English Satires | Page 6

only remarkable for the novel satirical device of the plan.
Bishop Latimer in his sermons is a vigorous satirist, particularly in that discourse upon "The Ploughers" (1547). His fearlessness is very conspicuous, and his attacks on the bishops who proved untrue to their trust and allowed their dioceses to go to wreck and ruin, are outspoken and trenchant:
"They that be lords will ill go to plough. It is no meet office for them. It is not seeming for their state. Thus came up lording loiterers; Thus crept in unprechinge prelates, and so have they long continued. For how many unlearned prelates have we now at this day? And no marvel; For if the ploughmen that now be, were made lordes, they would clean give over ploughing, they would leave of theyr labour and fall to lording outright and let the plough stand. For ever since the Prelates were made lords and nobles, the plough standeth, there is no work done, the people starve. They hawke, they hunte, they carde, they dyce, they pastime in their prelacies with galaunt gentlemen, with their dauncing minions, and with their freshe companions, so that ploughing is set aside."[7]
But after Gascoigne's Steel Glass was published, which professed to hold a mirror or "steel glass" up to the vices of the age, we reach that wonderful outburst of satiric, epigrammatic, and humorous composition which was one of the characteristics, and certainly not the least important, of the Elizabethan epoch. Lodge's Fig for Momus (1593) contains certain satires which rank with Gascoigne's work as the earliest compositions of that type belonging to the period. That they were of no mean reputation in their own day is evident from the testimony of Meres,[8] who says, "As Horace, Lucilius, Juvenal, Persius, and Lucullus are the best for satire among the Latins, so with us, in the same faculty, these are chiefe, Piers Plowman, Lodge, Hall of Emanuel College, Cambridge, the author of _Pygmalion's Image and Certain Satires[9] and the author of Skialethea_". This contemporary opinion regarding the fact that The Vision of Piers Plowman was esteemed a satire of outstanding merit in those days, is a curious commentary on Hall's boastful couplet describing himself as the earliest English satirist.
To name all the writers who, in this fruitful epoch of our literature, devoted themselves to this kind of composition would be impossible. From 1598 until the death of James I. upwards of one hundred separate satirists can be named, both in verse and prose. Of these Bishop Hall is one of the greatest, and I have chosen him as the leading representative of the period. To the study of Horace and Juvenal he had devoted many years of his early manhood, and his imitation of these two great Romans is close and consistent. Therefore, for vigour, grave dignity, and incisiveness of thought, united to graphic pictures of his age, Hall is undeniably the most important name in the history of the Elizabethan satire, strictly so called. His exposures of the follies of his age were largely couched in the form, so much affected by Horace, of a familiar commentary on certain occurrences, addressed apparently to an anonymous correspondent.
Contemporary with Hall was Thomas Nash, whose _Pierce Penilesse's Supplication to the Devil_ was one of the most extraordinary onslaughts on the social vices of the metropolis that the period produced. Written in close imitation of Juvenal's earlier satires, he frequently approaches the standard of his master in graphic power of description, in scathing invective, and ironical mockery. In _Have with you to Saffron Walden_ he lashed Gabriel Harvey for his unworthy conduct towards the memory of Robert Greene. Both satires are written in prose, as indeed are nearly all his works, inasmuch as Nash was more of a pamphleteer than anything else. Other contemporaries of Hall were Thomas Dekker, whose fame as a dramatist has eclipsed his reputation as a satirist, but whose _Bachelor's Banquet--pleasantly discoursing the variable humours of Women, their quickness of wits and unsearchable deceits_, is a sarcastic impeachment of the gentler sex, while his Gull's Hornbook must be ranked with Nash's work as one of the most unsparing castigations of social life in London. The latter is a volume of fictitious maxims for the use of youths desirous of being considered "pretty fellows". Other contemporaries were John Donne, John Marston, Jonson, George Chapman, and Nicholas Breton--all names of men who were conspicuous inheritors of the true Elizabethan spirit, and who united virility of thought to robustness and trenchancy of sarcasm.
Marston and Breton were amongst the best of the group, though they are not represented in these pages owing to the unsuitability of their writings for extract. Here is a picture from one of the satires of Marston which is instinct with satiric power. It is a portrait of a