This throwing of a fierce attack, whether political or moral, into the form of an allegory, though it seems to veil the direction of the assault, really gives it more point. In the attacks of derision, at least, a back-handed blow may often hurt more than one straight from the shoulder. The reader’s satisfaction includes no doubt an {383} element of admiration for the finesse of art: yet more seems to be involved. Swift could not have shown us the absurdities in our social and political institutions half as well by any direct attack on them as he has shown us by the indirect attack in _Gulliver’s Travels_. The indignity of a familiar vice or folly seems to be made palpable when it is thus ridiculed under the guise of some new semblance. Further, our laughter at the vice is reinforced by that which comes from the detection of the make-believe of the allegory. The playful element probably takes on something of malice from the prevailing tone of the satire, and in the end we may laugh yet more cruelly at the victim who is ever being anew detected, so to speak, under the literary mask. Much the same kind of remark applies to the effect of simile, innuendo, irony, and all that we mean by wit in satire. We have touched on the playful side of wit under the head of Comedy. But this is only a part of what the word commonly implies. Even in comic dialogue there is something of attack, and the witty women of the Restoration and other writers have now and again a rasping tongue. Yet it is in satire that we see the deep malignity of wit. The witty sarcasms of Voltaire and the rest seem to be imps of malice disguised as toys. The sally of cruel meaning out of what looks harmless nonsense, or a mere verbal slip—as in the polished rebuke of a Master of Trinity to a too confident Junior Fellow, “we are all fallible, even the youngest of us”—has a wounding force greater than that of a direct mode of statement. The effect is still greater where failure and disgrace are exhibited under a thin ironical veil of glorious achievement, as in Pope’s lines on the Lord Mayor’s Show—said by Leigh Hunt to be the finest piece of wit he knew:— {384} Now night descending the proud scene is o’er, But lives in Settle’s numbers one day more. In all such ironical inversion the satirist manages by a suggestion of the worthy and honourable to drive home with added force the humiliating truth; as in the remark of Cicero, apropos of an elderly dame who said that she was but forty years old: “I must believe her, for I have heard her say so any time these ten years”.[319] The presentation in this case of something hidden, immediately followed by an uncovering, may evoke an echo of the “bo-peep” laugh of infancy, which should, one supposes, tend to introduce a milder and playful tone into the attack; yet, owing to the predominance of the attitude of fierce derision, this very element of playfulness appears, somehow, to give a new pungency to the satirical thrust.