of which even the careless Churchill would have been ashamed. Gifford wanted good-breeding, and he had no geniality; his irascible nature made him intolerant and unjust. Moreover he lacked a sense of discrimination and proportion; he used a sledge-hammer constantly, often when a lighter weapon would have served his purpose. In him the artistic satire of Pope seems to have degenerated into clumsy and crude abuse. Carrying to excess a practice probably begun by Pope, with the advice of Swift, Gifford had accompanied his satires with copious and diffuse notes, sometimes affixing a page or more of prose comment to a single line of verse.[35] Mathias, whose _Pursuits of Literature_ was, according to De Quincey, the most popular book of its day, so exaggerated this fashion that it is often a question in his work to decide which is meant for an adjunct to the other--verse or prose annotation. Thomas James Mathias (1754–1835), like Gifford, a Tory, with a bigoted aversion to anything new or strange, and a firm belief in the infallibility of established institutions, published Dialogue I of the _Pursuits of Literature_ in May, 1794, Dialogues II and III in June, 1796, and Dialogue IV in 1797. In his theory of satire he insisted on three essentials: notes, and full ones; anonymity in the satirist; and a personal application for the attack. His chosen field included “faults, vices, or follies, which are destructive of society, of government, of good manners, or of good literature.” Mathias is pedantic, ostentatious in airing his information, and indefatigable in tracking down revolutionary ideas. His chief work is a curiosity, discursive, disorderly, and incoherent, with a versification that is lifeless and unmelodious.[36] With the work of Mathias, this cursory summary of the strictly formal satire in the eighteenth century comes to a natural resting-place. Only a year or two after the _Pursuits of Literature_, the _Anti-Jacobin_ began, and in its pages we find a more modern spirit. It is now necessary, reverting to an earlier period, to trace the progress of satire along other less formal lines, and to deal with some anomalous poems, which, although satiric in tone, are difficult to classify according to any logical system.