It is a ridiculous thing, and fit for a satire, to persons of judgement, to see what shifts these formalists have, and what prospectives, to make superficies to seem body, that hath depth and bulk.
( W) Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face their own.
Why, it was curious enough to hear, but there was malice and satire in it.
Surely I must know my own satire.
Out of the "Clouds" of Aristophanes, satire and humor are pouring down in streams upon the audience; on the stage Socrates, the most remarkable man in Athens, he who had been the shield and defence of the people against the thirty tyrants, is held up mentally and bodily to ridicule—Socrates, who saved Alcibiades and Xenophon in the turmoil of battle, and whose genius soared far above the gods of the ancients.
But when a man, simply because he is of noble birth and possesses a genealogy, stands on his hind legs and neighs in the street like an Arabian horse, and says when a commoner has been in a room: 'Some people from the street have been here,' there nobility is decaying; it has become a mask of the kind that Thespis created, and it is amusing when such a person is exposed in satire.
The defendant replied with satire as keen, while the audience laughed, and gave their verdict.
