History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne

CHAPTER XXVI.

AUGUSTAN POETRY.

Alexander Pope.

Alexander Pope, the son of Catholic parents in the trading class, was born in the year of Revolution, 1688. His education was private, priests were his tutors, but he acquired Latin, and was from childhood a great reader of poetry, and an imitator of what he read. He was not born deformed, but overstudy, perhaps, or unnoted accident, made him the stunted and crooked thing that he became, while his health, and the hideous personal insults which his enemies used as freely as Hazlitt did in later times, exasperated his temper.

His parents withdrew to Windsor Forest, a centre of Catholic families like the Blounts and Englefields. Pope was early introduced to the coffee-house wits by the most chivalrous and accomplished of men, Charles Wogan, who, in 1719, rescued from prison in Austria, and brought to her affianced prince in Italy, Clementina Sobieska, mother of Prince Charles.

Pope corresponds very early, on literary subjects, with the veteran Wycherley (of whom Pope's account is, as always, quite untrustworthy) and with "knowing Walsh". He taught himself verse by translating the Latin poet Statius, and at 21 published, in 1709, his "Pastorals," "written at the age of 16," according to Pope.

It is not possible here to examine all Pope's statements about his works, all his really ingenious ways of fishing for fame, of mystifying; and, with none of the coarseness of our contemporary literary advertisement, of acting as his own interviewer and his own advertiser. He had no need to practise these arts, but his methods are amusing as exposed by his learned and hostile editor, Elwin. Pope's great delight was in literary quarrels, and he managed to pick some very pretty quarrels out of remarks on his pastorals and those of Philips which appeared in "The Guardian". Pope preluded his pastorals by an essay on pastoral poetry in general; a genre of which it may be said that Theocritus (using literary models, such as Stesichorus, and also familiar with the songs of Sicilian peasants) introduced it in immortal poems; Virgil imitated Theocritus: and Pope thinks that Virgil "refines upon his original, and in all points when judgment is principally concerned, he is much superior to his master". It would have been pleasant to set down Pope to the construing of a few passages from Theocritus. Pope kept pretty close to his originals: and follows his own advice "the numbers should be the smoothest, the most easy and flowing imaginable". The brevity of the pastorals, their smoothness, and their avoidance of the "burning questions" of the day, so commonly intruded into Elizabethan pastorals, permit Pope's to be read with ease and even with pleasure.

In the "Essay on Criticism" (1711) we find Pope with an ambition to reform the world of literature. It is not easy to find out exactly what he would be at, for he uses such terms as "Nature," "wit," "judgment," in various ways. Nature seems permanent enough, but human views of "Nature" differ perpetually, and when Pope says, "First follow Nature," what does he mean by "Nature"? Why are "wit" and "judgment" "at strife"? The poet refers them to Nature as interpreted by Greek art for a verdict; and of Greek art he knew very little. Read Homer and Virgil, especially Virgil, he says. The poem, though it teaches us little about criticism, is full of lines so witty and so pointed that they are now proverbial.

In 1713 he published "Windsor Forest," admired by Swift, his life-long friend; with Addison he was on apparently good terms, but he was already suspicious. He attacked Dennis, who had assailed Addison's "Cato," and he did so in a style which Addison, through Steele, repudiated. Addison's praise of Philips's pastorals, with their Fairies, to Pope appeared dispraise of his own; and in an article in "The Guardian" he made fun of Philips with ingenious irony of commendation.

Pope's great work, his version of the "Iliad," appearing in portions (1715-1720), met a kind of challenge in Tickell's version of the First Book. Addison spoke well of Tickell's specimen; did he write it, or inspire it, or set it up as a rival to Pope's? Pope, much later, told his own story of his wrongs and of his noble and dignified treatment of Addison. His most loyal biographer cannot accept the tale: at all events Pope wrote, and much later published, his famous verses on Addison (Atticus). (Published, 1722, after Addison's death.) The two men ceased to be friends, but Addison never hit back. Pope had also suspected him for doubts as to the wisdom of adding to the first shape of "The Rape of the Lock" (1712) the machinery of Sylphs and Gnomes in the second form (1714). The addition was deservedly successful, but Addison might well hesitate to recommend a change in that tiny mock-epic of a quarrel about the stealing of a lock of hair. It is perfection in its way, in its wit, sauciness, and gaiety.

