[Sidenote: John Philips (1676-1708).]

Ambrose Philips must not be confounded with his namesake John, the author of a clever burlesque of Milton, called The Splendid Shilling (1705); of Blenheim (1705), a poem which he was urged to write by the Tories in opposition to Addison's Campaign; and of a poem upon Cider (1706), in 'Miltonian verse,' which seems to have afforded several suggestions to Pope in his Windsor Forest. It is said to display a considerable knowledge of the subject, and in that its principal merit consists. From The Splendid Shilling a brief extract may be given:

'So pass my days. But when nocturnal shades This world envelop, and th' inclement air Persuades men to repel benumbing frosts With pleasant wines, and crackling blaze of wood; Me, lonely sitting, nor the glimmering light Of make-weight candle, nor the joyous talk Of loving friend delights; distressed, forlorn, Amidst the horrors of the tedious night, Darkling I sigh, and feed with dismal thoughts My anxious mind; or sometimes mournful verse Indite, and sing of groves and myrtle shades, Or desperate lady near a purling stream, Or lover pendent on a willow tree. Meanwhile I labour with eternal drought And restless wish, and rave; my parched throat Finds no relief, nor heavy eyes repose. But if a slumber haply does invade My weary limbs, my fancy still awake, Thoughtful of drink, and eager, in a dream Tipples imaginary pots of ale In vain; awake I find the settled thirst Still gnawing, and the pleasant phantom curse.'

'Philips,' says the poet Campbell, 'had the merit of studying and admiring Milton, but he never could imitate him without ludicrous effect, either in jest or earnest. His Splendid Shilling is the earliest and one of the best of our parodies; but Blenheim is as completely a burlesque upon Milton as The Splendid Shilling, though it was written and read with gravity, ... yet such are the fluctuations of taste that contemporary criticism bowed with solemn admiration over his Miltonic cadences.'

[Sidenote: Nicholas Rowe (1673-1718).]

Nicholas Rowe had the honour, if it was one in those days, of being made Laureate on the accession of George I. His odes, epistles, and songs are without merit, but he gained reputation as the translator of Lucan's Pharsalia, of which Sir Arthur Gorges had produced a version in 1614, and his plays entitle him to a place, though not a high one, in our dramatic literature.

Rowe edited an edition of Shakespeare, and should have known his author, yet in a prologue he declares that he could not draw women—an amazing assertion echoed by Collins, who praises Fletcher for his knowledge of the 'female mind,' and adds that 'stronger Shakespeare felt for man alone.'

The chronological list of Rowe's dramas runs as follows: The Ambitious Step-mother (1700); Tamerlane (1702); The Fair Penitent (1703); Ulysses (1705); The Royal Convert (1707); the Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714); and the Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey (1715). Measured by his contemporary dramatists he is a distinguished playwright. His characters do not live, but he could invent effective scenes, though in some cases the poet's taste may be questioned.

For many years Tamerlane was acted at Drury Lane on the anniversary of King William's landing in England, and under the names of Tamerlane and Bajazet the king is belauded at the expense of Louis XIV. The Fair Penitent, a piece even more successful upon the stage, will still please the reader, though he may question the high eulogium of Johnson, that "scarcely any work of any poet is at once so interesting by the fable, and so delightful by the language." Rowe has not the tragic power which can express passion without rant, and pathos without extravagance. In The Fair Penitent Calista gives utterance to her feelings by piling up expletives. Thus, when her husband attacks the lover who has ruined her, she exclaims, 'Destruction! fury! sorrow! shame! and death!' and, on another occasion, she cries out, 'Madness! confusion!' words which give a sense of the ludicrous rather than of the tragic; and so also does Calista's last utterance when, addressing Altamont, she says:

'Had I but early known Thy wondrous worth, thou excellent young man We had been happier both—now 'tis too late!'

Rowe may be regarded as the principal representative of tragedy in the 'age of Pope,' but his respectable work shows a fatal degeneration from the 'gorgeous tragedy' of the Elizabethans.

[Sidenote: Aaron Hill (1684-1749).]

Aaron Hill, unlike Rowe, was not distinguished as a dramatist, and succeeded only in two or three adaptations from the French. His claims as a poet are also insignificant. He was born in London in 1684, with expectations that were not destined to be realized, but Fortune was not unkind to him. His uncle, Lord Paget, Ambassador at Constantinople, gave the youth a warm welcome, supplied him with a tutor, and sent him to travel in the East. On Lord Paget's return to England, Hill accompanied him, and together they are said to have visited a great part of Europe. Some time later Hill went abroad again, and was absent two or three years. For awhile—it could not have been long—he was secretary to the Earl of Peterborough, and at the age of twenty-six, his good star being still in the ascendant, he married a young lady 'of great merit and beauty, with whom he had a very handsome fortune.' Hill was then appointed manager of Drury Lane, and he wrote a number of plays, the very names of which are now forgotten. Few men indeed so well known in his own day have sunk into such insignificance in ours. He wrote eight books of a long and unfinished epic called Gideon, which I suppose no one in the present century has had the hardihood to read; like Young he wrote a poem on The Judgment Day, a theme attempted also, shortly before his death, by John Philips, and that, after his kind, he produced a Pindaric ode goes without saying. A long poem called The Northern Star, a panegyric on Peter the Great, is said to have passed through several editions. The poem does not prove Hill to be a poet, but it shows his command of the heroic couplet. The style of the poem, which is an indiscriminate panegyric, may be judged from the following lines:

'Transcendent prince! how happy must thou be! What can'st thou look upon unblessed by thee? What inward peace must that calm bosom know, Whence conscious virtue does so strongly flow!

* * * * *

Such are the kings who make God's image shine, Nor blush to dare assert their right divine! No earth-born bias warps their climbing will, No pride their power, no avarice whets their skill. They poise each hope which bids the wise obey, And shed broad blessings from their widening sway; To raise the afflicted, stretch the healing hand, Drive crushed oppression from each rescued land, Bold in alternate right, or sheath or draw The sword of conquest, or the sword of law; Spare what resists not, what opposes bend, And govern cool, what they with warmth defend.'

Hill has the merit of having turned the tables upon Pope, who had put him into the treatise on the Bathos, and then into the Dunciad, where, however, the lines have more of compliment than censure, since he is made to mount 'far off among the swans of Thames.' Irritated by a note in the Dunciad, Hill replied in a long poem entitled The Progress of Wit, a Caveat, which opens with the following pointed lines:

'Tuneful Alexis, on the Thames' fair side, The ladies' plaything, and the Muses' pride; With merit popular, with wit polite, Easy though vain, and elegant though light; Desiring, and deserving others' praise, Poorly accepts a fame he ne'er repays; Unborn to cherish, sneakingly approves, And wants the soul to spread the worth he loves.'

In a letter to Hill Pope complained of these lines, and had the hypocrisy to say that he never thought any great matters of his poetical capacity, but prided himself on the superiority of his moral life. Hill returned a masterly and incisive reproof to this ridiculous statement, in the course of which he says:

'I am sorry to hear you say you never thought any great matters of your poetry. It is in my opinion the characteristic you are to hope your distinction from. To be honest is the duty of every plain man. Nor, since the soul of poetry is sentiment, can a great poet want morality. But your honesty you possess in common with a million who will never be remembered; whereas your poetry is a peculiar, that will make it impossible that you should be forgotten.'

He adds that if Pope had not been in the spleen when he wrote, he would have remembered that humility is a moral virtue; and how, asks the writer, can you know that your moral life is above that of most of the wits 'since you tell me in the same letter that many of their names were unknown to you?'

Aaron Hill, though he could write a sensible letter, was not a wise man. He was 'everything by turns and nothing long.' Poetry was but one of his accomplishments, and we are told that he cultivated it 'as a relaxation from the study of history, criticism, geography, physic, commerce, agriculture, war, law, chemistry, and natural philosophy, to which he devoted the greatest part of his time.'

As a poet Hill has the facility in composition exhibited by so many of his contemporaries, and he has occasionally a pretty turn of fancy. His last labour was the successful adaptation of Voltaire's Merope to the English stage (1749); sixteen years before he had adapted Zara with equal success.

[Sidenote: Thomas Parnell (1679-1718).]

Among the minor poets of the period an honourable place must be given to Parnell, who possessed the soul of a poet, but gave limited expression to it, for it was only during the later years of a short life that he discovered where his genius lay. The friend of Pope, Arbuthnot, and Swift, his biography has been written by Johnson, and more discursively by his countryman Goldsmith.

Thomas Parnell was born in Dublin, 1679, entered Trinity College at the early age of thirteen, and in 1700 obtained the degree of Master of Arts. Having taken orders he gained preferment in the Church, became, in 1706, Archdeacon of Clogher, and through the recommendation of Swift obtained also a good living. Parnell was fond of society, and was accustomed as often as possible to join the wits in London. He was a member of the Scriblerus Club, wrote for the Spectator, preached eloquent sermons, and had the ambition of a poet. But the loss of his wife preyed upon his mind, and he is said, though I believe chiefly on Pope's authority, to have given way to intemperance. He died suddenly at Chester at the age of thirty-nine in 1718.

Parnell was one of the poets whose fortunes Swift did his best to promote. Writing in 1712, he says, 'I gave Lord Bolingbroke a poem of Parnell's. I made Parnell insert some compliments in it to his lordship. He is extremely pleased with it, and read some parts of it to-day to Lord Treasurer, who liked it as much. And indeed he outdoes all our poets here a bar's length.' And a month later he writes, 'Lord Bolingbroke likes Parnell mightily, and it is pleasant to see that one who hardly passed for anything in Ireland, makes his way here with a little friendly forwarding.'

