great satires, _Absalom and Achitophel_, _The Medal_, _MacFlecknoe_,
and the _Hind and the Panther_, each exemplify a distinct and important
type of satire. The first named is the classical instance of the use of
"historic parallels" as applied to the impeachment of the vices or
abuses of any age. With matchless skill the story of Absalom is
employed not merely to typify, but actually to represent, the designs
of Monmouth and his Achitophel--Shaftesbury. _The Medal_ reverts to the
type of the classic satire of the Juvenalian order. It is slightly more
rhetorical in style, and is partly devoted to a bitter invective
against Shaftesbury, partly to an argument as to the unfitness of
republican institutions for England, partly to a satiric address to
the Whigs. The third of the great series, _MacFlecknoe_, is Dryden's
masterpiece of satiric irony; a purely personal attack upon his rival,
Shadwell, "Crowned King of Dulness, and in all the realms of nonsense
absolute". Finally, the _Hind and the Panther_ represents a new
development of the "satiric fable". Dryden gave to British satire the
impulse towards that final form of development which it received from
the great satirists of the next century. There is little that appears
in Swift, Addison, Arbuthnot, Pope, or even Byron, for which the way
was not prepared by the genius of "Glorious John".

Of the famous group which adorned the reign of Queen Anne, Steele lives
above all in his Isaac Bickerstaff Essays, the vehicle of admirably
pithy and trenchant prose satire upon current political abuses. But,
unfortunately for his own fame, his lot was to be associated with the
greatest master of this form of composition that has appeared in
literature, and the celebrity of the greater writer dimmed that of the
lesser. Addison in his papers in the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_ has
brought what may be styled the Essay of Satiric Portraiture--in after
days to be developed along other lines by Praed, Charles Lamb, Leigh