Juvenal’s conclusion that it is hard not to write satire, from the premise that the number of fools is infinite, is said by Herford to be “the fundamental axiom of all satire.” But as a matter of fact, it was Horace who took the fool for his province, while his sterner successor rather specialized on the knave. From then on there has been as little endeavor to disentangle the two strands as to define them. One of the earliest English satirists[30] emphasised the knavery; and another[31] includes that and folly in the same indictment. Dryden,[32] inclined to the serious Juvenalian type, discriminates between positive and negative attitudes, but not between the two stock objects. Speaking of the narrowed use of the word _satire_ in French and English, he adds, “For amongst the Romans it was not only used for those discourses which decried vice, or exposed folly, but for others also where virtue was recommended. But in our modern languages we apply it only to invective poems, * * * for in English, to say Satire, is to mean reflection, as we use that word in its worst sense; or as the French call it, more properly, _medisance_.” Defoe[33] adds to the two a third, but in a somewhat casual enumeration: “Speak, Satire; for there’s none can tell like thee Whether ’tis folly, pride, or knavery That makes this discontented land appear Less happy now in times of peace than war?” Swift[34] echoes the old duality: “His vein, ironically grave, Exposed the fool, and lash’d the knave.” And Fielding,[35] though he actually finds good game in folly, evidently considers vice the prime object: “But while I hold the pen, it will be a maxim with me, that vice can never be too great to be lashed, nor virtue too obscure to be commended; in other words, that satire can never rise too high, nor panegyric stoop too low.” He also makes the same point in a historical review:[36] “In ancient Greece, the infant muses’ school, Where Vice first felt the pen of ridicule, With honest freedom and impartial blows The Muse attacked each Vice as it arose: No grandeur could the mighty villain screen From the just satire of the comic scene.” Although vice is now too powerful for such censure, he dares the lion in his den, and comforts the virtuous with reassurances: “And while these scenes the conscious knave displease, Who feels within the criminal he sees, The uncorrupt and good must smile, to find No mark for satire in his generous mind.” The nineteenth century is full of straws still blowing in the direction of Vice and Folly: such as Taine’s[37] “Satire is the sister of elegy; if the second pleads for the oppressed, the first combats the oppressors.” And Lionel Johnson[38] comments that Erasmus “had something in common with Matthew Arnold: a like satiric yet profoundly felt impatience with intellectual pedantry and social folly.”