The Hermit, the Hymn to Contentment, an Allegory on Man, and a Night Piece on Death, give Parnell his title to a place among the poets. The Rise of Woman, and Health, an Eclogue, have also much merit, and were praised by Pope (but this was to their author) as 'two of the most beautiful things he ever read.' The story of The Hermit, written originally in Spanish, is given in Howell's Letters (1645-1655), and is admirably told by Parnell, but much that he wrote, including a series of long poems on Scripture characters, is poetically worthless. His poems, published five years after his death, were edited by Pope, who wisely suppressed some pieces unworthy of the poet. Then, as now, literary scavengers were at work. In 1758 the suppressed poems were published, and called forth the comment from Gray, 'Parnell is the dunghill of Irish Grub Street.' To Parnell Pope was indebted for the Essay on Homer prefixed to the translation, with which he does not seem to have been well pleased. He complained of the stiffness of the style, and said it had cost him more pains in the correcting than the writing of it would have done.

If Parnell's prose has the defect of stiffness, his lines glide with a smoothness that must have satisfied the ear of Pope. The higher harmonies of verse were unknown to him, but ease is not without a charm, and in illustration of Parnell's gift the final lines of A Night Piece on Death shall be quoted:

'When men my scythe and darts supply, How great a king of fears am I! They view me like the last of things, They make and then they draw my stings. Fools! if you less provoked your fears, No more my spectre form appears. Death's but a path that must be trod, If man would ever pass to God; A port of calms, a state to ease From the rough rage of swelling seas. Why then thy flowing sable stoles, Deep pendent cypress, mourning poles, Loose scarfs to fall athwart thy weeds, Long palls, drawn hearses, covered steeds, And plumes of black that as they tread, Nod o'er the scutcheons of the dead? Nor can the parted body know, Nor wants the soul these forms of woe; As men who long in prison dwell, With lamps that glimmer round the cell, Whene'er their suffering years are run, Spring forth to greet the glittering sun; Such joy, though far transcending sense, Have pious souls at parting hence. On earth and in the body placed, A few and evil years they waste; But when their chains are cast aside, See the glad scene unfolding wide, Clap the glad wing, and tower away, And mingle with the blaze of day.'

[Sidenote: Thomas Tickell (1686-1740).]

Tickell wished to be remembered as the friend of Addison, and with Addison his name is indissolubly associated. The poem dedicated to the essayist's memory is perhaps over-praised by Macaulay when he says that it would do honour to the greatest name in our literature, but it proved incontestibly that Tickell, as a poet, was superior to the master whom he so loved and honoured. His reputation hangs upon this elegy, which Fox pronounced perfect.[34] The Prospect of Peace, which passed through several editions, had at one time a considerable reputation, not assuredly for its poetry, but because it appealed to the spirit of the time The style of the poem may be judged from these lines:—

'Accept, great Anne, the tears their memory draws, Who nobly perished in their sovereign's cause; For thou in pity bidd'st the war give o'er, Mourn'st thy slain heroes, nor wilt venture more. Vast price of blood on each victorious day! (But Europe's freedom doth that price repay.) Lamented triumphs! when one breath must tell That Marlborough conquered and that Dormer fell.'

His Colin and Lucy called forth high praise from Goldsmith as one of the best ballads in our language, and Gray terms it the prettiest ballad in the world. Three stanzas from this once famous poem shall be quoted:—

'"I hear a voice you cannot hear, Which says I must not stay; I see a hand you cannot see, Which beckons me away. By a false heart and broken vows, In early youth I die; Was I to blame because his bride Was thrice as rich as I?

'"Ah, Colin, give not her thy vows, Vows due to me alone; Nor thou, fond maid, receive his kiss, Nor think him all thy own. To-morrow in the church to wed, Impatient, both prepare! But know, fond maid, and know, false man, That Lucy will be there!

'"Then bear my corse, my comrades, bear, This bridegroom blithe to meet, He in his wedding trim so gay, I in my winding-sheet." She spoke, she died; her corse was borne The bridegroom blithe to meet, He in his wedding trim so gay, She in her winding-sheet.'

There is some fancy but no imagination in the machinery of Tickell's long poem on Kensington Gardens, a title which recalls Matthew Arnold's exquisite stanzas. But the pathetic beauty of Arnold's lines belongs to a world of poetry wholly unlike that in which even the best of the Queen Anne poets lived and moved.

Tickell's translation of the first book of the Iliad led to the quarrel already mentioned in the account of Pope. He wrote, also, a rather lengthy poem on Oxford, in which there is some absurd criticism of insignificant poetasters, and, as a matter of course, an extravagant eulogium of Addison.

The few facts recorded of Tickell's life may be summed up in a paragraph. He was born in 1686 at Bridekirk, in Cumberland, and entered Queen's College, Oxford, in 1701. In 1708 he obtained his M.A. degree, and two years later was chosen Fellow. For sixteen years Tickell held his fellowship, but resigned it on his marriage in 1726. In a poem addressed to the lady before marriage, he asks whether

'By thousands sought, Clotilda, canst thou free Thy crowd of captives and descend to me?'

Praise which in those days would be regarded as fulsome secured the friendship and patronage of Addison, who employed him in public affairs, and when he became Secretary of State made Tickell Under-Secretary. To him Addison left the charge of editing his works, which were published by subscription, and appeared in four quarto volumes in 1721. In 1725 he was made secretary to the Lord Justices of Ireland, 'a place of great honour,' which he held until his death in 1740. The praise of Wordsworth, a poet always chary of expressing approbation, has been bestowed upon Tickell. 'I think him,' he said, 'one of the very best writers of occasional verses.'

[Sidenote: William Somerville (1692-1742).]

Tickell had written some lines on hunting, which he published as a fragment. His contemporary Somerville, selecting the same subject, wrote The Chase (1735), a poem in blank verse. He was born at Edston, in Warwickshire, and was said, Dr. Johnson writes, 'to be of the first family in his county.' He was educated at Winchester and Oxford, and had the tastes of a scholar as well as of a country gentleman, which, among other accomplishments, included that of hard drinking. We know little about him, and what we do know is deplorable, for his friend Shenstone writes that he was plagued and threatened by low wretches, and 'forced to drink himself into pains of the body in order to get rid of the pains of the mind.' He died in 1742, the owner of a good estate, which, owing to a contempt for economy, he was never able to enjoy. 'I loved him for nothing so much,' said Shenstone, 'as for his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money.'

In The Chase Somerville had the advantage of knowing his subject, but knowledge is not poetry, and the interest of the poem is not due to its poetical qualities. He deserves some credit for his skill in handling a variety of metres as well as blank verse, in which his principal poem is written. In an address To Mr. Addison, the couplet,

'When panting Virtue her last efforts made, You brought your Clio to the virgin's aid,'

is praised by Johnson as one of those happy strokes which are seldom attained. In the same poem Shakespeare and Addison are brought together in a way that is far from happy:

'In heaven he sings; on earth your muse supplies Th' important loss, and heals our weeping eyes, Correctly great, she melts each flinty heart With equal genius, but superior art.'

Praise can be too strong even for a poet's digestion, and Somerville, who writes a great deal more nonsense in the same strain, should have remembered that he was not addressing a fool. If the poetical adulation of the time is to be excused, it must be on the ground that a poet had to live by patronage and not by the public. In a pecuniary point of view his subservience to men in high position was often successful. An almost universal custom, it was not regarded as degrading; but the poet must have been peculiarly constituted who was not degraded by it.

[Sidenote: John Dyer (1698(?)-1758).]

In the last century any subject was deemed suitable for poetry, and the Welsh poet, John Dyer, who was born about 1698, found in his later life poetical materials in The Fleece (1757), a poem in four books of blank verse. His genius for descriptive poetry and his passionate and intelligent delight in natural objects are seen more pleasantly in Grongar Hill (published in the same year as Thomson's Winter), a poem not without grammatical inaccuracies, one of which deforms the first couplet, but full of poetical feeling. In an ease of composition which runs into laxity he reminds us occasionally of George Wither. His chief merit is, that while independent of Thomson, he was inspired by the same love, and wrote with the same aim. Dyer is not content with bare description, but likes to moralize on the landscape he surveys. Thus, when looking on a ruined tower, the poet exclaims:

'Yet time has seen, that lifts the low, And level lays the lofty brow, Has seen this broken pile compleat, Big with the vanity of state; But transient is the smile of fate! A little rule, a little sway, A sunbeam in a winter's day,' Is all the proud and mighty have Between the cradle and the grave.'

Dyer who is best seen in the octosyllabic metre, chose it also for The Country Walk, a poem in which, notwithstanding an occasional lapse into the conventional diction of the period, the rural pictures are drawn from life. He takes the reader into the farm-yard and fields as he writes:

'I am resolved this charming day In the open field to stray, And have no roof above my head But that whereon the gods do tread. Before the yellow barn I see A beautiful variety Of strutting cocks, advancing stout, And flirting empty chaff about; Hens, ducks, and geese, and all their brood, And turkeys gobbling for their food; While rustics thrash the wealthy floor, And tempt all to crowd the door.

* * * * *

And now into the fields I go, Where thousand flaming flowers glow, And every neighbouring hedge I greet With honey-suckles smelling sweet; Now o'er the daisy meads I stray And meet with, as I pace my way, Sweetly shining on the eye A rivulet gliding smoothly by, Which shows with what an easy tide The moments of the happy glide.'

An Epistle to a Friend in Town, records his satisfaction with the country retirement in which his days are passed. In a rather awkward stanza he says that he is more than content, and is indeed charmed with everything, and the lines close with the moralizing that was dear to Dyer's heart:

'Alas! what a folly that wealth and domain We heap up in sin and in sorrow! Immense is the toil, yet the labour how vain! Is not life to be over to-morrow? Then glide on my moments, the few that I have, Smooth-shaded and quiet and even; While gently the body descends to the grave, And the spirit arises to heaven.'

