ABSTRACT
Satire always has a victim, it always criticizes. Why does the satirist act in this way? His first task is to convince his audience of the worth – even more, of the necessity – of what he is doing. He must mean, or at any rate convince his readers that he means, what he says. The unconvinced reader reacts as Quiller-Couch did when he wrote:
Few will deny Juvenal’s force: yet after all as we open a volume entitled Sixteen Satires of Juvenal, what are we promised but this –‘Go to! I Decimus Junius Juvenalis, propose to lose my temper on sixteen several occasions’?
(Studies in Literature, First Series, 1937 edn., p. 49)