Several satires of the period, based particularly on Pope’s satiric epistles, seem to maintain a more elevated tone, although they also are frequently intemperate in their personalities.[19] An excellent example is the very severe _Epistle to Curio_ by Akenside, praised for its literary merits by Macaulay.[20] A small, but rather important class of satires is made up of criticisms of literature or literary men in the manner of either the _Essay on Criticism_ or the _Dunciad_.[21] Still another group deal, like Young’s _Love of Fame_, with the foibles and fads of society, using type figures and avoiding specific references.[22] It is necessary, finally, to include under satire many of the didactic and philosophic poems which seemed to infect the century.[23] These Ethic Epistles, as they are styled in Bell’s _Fugitive Pieces_, are often little more than verse sermons. Obviously many poems of this nature hardly come within the scope of true satire. Goldsmith’s _Deserted Village_ (1770), for instance, has some satirical elements; yet it is, properly speaking, meditative and descriptive verse. The same may be said, perhaps, of the so-called satires of Cowper. The body of work thus cursorily reviewed shows a wide diversity of subject-matter combined with a consistent and monotonous uniformity of style. In most of the material we find the same regular versification, the same stock epithets, and the same lack of distinctive qualities; indeed, were the respective writers unknown, it would be a difficult task to distinguish between the verse of two such satirists as James Scott and Soame Jenyns. During the fifty years between the death of Pope and the appearance of Gifford’s _Baviad_ (1794) only four names stand out above the rest as important in the history of English satire in verse: Johnson, Churchill, Cowper, and Crabbe. Of these writers, Johnson contributed but little to the mass of English satire. His _London_ (1738) and _The Vanity of Human Wishes_ (1749) are imitations of Juvenal, characterized by stateliness, dignity, melancholy, and sonorous rhetoric, but with only a slight element of personal attack. The latter poem received high praise from Byron.[24] Churchill and Byron, who have often been compared because of their quarrels with the reviewers and their denunciation of a conservative and reactionary government, were much alike in their arrogant independence, their fiery intensity, and their passionate liberalism. Churchill, however, unlike Byron, was always a satirist, and undertook no other species of poetry. In many respects he resembled Oldham, whose career, like his, was short and tumultuous, and whose wit, like his, usually shone “through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.”