Dyer was an artist as well as a poet, and visited Italy, which suggested a poem in blank verse, The Ruins of Rome (1740). After his return to England he entered into holy orders, took a wife, who is said to have been a descendant of Shakespeare, and settled at Calthorp in Leicestershire, which he afterwards exchanged for a living in Lincolnshire. There is much to like in Dyer, and he has had the good fortune to win the applause of two great poets. Gray says, in a letter to Horace Walpole, that he had 'more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number,' and Wordsworth in a sonnet, To the Poet, John Dyer, writes:

'Though hasty Fame hath many a chaplet culled For worthless brows, while in the pensive shade Of cold neglect she leaves thy head ungraced, Yet pure and powerful minds, hearts meek and still, A grateful few, shall love thy modest Lay, Long as the shepherd's bleating flock shall stray O'er naked Snowdon's wide aerial waste; Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill!'

[Sidenote: William Shenstone (1714-1764).]

'The true rustic style,' Charles Lamb writes, 'I think is to be found in Shenstone,' and he calls his Schoolmistress the 'prettiest of poems.'

William Shenstone was born in 1714 at the Leasowes in Hales-Owen, a spot upon which he afterwards expended his skill as a landscape gardener. In 1732 he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, and remained there for some years without taking a degree. Those years appear to have been devoted to poetry. In 1737 Shenstone published a small volume anonymously. This was followed by the Judgment of Hercules (1741), and by the Schoolmistress (1742). In 1745 he undertook the management of his estate, and began, to quote Dr. Johnson's quaint description, 'to point his prospects, to diversify his surface, to entangle his walks, and to wind his waters; which he did with such judgment and such fancy, as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skilful; a place to be visited by travellers and copied by designers.' On this estate, with its lakes and cascades, its urns and poetical inscriptions, its hanging woods, and 'wild shaggy precipice,' Shenstone appears to have spent all his fortune. He led the life of a dilettante, and died unmarried at the age of fifty. His elegies and songs are dead, and whatever vitality remains in his verse will be found in the Pastoral Ballad and the Schoolmistress.

The ballad written in anapaestic verse has an Arcadian grace, against which even Johnson's robust intellect was not proof. For the following lines he says, 'if any mind denies its sympathy it has no acquaintance with love or nature':

'When forced the fair nymph to forego, What anguish I felt in my heart! Yet I thought—but it might not be so— 'Twas with pain that she saw me depart. She gazed as I slowly withdrew, My path I could hardly discern; So sweetly she bade me adieu, I thought that she bade me return.

The Schoolmistress, written in imitation of Spenser, has the merits of simplicity and homely humour. The village dame is a life-like character, and the urchins whom she is supposed to teach, and does sometimes teach by chastisement, are cunningly portrayed.

From the verses Written at an Inn in Henley three stanzas may be quoted. The last will be already known to readers familiar with their Boswell:

'I fly from pomp, I fly from plate, I fly from falsehood's specious grin! Freedom I love, and form I hate, And choose my lodgings at an inn.

'Here, waiter! take my sordid ore, Which lacqueys else might hope to win; It buys what courts have not in store, It buys me freedom at an inn!

'Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn.'

Unhappily this final verse, which Johnson is said to have repeated 'with great emotion,' has lost its application. The modern traveller, instead of being warmly welcomed at an inn, loses his identity and becomes a number.

[Sidenote: Mark Akenside (1721-1770).]

Akenside, who was born at Newcastle, 1721, received his education in Edinburgh, where he was sent to prepare for the ministry among the Dissenters. He, however, changed his mind, became a medical student, and finally, though much disliked for his manners, gained reputation as a physician in London. He is stated to have been excessively stiff and formal, and a frigid stiffness marks the Pleasures of Imagination (1744), a remarkable work considering the writer's age, since it is without the faults of youth. The poem is founded on Addison's Essays on the subject in the Spectator, and the poet also owes a considerable debt to Shaftesbury. Akenside's blank verse has the merits of dignity and strength. But the work is as cold as the author's manners were said to be, and in spite of what may be called poetical power, as distinct from a high order of inspiration, the poem leaves the reader unmoved. Pope, who saw it in MS., said that Akenside was 'no everyday writer,' which is a just criticism. The Pleasures of Imagination has the merits of careful workmanship and of some originality, but the interest which it at one time excited is not likely to be revived. In 1757 Akenside re-wrote the poem, and I believe that no critic, with the exception of Hazlitt, regards the second attempt as an improvement on the first. His skill in the use of classical imagery is seen to advantage in the Hymn to the Naiads (1746), and he deserves praise, too, for his inscriptions, which are distinguished for conciseness and vigour of style. The poet, it may be added, wrote a great number of odes that lack all, or nearly all, the qualities which should distinguish lyrical poetry. Not a spark of the divine fire warms or illuminates these reputable verses, but the author states that his chief aim was to be correct, and in that he has succeeded.

[Sidenote: David Mallet (1700-1765).]

David Mallet, a friend or acquaintance of Thomson, was contemptible as a man and comparatively insignificant as a poet. He did a large amount of dirty work, and appears to have made a good income by it. The base character of the man was known to Bolingbroke, of whose basest purpose he made him the instrument (see c. vii.). Mallet's ballad of William and Margaret (1724) is known to many readers, and so is the inferior ballad Edwin and Emma, which was written many years afterwards. In 1728 he published The Excursion, a poem not sufficiently significant to prevent Wordsworth from selecting the same title. In Mallet's poem on Verbal Criticism (1733), Johnson states that he paid court to Pope, and was rewarded by a travelling tutorship gained through the poet's influence. In 1731 his tragedy, Eurydice, was acted at Drury Lane. He joined Thomson, as we have said elsewhere, in the composition of the masque of Alfred, and 'almost wholly changed' the piece after Thomson's death. Amyntor and Theodora, a long poem in blank verse, appeared in 1747; Britannia, a masque, in 1753, and Elvira, a tragedy, in 1763. Mallet, who was without qualifications for the task, wrote a life of Lord Bacon. He is said to have obtained a pension for inflaming the mind of the public against Admiral Byng, and thereby hastening his execution.

In Anderson's edition of the poets, Mallet's biography is related with more fulness than by Dr. Johnson, and, after frankly recording acts which fully justify Macaulay's statement that Mallet's character was infamous, the writer adds, 'his integrity in business and in life is unimpeached.'

SCOTTISH SONG-WRITERS.

When the poets of England were writing satires, moral essays, and elaborate didactic treatises, the poets of Scotland were singing, in bird-like notes, songs of humour and of love. It is remarkable that the Scotch, the shrewdest, hardest, and most business-like people in these islands, should be so richly endowed with a gift shared and enjoyed by rich and poor alike. The most exquisite of English lyrics fall, where culture is wanting, on regardless ears; the songs of Ramsay and of Burns, of Lady Anne Lindsay and Jane Elliot, of Hogg and Lady Nairne, of Tannahill and Macneil, are household words in Scotland to gentle and simple. A few of the choicest songs of Scotland are due to ladies of rank, but the larger number have sprung from 'the huts where poor men lie.' Ramsay was a barber and wig-maker; Burns, as all the world knows, followed the plough; Tannahill was a weaver; Hogg a shepherd; and Robert Nicoll the son of a small farmer, 'ruined out of house and hold.'

[Sidenote: Allan Ramsay (1686-1758).]

Allan Ramsay was, born at Leadhills, in Lanarkshire, in 1686, and was therefore Pope's senior by two years. He has been called 'the restorer of Scottish poetry,' and by his compilation of The Evergreen (1724), and of The Tea-Table Miscellany, published in the same year, he gathered up the wealth of song scattered through the country. The Miscellany extended to four volumes, and before the poet's death had reached twelve editions. An undying interest belongs to both anthologies. The Evergreen was the first poetry Walter Scott perused, and in a marginal note on his copy of The Tea-Table Miscellany he writes: 'This book belonged to my grandfather, Robert Scott, and out of it I was taught Hardiknute by heart before I could read the ballad myself. It was the first poem I ever learnt, the last I shall ever forget.' The ballad Scott loved so well, I may say in passing, was written as a whole or in part by Lady Wardlaw (1677-1727),[35] and belongs therefore either to our period or to the later years of the seventeenth century.

In 1725 Ramsay published The Gentle Shepherd, a pastoral that puts to shame the numerous semi-classical and mythological poems which appeared under that name in England. It is essentially a rural poem, in which the action and language harmonize with what we know, or think we know, of country manners and life. There is neither striking invention in the plot nor much individuality in the characters, but there is poetical harmony throughout, many pretty rustic scenes, and sufficient interest to carry the reader pleasantly over the ground. The Gentle Shepherd is the work of a poet, and gives a higher impression of Ramsay's power than his songs alone would warrant. His lyrical pieces, though not wholly without the lilt and charm such verse exacts, are perhaps mainly of service in showing the immeasurable superiority of Burns. Ramsay was a successful poet, and not too much of a poet to be also a successful man of business. He exchanged wig-making for bookselling, kept a shop in the High Street of Edinburgh, and finally retired to a villa which he had built for himself on the Castle Hill. A good-humoured, care-defying man, he enjoyed life in an easy way, and was not disposed to repine when his road lay down the hill. In an epistle to a friend he writes:

'And now in years and sense grown auld, In ease I like my limbs to fauld, Debts I abhor, and plan to be From shackling trade and dangers free; That I may, loosed frae care and strife, With calmness view the edge of life; And when a full ripe age shall crave, Slide easily into my grave.'

Among the Scottish song-writers of the period may be mentioned Robert Crawford (1695?-1732), whose love verses, written in a conventional strain, are not without music; Lord Binning (1696-1732), the author of a pretty song called Ungrateful Nanny; and William Hamilton of Bangour (1704-1754), who wrote the well-known Braes of Yarrow. The most charming of Scottish lyrics belong, however, to a later period of the century than the age of Pope.

