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It seems written to expose the corruption of domestic life in Florence, and especially to satirize the friars in their familar part of gobetweens, tame cats, confessors and adulterers.
Many Utopias, such as the Fable of the Bees and Erewhon, are designed to satirize existing social conditions as well as to depict a more perfect civilization.
After publishing The Mock Mourners, intended to satirize and rebuke the outbreak of Jacobite joy at the king's death, he turned his attention once more to ecclesiastical subjects, and, in an evil hour for himself, wrote the anonymous Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), a statement in the most forcible terms of the extreme "high-flying" position, which some high churchmen were unwary enough to endorse, without any suspicion of the writer's ironical intention.