One explanation for this deliberate avoidance of more profound issues is not hard to find. An astonishing number of satires of this period contain a large proportion of lines devoted to describing how wonderful everything is. The widespread conviction that whatever is, in the England of the late eighteenth century, is right, may have resulted from the influence of _An Essay on Man_. Or the _Essay_ may have been popular because it expressed ideas already in general acceptance. But whatever the explanation is, the catch-phrases extracted from Pope's most popular work become the touchstones of post-Augustan satire. The problem that the satirist faced in the sixties was, then, formidable. The country was in upheaval but the conventions demanded that the satirist say everything was nearly perfect. As a result, satire tended toward personal whines, like _The Curate_, toward attacking tiresomely obvious objects, like the superficial chit-chat of Lloyd's _Conversation_, toward trivial quarrels, like Churchill's _Rosciad_, toward broadly unimpeachable morals, like Johnson's _The Vanity of Human Wishes_. It is understandable that many writers, such as Joseph Warton and Christopher Smart, abandoned satire for various kinds of enthusiasm. Methodism lent itself to such satire. Methodists could be described as unfortunate aberrants from an essentially good world, typical of those bothersome fanatics and deviants at the fringe of society who keep this world from being perfect. They were also logical heirs to the satire once visited upon Dissenters but which diminished when Dissenters became more restrained in their style of worship. (The Preface to one anti-Methodist satire even takes pains to exclude "rational Dissenters" from its target.) Many Methodists were followers of Calvin. These Methodists brought out the old antagonisms against the Calvinist doctrine of Election (or the popular version of it), directed against its severity, its apparent encouragement of pride, and its antinomian implications. The mass displays of emotion at Methodist meetings would be distasteful to many people in most periods and probably were especially so in an age in which rational behavior was particularly valued. And there were those people who believed that Methodism, in spite of Wesley's arguments to the contrary, led good members of the Church of England astray and threatened religious stability.