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He was a libertine without that openness of heart and hand which sometimes makes libertinism amiable, and a haughty aristocrat without that elevation of sentiment which sometimes makes aristocratical haughtiness respectable. The satirists of the age nicknamed him Lord Allpride. Yet was his pride compatible with all ignoble vices.
It was nuts to the Washington Correspondents story writers and satirists who were there to make the most out of an occasion in which the bizarre was much in excess of the conventional with George Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt to set the pace. Hyde had come from St. Louis to keep especial tab on Grosvenor. Though rival editors facing our way, they had not been admitted to the Quadrilateral.
His characterization, however, is more marked with serious satire than playful ridicule: the later Roman satirists, rather than the comic authors, were his models.
Satire, as every one knows, is the one branch of literature claimed by the Romans as their own. It is, at any rate, the branch in which their excellence is most characteristically displayed. Nor is the excellence confined to the professed satirists; it was rather inherent in the genius of the nation. All their serious writings tended to assume at times a satirical spirit.
They were exposed to the utmost licentiousness of the press and of the stage, at the time when the press and the stage were most licentious. They were not men of letters; they were, as a body, unpopular; they could not defend themselves; and the public would not take them under its protection. They were therefore abandoned, without reserve, to the tender mercies of the satirists and dramatists.
Caricaturists and satirists, who smear the many with the weaknesses of the few, would have us believe that the son of a lord is no better than the son of a fool; yet, if the vaults of some of the old families were to unfold their century-hugged secrets, it would be seen that, as Gray's country churchyard might hold some mute inglorious Milton, so might these vaults hold the ashes of many a splendid brain ruined by the genial absurdity of 'class' wherein it had been placed.
And when Browning said in brackets to the simple, sensible people who did not like his books, "God love you!" he was not sneering in the least. He was laughing that is to say, he meant exactly what he said. There are three distinct classes of great satirists who are also great men that is to say, three classes of men who can laugh at something without losing their souls.
And it may be well, therefore, rapidly to sketch the history of religion, which is the greatest of moral forces, as it sank and rose in this island through the last two hundred years. Historians and satirists ascribe a large effect in this change to the personal influence of Charles II., and the foreign character of his court.
He made clever adaptations of the classical satirists, wrote an ironical Satire against Virtue, and four severe satires against the Jesuits. He is cynical to the verge of misanthropy, but independent and manly.
Poets, dramatists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers, the character-writers, the maxim-writers, the great political orators they are all literature in so far as they teach us to know man and to know human nature.
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