tive. Though in parts often as terse in
style as Pope's best work, still the poem is too long, and it undoes
the force of its attack on the Puritans by its exaggeration.

All these writers, even Butler himself, simply prepared the way for the
man who is justly regarded as England's greatest satirist. The epoch of
John Dryden has been fittingly styled the "Golden Age of English
Satire".[13] To warrant this description, however, it must be held to
include the writers of the reign of Queen Anne. The Elizabethan period
was perhaps richer, numerically speaking, in representatives of certain
types of satirical composition, but the true perfection, the
efflorescence of the long-growing plant, was reached in that era which
extended from the publication of Dryden's _Absalom and Achitophel_
(Part I.) in 1681 to the issue of Pope's _Dunciad_ in its final form in
1742. During these sixty years appeared the choicest of English
satires, to wit, all Dryden's finest pieces, the _Medal_,
_MacFlecknoe_, and _Absalom and Achitophel_, Swift's _Tale of a Tub_,
and his _Miscellanies_--among which his best metrical satires appeared;
all Defoe's work, too, as well as Steele's in the _Tatler_, and
Addison's in the _Spectator_, Arbuthnot's _History of John Bull_,
Churchill's _Rosciad_, and finally all Pope's poems, including the
famous "Prologue" as well as the "Epilogue" to the _Satires_. It is
curious to note how the satirical succession (if the phrase be
permitted) is maintained uninterruptedly from Bishop Hall down to the
death of Pope--nay, we may even say down to the age of Byron, to whose
epoch one may trace something like a continuous tradition. Hall did
not die until Dryden was twenty-seven years of age. Pope delighted to
record that, when a boy of twelve years of age, he had met "Glorious
John", though the succession could be passed on otherwise through
Congreve, one of the most polished of English satirical writers, whom
Dryden complimented as "one whom every muse and grace adorn", while to
him also Pope dedicated his translation of the _Iliad_.[14] Bolingbroke,
furthermore, was the friend and patron of Pope, while the witty St.
John, in turn, was bound by ties of friendship to Mallet, who passed on
the succession to Goldsmith, Sheridan, Ellis, Canning, Moore, and
Byron. Thereafter satire begins to fall upon evil days, and the
tradition cannot be so clearly traced.

But satire, during this "succession", did not remain absolutely the