Mycterism

But he recovers himself soon, if only by the dry fashion in which he observes that, if anybody does not know it, the Greeks call certain kinds of allegory sarcasm, asteism, antiphasis, and parœmia, to which it may be well to at mycterism, a kind of derision which is dissembled, but not altogether concealed―as very neatly by M. Fabius Quintillianus in the passage before us.

As he makes clear, he has quite a few such “nauseatingly gross figures of clay” in mind, turning the irony or sarcasm of a specific instant into widespread mycterism—broad disdain pronounced with a sneer.