the others in Langland, Skelton, Lyndsay, Nash, Marston, Dryden, Pope,
Churchill, Johnson, Junius, Burns, and Browning.

Langland was a naïve mediæval 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 inveighing against clerical abuses and the rapacity of the friars,
of representing the miseries caused by the great pestilences then
prevalent, and by the hasty and ill-advised marriages consequent
thereon; of denouncing lazy workmen and sham beggars, the corruption
and bribery then too common in the law-courts--in a word, to lash all
the numerous forms of falsehood, which are at all times the fit
subjects for satire and indignant exposure. Amid many essential
differences, is there not here a striking likeness to the work of the
Roman Juvenal? Langland's satire is not so fiery nor so rhetorically
intense as that of his prototype, but it is less profoundly despairing.
He satirizes evil rather by exposing it and contrasting it with good,
than by vehemently denouncing it. The colours of the pictures are
sombre, and the gloom is almost overwhelming, but still it is illumined
from time to time with the hope of coming amendment, when the great
reformer Piers the Plowman, by which is typified Christ,[5] should
appear, who was to remedy all abuses and restore the world to a right
condition. In this sustaining hope he differs from Juvenal, the
funereal gloom of whose satires is relieved by no gleam of hope for the
future.