But here, as everywhere, the complexity of this type obtrudes itself. Most of the preceding illustrations have been concerned with men as authors, that is to say, with certain products of literature; and this puts them out of the personal class. The same thing is true of Trollope’s sarcastic allusions to the novels of Disraeli and Dickens, and Kingsley’s little flings at _Coningsby_ and Young England generally. No comment on the whole matter of personal satire could be more to the point or more conclusive than that given informally by Thackeray in a couple of letters concerning his own attack on Lytton,--which he calls by the right name. The first is addressed to Lady Blessington, and accounts for his objection to E. L. B.[259] “But there are sentiments in his writings which always anger me, big words which make me furious, and a premeditated fine writing against which I can’t help rebelling. My antipathy don’t go any further than this.” The other is written to Lytton himself, calling his attention to a paragraph in his Preface to the 1856 edition of his (Thackeray’s) Works; it is this that really contains the apology: “There are two performances especially (among the critical and biographical works of the erudite Mr. Yellowplush) which I am very sorry to see reproduced, and I ask pardon of the author of _The Caxtons_ for a lampoon which I know he himself has forgiven, and which I wish I could recall. * * * I wonder at the recklessness of the young man who could fancy such satire was harmless jocularity, and never calculate that it might give pain.” This fine utterance, coming at just the right time and from the right person,--the last of the personal satirists, reformed into the author of _Vanity Fair_,--might be used as an appropriate epitaph for individual satire. Since the time when Lamb observed that “Satire does not look pretty upon a tombstone,” we have not only agreed with him, but gone enough further to admit that it is no more winsome applied to the living than to the dead. And if we still for the most part reserve our eulogy until it can serve as elegy, we are willing to let the dead past of spiteful, recriminating satire bury its dead. It would not, as a matter of fact, be quite fair to the past to ignore its own repudiation of this brackish current that has discolored the main satiric stream. For it was undoubtedly this element that Cervantes had in mind when he declared,--[260] “My humble pen hath never winged its way Athwart the field satiric, that low plain Which leads to foul rewards, and quick decay.” In the bitterly partisan seventeenth century Sir Thomas Browne might well say, “It is seldom that men who care much for the truth write satire.” And in the beginning of the next century we find the confession,--[261]