The "Iliad," a terrible task for Pope, executed through long years of advice from all quarters, of doubt, and of weariness, was a triumph, celebrated in charming verses by Gay's "Welcome to Mr. Pope on His Return from Greece". In that strange age the noble, the great, the beautiful swelled Pope's triumph; literature was fashionable. Pope's "Iliad" can never be superseded as a masterpiece of English literature. He was no scholar, but he had many friends to help him, and his plan was to give the spirit of the Epic, as he conceived it, in a form which his age could appreciate. It is almost as if he had taken Homer's theme and written the poem himself. The minor characteristics of the antique manner are gone; but his age would have thought them barbarous and fatiguing. Wherever there is rhetoric, as in the speeches of the heroes, Pope is magnificent; where there are pictures of external nature he is conventional. But he is never slow. His conventions were those of his age, and are extinct, but time cannot abate the splendour of his spirit.

In doing the "Odyssey," of which the first part appeared in 1725, he was aided by Fenton and Broome, who, under his supervision, wrote exactly like himself. With them, too, there were quarrels; they were not paid in what they reckoned a satisfactory style. Pope received about £10,000 in all for Homer, a large sum in those days, and not likely to be equalled by the gains of any later translator of Homer. He dabbled in the shares of the South Sea Bubble, and appears to have been rather a winner than a loser.

He had accumulated quarrels to his heart's content, hence "The Dunciad" of 1728-1729: a satire on minor men of letters, in which he shows wit and ill-nature enough, with a vein of true poetry in the conclusion; but the dirt and the personalities are now rather amazing than agreeable; while the necessary notes below drive the text into the garrets of the page. Not even Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had laughed at Pope's attempts to make love to her, escaped a flick of the whip of scandal in "The Dunciad". Perhaps Pope had not been gently treated, but nobody admires his revenges. The business of publication was managed with all the intricate wiles and subterfuges in which he took such strange delight. One of his butts, Cibber, retorted in kind, and was successful in giving pain: Theobald, a useful editor of Shakespeare, Pope assailed, because Theobald had not spared the errors in his own edition (1728).

His later works, Epistles to Burlington and Arbuthnot, "The Essay on Man," the "Imitations of Horace," are full of the wit and polished verse that were natural to Pope, and were fostered by his friendships with St. John (Bolingbroke), Swift, Gay, and Arbuthnot; friendships that never failed, and eternally testify to the better part in Pope, despite his tempers of malice and his feline arts. His enthusiasm for Atterbury, exhibited in letters written before the bishop's too well-merited exile, is the most romantic point in his career. Late in life he was kind to Johnson and Thomson; he had been a good son; his character greatly irritated his most learned editor, Mr. Elwin; but nobody suffered so much from his faults of jealousy and suspiciousness as Pope himself. He died on 30 May, 1744.

Ever since the romantic movement of the early nineteenth century, people have asked "Was Pope a poet?" He was, in the highest degree, the kind of poet that his age and the English society of his age desired and deserved; a town poet—where rural nature is concerned, conventional and unobservant; where Man is concerned a poet of Man, literary, political, and fashionable. In the great fight over Pope's claim to be a poet, of 1819, when Bowles was the assailant, Byron was the champion of Pope: Byron himself being a satirist and a poet of mankind, urban, political, and fashionable, as well as piratical. Horace was busied with the same field of human nature (not with the desperate pirate and remorseful Giaour) but nobody has asked "Was Horace a poet?"

Pope wrote in reaction against the conceited poetry of the seventeenth century; he did well, though the manner was already dead, but he never came within sight or hearing of the inspired songs of Lovelace and Carew. The world of Pope was in many ways a limited and evanescent and artificial world; but in his verse it lives eternally, and that is enough for his fame, and testimony sufficient to his genius. He brought his instrument, the decasyllabic couplet, to the perfection required for his purpose, each couplet existing in and for itself. But in reading him we feel that "paper-sparing Pope" wrote down his best passages, detached, on the backs of letters; they are separate inspirations, and are fitted into the whole like fragments of a mosaic: for example the lines on Atticus are fitted into "The Epistle to Arbuthnot". His rhymes, as "fault" to "thought," are not the things on which he bestowed most pains.

Concerning other poets—Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare—we feel that, in any age of literature, in any period of taste, under any conventions, they must have been great. Pope, on the other hand, cannot easily be thought of as having the capacity for greatness, except in the literary conditions of the early eighteenth century. But in that period he was supreme.

Prior.

From the galaxy of wits who dined with Harley and St. John and were addressed in that splendid society by their Christian names, Jonathan or Mat, Matthew Prior stands somewhat apart. His duties as a diplomatist carried him abroad; he owed his diplomatic posts to his wit, not to his birth, which Queen Anne spoke of as unpleasantly obscure. He was born on 14 July, 1664, at Wimborne or Winburn, in Dorsetshire; Westminster was his school, and St. John's, Cambridge, his college. Here he took his degree, in 1686, and obtained a fellowship in 1688. He attracted the notice of the Whigs by parodying Dryden's "Hind and Panther," in "The Town and Country Mouse," aided in the jest by Charles Montagu. Dryden is very improbably said to have wept; the Whigs, at all events, laughed, and in 1691 made Prior secretary to the Embassy in Holland. He held the same post at Versailles later; at this time he was a sincere eulogist of our Dutch deliverer, William III, whom he celebrated in "The Carmen Seculare" (1700), indeed constantly, like Horace, he "praising his tyrant sung". Reviewing history, he places William before a number of Roman heroes, and, remembering that William's wife is a Stuart, bids the god Janus

Finding some of Stuart's race
Unhappy, pass their annals by.

