“‘Not write!’ cried Satire, red as fire with rage: ‘This instant glorious war with dulness wage; * * * * * Flay half the Academic imps alive; Smoke, smoke, the Drones of that stupendous Hive.’” Later, made compunctious by the fable of the frogs pelted to death with stones thrown merely in sport, he resolves to reform, but is dissuaded: “‘Poh, poh!’ cried Satire with a smile, ‘Where is the _glorious freedom_ of our isle, If not permitted to call names?’ Methought the argument had weight: ‘Satire,’ quoth I, ‘You’re very right;’ So once more forth volcanic Peter flames.” “Life,” says Hawthorne, “is a mixture of marble and mud.” In this particular fragment of life as represented in literature, we have the two in paradoxical combination. Personal satire has the effect sometimes of being an ugly little gargoyle made of marble, and sometimes, of a harmonious form done in muddy clay. The ideal union of matter and manner,--an Apollo in marble,--is not for such an impish sculptor as satire. Only to the true artist, poetry, is allotted the task of shaping beauty into rounded perfection. CHAPTER II INSTITUTIONS Since institutions are satirized by those who take an interest in public affairs, without being too well satisfied with the way they are managed, we may expect to find them conspicuously under indictment at this time. The Victorians were notably a public-spirited group, and left no cranny unpenetrated by their critical searchlight; for it was the lamp they used, and not the hammer. The two most striking features of nineteenth century public satire are its ubiquity and its moderation. In all departments it was zealous for reform; in none did it see the need of sweeping abolishment. It emanated from a generation poised waveringly between acquiescence and iconoclasm, but avoiding both extremes. Awake to the blindness and blundering of the past, it was still too rooted in piety and tradition to visualize a future radically different. Strong remedies, falling short of the drastic and destructive, seemed about the right prescription. Dudley Sowerby is Victorianism incarnate:[265] “* * * he had been educated in his family to believe, that the laws governing human institutions are divine--until History has altered them. They are altered, to present a fresh bulwark against the infidel.” The Victorians deplored, for instance, the domestic disaster that inevitably follows the mercenary marriage encouraged by Society, but they no more questioned the marriage ceremony than they would any law of nature. _Getting Married_ does not merely happen to be post-Victorian; it could not have been otherwise.