Space only remains for a single word upon the satire of the nineteenth century. In this category would be included the _Baeviad_ and the _Maeviad_ by William Gifford (editor of the _Anti-Jacobin_), which, though first printed in the closing years of the eighteenth century, were issued in volume form in 1800. Written as they are in avowed imitation of Juvenal, Persius, and Horace, they out-Juvenal Juvenal by the violence of the language, besides descending to a depth of personal scurrility as foreign to the nature of true satire as abuse is alien to wit. They have long since been consigned to merited oblivion, though in their day, from the useful and able work done by their author in other fields of literature, they enjoyed no inconsiderable amount of fame. Two or three lines from the _Baeviad_ will give a specimen of its quality:-- "For mark, to what 'tis given, and then declare, Mean though I am, if it be worth my care. Is it not given to Este's unmeaning dash, To Topham's fustian, Reynold's flippant trash, To Andrews' doggerel where three wits combine, To Morton's catchword, Greathead's idiot line, And Holcroft's Shug-lane cant and Merry's Moorfields Whine?"[22] The early years of the present century still felt the influence of the sardonic ridicule which prevailed during the closing years of the previous one, and the satirists who appeared during the first decades of the former belonged to the robust or energetic order. Their names and their works are well-nigh forgotten. We now reach the last of the greater satirists that have adorned our literature, one who is in many respects a worthy peer of Dryden, Swift, and Pope. Lord Byron's fame as a satirist rests on three great works, each of them illustrative of a distinct type of composition. Other satires he has written, nay, the satiric quality is present more or less in nearly all he produced; but _The Vision of Judgment_, _Beppo_, and _Don Juan_ are his three masterpieces in this style of literature. They are wonderful compositions in every sense of the word. The sparkling wit, the ready raillery, the cutting irony, the biting sarcasm, and the sardonic cynicism which characterize almost every line of them are united to a brilliancy of imagination, a swiftness as well as a felicity of thought, and an epigrammatic terseness of phrase which even Byron himself has equalled nowhere else in his works. _The Vision of Judgment_ is an example in the first instance of parody, and, in the second, but not by any means so distinctly, of allegory. Its savage ferocity of sarcasm crucified Southey upon the cross of scornful contempt. Byron is not as good a metrist as a satirist, and the _Ottava rima_ in his hands sometimes halts a little; still, the poem is a notable example of a satiric parody written with such distinguished success in a measure of great technical difficulty.