* * * * *

The student who reads the minor poets who figured, in some cases with much applause, during the years of Pope's ascendency, will be struck by the almost total absence from their works of creative power. These rhymers wrote for the age, and illustrate it, but they did not write for all time, and a small volume would suffice to hold all their verse which is of permanent value. Too often they imagined that by the composition of flowing couplets they proved their title to rank with inspired poets. They confounded the art of verse-making with the divine art of poetry, and were not aware that the substance of their work is prose. Now and then the digger in this mine will discover a small nugget of gold, but for the most part the interest called forth by the poets mentioned in the present chapter, is more historical than poetical, and the reader in passing to the great prose writers of the age will be conscious of gain rather than of loss.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Cowper's line,

'Where tempests never beat nor billows roar,'

is not an improvement upon Garth's. Tempests, it has been justly said, do not beat.

[32] The Spectator, No. 335.

[33] Elwin and Courthope's Pope, vol. vii., p. 62.

[34] Edward Young tried his skill on the same theme in a poetical epistle to Tickell, but his lines are leaden and his praise absurd. Addison's glory was so great, he says, as a statesman and a patriot, that

'It borders on disgrace To say he sung the best of human race.'

[35] To Lady Wardlaw Dr. Robert Chambers attributed twenty-five ballads, and among them several of the finest we possess, which are regarded as ancient by every other authority. If the assumption were proved, this lady would hold a distinguished and unique position among the poets of the Pope period, but there is absolutely no ground for the theory so zealously advocated by Chambers.



PART II.

THE PROSE WRITERS



CHAPTER IV.

JOSEPH ADDISON—SIR RICHARD STEELE.

As essayists, the writings of Addison and of Steele are familiar to all readers of eighteenth-century literature. Their work in other departments may be neglected without much loss; but the student who disregards the Tatler, the Spectator, the Guardian, and some of the essay-volumes which follow in their wake, will be blind to one of the most significant literary features of the period.

The alliance between Addison and Steele was so intimate, that to judge of one apart from the other, would be fair to neither. It may be well, therefore, after giving the leading facts in the lives of the two friends, to bring them together again while considering the work they accomplished in their literary partnership. One point, I think, will come out clearly in this examination, namely, that while Steele might, under very inferior conditions, have produced the Tatler and Spectator without Addison, it is highly improbable that Addison, as an essayist, would have existed without Steele.

[Sidenote: Joseph Addison (1672-1719).]

Addison lives on the reputation of his prose works, but he thought that he was a poet, and was regarded as a poet by his contemporaries. It was by verse that he won his earliest reputation, and it was on his Pegasus that he rose to be Secretary of State. He was born on May 1st, 1672, at Milston, in Wiltshire, a parish of which his father was the rector, and was educated at the Charterhouse, where he contracted his memorable friendship with Steele. Thence, in 1687, at the boyish age of fifteen, he went up to Queen's College, Oxford, and in a few months, thanks to his Latin verses, gained a scholarship at Magdalen, of which college ten years later he became a fellow.

While at Oxford he acquired, after the fashion of the day, what Johnson calls 'the trade of a courtier.' His Latin poem on the Peace of Ryswick was dedicated to Montague, and two years later a pension of L300 a year, gained through Somers and Montague, enabled him to travel, in order that by gaining a knowledge of French and Italian, he might be fitted for the diplomatic service. Some time after his return to England he published his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), and dedicated the volume to Swift, 'the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age.'

Addison's patrons had now lost their power, and he was left to his own exertions. His difficulties did not last long. In 1704 the battle of Blenheim called forth several weak efforts from the poetasters, and as the Government required verse more worthy of the occasion, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, on the recommendation of Montague, now Earl of Halifax, applied to Addison, who, in answer to the appeal, published The Campaign, in 1705. The poem contains the well-known similitude of the angel, and also an apt allusion to the great storm that had lately destroyed fleets and devastated the country.

'So when an angel by divine command With rising tempests shakes a guilty land, Such as of late o'er pale Britannia past, Calm and serene he drives the furious blast; And, pleased the Almighty's orders to perform, Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.'

The Campaign, which has no other passage worth quoting, proved a happy hit, and was of such service to the Ministry, that Addison found the way to fame and fortune. He was appointed Commissioner of Appeals, and not long after Under Secretary of State. In 1707 he accompanied his friend and patron, Halifax, on a mission to Hanover, and two years later he was appointed Chief Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. In Dublin he gained golden opinions. 'I am convinced,' Swift writes, 'that whatever Government come over, you will find all marks of kindness from any parliament here with respect to your employment; the Tories contending with the Whigs which should speak best of you. In short, if you will come over again when you are at leisure, we will raise an army and make you king of Ireland.' When the Whig Ministry fell in 1710, and Addison lost his appointment, he must have gained a fortune, for he was able to purchase an estate for L10,000.

In the early years of the century the Italian opera, which had been brought into England in the reign of William and Mary, excited the mirth and opposition of the wits. Lord Chesterfield, who called it 'too absurd and extravagant to mention,' said, 'Whenever I go to the opera I leave my sense and reason at the door with my half-guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and ears.' Steele, Gay, and Pope ridiculed the new-fangled entertainment, and Colley Cibber, too, pointed his jest at these 'poetical drams, these gin-shops of the stage that intoxicate its auditors, and dishonour their understanding with a levity for which I want a name.' Addison, who has some lively papers on the subject in the Spectator, undertook to give a faithful account of the progress of the Italian opera on the English stage, 'for there is no question,' he writes, 'but our great grandchildren will be very curious to know why their forefathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in their own country; and to hear whole plays acted before them in a tongue which they did not understand.'

Before writing thus in the Spectator, Addison, in order to oppose the Italian opera, by what he regarded as a more rational pastime, produced his English opera of Rosamond, which was acted in 1706, and proved a failure on the stage. The music is said to have been bad, and the poetry is the work of a writer destitute of lyrical genius. Lord Macaulay, who finds a merit in almost everything produced by Addison, praises 'the smoothness with which the verses glide, and the elasticity with which they bound,' and considers that if he 'had left heroic couplets to Pope, and blank verse to Rowe, and had employed himself in writing airy and spirited songs, his reputation as a poet would have stood far higher than it now does.' The gliding movement of the verse may be admitted; but lyric poetry demands the higher qualities of music and imaginative treatment, and Addison's 'smoothness,' so far from being a poetical gift, is a mechanical acquisition.

In 1713 his Cato, with its stately rhetoric and cold dignity, received a very different reception. The prologue, written by Pope, is in admirable accordance with the spirit of the play. Addison's purpose is to exhibit a great man struggling with adversity, and Pope writes:

'He bids your breasts with ancient ardour rise, And calls forth Roman drops from British eyes; Virtue confessed in human shape he draws, What Plato thought, and God-like Cato was: No common object to your sight displays, But what with pleasure Heaven itself surveys; A brave man struggling in the storms of fate, And greatly falling with a falling state! While Cato gives his little senate laws, What bosom beats not in his country's cause?'

Addison has proved that he could draw a life-like character in his representation of Sir Roger de Coverley, but the dramatis personae, who act a part, or are supposed to act one, in Cato, are mere dummies, made to express fine sentiments. There is no flesh and blood in them, and owing to the dramatist's regard for unity of place, the play is full of absurdities. Yet Cato was received with immense applause. It was regarded from a political aspect, and both Whig and Tory strove to turn the drama to party account. 'The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party,' Pope writes, 'on the one side of the theatre, were echoed back by the Tories on the other; while the author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause proceeding more from the hand than the head.'

In another letter he says: 'The town is so fond of it, that the orange wenches and fruit women in the parks offer the books at the side of the coaches, and the prologue and epilogue are cried about the streets by the common hawkers.' It would be interesting to ascertain what there was in the state of public affairs in the spring of 1713, which created this enthusiasm. Swift, writing to Stella, alludes to a rehearsal of the play, but makes no criticism upon it; and Berkeley, who was in London at the time, and had a seat in Addison's box on the first night, is also silent about it. In a letter written, as it happens, by Bolingbroke, on the day that Cato was produced, he indicates the signs of the time, as they appeared to a Tory statesman: 'The prospect before us,' he writes, 'is dark and melancholy. What will happen no man is able to foretell.'

It was this sense of doubt and insecurity in the nation that gave significance to trifles. The political atmosphere was charged with electricity. The Tories, though in office, were far from feeling themselves secure, and both Harley and Bolingbroke were in correspondence with the Pretender. Atterbury, who was heart and soul with him, had just been made a bishop, Protestant ascendancy was in danger, the security of the country seemed to hang on the frail life of the Queen, and the strong party spirit of the time was easily fanned into a flame. We cannot now place ourselves in the position of the spectators whose passions gave such popularity to Cato. Its mild platitudes and rhetorical periods, its coldness and sobriety, seem ill fitted to arouse the fervour of playgoers, but Addison, whose good luck rarely failed him, was especially fortunate in the moment chosen for the representation of the play. Had Cato exhibited genius of the highest order, it could not have been more successful. Cibber writes that it was acted in London five times a week for a month to constantly crowded houses, and when the tragedy was acted at Oxford, 'Our house,' he says, 'was in a manner invested, and entrance demanded by twelve o'clock at noon, and before one it was not wide enough for many who came too late for places.'[36]

Cato had the good fortune to run in London for thirty-five nights, and gained also some reputation on the continent. It is formed on the French model, and Addison was therefore praised by Voltaire as 'the first English writer who composed a regular tragedy.' He added that Cato was 'a masterpiece.' If so, it is one of the masterpieces that has long ceased to be read. Little could its author have surmised that his tragedy, received with universal praise, had but a brief life to live, while the Essays which he had already contributed to the Tatler and Spectator would make his name familiar to future generations.

