According to Samuel Johnson's great eighteenth-century Dictionary, satire

is a censorious poem, properly distinguished by the generality of its

reflections but all too often confused with a lesser form, lampoon,
distinguished by the particularity of its reflections. Libel is an actionable
defamation, but the term was often used synonymously with lampoon.
Slander is libel with a casual or callous disregard for truth.
In the Restoration and early eighteenth century, satire, libel, lampoon, and
slander were inextricably mixed, whether the specific forms they took were
poetic, dramatic, narrative, or expository. But when commentators wished
to separate good vilification from bad the distinction was one of style.
"Loose-writ" libels were never as effective as "shining satire," according to
John Dry den and the Earl of Mulgrave in their joint effort, "An Essay Upon
Satire" (1679). Perhaps "shining" does not take us very far conceptually in
distinguishing satire from libel, lampoon, or slander as an embodiment of
the literary spirit of opposition, but Dry den and Mulgrave have in mind the
way effective satire always combines abuse with wit and imagination.
To say that a satiric work's expressive power is witty or imaginatively
oppositional does not necessarily make the particular animus of that work
any easier to define. Whereas certain attitudes and gestures of verbal
opposition mark satire - tirade, derision, disdain, mockery, belittlement,
sarcasm, irony - it is far from clear exactly what a subject must do to make
him, her, or it qualify as a protagonist in a satiric action. Tragedy invites
viewers to identify the key flaws in a character's nature that rationalize a
reversal of fortune; in comedy audiences identify strains among lovers,
families, generations, classes that temporarily unsettle the social order; and
in epic readers quickly mark the national and the heroic. But in satire the
object of an action is identified primarily by the stance taken against it. The
satirist depicts things as absurd, disreputable, or hypocritical because he
deems them so. "Indignation," as the Restoration satirist John Oldham
puts it, "can create a muse."