regarding the fact that _The Vision of Piers Plowman_ was
esteemed a satire of outstanding merit in those days, is a curious
commentary on Hall's boastful couplet describing himself as the
earliest English satirist.

To name all the writers who, in this fruitful epoch of our literature,
devoted themselves to this kind of composition would be impossible.
From 1598 until the death of James I. upwards of one hundred separate
satirists can be named, both in verse and prose. Of these Bishop Hall
is one of the greatest, and I have chosen him as the leading
representative of the period. To the study of Horace and Juvenal he had
devoted many years of his early manhood, and his imitation of these two
great Romans is close and consistent. Therefore, for vigour, grave
dignity, and incisiveness of thought, united to graphic pictures of his
age, Hall is undeniably the most important name in the history of the
Elizabethan satire, strictly so called. His exposures of the follies of
his age were largely couched in the form, so much affected by Horace,
of a familiar commentary on certain occurrences, addressed apparently
to an anonymous correspondent.

Contemporary with Hall was Thomas Nash, whose _Pierce Penilesse's
Supplication to the Devil_ was one of the most extraordinary onslaughts
on the social vices of the metropolis that the period produced. Written
in close imitation of Juvenal's earlier satires, he frequently
approaches the standard of his master in graphic power of description,
in scathing invective, and ironical mockery. In _Have with you to
Saffron Walden_ he lashed Gabriel Harvey for his unworthy conduct
towards the memory of Robert Greene. Both satires are written in prose,
as indeed are nearly all his works, inasmuch as Nash was more of a
pamphleteer than anything else. Other contemporaries of Hall were
Thomas Dekker, whose fame as a dramatist has eclipsed his reputation
as a satirist, but whose _Bachelor's Banquet--pleasantly discoursing
the variable humours of Women, their quickness of wits and unsearchable
deceits_, is a sarcastic impeachment of the gentler sex, while his
_Gull's Hornbook_ must be ranked with Nash's work as one of the most
unsparing castigations of social life in London. The latter is a volume
of fictitious maxims for the use of youths desirous of being considered
"pretty fellows". Other contemporaries were John Donne, John Marston,
Jonson, George Chapman, and Nicholas Breton--all names of men who w