer classes,
of