But, as thou dwell'st upon that heavenly name
To grief for ever sacred, as to fame,
O! read it to thyself: in silence weep!

Is the name Charles or Mary? At this time there was a fashionable cult of Mary Stuart. This long ode, granting the mythology, has considerable merit, though, says Dr. Johnson, "Who can be supposed to have laboured through it?" Not the Doctor, as he candidly confesses.

Under Queen Anne, Prior was tempted over to the Tory party, and his doings, as a negotiator with France, were thought, and perhaps not unjustly, to smack of Jacobitism. He was in Paris when Beatrix Esmond's Duke of Hamilton was about to go thither on a mission, and there seems little doubt (from a record by Lockhart of Carnwath, the leader of the Scottish Cavaliers) that Hamilton was to bring over to England, in disguise, the exiled son of James II, "the Pretender," as Colonel Esmond does in Thackeray's novel. But Hamilton fell in a duel with Mohun, and that chance was lost.

As acknowledged ambassador, Prior was at the French Court from August, 1712, to August, 1714, when the death of Queen Anne scattered the Tories. Early in 1715 he was locked up on suspicion of treason, and was not released till three years later.

The hope of the Whigs was to decapitate Harley, who lay in the Tower; but Harley could have involved Marlborough, possessing a fatal letter of his, and finally Prior and Harley were released. He had now no resources except his college fellowship, but his friends by securing a large subscription for his poems, and by the generosity of the family of Harley, placed him beyond want. He died on September 18, 1721.

Prior does not live by his "Alma, or the Progress of the Mind," a long poem in rhymed eight syllable couplets, in the manner of Butler's "Hudibras". This work is a kind of comic history of Psychology, and ends with Barry Lyndon's rhyme to Aristotle, "Here, Jonathan, your master's bottle!" Prior's "Solomon," on the vanity of knowledge, pleasure, and power, in heroic rhymed verse, is best remembered for two lines to Abra, and might, so easily does the author take his theme, be called the vanity of melancholy, though it closes in serious admonitions to "the weary King Ecclesiast".

Prior's tales in the manner of Fontaine's "Contes," are lively, like these; and like these, may have seemed coarse to such a moralist as Sir Richard Steele.

Prior, in fact, lives by his merry, tender, light, and bright social verses, in tripping measures, for example, "Thus Kitty, beautiful and young" (for Gay's patroness, the Duchess of Queensberry), "To a Child of Quality," "The Merchant, to Secure His Treasure," "Dear Chloe, how blubber'd is that pretty face," and many other things; the best reminding us more of the charming trifles in the Greek Anthology than of Horace.

Gay.

The spoiled improvident child in the group of wits was John Gay, to whom Pope and Swift were attached by the most tender affection. Gay was an author who never aimed high, but who almost always hit his mark and pleased the Town. But his success was so much the consequence of choosing the happy moments, his poems are so completely poems of his age, that he is now praised at a venture rather than read. He was born at Barnstaple, in Devonshire (1685); though of an old family he "was without prospect of hereditary riches," and was "placed apprentice with a silk-mercer" in London.

Perhaps some fair customer discovered that he had a soul above silk; the Duchess of Monmouth, the heiress of the Scotts of Buccleuch, made him her secretary (1712). Becoming acquainted with Pope, Gay dedicated to him (1713) his "Rural Sports" in the usual heroic rhymed couplets. Gay's descriptions of nature, and his praises, are more genuine than, in that age of the Town, such things usually were. He writes of angling "with his eye on the object," in Wordsworth's phrase. His remarks on fishing with the worm, a theme unworthy of the Muse, are judicious. As to fly fishing, Gay is among those who advocate a search for the insect in the waters and an exact imitation. He would have us fish "fine and far off," with "a single hair" next the hook, and perhaps he is the first to recommend the use of the "dry" or floating fly: "Upon the curling surface let it glide," not sunk. The catching of a salmon is not ill described, but as Gay retains his "single hair," he must always have been broken if he did happen to hook a fish. For his own part, he never uses either worm or the natural fly: never tries for coarse fish—pike, perch, and so forth,—and this justifies the affection of his friends.