Addison's poetry may now be regarded as extinct, and most of the poems he wrote are probably unknown to the present generation of readers even by name. His Latin verses are pronounced excellent by all competent critics, but when a man writes verses in a dead language he does so generally to show his scholarship, and not to express his inspiration. Latin verse is, as M. Taine says, a faded flower. Now and then, indeed, a poem has been written with merits apart from its latinity—witness the Epitaphium Damonis of Milton—but Addison, who lacked poetic fire in his native language, was not likely to find it in a dead tongue. His English poems are generally dull, and sometimes, as in his earliest poem, the Account of the greatest English Poets (1694), the tameness of the verse is matched by the ignorance of the criticism. The student will observe how differently the theme is treated by a true poet like Drayton in his Epistle to Reynolds; or, like Ben Jonson, in the many allusions that he makes to his country's poets. Compare, too, Addison's Letter from Italy (1701) with the lovely lines on a like theme in Goldsmith's Traveller, and the contrast between a verseman and a poet is at once apparent. Addison, it may be added, is remembered for his hymns, which may be found in most selections of sacred verse, and deserve a place in the best of them. As the forerunner of Isaac Watts (1674-1748) and of Charles Wesley (1708-1788), he struck upon what at that time might, in our country, be almost called a new department of literature; and it is remarkable that an age which so dreaded enthusiasm should have originated verse which gives utterance to the most emotional form of spiritual aspiration. As hymn-writers, Englishmen were more than a century behind the best sacred poets of Germany. Luther had taught the German people the power of hymnody, but it was during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), and after its conclusion, that the spirit of devotion found full expression in religious verse. Just before the engagement at Leipzic, Gustavus Adolphus wrote his well-known battle hymn, and the peace was celebrated in a noble hymn by Martin Rinkart. He was followed by a succession of sacred singers whose devout utterances influenced and in some degree inspired the Wesleys.

"A verse may find him whom a sermon flies,"

says George Herbert, and the enormous power wielded by Methodism owes a large portion of its strength to song.

Amidst much in their writings that is questionable in taste and weak in expression, both Watts and Charles Wesley have written hymns which prove their incontestible right to a place among the poets, and the influence they have exerted over the English-speaking race is beyond the power of the literary historian to estimate. The external divisions of the Christian Church are numerous; its unity is to be seen in the Hymn Book. 'Men whose theological views contrast most strongly,' says Mr. Abbey in his essay on The English Sacred Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 'meet on common ground when they express in verse the deeper aspirations of the heart and the voice of Christian praise.'

In 1714, on the death of the Queen, Addison was once more in office, and held his old position of Irish Secretary. In the following year he defended the Whig Government and Whig principles in the Freeholder, a paper published twice weekly. In it he gives no niggard praise to the Government of George I., and to the King himself, for his 'civil virtues,' and for his martial achievements. Addison's praise disagrees, it need scarcely be said, with the more minute and veracious description of the King given by Thackeray, but a party politician in those days could scarcely be a faithful chronicler. He could see what he wished to see, but found it necessary to shut his eyes when the prospect became unpleasant. George was a heartless libertine, but Addison observes with great satisfaction that the women most eminent for virtue and good sense are in his interest. 'It would be no small misfortune,' he says, 'to a sovereign, though he had all the male part of the nation on his side, if he did not find himself king of the most beautiful half of his subjects. Ladies are always of great use to the party they espouse, and never fail to win over numbers to it. Lovers, according to Sir William Petty's computation, make at least the third part of the sensible men of the British nation, and it has been an uncontroverted maxim in all ages, that though a husband is sometimes a stubborn sort of a creature, a lover is always at the devotion of his mistress. By this means it lies in the power of every fine woman to secure at least half-a-dozen able-bodied men to his Majesty's service. The female world are likewise indispensably necessary in the best causes to manage the controversial part of them, in which no man of tolerable breeding is ever able to refute them. Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.'

The essayist thinks it fortunate for the Whigs 'that their very enemies acknowledge the finest women of Great Britain to be of that party;' and in an amusing but rather absurd way he discourses to maids, wives, and widows on the advantages of adhering to the Hanoverian Government. It is characteristic of Addison that a political paper like the Freeholder should be flavoured with the humour and badinage he found so effective in the Spectator. To the ladies he appeals again and again, but not to their reason. He gives them mirth instead of argument, and thinks it more likely to prevail with the 'Fair Sex.' The Freeholder has several papers worthy of the author in his best moods, the best of them, perhaps, being the 'Tory Fox-hunter,' with which, to quote Johnson's words, 'bigotry itself must be delighted.' In the year which gave birth to the Freeholder, The Drummer, a comedy, was acted at Drury Lane, and ran three nights. The play was not acknowledged by Addison, neither was it printed in Tickell's edition of his works; but Steele, who published an edition of the play, with a dedication to Congreve, never doubted, and there is no reason to doubt, that Addison was the author. 'The piece,' Mr. Courthope writes, 'is like Cato, a standing proof of Addison's deficiency in dramatic genius. The plot is poor and trivial, nor does the dialogue, though it shows in many passages traces of its author's peculiar vein of humour, make amends by its brilliancy for the tameness of the dramatic situation.'[37]

After the Freeholder Addison wrote nothing of importance, unless we except the essay published after his death On the Evidences of Christianity. Of this essay it will suffice to quote the judgment of his most distinguished eulogist. After observing that the treatise shows the narrow limits of Addison's classical knowledge, Lord Macaulay adds: 'It is melancholy to see how helplessly he gropes his way from blunder to blunder. He assigns as grounds for his religious belief stories as absurd as that of the Cock Lane Ghost, and forgeries as rank as Ireland's Vortigern; puts faith in the lie about the Thundering Legion; is convinced that Tiberius moved the senate to admit Jesus among the gods, and pronounces the letter of Agbarus, King of Edessa, to be a record of great authority. Nor were these errors the effects of superstition, for to superstition Addison was by no means prone. The truth is, that he was writing about what he did not understand.'

In 1716, after having been made one of the Commissioners for Trades and Colonies, he married the Countess Dowager of Warwick, with whom he had been acquainted for some years. The marriage, according to the doubtful authority of Pope, was not a happy one, and is said to have driven Addison to the consolations of the tavern. He did not need them long. In 1717 Sunderland became Prime Minister, and made Addison a Secretary of State, an appointment which he resigned eleven months afterwards; and in 1719 he died at Holland House at the age of forty-seven, leaving one daughter as the memorial of the union. He lies, as is fitting, in the great Abbey of which he has written so beautifully.

Tickell's noble tribute to his friend's memory belongs to the undying poetry which neither age nor fresher forms of verse can render obsolete. It must suffice to quote here a few lines from a poem which, despite some conventional expressions common to the time, is worthy of its theme throughout:

'If pensive to the rural shades I rove, His shape o'ertakes me in the lonely grove; 'Twas there of Just and Good he reasoned strong, Cleared some great truth, or raised some serious song; There patient showed us the wise course to steer, A candid censor, and a friend severe; There taught us how to live; and (oh! too high The price for knowledge) taught us how to die.'

There are few men of literary eminence in the eighteenth century of whom we know so little as of Addison. His own Spectator, who never opened his lips but in his club, is scarcely more silent than the essayist's biographers, so trifling are the details they have to record beyond the bare facts of his official and literary career. Steele knew him better, and, in spite of an unhappy estrangement at the last, probably loved him more than anyone else, and had he written his story, as he once proposed doing, the narrative might have been charming; but, alas for Steele's resolutions!

That Addison was a shy man we know—Lord Chesterfield said he was the most timid man he ever knew—and it speaks well for his resolution and strength of purpose that he should have risen notwithstanding this timidity to so high a position in public affairs. His want of oratorical power was a drawback to his efficiency, and Sir James Macintosh was probably right in saying that Addison as Dean of St. Patrick's, and Swift as Secretary of State, would have been a happy stroke of fortune, putting each into the place most fitted for him. The essayist's reserve, while it closed his lips in general society, did not prevent him from being one of the most fascinating of companions in the freedom of conversation with a few intimate friends. Swift, Steele, and even Pope, testify to Addison's irresistible charm in the select society that he loved. Young said he could chain the attention of every hearer, and Lady Mary Montagu declared that he was the best company in the world.

[Sidenote: Richard Steele (1672-1729).]

Richard Steele was born in Dublin, 1672, of English parents, and educated at the Charterhouse, where, as we have said, Addison was at the same time a pupil. In 1690 he matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, Addison being then demy at Magdalen. Steele left college without taking a degree, and entered the army as a cadet. After a time he obtained the rank of captain in Lord Lucas's fusiliers, and wrote his treatise, The Christian Hero (1701), with the design, he says, 'principally to fix upon his own mind a strong impression of virtue and religion in opposition to a stronger propensity towards unwarrantable pleasure.' Steele was an honest lover of the things most worthy of love, but his frailty too often proved stronger than his virtue, and the purpose of The Christian Hero was not answered.

Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profanity of the English Stage, published in 1698, had made, as it well might, a powerful impression, and Steele, who was always ready to inculcate morality on other people, wrote four comedies with a moral purpose. The Funeral; or Grief a-la-Mode was acted with success at Drury Lane in 1701, and when published passed through several editions. The Lying Lover followed two years later, and was, in the comfortable judgment of the author, 'damned for its piety.' This was followed, in 1705, by The Tender Husband, a play suggested by the Sicilien of Moliere, as The Lying Lover had been founded on the Menteur of Corneille. Many years later Steele's last play, The Conscious Lovers (1722), completed his performances as a dramatist. It was dedicated to the King, who is said to have sent the author L500. The modern reader will find little worthy of attention in the dramas of Steele. His sense of humour enlivens some of the scenes, and is, perhaps, chiefly visible in The Funeral; but for the most part dulness is in the ascendant, and the sentiment is frequently mawkish. The Conscious Lovers, said Parson Adams, contains 'some things almost solemn enough for a sermon.' This may be true, but we do not desire a sermon in a play, and Steele, who is always a lively essayist, loses his liveliness in writing for the stage. It has been observed by Mr. Ward that, taking a hint from Colley Cibber, he 'became the real founder of that sentimental comedy which exercised so pernicious an influence upon the progress of our dramatic literature.' 'It would be unjust,' he adds, 'to hold him responsible for the feebleness of successors who were altogether deficient in the comic power which he undoubtedly even as a dramatist exhibits; but in so far as their aberrations were the result of his example, he must be held to have contributed, though with the best of motives, to the decline of the English drama.'[38] One of the prominent offenders who followed in Steele's wake was George Lillo (1693-1739), whose highly moral tragedies, written for the edification of playgoers, have the kind of tragic interest which is called forth by any commonplace tale of crime and misery. In Lillo's two most important dramas, George Barnwell (1731), a play founded on the old ballad, and The Fatal Curiosity (1736), there is a total absence of the elevation in character and language which gives dignity to tragedy. His plays are like tales of guilt arranged and amplified from the Newgate Calendar. The author wrote with a good purpose, and the public appreciated his work, but it is not dramatic art, and has no pretension to the name of literature.

