hold a mirror or "steel glass" up to the vices of the age, we reach
that wonderful outburst of satiric, epigrammatic, and humorous
composition which was one of the characteristics, and certainly not the
least important, of the Elizabethan epoch. Lodge's _Fig for Momus_
(1593) contains certain satires which rank with Gascoigne's work as the
earliest compositions of that type belonging to the period. That they
were of no mean reputation in their own day is evident from the
testimony of Meres,[8] who says, "As Horace, Lucilius, Juvenal,
Persius, and Lucullus are the best for satire among the Latins, so with
us, in the same faculty, these are chiefe, Piers Plowman, Lodge, Hall
of Emanuel College, Cambridge, the author of _Pygmalion's Image and
Certain Satires_[9] and the author of _Skialethea_". This contemporary
opinion 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