I write" ("Epistle to Godfrey Kneller").

Swift later sensed something of this

when he made fun of the pretensions of Dryden and other satirists in A
Tale of A Tub for aspiring to reach the "bottom of the Sublime," at once a
spatial joke and a very good description of the generic territory occupied by
satire in the Restoration and early eighteenth century.
Dryden tried to make satire into an art so sublime that its local victims
remained oblivious to the wounds it inflicted. He wrote of his own portrait
of the Duke of Buckingham in Absalom and Achitophel: "a Man is secretly
wounded, and though he be not sensible himself, yet the malicious World
will find it for him: Yet there is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly
Butchering of a Man, and the fineness of a stroak that separates the Head
from the Body, and leaves it standing in its place."4 Here are a few of
Dryden's fine strokes directed at Buckingham's neck:
A man so various, that he seem'd to be
Not one, but Mankinds epitome.
Stiff in Opinions, always in the wrong;
Was every thing by starts, and nothing long:
But, in the course of the revolving Moon,
Was Chymist, Fidler, States-man, and Buffoon, (lines 545-50)
The victim of satire is most effectively presented when least able to
comprehend exactly what has happened to him. In the Discourse, Dryden
takes the matter a step further. He points out that his favorite satirist,
Juvenal, interpreted Roman law as requiring the poet to name none but the
already dead. Such a reading of the law, reinforced by the ancient injunction
from Roman legal tradition against evil utterance, comes close to the
metaphoric center of satiric action. When the satirist has dispatched his
victim properly - that is with wit and finality - that victim already belongs
among the dead whether or not he breathes in the world he thinks he still
inhabits.
A particularly rich and complex instance of a satirist at work in this vein
comes a few years later with Jonathan Swift's attack on astrology in the
Bicker staff Papers (1708). Swift's Bickerstaff actually predicts the death of
a rival astrologer named Partridge. When that astrologer protests he still
lives, Bickerstaff pretends that an obvious imposter walks the streets as an
"uninformed Carcass" masquerading as Partridge. Uninformed is without
shape and without knowledge, and carcass is dead substance. The satiric
image is even further complicated - and Swift is well aware of it - by the
fact that Partridge had actually died many years before, though his name
still appears on Partridge's Almanac. Partridge is made available for a fate