ABSTRACT
If satirical verse has only been touched on incidentally up to this point, it is not for any dearth of material. Byron’s Don Juan and Beppo, Crabbe’s The Borough, and the double-edged social comments of Cowper, Burns, Blake and Southey, have already been considered in other contexts. No history of literary taste from 1780 to 1800 would be complete, however, without some mention of the sly sarcasms of William Mason, the anonymous scurrilities of William Combe, the occasionally hilarious lampoons of Peter Pindar, the literary invective of William Gifford and T. J. Mathias, and the literary parodies of George Canning and J. H. Frere. After the turn of the century the writing of satirical verse continued unabated, with George Huddesford’s anti-French tirades, with unflattering imitations of contemporary poets in James and Horace Smith’s Rejected Addresses (1812) and James Hogg’s Poetic Mirror (1816), and with the droll political squibs of Thomas Moore. It is easier to record the names of these witty, ingenious and accomplished men than it is to think of a single satirical poem by any of them that is still read for pleasure. Nevertheless, in their own day their works were popular in much the same way as the caricatures of Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank were.
