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Their jests are necessarily of the coarsest; nevertheless excellent local hits are made and satiric personalities of considerable pungency are not infrequently indulged in. One of the clowns has tumbled down; he lies on his back, feet in the air; another takes hold of his legs and drags him around in the dust.
And while he could watch the grimaces or the graces of these with a satiric humour that was not deprived of sympathy, he could look on with an eye of kindness at the lookers-on too; at the roystering youth bent upon enjoyment, and here taking it: at the honest parents, with their delighted children laughing and clapping their hands at the show: at the poor outcasts, whose laughter was less innocent though perhaps louder, and who brought their shame and their youth here, to dance and be merry till the dawn at least; and to get bread and drown care.
There was no further action, beyond a recommendation in the President's message to Congress that the whole matter should be settled by treaty. Such was the situation when Lord Elgin arrived at Washington in May 1854. His suite included Hincks and Laurence Oliphant, the writer, whose humorous and satiric account of what he saw during the negotiations makes most amusing reading.
A survey of what Aristotle includes in his Poetics, what he excludes, and what he ignores, will be a helpful initial step in an investigation of what he meant by poetic. Five kinds of poetry are mentioned by name in the Poetics: epic, dramatic, dithyrambic, nomic, and satiric; and lyric is included by implication as a form of epic, where the poet narrates in his own person.
Bullen's epithet of 'attractive, it must be admitted that it is almost the only part of the play to which that epithet can be applied. Day was in no wise concerned to maintain the polished and artificial dignity of the original; his satiric purpose indeed called for a very different treatment.
Further, he talked straight to Pauline, without embarrassment and with a quaint, satiric humor. She was forgetting for the moment his almost uncouth hair and dress when, in making a sweeping gesture, he upset a glass of water and sent a plate of hot bread flying from the waitress' hand. "He'd do well in the open air," thought she, "but he's out of place in a house."
Swift philosophised on the satiric touch of building a madhouse, as the most appropriate charity to Ireland; but what would he have said had he heard that the greatest favour its rulers could bestow the most flattering compliment to national feeling was to open the gaols, to let loose robbers and housebreakers, highwaymen and cutthroats to return burglars to their afflicted homes, and bring back felons to their weeping families.
His gold never reaches his own pocket; it is filched from him by dexterous thieves; it gleams before him for an instant like the coin spun in the air by the conjurer or thimble-rigger, and then vanishes for ever. Yet I have found few men keen enough to penetrate the delusion; it would seem they love to be deluded, and by their conduct justify the satiric lines of Hudibras
The futilities of the problems upon which the scholastic thinkers exercised themselves gave occasion for the satiric onslaught both of Rabelais and Erasmus.
"Yes," said that wonderful man, "it is Salvator Rosa, whom the Romans would not recognise as painter and poet, but who in the character of Formica drew from them, without their being aware of it, almost every evening for more than a year, in Nicolo Musso's wretched little theatre, the most noisy and most demonstrative storms of applause, from whose mouth they willingly took all the scorn, and all the satiric mockery of what is bad, which they would on no account listen to and see in Salvator's poems and pictures.
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