having a full account of his virtues. It is too much the custom in
politics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhuman, as utterly
careless of his country, as utterly cynical, which no man ever was since
the beginning of the world. This kind of invective may often have a
great superficial success: it may hit the mood of the moment; it may
raise excitement and applause; it may impress millions. But there is one
man among all those millions whom it does not impress, whom it hardly
ever touches; that is the man against whom it is directed. The one
person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the man
whom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach. He
knows that such a description of him is not true. He knows that he is
not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly self-seeking, or utterly barbarous
and revengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he can
count as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many hours
of decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man. But behind
all this he has his real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul:
behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the craven
silences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanly
visions of revenge. It is to these that satire should reach if it is to
touch the man at whom it is aimed. And to reach these it must pass and
salute a whole army of virtues.

If we turn to the great English satirists of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, for example, we find that they had this rough, but
firm, grasp of the size and strength, the value and the best points of
their adversary. Dryden, before hewing Ahitophel in pieces, gives a
splendid and spirited account of the insane valour and inspired cunning
of the

"daring pilot in extremity,"