Throughout his life Steele was at war with fortune. His hopefulness was inexhaustible, but he learnt no lessons from experience, and escaped from one slough to fall into another. He was as unthrifty as Goldsmith, whom in many respects he resembles, and his warm, impulsive nature was allied to a combativeness and jealousy which sometimes led him to quarrel with his best friends. Of his passion for the somewhat exacting lady whom he married,[39] and of the 400 and odd notelets addressed by the lover-husband to his 'dear, dearest Prue,' and 'absolute Governess,' it is enough to say here, that the story told offhand in his own words, shows how lovable the man was in spite of the faults which he never attempted to conceal. Only about a week before the marriage the lady had fair warning of one probable drawback to her happiness as a wife.[40] On the morning of August 30th, 1707, Steele advised his 'fair one' to look up to that heaven which had made her so sweet a companion, and in the evening of that day he wrote:

'DEAR LOVELY MRS. SCURLOCK,

'I have been in very good company, where your health, under the character of the woman I loved best, has been often drunk, so that I may say I am dead drunk for your sake, which is more than I die for you.

'RICH. STEELE.'



After marriage Steele's extravagance and impecuniosity must have proved a severe trial to Prue. At times he would live in considerable style, and Berkeley, who writes, in 1713, of dining with him frequently at his house in Bloomsbury Square, praises his table, servants, and coach as 'very genteel.' At other times the family were without common necessaries, and on one occasion there was not 'an inch of candle, a pound of coal, or a bit of meat in the house.'

On the 12th April, 1709, Steele issued the first number of the Tatler, its supposed author being the Isaac Bickerstaff, whose name, thanks to Swift, had been 'rendered famous through all parts of Europe.' The essays appeared every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, for the convenience of the post, and at the outset contained political news, which Steele, by his government appointment of Gazetteer, was enabled to supply. After awhile, however, much to the advantage of the Tatler, this news was dropped. The articles are dated from White's Chocolate-house, from Will's Coffee-house, from the Grecian, and from the St. James's. It is probable that the column in Defoe's Review, containing Advice from the Scandal Club, suggested his 'Lucubrations' to Steele. If so, it does not detract from his originality of treatment, for Defoe's town gossip is poor stuff. Addison, who knew nothing of the project beforehand, came, ere long, to his friend's assistance; but it was not until about eighty numbers had appeared, that he became a frequent contributor, and before that time Steele had made his mark. When the essays were afterwards reprinted in four volumes, Steele, who was never wanting in gratitude, generously acknowledged the help he had received. 'I fared,' he says, 'like a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid. I was undone by my auxiliary. When I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence on him.' The Tatler still supplies delightful entertainment, and in the almost total absence of amusing and wholesome reading in Steele's time, must have proved a welcome companion. Readers who are inundated by what is called 'light literature' can with difficulty imagine the dearth suffered in Pope's day, when the interminable romances of Calprenede, of Mdlle. de Scuderi and her brother, and of Madame la Fayette, were the liveliest books considered fit for a modest woman to read. A novel, however, in ten volumes, like the Grand Cyrus or Clelie, had one advantage over the cheap fictions of our time, its interest was not soon exhausted.

The Tatler has claims upon the student's attention, apart from the entertainment it affords. Steele, who lived from hand to mouth, and wrote, as he lived, on the impulse of the moment, had unwittingly begun a work destined to form an epoch in English literature. The Essay, as we now understand the word, dates from the Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, and Steele and Addison, who may boast a numerous progeny, have in Charles Lamb the noblest of their sons.

On the 2nd January, 1711, Steele wrote the final number of the Tatler, partly on the plea that the essays would suffice to make four volumes, and partly because he was known to be the author, and could not, as Mr. Steele, attack vices with the freedom of Mr. Bickerstaff. Addison, who had done so much to assist Steele in his first venture, was as ignorant of his intention to close the work as he was of its initiation. Two months later The Spectator appeared, and this time the friends worked in concert. It proved a brilliantly successful partnership. The second number, in which the characters of the club are introduced, was written by Steele, and to him we owe the first sketch of the immortal Sir Roger de Coverley:

'When he is in town he lives in Soho Square. It is said he keeps himself a bachelor by reason he was crossed in love by a perverse, beautiful widow of the next county to him. Before his disappointment, Sir Roger was what you call a fine gentleman, had often supped with my Lord Rochester and Sir George Etheridge, fought a duel upon his first coming to town, and kicked bully Dawson in a public coffee-house for calling him youngster. But being ill-used by the above-mentioned widow, he was very serious for a year and a half; and though, his temper being naturally jovial, he at last got over it, he grew careless of himself, and never dressed afterwards. He continues to wear a coat and doublet of the same cut that were in fashion at the time of his repulse, which, in his merry humours, he tells us has been in and out twelve times since he first wore it.... He is now in his fifty-sixth year, cheerful, gay, and hearty, keeps a good house both in town and country; a great lover of mankind; but there is such a mirthful cast in his behaviour, that he is rather beloved than esteemed. His tenants grow rich, his servants look satisfied, all the young women profess love to him, and the young men are glad of his company. When he comes into a house he calls the servants by their names, and talks all the way upstairs to a visit. I must not omit that Sir Roger is a justice of the quorum; that he fills the chair at a quarter-session with great abilities; and three months ago gained universal applause by explaining a passage in the Game Act.'

In their daily issue, as well as afterwards in volumes, the essays had an extensive sale. They were to be found on every breakfast-table, and so popular did they prove, that when the imposition of a halfpenny tax destroyed a number of periodicals, Steele found it safe to double the price of the Spectator. The vivacity and humour of the paper were visible from the beginning. 'Mr. Steele,' Swift wrote, 'seems to have gathered new life, and to have a new fund of wit.' Of 555 papers, Addison wrote 274 and Steele 236, while the remaining forty-five were the work of occasional contributors. In the full tide of its success, and without any assigned reason, the Spectator was brought to a conclusion in December, 1712, and in the following spring Steele started the Guardian, which might have been as fortunate as its predecessor, had not the editor's zeal tempted him to diverge to politics. He had also a disagreement with his publisher, and the Guardian was allowed but a short life of 175 numbers. Of these about fifty were due to Addison, and upwards of eighty to Steele.

Steele's political ardour was irrepressible, and a paper in the Guardian (No. 128), demanding the abolition of Dunkirk, called forth a pamphlet from Swift, in which the weaknesses of his former friend are sneered at and denounced with enough of truthfulness to enhance their malice. After allowing that Steele has humour, and is no disagreeable companion 'after the first bottle,' Swift adds, 'Being the most imprudent man alive, he never follows the advice of his friends, but is wholly at the mercy of fools and knaves, or hurried away by his own caprice, by which he has committed more absurdities in economy, friendship, love, duty, good manners, politics, religion, and writing than ever fell to one man's share.' A little later, in anticipation of the Queen's death, Steele published The Crisis (1714), a political pamphlet, which led to his expulsion from the House of Commons. It was answered by one of the most masterly of Swift's pamphlets, The Public Spirit of the Whigs, in which it is suggested that Steele might be superior to other writers on the Whig side 'provided he would a little regard the propriety and disposition of his words, consult the grammatical part, and get some information in the subject he intends to handle.'

The reader is chiefly concerned with Steele as an essayist, and it is unnecessary to follow his career in the House of Commons and out of it. Yet there is one anecdote too characteristic to be omitted in the briefest notice of his life. Lady Charlotte Finch had been attacked in the Examiner 'for knotting in St. James's Chapel during divine service, in the immediate presence both of God and her Majesty, who were affronted together.' Steele denounced the calumny in the Guardian. Upon taking his seat as member for Stockbridge, he was attacked by the Tories on account of The Crisis, which they deemed an inflammatory libel, and defended himself in a speech which occupied three hours. When he left the House, Lord Finch, who, like Steele, was a new member, rose to make his maiden speech in defence of the man who had defended his sister; a nervous feeling caused him to hesitate, and he sat down, exclaiming, 'It is strange I cannot speak for this man, though I could readily fight for him.' The House cheered these generous words, and Lord Finch rising again, made an able speech. The effort was a vain one, and Steele lost his seat. A few months later, after the death of Queen Anne, he entered the House again as member for Boroughbridge, and having been placed in the commission of peace for Middlesex, on presenting an address from the county, he received the honour of knighthood.

Meanwhile he had not renounced his vocation of essayist. The Guardian was followed by the Englishman (1713), the Englishman by the Lover (1714), and the Lover by the Reader (1714), a journal strongly political in character. Of this only nine numbers were issued. Then came Town Talk, the Tea Table, Chit-chat, and the Theatre. Sir Richard appears to have been always in a hurry to break new ground, a foible not confined to literature. He was continually starting new projects, and never doubted, in spite of numberless failures, that his latest effort to make a fortune would be successful.

Notwithstanding his appointments as manager of Drury Lane and as a Commissioner in Scotland to inquire into the Estates of Traitors, Steele's money difficulties did not lessen as he advanced in life; worse still, he had the misfortune to quarrel with his oldest and dearest friend. For this he and Addison were alike to blame, and Addison dying a few months later, there was no time for reconciliation. In 1718 Steele had lost his wife, and some years afterwards his only remaining son. Ultimately, broken in health and fortune, Sir Richard retired to Carmarthen, and there, in 1729, he died.

