Juvenal's depth of conviction that desperate diseases demand radical
remedies.[19]

By the side of Pope stands an impressive but a mournful figure, one of
the most tragic in our literature, to think of whom, as Thackeray says,
"is like thinking of the ruin of a great empire". As an all-round
satirist Jonathan Swift has no superior save Dryden, and he only by
virtue of his broader human sympathies. In the works of the great Dean
we have many distinct forms of satire. Scarce anything he wrote, with
the exception of his unfortunate _History of the Last Four Years of
Queen Anne_, but is marked by satiric touches that relieve the tedium
of even its dullest pages. He has utilized nearly all the recognized
modes of satiric composition throughout the range of his long list of
works. In the _Tale of a Tub_ he employed the vehicle of the satiric
tale to lash the Dissenters, the Papists, and even the Church of
England; in a word, the cant of religion as well as the pretensions of
letters and the shams of the world. In the _Battle of the Books_ the
parody or travesty of the Romances of Chivalry is used to ridicule the
controversy raging between Temple, Wotton, Boyle, and Bentley,
regarding the comparative merits of ancient and modern writers. In
_Gulliver's Travels_ the fictitious narrative or mock journal is
impressed into the service, the method consisting in adopting an absurd
supposition at the outset and then gravely deducing the logical effects
which follow. These three form the trio of great prose satires which
from the epoch of their publication until now have remained the wonder
and the delight of successive generations. Their realism, humorous
invention, ready wit, unsparing irony, and keen ridicule have exercised
as potent an attraction as their gloomy misanthropy has repelled. Among
minor satires are his scathing attacks in prose and verse on the war
party as a ring of Whig stock-jobbers, such as _Advice to the October