“I loathe it: he had never kindly heart, Nor ever cared to better his own kind, Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it.” Birrell,[62] less caustic than De Quincey about Pope, still uses him as an instance of how not to do it: “Dr. Johnson is more to my mind as a sheer satirist than Pope, for in satire character tells more than in any other form of verse. We want a personality behind--a strong, gloomy, brooding personality; soured and savage, if you will * * * but spiteful never.” Even the traits of gloom and savagery might be dispensed with, and room made for an infusion of sweetness and light. This is implied in the condition laid down by Lionel Johnson:[63] “To tilt at superstition, to shoot at folly, is seldom a grateful or a gratifying pursuit, if there be no depth of purpose in it, nothing but pleasure in the consciousness of destructive power, no feeling of sympathetic pity, no tenderness somewhere in the heart, no cordiality sweetening the work of overthrow.” And Garnett[64] concludes: “Satirists have met with much ignorant and invidious depreciation, as though a talent for ridicule was necessarily the index of an unkindly nature. The truth is just the reverse.” Discrimination as to objects of satire has reference not to their nature, as foolish, vicious, deceitful, but to their legitimacy as objects. It is a matter of taste and justice on the part of the satirist. The first definite reproof of heedlessness on this score is given in the memorial tribute to Pope:[65] “Dart not on Folly an indignant eye: Whoe’er discharged artillery on a fly? Deride not Vice: absurd the thought and vain, To bind the tyger in so weak a chain. * * * * * The Muse’s labour then success shall crown, When Folly feels her smile, and Vice her frown. * * * * * Let SATIRE then her proper object know, And ere she strikes, be sure she strikes a foe. Nor fondly deem the real fool confest, Because blind _Ridicule_ conceives a jest.” Another critic[66] of that time utters a similar caution: “A satire should expose nothing but what is corrigible, and make a due discrimination between those who are, and those who are not the proper objects of it.” The best modern expression[67] of this idea happens to be an interpretation of a pioneer satirist. And it is distinctly modern in its recognition that while the real object of satire must be an abstraction,--the sin not the sinner--it must, to be artistic, have a concrete embodiment,--the sinner rather than the sin. The Greek dramatist explains: