106 The Poetry of Mary Robinsoninto 1794 but never materialized on stage or in print. In the summer
of 1793, Robinson struck back at Gifford with her two- canto poetic
satire Modern Manners, signed “Horace Juvenal,” thereby incongru-
ously yoking for comic effect the two great (but very different) Roman
satirists in opposition to Gifford’s imitation of Persius. Robinson
clearly means to imitate the great English satirist Pope, himself a com-
mitted Tory. Like Gifford, Robinson chooses Pope’s Dunciad as her
model, referring to it throughout. She of course, therefore, adopts the
heroic couplet, as Pope and Gifford do, but she also means to attack
Gifford from his own ideological position. The poem is thoroughly
conservative, anti- Jacobin even (Strachan 91). Gary Dyer points out
that women writing between 1789 and 1832 “generally shunned the
conventional satiric forms” and that Robinson, in writing Modern
Manners as a “formal verse satire,” “was practically alone in appro-
priating this classical form” (150). “Horace Juvenal” functions not so
much as one of her avatars; it is a decided guise for Robinson to pose
as a masculine Tory satirist, full of swagger and venom. As such, the
“Lilliputian” Gifford himself is beneath notice—he was short—and
she portrays him as one of a class of “critic elves” and “calm assas-
sins of poetic worth” (1: 196; 1.1, 6). Robinson’s targets are many,
most of her barbs directed at the fashionable world in which she once
moved. But she does take satirical aim at such targets as sentimental
fiction published by William Lane (1.122), women (like herself) who
love The Sorrows of Young Werter (1.123), Erskine’s defense of Paine
(1.195–6), bluestockings (1.197–206), and especially fashionable
Francophilia, sarcastically equating Buchoz’s recipes for cosmetics
with the writings of suspected Jacobins Holcroft and Wollstonecraft
(1: 208; 2.133–46). What begins as a counterattack on Gifford’s
Baviad culminates with “Horace Juvenal” mocking English women,
“the boast of modern times, / Who ape the French,—yet shudder at
their crimes” (2.183–4). The poem objects severely to the hypocrisy
of admiring French culture at a time when France itself is governed
by “the dreadful havock made by Anarchy” (2.186). Robinson as
Horace Juvenal asks, “Why deck your brows with flow’rs from Gallia’s
shore, / When Gallia’s lily withers—drench’d in gore?” (2.201–2).
The poem closes with a patriotic celebration of the virtues of “happy
Britain” (2.188) and the assertion that “Transcendent Virtue guards
Britannia’s coast!” (2.204). Although Modern Manners is not an
overt denunciation of Revolutionary principles, it is careful to main-
tain positions friendly to the government. By constructing the satire
this way, Robinson cannily figures that the best way to undermine
Gifford is to appear to do so from his own side.9780230100251_04_ch02.indd 1069780230100251_04_ch02.indd 106 12/28/2010 11:08:31 AM12/28/2010 11:08:31 AM
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