There are first the completely surcharged. But the important matter is whether the container is itself large,--Aristophanes, Juvenal, Swift, Voltaire,--or of smaller mold and less capacity,--Dunbar, Skelton, Smollett, Churchill, Gifford. To this class come no recruits from the nineteenth century. _Sæva indignatio_, no longer makes verses, even when witticized, having been put out of fashion by the autonomic humor which informs the sophisticated critic that of all incongruous things the most incongruous and absurd is the satirist who takes himself seriously. Next come those whose absolute amount of satire may be equal to that of the preceding, but whose versatile interests make it relatively smaller. It is neither of their life a thing apart, nor yet their whole existence. Such are Horace, Cervantes, Jonson, Dryden, Boileau, Pope, Fielding, Burns, Byron. This class on a smaller scale is represented by Gascoigne, Wyatt, Hall, Donne, Lodge, Addison, Goldsmith, Hood, Moore, Mark Twain. Among these we find about half of our novelists,--Peacock and Butler, Dickens and Trollope, Thackeray and Meredith. In the third division satire is measured still more by the law of diminishing returns. It is composed of those who are never thought of as satirists, not even as satirical, and yet are very far from being innocent. Such are the Hebrew Prophets and the author of _Job_, Euripides, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (in his prose), Johnson, Scott, Shelley, Browning. Similar but of lesser magnitude are Erasmus, More, Defoe, Young, Cowper, Blake, De Quincey. Here are found the other half of the novelists,--Lytton, Disraeli, Gaskell, Reade, Brontë, Kingsley. The impression given by these is not so much a solution at all as of separate and distinguishable particles: of elements native and yet not integral,--like fish in water. They might be taken away, and though the total effect would be very much changed, the real character of the liquid would not. Quite the opposite of this is the condition of the fourth estate. Here the process of amalgamation is carried to an extreme, one might say, paradoxically, to the vanishing point. It resembles the first class in that the satire is pervasive, and the third in that it is of relatively small quantity; so small that it hardly seems worth taking into account, yet it could not be abstracted. If it could, it would leave a scarcely diminished but almost unrecognizable remainder. It is not revealed so much as betrayed. It seldom indulges in anything so bald as overt satire, or so conscious even as covert innuendo. It is the tone of a personality. It is not Aristotle nor Virgil nor Wyclif nor Wordsworth nor Tennyson. It is Homer, Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Langland, Burton, Gibbon, Sterne, Austen, Arnold, Carlyle, Hardy, Anatole France. Among the Victorian novelists it is George Eliot.