The poets have frequently made satire an auxiliary of their wit; and when the proportions are properly adhered to, a favorable result is produced. Satire, like many subtle poisons used as a medicine, may be safely taken in small quantities, while an overdose is liable to be fatal. In Chaucer's[192] Canterbury Pilgrims he draws his portraits to the life. While he exposes the weakness of human nature, he does not do so in surliness; a pleasant smile wreathes his lips all the while. There is slyness, but no bitterness in his satire. He would not chastise, he would only reform his fellow-men. As illustrating exactly the opposite spirit, we may instance Pope, Dryden, and Byron, who, descending from their high estate, often prostituted their genius to attacks upon personal enemies or rivals, with keenest weapons, while their opponents had no means of defence. The "Dunciad" is a monument of satiric wit, or genius belittled. Swift, who wrote "cords" of worthless rhymes, squibs, songs, and verses, which live as much by their vulgar smartness as for the slight portion of true wit which tinctures them, says: "Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets with in the world, and that so few are offended with it." Hawthorne gave the Dean a merited thrust when he said, "the person or thing on which his satire fell shrivelled up as if the Devil had spit on it." The _double entendre_ to be found in nearly all of Swift's effusions, epigrams, and verses, comes with ill grace from a dignitary of the Church. He was always ready with an epigram on all occasions. One "lives in our memory" which he addressed to Mrs. Houghton of Bormount, who took occasion one day to praise her husband in Swift's presence:-- "You always are making a god of your spouse; But this neither reason nor conscience allows: Perhaps you will say 'tis in gratitude due, And you adore him because he adores you. Your argument's weak, and so you will find; For you, by this rule, must adore all mankind." The wit and humor of Shakespeare endear him to our hearts; and what a rich harvest does the gleaner obtain from his pages! Take "Love's Labor's Lost," for instance, a play produced in his youth, so full of quips and quiddity as to live in the memory by whole scenes. There is no lack of scathing sarcasm in the play, but it leaves no bitter taste in the mouth, like the "doses" of Swift or the more unscrupulous productions of Pope in the same line. Ben Jonson,[193] who ranked so high as a dramatist, has been pronounced to be, next to Shakespeare, the greatest wit and humorist of his time. His expression was through the pen, not by the tongue: no man was more taciturn in society. Much of Jonson's matter was better adapted to his time than to ours; words which seem to us so coarse and vulgar passed unchallenged in the period which gave them birth.