“Our Satire is nothing but Ribaldry and Billingsgate. Scurrility passes for wit; and he who can call names in the greatest variety of phrases, is looked upon to have the shrewdest pen.” A later eighteenth century view is voiced by Cowper:[262] “Most satirists are indeed a public scourge; Their mildest physic is a farrier’s purge; Their acrid temper turns, as soon as stirr’d, The milk of their good purpose all to curd. Their zeal begotten, as their works rehearse, By lean despair upon an empty purse, The wild assassins start into the street, Prepar’d to poignard whomsoe’er they meet.” It is with reference to this conception, induced by this type of satire, that a modern critic observes, “It is commonly held by the unreflecting that your satirist is bitter, your humorist a jester.”[263] But in the nineteenth century comes a change brought about by two influences: a finer discrimination, which shrinks from passing snap judgments on things in the lump; and a more gracious urbanity, sometimes springing from that humanitarianism which is the Victorian’s pride, sometimes masquerading under its guise, sometimes even in scorn of it, but always characterized by tact and taste, if not by a tender regard for possibly hurt feelings. Amidst the abundance of indirect testimony to this fact we have two direct ones, from an earlier and a later novelist. Lytton declared in _Pelham_ that he “did not wish to be an individual satirist.” And George Eliot said in one of her letters,-- “We may satirize character and qualities in the abstract without injury to our moral nature, but persons hardly ever.” One of her own critics makes an observation on her work which shows the new idea of satire struggling with the old, that all satire must be toothed,--in spite of Bishop Hall. In the _milieu_ of Eliot, says Mrs. Oliphant, “the satirist need be no sharper than the humorist, and may almost fulfil his office lovingly.”[264] Whether or not the satirist has any more of an “office” than that of being an artist, he is at least beginning to have love enough for his art, if not for humanity, to do his work as graciously as the nature of it will permit. In Mallock’s _New Republic_, for instance, there is a sort of Peacockian revival of personalities. But, while the figures of Carlyle, Arnold, Huxley, Jowett, Pater, Ruskin, Rossetti, and others, are recognizable through their thin disguises, they are not drawn with the caricaturistic strokes that distorted those of Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron, a generation or so earlier. It is, however, from a member of that earlier generation that we get a vivacious expression of the self-reflexive irony which is for the satirist literally a _saving_ sense of humor. In his _Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians_, Peter Pindar reports a dialogue with Satire, who urges him to attack certain of his contemporaries: