So also was the _Anti-Jacobin_ designed as an instrument for the public weal, though conceived in panic and brought forth in extravagance. Both these productions, moreover, illustrate the difficulty of distinguishing between personal and political or some sort of partisan satire.[249] When Claudius was exposed on his bad eminence by Seneca, Nero, by Persius, Domitian, by Juvenal, Wolsey, by Skelton, Napoleon and George the Third, by Byron, and all four Georges, by Thackeray, it was in every case, not as a mere human Doctor Fell, but as a crafty tyrant or an incompetent mannikin made absurd by an incongruous position of power and authority; although at first the personal interest predominated over the political, the latter increasing with time. In any case, what has preserved personal satire in literature has been the amber, not the flies. Such satiric portraits as are saved from oblivion,--as those in _Absalom and Achitophel_, _Macflecknoe_, _The Dunciad_, _The Vision of Judgment_,--are spared, not for their subjects but for the wit in which they are dressed, irrespective of the justice or the slander stitched into the costume. In the field of prose fiction we find a comparatively small amount of direct personal satire, and that modicum attached to the romantic or fantastic section rather than the realistic. In the latter the fusion of fact and fancy is too subtle to result in overt portraiture. What Dickens says of Squeers is true in some degree of all fictitious characters. All are drawn from observation, but none remain precisely as observed, after passing through the crucible of their creator’s imagination. Of some we chance to know more definitely than of others that they were “taken from life.” Disraeli, for instance, in his _Coningsby_, made the Honorable J. W. Croker into the politician Rigby, Lord George Manners into Henry Sidney, and Lord Hertford into the Duke of Monmouth. The last achieved his real immortality as the Marquis of Steyne, and Theodore Hook also had the double honor of being the original of Disraeli’s Lucian Gay and Thackeray’s Mr. Wagg. Richard Monckton Milnes became the Vavasour of _Tancred_, John Bright, the Mr. Turnbull of _Phineas Redux_, and Gerald Massey played the title rôle in _Felix Holt_. We are aware too that their own families supplied material to Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, and Meredith,[250] but we could hardly class Mr. Micawber, Shirley Keeldar (or her friend Caroline Helstone), Adam Bede, Dinah Morris, or Melchisedek Harrington as examples of personal satire, even when given satirical treatment. It is natural, therefore, that the member of our group who stands preëminent in the line of individual satire is the one who also heads the list chronologically; that the next are the two Victorian forerunners; and that the only real Victorian left to complete this small tale does it by virtue of his early work. After Thackeray’s burlesques, ending about 1850, the personal species becomes practically extinct.