it were, waves off his adversaries disdainfully, but the very wave of
his hand cuts like a sabre. His satire is not savage and furious, like
Juvenal's; not cool, collected, and infernal, like that of Junius; not
rabid and reckless, like that of Swift; and never darkens into the
unearthly grandeur of Byron's: but it is strong, swift, dashing, and
decisive. Nor does it want deep and subtle touches. His pictures of
Shaftesbury and Buckingham are as delicately finished, as they are
powerfully conceived. He flies best at the highest game; but even in
dealing with Settles and Shadwells, he can be as felicitous as he is
fierce. No satire in the world contains lines more exquisitely inverted,
more ingeniously burlesqued, more artfully turned out of their
apparently proper course, like rays at once refracted and cooled, than
those which thus ominously panegyrise Shadwell:--

"His brows thick fogs, instead of glories grace,
And _lambent dulness_ play'd about his face.
As Hannibal did to the altar come,
Sworn by his sire, a mortal foe to Rome;
So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain,
That he till death true dulness would maintain."

Better still the following picture, in imitation of the Homeric or
Miltonic manner:--

"The Sire then shook the honours of his head,
And from his brows damps of oblivion shed
Full on the _filial dulness_--long he stood
Repelling from his breast the _raging_ God."

What inimitable irony in this epithet! The God of dulness _raging_! A