He displays Juvenal's violence of invective without his other redeeming qualities. All these, however, were entirely eclipsed in reputation by a writer who made the mock-epic the medium through which the bitterest onslaught on the anti-royalist party and its principles was delivered by one who, as a "king's man", was almost as extreme a bigot as those he satirized. The _Hudibras_ of Samuel Butler, in its mingling of broad, almost extravagant, humour and sneering mockery has no parallel in our literature. Butler's characters are rather mere "humours" or _qualities_ than real personages. There is no attempt made to observe the modesty of nature. _Hudibras_, therefore, is an example not so much of satire, though satire is present in rich measure also, as of burlesque. The poem is genuinely satirical only in those parts where the author steps in as the chorus, so to speak, and offers pithy moralizings on what is taking place in the action of the story. There is visible throughout the poem, however, a lack of restraint that causes him to overdo his part. Were _Hudibras_ shorter, the satire would be more effective. Though in parts often as terse in style as Pope's best work, still the poem is too long, and it undoes the force of its attack on the Puritans by its exaggeration. All these writers, even Butler himself, simply prepared the way for the man who is justly regarded as England's greatest satirist. The epoch of John Dryden has been fittingly styled the "Golden Age of English Satire".[13] To warrant this description, however, it must be held to include the writers of the reign of Queen Anne. The Elizabethan period was perhaps richer, numerically speaking, in representatives of certain types of satirical composition, but the true perfection, the efflorescence of the long-growing plant, was reached in that era which extended from the publication of Dryden's _Absalom and Achitophel_ (Part I.) in 1681 to the issue of Pope's _Dunciad_ in its final form in 1742. During these sixty years appeared the choicest of English satires, to wit, all Dryden's finest pieces, the _Medal_, _MacFlecknoe_, and _Absalom and Achitophel_, Swift's _Tale of a Tub_, and his _Miscellanies_--among which his best metrical satires appeared; all Defoe's work, too, as well as Steele's in the _Tatler_, and Addison's in the _Spectator_, Arbuthnot's _History of John Bull_, Churchill's _Rosciad_, and finally all Pope's poems, including the famous "Prologue" as well as the "Epilogue" to the _Satires_. It is curious to note how the satirical succession (if the phrase be permitted) is maintained uninterruptedly from Bishop Hall down to the death of Pope--nay, we may even say down to the age of Byron, to whose epoch one may trace something like a continuous tradition. Hall did not die until Dryden was twenty-seven years of age. Pope delighted to record that, when a boy of twelve years of age, he had met "Glorious John", though the succession could be passed on otherwise through