'I was told,' says Victor, 'he retained his cheerful sweetness of temper to the last; and would often be carried out in a summer's evening, when the country lads and lasses were assembled at their rural sports, and with his pencil give an order on his agent, the mercer, for a new gown to the best dancer.'[41]

All literature worthy of the name is the expression of the writer's life, of his aspirations, and of his ultimate aims; and since man is a moral being, it cannot be severed from morality. To point a moral, if it be within the scope of imaginative art, is subordinate to its main purpose. To delight by stimulating the imagination, to give a new beauty to existence by widening the realm of thought,—these are some of the noblest purposes of literature; and while men and women of creative genius are among our wisest teachers, the wisdom we gain from them comes to us without direct enforcement. In the last century, however, authors of good character, and authors who had no character to boast of, were equally impressed with the necessity of adorning their pages with moral maxims, and if this moral was not inserted in the body of the work, it was inevitable that it should be tacked on to the end of it like a tail to a kite. Steele in his artless way had a moral end in view, though his method of reaching it was not always wise or even discreet. Addison had his moral also. It pervades everything he wrote, but so artfully does he make use of it, that the reader is not unpleasantly conscious of a purpose. His allegories belong to an obsolete form of literature, but one of them at least The Vision of Mirza, may be still read with pleasure. His Saturday essays, which are nearly always serious in character, are the sermons of a layman, expressed in the most lucid style and in the purest English. His tales, like his allegories, have lost much of their flavour, but the humorous essays, in which he depicts the manners of the time, as well as the numbers devoted to the Spectator Club and to Addison's beloved Sir Roger, have a perennial charm. There is a felicity in the essayist's touch which is beyond imitation, although a reader might give, as Johnson suggested, days and nights to the study. The style is the man, and to write as Addison wrote it would be necessary to reach his moral and intellectual level, to see with his shrewd but kindly eyes, and to have his fine sense of humour. His faults, too, must be shared by his imitator—the somewhat too delicate refinement of a nature that never yields to impulse—the feminine sensitiveness that is allied to jealousy. Addison, in the judgment of his admirers, comes very near to perfection, and that is an irritating quality in a fellow mortal. It is, if it be not paradoxical to say so, the defect of his essays. There is nothing definite to find fault with in them, but we feel that strength is wanting. The clear and silent stream is a beautiful object, but after awhile it becomes monotonous, and we long for the swift and impetuous movement of a mountain torrent. It would be a thankless task, however, to dwell insistently on the deficiencies of a writer who has done so much for literature, and so much, too, for what is better than literature. We may wish that he had more warmth in him, somewhat more of energy and passion, yet such merits would be scarcely consonant with the graceful charm which gives to the prose writings of Addison an unrivalled position in Pope's age, and, it might be added, in the eighteenth century, were it not for the priceless literary gift bestowed upon Oliver Goldsmith.

Steele's fame as a writer has been overshadowed by the more exquisite genius of Addison, and his reputation has suffered partly from his own frailties and partly from the contemptuous way in which he has been treated by the panegyrists and critics of Addison. Pity is closely allied to contempt, and Sir Richard has come to be regarded as a scapegrace whose chief honour in life was the friendship of the accomplished essayist. Yet it was Steele who created the form of literature in which Addison earned his laurels, and without which he would in the present day be utterly forgotten. Steele was the discoverer of a new country, and if Addison took possession of its fairest portion, it was after his friend had pointed out the path and made the way easy. It would be very unjust, however, to treat of Steele solely as a pioneer. His own work, though less perfect than that of Addison, a consummate master of composition, is rich in variety and spirit, in pathos and in knowledge of the world. Steele is often careless, but he is never dull, and writes with a glow of enthusiasm that excites the reader's sympathy. Truly does Mr. Dobson say that while Addison's essays are faultless in their art and beyond the range of his friend's more impulsive nature, 'for words which the heart finds when the head is seeking; for phrases glowing with the white heat of a generous emotion; for sentences which throb and tingle with manly pity or courageous indignation, we must go to the essays of Steele.'[42]

Sir Richard's pathetic touches and artless turns of expression come from the heart. He is the most natural of writers, but does not seem to be aware that nature, in order to be converted into good literature, needs a little clothing. His essays have often a looseness or negligence of aim unpardonable in a man who can write so well. A conspicuous illustration of this defect may be seen in No. 181 of the Tatler, one of the most beautiful pieces from Steele's pen.

'The first sense of sorrow,' he writes, 'I ever knew was upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years of age; but was rather amazed at what all the house meant, than possessed with a real understanding why nobody was willing to play with me. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin and calling "Papa," for, I know not how, I had some slight idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her arms, and transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embraces; and told me in a flood of tears, "Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again." She was a very beautiful woman of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport, which, methought, struck me with an instinct of sorrow, that before I was sensible of what it was to grieve, seized my very soul, and has made pity the weakness of my heart ever since.'

Later on in the essay, and still looking back on the past, Steele recalls the untimely death of the first object his eyes ever beheld with love, and then abruptly dismissing his regrets he carelessly finishes the paper with this characteristic passage: 'A large train of disasters were coming on to my memory when my servant knocked at my closet door, and interrupted me with a letter, attended with a hamper of wine of the same sort with that which is to be put to sale on Thursday next at Garraway's Coffee-house. Upon the receipt of it I sent for three of my friends. We are so intimate that we can be company in whatever state of mind we meet, and can entertain each other without expecting always to rejoice. The wine we found to be generous and warming, but with such a heat as moved us rather to be cheerful than frolicsome. It revived the spirits, without firing the blood. We commended it until two of the clock this morning, and having to-day met a little before dinner, we found that though we drank two bottles a man, we had much more reason to recollect than forget what had passed the night before.'

Steele, to quote Johnson's phrase, was 'the most agreeable rake that ever trod the rounds of indulgence,' but he had many a fine quality that does not harmonize with the character of a rake; and although he hurt himself by his follies, he did his best to help others by his genial wisdom. If he did not sufficiently regard his own interests, his thoughts, as Addison said, 'teemed with projects for his country's good.' Savage Landor, with an impulse of somewhat extravagant eulogy, exclaimed, 'What a good critic Steele was! I doubt if he has ever been surpassed.' This is one of the sayings that will not bear examination. Steele had doubtless the fine perception of what is noble in art and literature, which some men possess instinctively. He felt what was good, but does not appear either to have reached or strengthened his conclusions by any process of study.

As an essayist Steele is careless, rapid, emotional, and disposed to be on the best terms with himself and with his readers. He makes them sure that if they could have met him in his rollicking mood at Will's Coffee-house, he would have treated them all round, even if, like Goldsmith, he had been forced to borrow the money to do it. But he was not always in this reckless humour. His heart was expansive in its sympathies and tender as a woman's; his mind was open to all kindly influences, and his essays have in them the rich blood and vivid utterances of a man who has 'warmed both hands before the fire of life.'

Between Steele's Guardian (1713) and the Rambler of Johnson (1750), a period of thirty-seven years, a swarm of periodicals testify to the fame of Steele and Addison. The reader curious on the subject will find in Dr. Drake's essays a minute account of the numerous essayists who flourished, or who made an effort to live, between the close of the eighth volume of the Spectator and the beginning of the present century. Of these a few have still a place on our shelves, but for the most part they enjoyed a butterfly existence, and serve but to prove the immeasurable superiority of the writers who created the English Essay.

FOOTNOTES:

[36] Cibber's Apology, p. 386.

[37] Courthope's Addison, p. 150.

[38] English Dramatic Literature, vol. ii., p. 603.

[39] 'It is a strange thing,' he writes, 'that you will not behave yourself with the obedience people of worse features do, but that I must be always giving you an account of every trifle and minute of my time.'

[40] Steele had been previously married to Mrs. Stretch, a widow, who possessed an estate in the West Indies; but the lady did not long survive the marriage.

[41] Victor's Original Letters, Dramatic Pieces, and Poems, vol. i., p. 330.

[42] Selections from Steele, by Austin Dobson. Introduction, p. xxx. Clarendon Press.



CHAPTER V.

JONATHAN SWIFT—JOHN ARBUTHNOT.

The booksellers who employed the most famous man of letters then living (1777), to write the Lives of the Poets, selected the authors whose biographies were to accompany the poems they proposed to publish. They did not know the difference between versemakers and poets; but they probably did know what authors of the rhyming tribe were likely to prove the most popular. Dr. Johnson, who was then in his sixty-ninth year, was willing to write the Lives to order. He added, indeed, three or four names to the list which had been given him; but he made no protest, and contented himself, as he told Boswell, in saying that a man was a dunce when he thought that he was one.

Among the biographies included by Johnson in the Lives, appears the illustrious name of Swift. He was far indeed from being a dunce; but just as certainly he was not a poet, unless the title be given to him by courtesy. On the other hand, Swift ranks among the most distinguished prose writers of his time—many critics consider him the greatest—and he therefore finds his natural place in the prose section of this volume.

[Sidenote: Jonathan Swift (1667-1745).]

Swift's life is an extraordinary psychological study, but it will suffice to state here the bare outline of his career. He was a posthumous child, and born in Dublin of English parents, November 30th, 1667. When a year old he was kidnapped by his nurse out of pure affection, and carried off to Whitehaven, where she remained with the child for three years. At the age of six the boy was sent to Kilkenny school, and there he had William Congreve (1670-1729), the future dramatist, for a schoolfellow. Neither at school nor at Trinity College, Dublin, which he entered as a boy of fifteen, did Swift distinguish himself, and he left the University in disgrace. At the Revolution he found a refuge with his mother at Leicester, and she, through a family relationship, obtained a position for her boy in the house of Sir William Temple (1628-1698), who was accounted a great man in his own day, and was famous alike for statecraft and literature. By many readers he will be best remembered as the husband of the charming Dorothy Osborne, whose innocently sweet love-letters have not lost their freshness in the lapse of two centuries.

