“Men’s future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning short-sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their professions, * * * whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, * * * they are detected and ridiculed.” Meredith[47] also reiterates the distinction made by Swift and Fielding in regard to misfortune: “Poverty, says the satirist, has nothing harder in itself than that it makes men ridiculous. But poverty is never ridiculous to Comic perception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its bareness in a forlorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival ostentation.” And he remarks of Molière: “He strips Folly to the skin, displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her better clothing.” Of the two forms of affectation, Fielding chooses hypocrisy as better satirical game, but Bergson[48] votes for the other: “In this respect it might be said that the specific remedy for vanity is laughter, and that the one failing that is essentially laughable is vanity.” Fuess[49] makes for the last great poetic satirist the familiar conventional claim: “Byron is attacking not virtue, but false sentiment, false idealism, and false faith. His satiric spirit is engaged in * * * tearing down what is sham and pretence and fraud.” Previté-Orton[50] applies the test to politics: “Finally, there is another service political satires render, which is peculiarly necessary to a government based on discussion. One of the greatest evils in such a state is the presence of mere words and phrases, and of the vague Pecksniffian virtues. Now to satire cant and humbug are proper game. It brings fine professions down to fact, points the contrast between the commonplace reality and its tinsel dress, and by the dread of ridicule raises the standard of plain-dealing. Other means of criticism as well act as a check on more opprobrious faults in public life. But satire is the best agent to keep us free from taking words for substance.” Apparently, then, we may conclude that deception in some form is, so far as any one thing can be, the basic object of satire, or at least is so considered by those who reflect upon it. But we must admit here as elsewhere that to recognise a phenomenon is easier than to account for it.