But what more need be said of an introductory character to these
selections that are now placed before the reader? English satire,
though perhaps less in evidence to-day as a separate department in
letters, is still as cardinal a quality as ever in the productions of
our leading authors. If satires are no longer in fashion, satire is
perennial as an attribute in literature, and we have every reason to
cherish it and welcome it as warmly as of old. The novels of Thackeray,
as I have already said, contain some of the most delicately incisive
shafts of satire that have been barbed by any writer of the present
century. "George Eliot", also, though in a less degree, has shown
herself a satirist of much power and pungency, while others of our
latter-day novelists manifest themselves as possessed of a faculty of
satire both virile and trenchant. It is one of the indispensable
qualities of a great writer's style, because its quarry is one of the
most widely diffused of existing things on the face of the globe. There
is no age without its folly, no epoch without its faults. So long,
therefore, as man and his works are imperfect, so long shall there be
existent among us abuses, social, political, professional, and
ecclesiastical, and so long, too, shall it be the province and the
privilege of those who feel themselves called upon to play the
difficult part of _censor morum_, to prick the bubbles of falsehood,
vanity, and vice with the shafts of ridicule and raillery.

[Footnote 1: _The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century_.]

[Footnote 2: Cf. Lenient, _History of French Satire_.]

[Footnote 3: Thomson's _Ante-Augustan Latin Poetry_.]

[Footnote 4: Cf. Mackail; Paten, _Études sur la Poésie latine_.]