There was a degree of servitude in Swift's position of secretary, which galled his proud spirit. But Temple, so far from treating him unkindly, introduced him to the King, and employed him in 'affairs of great importance.' In 1694 he left Temple, went to Dublin, took holy orders, and lived as prebend of Kilroot on L100 a year. In 1696 he resigned the office and returned to Moor Park, where he remained until Sir William Temple's death, in 1699. There he studied hard, ran up a steep hill daily for exercise, and cultivated the acquaintance of Esther Johnson, the 'Stella' destined to take a strange part in Swift's history, then a mere girl, and a companion of Temple's sister, who lived with him after his wife's death.

Swift began his literary career by writing Pindaric odes, one of which led Dryden to say, and the prediction was amply verified, 'Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.' Probably no man of genius ever wrote worse poetry than is to be found in these portentous efforts.

Here is one fair illustration of his flights as an ode writer, and the reader will not ask for more:

'Were I to form a regular thought of Fame, Which is perhaps, as hard to imagine right As to paint Echo to the sight, I would not draw the idea from an empty name; Because, alas! when we all die, Careless and ignorant posterity, Although they praise the learning and the wit, And though the title seems to show The name and man by whom the book was writ, Yet how shall they be brought to know Whether that very name was he, or you, or I? Less should I daub it o'er with transitory praise, And water-colours of these days: These days! where e'en th' extravagance of poetry Is at a loss for figures to express Men's folly, whimsies, and inconstancy, And by a faint description makes them less. Then tell us what is Fame, where shall we search for it? Look where exalted Virtue and Religion sit, Enthroned with heavenly Wit! Look where you see The greatest scorn of learned Vanity! (And then how much a nothing is mankind! Whose reason is weighed down by popular air. Who, by that, vainly talks of baffling death, And hopes to lengthen life by a transfusion of breath, Which yet whoe'er examines right will find To be an art as vain as bottling up of wind!) And when you find out these, believe true Fame is there, Far above all reward, yet to which all is due; And this, ye great unknown! is only known in you.'

It is remarkable that at the very time Swift was perpetrating these lyrical atrocities, he was at work on the Tale of a Tub, which is generally regarded as the most masterly effort of his genius. A critic has said that Swift's poetry 'lacks one quality only—imagination,' but verse without imagination is like a body without a soul, like a house without windows, like a landscape-painting without atmosphere, and no license of language will allow us to call Swift a poet. Enough that he became a master of rhyme, and used it with extraordinary facility. Dr. Johnson's estimate of Swift's powers in this respect is a just one:

'In the poetical works of Dr. Swift there is not much upon which the critic can exercise his powers. They are often humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which recommend such compositions, ease and gaiety. They are, for the most part, what their author intended. The diction is correct, the numbers are smooth, and the rhymes exact. There seldom occurs a hard-laboured expression, or a redundant epithet; all his verses exemplify his own definition of a good style; they consist of proper words in proper places.'

The merits with which Swift's verse is credited are, therefore, not poetical merits, unless we accept what Schlegel calls the miserable doctrine of Boileau, that the essence of poetry consists in diction and versification.

The great bulk of Swift's verse is suggested by the incidents of the hour. No subject is too trivial for his pen; but the poems which are addressed to Stella, and others which, like Cadenus and Vanessa, and On the Death of Dr. Swift, have a personal interest, are by far the most attractive. We see the best side of Swift when he addresses Stella, whether in verse or prose. The birthday rhymes he delighted to write in her praise have the mark of sincerity, and there is true feeling in the lines which describe her as a ministering angel in his sickness:

'When on my sickly couch I lay, Impatient both of night and day, Lamenting in unmanly strains, Called every power to ease my pains; Then Stella ran to my relief With cheerful face and inward grief; And though by Heaven's severe decree She suffers hourly more than me, No cruel master could require From slaves employed for daily hire, What Stella, by her friendship warmed, With vigour and delight performed; My sinking spirits now supplies With cordials in her hands and eyes, Now with a soft and silent tread Unheard she moves about my bed. I see her taste each nauseous draught And so obligingly am caught, I bless the hand from whence they came, Nor dare distort my face for shame.'

The poem in which Swift imagines what will take place upon his death, is full of satiric humour, combined with that vein of bitterness that is never long absent from his writings. His humour is always allied to sadness; his mirth often sounds like a cry of misery. In this poem he pictures his gradual decay, and how his special friends, anticipating the end, will show their tenderness by adding largely to his years:

'He's older than he would be reckoned, And well remembers Charles the Second. He hardly drinks a pint of wine, And that I doubt is no good sign. His stomach too begins to fail, Last year we thought him strong and hale, But now he's quite another thing, I wish he may hold out till Spring.'

No enemy can match a friend, Swift adds, in portending a great misfortune:

'He'd rather choose that I should die Than his prediction prove a lie, No one foretells I shall recover, But all agree to give me over.'

So he dies, and the first question asked is, 'What has he left and who's his heir?' and when these questions are answered, the Dean is blamed for his bequests. The news spreads to London and is told at Court:

'Kind Lady Suffolk, in the spleen, Runs laughing up to tell the Queen. The Queen so gracious, mild, and good, Cries, "Is he gone? 'tis time he should."'

But the loss of the Dean will cause a brief regret to his most intimate friends:

'Poor Pope will grieve a month; and Gay A week; and Arbuthnot a day. St. John himself will scarce forbear To bite his pen and drop a tear. The rest will give a shrug, and cry, "I'm sorry—but we all must die."'

Why grieve, indeed, at the death of friends, since no loss is more easy to supply, and in a year the Dean will be forgotten, and his wit be out of date.

'Some country squire to Lintot goes, Inquires for "Swift in Verse and Prose." Says Lintot, "I have heard the name; He died a year ago." "The same." He searches all the shop in vain. "Sir, you may find them in Duck Lane, I sent them with a load of books Last Monday to the pastrycook's. To fancy they could live a year! I find you're but a stranger here. The Dean was famous in his time, And had a kind of knack at rhyme. His way of writing now is past, The town has got a better taste."'

Enough has been transcribed to show Swift's art in this poem, which is of considerable, but not of wearisome length. Perhaps ten or twelve pieces, in addition to those already mentioned, will repay the student's attention. One of the worthiest is a Rhapsody on Poetry. Baucis and Philemon, too, is a lively piece that pleased Goldsmith, and will please every reader. It was much altered from the original draught at Addison's suggestion; but the alterations are not improvements.[43] The City Shower is a piece of Dutch painting, reminding us of Crabbe. Mrs. Harris's Petition is an admirable bit of fooling; Mary the Cook-Maid's Letter, is in its way inimitable; and so, too, is the amusing talk of 'my lady's waiting-woman' in The Grand Question Debated.

It is difficult, unhappily, to pursue one's way through Swift's poems, without being repelled again and again by the filth in which it pleases him to wade. The Beast's Confession, which has been reprinted in the Selections from Swift (Clarendon Press), is not obscene, like The Lady's Dressing-Room, Strephon and Chloe, and other poems of the class; but it has the inhumanity which deforms the description of the Houyhnhnms. Strange to say, in private life Swift appears to have been not only moral in conduct, but refined in conversation, and he is even said to have rebuked Stella on one occasion for a slightly coarse remark. His imagination was diseased, and he was himself always apprehensive of the calamity under which he became at last 'a driveller and a show.' 'I shall be like that tree,' he said once to the poet Young, 'I shall die at the top.'

It has been already said that The Tale of a Tub was written at Moor Park. It appeared in 1704, and although published anonymously and never owned, the book effectually stood in the way of Swift's high preferment in the Church. Queen Anne declined, and not without reason, to make its author a bishop.

It is a satire of amazing power, written by a man who takes, as Swift took throughout life, a misanthropical view of human nature, and who agrees with the cynical judgment of Carlyle, that men are mostly fools. Swift, however, did not consider fools useless, but observes that they 'are as necessary for a good writer as pen, ink, and paper.' Never was volume written which betrayed in larger characters the opinions and disposition of its author. Swift was consistent in defending the National Church as a political institution; but in the Tale of a Tub he does so with weapons an atheist might use if he possessed the skill. The author maintains that in his ridicule of the Church of Rome and of Protestant dissenters, he is only displaying the abuses which deform the Christian Church; but no defence can be urged for his wild and irreverent method of turning subjects into ridicule which by a vast number of people are regarded as sacred. In judging of Swift's satire from a moral standing-point, one test, as Mr. Leslie Stephen observes, may be supposed to guide our decision. 'Imagine the Tale of a Tub to be read by Bishop Butler and by Voltaire, who called Swift a Rabelais perfectionne. Can anyone doubt that the believer would be scandalized, and the scoffer find himself in a thoroughly congenial element? Would not any believer shrink from the use of such weapons, even though directed against his enemies?'[44]

Although the wit poured out with such profusion in the Tale of a Tub, in so far as it offends the moral sense, fails to give pleasure, the reader is astonished, as Swift in later life was himself, at the genius displayed in this allegory, the argument of which may be told in a few words.

A man is supposed to have three sons by one wife, and all at a birth. On his deathbed he leaves to each of them a new coat, which he says will grow with their growth, and last as long as they live. In his will he leaves directions, saying how the coats are to be used, and warning them against neglecting his instructions. For some years all goes well, the will is studied and followed, and the brothers, Peter (the Church of Rome), Martin (the Church of England), and Jack (the Calvinist), live in unity. How by degrees they misinterpret their father's will, how Peter begins by adding topknots to his coat, and afterwards grows so scandalous that his brothers resolve to leave him, and then fall out between themselves, is told with abundant wit. A great part of the volume consists of digressions written in Swift's most vigorous style, and with the cynical humour in which he has no competitor.