Hypocrisy: A Satirical Poem

Overview
Charles Caleb Colton’s 1812 poem Hypocrisy is a brisk, Popean satire that dissects the many masks of moral pretense in Regency Britain. Composed in polished, epigrammatic couplets, it sets up Hypocrisy as the age’s most prosperous trade, a universal solvent that seeps through public institutions and private life alike. Colton’s speaker adopts the stance of a keen moral anatomist, tracing how self-love, fashion, and fear of opinion conspire to turn virtue into performance and conscience into costume.

Design and Voice
The poem unfolds as a moral survey rather than a narrative, its momentum driven by pointed contrasts, balanced antitheses, and aphoristic turns. Truth is imagined as plain and austere, while Hypocrisy appears richly habited, ever ready with a new livery for every occasion. The voice is urbane, sardonic, and learned, borrowing the classical satirists’ scalpel but wielding it with a clergyman’s eye for spiritual imposture.

Portrait of Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is presented as the ape and counterfeit of virtue, a Proteus assuming whatever shape wins applause. It flatters pride under the name of zeal, baptizes ambition as patriotism, and dresses indolence in the robe of contemplative piety. Colton insists the counterfeit thrives because it is cheaper than the coin it imitates: to look brave, wise, or devout costs far less than to be so. Manners become a theater; motives, merchandise; the face, a mask that smiles for the pit while the greenroom bargains are struck within.

Public Arenas
The satire tours the Parliament, the courts, the exchange, and the salon. Legislators declaim for liberty while voting for place and pension; barristers praise justice as they split hairs to sell it; merchants sermonize about probity until a profit beckons; wits deride cant with borrowed witticisms. Fashionable philanthropy takes a bow, where banquets for the poor cost more than alms, and reputations are varnished by subscriptions that weigh more in newspaper columns than in the scales of relief. Politeness receives an equivocal treatment: it oils the wheels of life but, when mistaken for virtue, becomes its rival and usurper.

Religion and Morality
Colton reserves his sharpest strokes for spiritual masquerade. He depicts pulpits thunderous against sins that are fashionable to condemn and discreet about those that pay the pew-rents. Fervor is suspect when it warms chiefly to doctrines that flatter the believer and cools at duties that cost. Sectarian pride, ceremonial ostentation, and loud professions of humility are shown to be different uniforms of the same regiment. Yet the satire does not exempt the satirist; it presses the point that the itch to expose others can itself be a proud disguise. True religion, the poem suggests, loves quiet duties, plain veracity, and the inward witness over the drum and banner of display.

Style and Devices
Throughout, Colton relies on neat couplets that crystallize moral points into memorable epigrams, trading in sharp paradoxes and compressed contrasts. The imagery of masks, mirrors, and theaters recurs, as do mercantile metaphors that treat reputation as currency and conscience as credit. Classical allusions lend authority, but the targets are unmistakably modern, the diction brisk and contemporary to his day.

Final Turn
The closing movement shifts from public scourge to private counsel. Recognizing that a degree of social varnish is inevitable, the poet distinguishes between harmless civility and corrosive fraud. He urges self-scrutiny before censure, charity before satire, and a practice of virtue sturdy enough to need no trumpet. If hypocrisy prospers by our applause, its defeat begins where men prefer to be good rather than to seem so.