"But while I hold the pen, it will be a maxim with me, that vice can never be too great to be lashed, nor virtue too obscure to be commended; in other words, that satire can never rise too high, nor panegyric stoop too low."
He also makes the same point in a historical review:[1]
"In ancient Greece, the infant muses' school,
Where Vice first felt the pen of ridicule,
With honest freedom and impartial blows
The Muse attacked each Vice as it arose:
No grandeur could the mighty villain screen
From the just satire of the comic scene."
Although vice is now too powerful for such censure, he dares the lion in his den, and comforts the virtuous with reassurances:
"And while these scenes the conscious knave displease,
Who feels within the criminal he sees,
The uncorrupt and good must smile, to find
No mark for satire in his generous mind."
The nineteenth century is full of straws still blowing in the direction of Vice and Folly: such as Taine's[2] "Satire is the sister of elegy; if the second pleads for the oppressed, the first combats the oppressors." And Lionel Johnson[3] comments that Erasmus "had something in common with Matthew Arnold: a like satiric yet profoundly felt impatience with intellectual pedantry and social folly."
We may, however, see satire as opposition, and moreover opposition to vice and folly, and still be taking for granted that which demands more probing. For even if it were so simple a crusade as that, no crusade is as simple as it looks, and this one is particularly open to suspicion.
