_Beppo_ leads up to _Don Juan_, and it is hard to say which is the
cleverer satire of the two. In both, the wit is so unforced and
natural, the fun so sparkling, the banter and the persiflage so bright
and scintillating, that they seem, as Sir Walter Scott said, to be the
natural outflow from the fountain of humour. Byron's earliest satire,
_English Bards and Scots Reviewers_, is a clever piece of work, but
compared with the great trio above-named is a production of his nonage.

Byron was succeeded by Praed, whose social pictures are instinct with
the most refined and polished raillery, with the true Attic salt of wit
united to a metrical deftness as graceful as it was artistic. During
Praed's lifetime, Lamb with his inimitable _Essays of Elia_, Southey,
Barham with the ever-popular _Ingoldsby Legends_, James and Horace
Smith with the _Rejected Addresses_, Disraeli, Leigh Hunt, Tom Hood,
and Landor had been winning laurels in various branches of social
satire which, consequent upon the influence of Byron and then of his
disciple, Praed, became the current mode. A favourable example of that
style is found in Leigh Hunt's _Feast of the Poets_ and in Edward
Fitz-Gerald's _Chivalry at a Discount_. Other writers of satire in the
earlier decades of the present century were Peacock, who in his novels
(_Crotchet Castle_, &c.) evolved an original type of satire based upon
the Athenian New Comedy. Miss Austen in her English novels and Miss
Edgeworth in her Irish tales employed satire to impeach certain crying
social abuses, as also did Dickens in _Oliver Twist_ and others of his
books. Douglas Jerrold's comedies and sketches are full of titbits of
gay and brilliant banter and biting irony. If _Sartor Resartus_ could
be regarded as a satire, as Dr. Garnett says, Carlyle would be the
first of satirists, with his thundering invective, grand rhetoric,
indignant scorn, grim humour, and satiric gloom in denouncing the shams
of human society and of human nature. An admirable American school of