In the twenty volumes of the standard edition of Dryden's works there are only three major satires. This is strange considering that his reputation today is primarily as a satirist, the father of Augustan satire (Swift, Pope, Gay, and Fielding). MacFlecknoe (1676) and Absalom and Achitophel (1681) were the two satires he singled out in his “Discourse concerning the original and progress of Satire” (1693), and, besides these, there were only The Medal (1682) and the characters of Doeg and Og in Absalom and Achitophel Part ii (1682). Thereafter satire in his poetry was incidental, most fully utilized in the bestiary and beast fables of The Hind and the Panther (1687), a poem whose end was not ostensibly satiric. Satire remained fragmentary, as in the Horatian imitations he wrote at the end of his life. And yet running through the whole of Dryden's oeuvre we can detect the energies of satire.