allegory, the satire is earnest, grave and solemn, as though with a
sense of deep responsibility; that in Chaucer's _Canterbury
Tales_--nay, in all his poems--is genial, laughing, and good-natured;
tolerant, like Horace's of human weaknesses, because the author is so
keenly conscious of his own.

Langland and Chaucer both died about the beginning of the fifteenth
century. But from that date until 1576--when Gascoigne's _Steel Glass_,
the first verse satire of the Elizabethan age, was published--we must
look mainly to Scotland and the poems of William Dunbar, Sir David
Lyndsay, and others, to preserve the apostolic succession of satire.
William Dunbar is one of the greatest of British satirists. His _Dance
of the Seven Deadly Sins_, in which the popular poetic form of the
age--allegory--is utilized with remarkable skill as the vehicle for a
scathing satire on the headlong sensuality of his time, produces by its
startling realism and terrible intensity an effect not unlike that
exercised by the overpowering creations of Salvator Rosa. The poem is a
bitter indictment of the utter corruption of all classes in the society
of his period. Like Juvenal, to whose school he belongs, he softens
nothing, tones down nothing. The evil is presented in all its native
hideousness. Lyndsay, on the other hand, would have been more vigorous
had he been less diffuse, and used the pruning-knife more unsparingly.
His finest satiric pictures often lose their point by verbosity and
tediousness. Brevity is the soul of satire as well as of wit.

The most vigorous English satire of this entire period was that which
we owe to the scurrilous pen of Skelton and the provocative personality
of Wolsey. With his work may be mentioned the rude and unpolished, yet
vigorous, piece bearing the rhyming title,