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.Heshould drink pretty deep , before he goes into court, for Justice is always paintedBlind, and I don t know that you can better express your Impartiality, than by fallingasleep. He is to chew tobacco, flirt ostentatiously with the women in the courtroom,and suppress any Evidences that may be coming up in [the Prisoner s] behalf , if itis drawing near to dinner-time and the Haunch may be spoil d : would this remindreaders of Pope s wretches hang that jurymen may dine ?21 Now we are at the nub:If the Prisoner should have on a dirty Shirt, and a long Beard, (which may happen to aMan, who has long lain in Jail, and has no Money) you may safely tell him, accordingto Custom, that he looks like a Rogue, and every Body will admire your Wisdom andPenetration.(1: 115) Custom is a force of repression and cruelty here, as it uniformly is throughoutthe Midwife.Mrs.Midnight closes her letter by stressing the fact that she is simplyrecommending the normal behaviour for a sheriff: [t]hus, dear Cousin, I haveendeavoured to throw together such Observations, as I have made at the manyAssizes I have been at, and to collect from Experience, such Circumstances, as haverendered other Sheriffs amiable in the eyes of the People.Lest it might be thought that a reform of manners in venial sheriffs is all thatis being called for, Mrs.M.adds a postscript: I need not say any Thing respectingthe Judge; if he does but interrupt the Evidences, and put them out of Countenance,over-awe the Jury, and brow-beat the Prisoners, twill be sufficient.(1: 115)The law has been a target for satirists at least since Varro s Law at the-WhippingPost.Satire may frequently contain a fictional element, but Howard Weinbrot isright to note that it relies upon the authenticity of its central details and argument,made convincing by the voice of the speaker.22 Once Mrs.Midnight s Answerhas been read in full, there could be little doubt that the man who stepped into herskirts to write it had been to such Assizes , and had seen behaviour among thejudiciary of exactly this sort, so that ridicule by slight exaggeration seems aneffective description of this particular piece.There must indeed have been readers ofthe Midwife who had witnessed similar scenes.Allan Ramsay s 1753 tract On Ridicule illuminated contemporary understandingof how the juxtaposition of empiricism and comedy was working in a piece likethis.He might have been describing the Reynard letters in his conclusion that it is21 Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, Canto 3, line 22.22 Varro: Kirk, Menippean Satire, 7.Howard D.Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Satire:Essays on Text and Context from Dryden to Peter Pindar (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1988), 48. 173The Kind Jugglerthe combination of authentic experience and humour which makes ridicule indeed a test of truth :.if appeals to experience are the best test of truth.; if in the most serious questions,such wherein the welfare of mankind is chiefly interested, the entertainment rises inproportion to the familiarity of the known truths, by the application of which any falshoodin those important points is detected; if.these things are so,.a true philosopher.has abetter chance than ordinary of improving the understandings (of his audience), at the very23instant that he makes them laugh.(81 2)Paul Langford states that the central criticism of the eighteenth-century courts wasthat their procedures were outmoded, cumbersome and expensive, and that theywere in effect the resort of the rich, often against the poor.24 I suspect also that apolitical point is being made by the writer beyond this general one: Reynard is not aboorish Jacobite Squire Western, for as he is made to say at the very beginning ofhis letter, so that the point is not missed county sheriffs were Crown appointees,and the criminal justice system was exclusively a Whig and Hanoverian one.25Reynard is laughable in his idiotic complacency.As Plato has Socrates say inthe Philebus, a lack of self-knowledge in the weak is merely ridiculous, but theignorance of powerful people is dangerous as well as shameful it is a menace toanyone near : hence the necessity for the headsman s steel to transform the detachedHoratian offensive into truly bloodthirsty satire.The civic humanist requirementsfor integrity in public life are in tatters, and Reynard would barely be disturbedby his own signal failure to possess three of the four Ciceronian cardinal virtues:those of justice, temperance and wisdom.He s not too hot on the secondary valuesof benevolence or eloquence either.He is eager to discover, however, how best toingratiate himself with my Lord Judge , and thus comes under the heading of a Toadeater , the type attacked with vigour by More in his Utopia.26The technique of the prosopopoeic letter, then, is here used with marked satiricefficiency.The most comprehensive and celebrated previous example of thistechnique was the sixteenth-century epistolary satire called the Letters of Obscure23 Allan Ramsay, On Ridicule (London: A.Miller, 1753).His approach is similarto Shaftesbury s in the Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour , but is more closelyanalytical: Anthony Ashley Cooper, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinion, Times, ed.Lawrence E.Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29 69.24 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727 1783 (Oxford:Clarendon, 1989), 299.25 crown appointees : W.A.Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714 1760 (London:E.Arnold, 1977), 29.On the proscription of Tories from positions in public administrationand the judiciary, see Linda Colley, In Defence of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714 1760(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 23.For Jacobite distrust of the Whigcriminal justice system, see Murray G.H.Pittock, Inventing and Resisting Britain: CulturalIdentities in Britain and Ireland 1685 1789 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 94.26 Plato, Philebus, trans.J.C.B.Gosling (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 49. cardinal virtues :Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), 76 7.Thomas More, in vol.4 of Complete Works, eds.E.Surtz andJ.H.Hexter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 57.See also Rambler 104. 174Christopher Smart and SatireMen, which as previously noted Smart read at Cambridge.In this devastatinglyeffective collection of spurious letters, two German students took on the multiplepersonae of various (invented, but designed to seem typical) ignorant, corrupt,conceited church and university bigots, and from out of their own mouths, as itwere let readers know who they were.This exercise was undertaken on behalf ofJohannes Reuchlin, a scholar who had suggested that there was merit in the sacredHebrew writings, in order to advance the humanist cause of fair-minded study ofancient texts Erasmus was associated with the authors.27The Letters are careful in their precise delineations of the self-delusion andgreed of their supposed writers, and particularly good at exposing the unmeritedintellectual vanity of men who, in some cases, can barely write or think.Swift wascertainly indebted to this work, most notably in the Tale of a Tub, but also in other ofhis prosopopoeic creations, including Isaac Bickerstaff, and so too was ChristopherSmart.The sheer volume of letters in the Midwife, and the fact that they are lettersrather than other forms of prosopopoeic polemic, might suggest that the magazineowes much to Ulrich von Hutten and Johann Jaeger, the authors of the Letters, aswell as to Swift
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