186 Whitford undertaking to shadow forth the critical judgment of formal satire with regard to English literature in the days of the romantic revolt" lies not in discovering an appreciable body of critical opinion but in selecting from a great mass of more or less casual comments the material which is fairly representa- tive and which at the same time concerns authors and works not absolutely insignificant. Some of the best satire has to do with writers whose influence in the history of literature was quite negligible; for example, the poets of the Anti- Jacobin outdid themselves in their mockery of two didactic poets of the old school, Erasmus Darwin and Richard Payne Knight. Some scattered observations about writers of historical impor- tance, far from being typical of the conservative group which satire commonly represents, were not even consistent with other opinions expressed by their own authors; such were, for instance, Mathias' bits of praise for Mrs. Radcliffe. 80 In the case of the sentimental poets, it is particularly difficult to dis- cover whether this or that rhymester was important enough to make satirical criticism of him worth mentioning. On that account, satire's view of sentimentalism off the stage may, for the sake of comparative brevity, be considered under three heads: criticism of the Bath-easton coterie and their associates, criticism of the Delia Cruscans and their associates, criticism of the Bluestockings. 81 This classification makes it possible to 80 Mathias, who was something of a romanticist himself in spite of his conventionality, praised The Mysteries of Udolpho "bred and nourished by the Florentine Muses in their sacred solitary caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition, and in all the dreariness of inchantment. " But he had JBL dislike for terror novels in general: "Shall nought but ghosts and trinkets be display'd; Since Walpole play'd the virtuoso's trade, Bade sober truth revers'd for fiction pass, And mus'd o'er Gothic toys through Gothic glass?" The Pursuits of Literature, 56-57, 336. 81 These categories exclude comment upon the "ladies' poet," Hayley, whose Triumphs of Temper (1781) went through many editions. He was attacked by Peter Pindar for his sentimentalism and the injustice of his critical work for the Gentleman's Magazine. Peter's imitator, Matthew Bramble, made sweet mock of Hayley in a " New Probationary Ode. " The Rev. Richard Polwhele smiled at him in The Unsex'd Females (1798). And Byron laughed
at him in English Bards.
