Club_, _Public Spirit of the Whigs, &c._, the _Virtues of Sid Hamet_,
_The Magician's Wand_ (directed against Godolphin); his _Polite
Conversations_ and _Directions to Servants_ are savage attacks on the
inanity of society small-talk and the greed of the menials of the
period. But why prolong the list? From the _Drapier's Letters_,
directed against a supposed fraudulent introduction of a copper
currency known as "Wood's Halfpence", to his skit on _The Furniture of
a Woman's Mind_, there were few topics current in his day, whether in
politics, theology, economics, or social gossip, which he did not
attack with the artillery of his wit and satire. Had he been less
sardonic, had he possessed even a modicum of the _bonhomie_ of his
friend Arbuthnot, Swift's satire would have exercised even more potent
an influence than it has been its fortune to achieve.

Pope died in 1744, Swift in 1745. During their last years there were
signs that the literary modes of the epoch of Queen Anne, which had
maintained their ascendency so long, were rapidly losing their hold on
the popular mind. A new literary period was about to open wherein new
literary ideals and new models would prevail. Satire, in common with
literature as a whole, felt the influence of the transitional era. As
we have seen, it concerned itself largely with ridiculing the follies
and eccentricities of men of letters and foolish pretenders to the
title; also in lashing social vices and abuses. The political enmity
existing between the Jacobites and the Hanoverians continued to afford
occasion for the exchange of party squibs and lampoons. The lengthened
popularity of Gay's _Beggars' Opera_, a composition wherein a new mode
was created, viz. the satiric opera (the prototype of the comic opera
of later days), affords an index to the temper of the time. It was the
age of England's lethargy.