In "The Shepherd's Week" (1714) his Idylls describe real peasants with their folklore superstitions, but Virgil, or Theocritus, is still imitated. The pastoral is an extinct species of literature, but Gay's were more natural and popular than Pope's. Dedicated to St. John, in verses celebrating the recovery of Queen Anne, who presently died, the poems were ungrateful to the Hanoverian Court, and Gay lost the secretaryship to an ambassador.

Gay's "Welcome from Greece, to Mr. Pope on his having finished his translation of the 'Iliad,'" has already been mentioned as one of the most charming relics of that golden age of letters, wit, and friendship.

Friendship did not aid wit, when Pope and Arbuthnot took hands in, and ruined, Gay's "Three Hours after Marriage," a comedy which was not comic (1717). In 1720 his collected poems brought Gay £1000: but a gift of stock in the South Sea Bubble was profitless, as Gay would not sell out in time. In 1727 he was offered by George II a Court place so small and ludicrous that it was declined.

Gay next made an immense but not a lucrative success with "The Beggar's Opera," which had an unexampled run of seven weeks. A sequel was not licensed by the censor; Gay was recouped by a subscription, and fell out of Court favour. The Duchess of Queensberry (Prior's Kitty), carried him to her place in the country, and here he was petted till his death, which seems to have been caused by indolence and the pleasures of the table.

His "Trivia; or the Art of Walking the Streets of London," is a vivacious picture of the crowds, dirt, and bustle: his "Fables," though original and witty, are, like pastorals, an obsolete form of literary entertainment. He wrote his own epitaph,

Life is a jest, and all things show it,
I thought so once, but now I know it.

He took a different view of this important theme in "Thoughts on Eternity".

Ambrose Philips.

But for his friendship with Addison and the collision of his "Pastorals," with those of Pope, producing Pope's famous ironical review, Ambrose Philips (1675-1749) would scarcely be remembered. The modern art of "booming" was illustrated in Philips's case. A whole 'Spectator' was devoted to a puff of his adaptation ("The Distressed Mother") of the "Andromache" of Racine: and another told how it affected Sir Roger de Coverley. As has occasionally happened more recently, though advertised by Addison, and by his own threat to birch Pope, "Philips became ridiculous, without his own fault, by the absurd admiration of his friends," and his Christian name, Ambrose, became the ludicrous nickname, Namby-pamby. But for Philips there was not lacking a patron, Boulter, Primate of Ireland, and in Ireland places were found for the exile. Philips translated several Odes of Pindar, and though he had not the pinion of the Theban eagle, the sentiments of Pindar are plainly visible in his versions.

Tickell.

Among the minor stars in the golden galaxy of Queen Anne's reign scrutiny detects Thomas Tickell. (Born in Cumberland in 1686, educated at Queen's, Oxford.) He is best remembered in connexion with Pope's story that to damage his translation of the "Iliad," Addison translated the First Book and published it, averring that Tickell was the author. That Addison was guilty of a villainous action is, says Macaulay, highly improbable, that Tickell was capable of a villainy is highly improbable, that the twain were united in a base conspiracy is improbable "out of all whooping". But that Pope's mind, resentful, brooding, and inventive, came to believe in the conspiracy, is, unfortunately, only too natural. We know the figments of all sorts which the imagination of Shelley imposed on him: they were, at least, more romantic than the figments of Pope. In both cases there is a resemblance to the fancy of persecutions which haunts the insane.

Tickell had the honour and happiness to be a friend of Addison, and wrote verses commendatory of his opera, "Rosamond," and of his tragedy, "Cato". His translation of the First Book of the "Iliad" is really good, when we consider the poetic conventions of the age, and the inevitable use of the rhyming heroic couplets. He who would estimate the difficulties of Pope's and Tickell's task, should endeavour, himself, to do a few of the lines of Homer into the classical metre of Queen Anne's day. When Tickell makes Agamemnon, speaking of Chryseis, say

Not Clytæmnestra boasts a nobler race,
A sweeter temper, or a lovelier face,

he is comically remote from what Agamemnon does say in Homer, and the sweetness of Clytæmnestra's temper was never famous. Tickell's "Thou fierce-looked talker with a coward soul" is much less spirited and literal than Pope's "Thou dog in forehead and in heart a deer" ("Drunkard, with eyes of dog and heart of deer," is the literal version). Tickell, more bound by the taste of his age than Pope, shirks the dog and deer. None the less Tickell's version is spirited and lucid; the course of events can be easily followed: the reader is enabled to understand the tragic situation from which the whole epic evolves itself. If Pope had not written, if Tickell had finished his version as well as he began it, he would have satisfied public taste, and won considerable fame.

Tickell, following Addison, was a Whig, "most Whiggish of Whigs," Swift said. This makes his line on "An Original Picture of King Charles I, Taken at the Time of His Trial," all the more curious. The portrait, of which several replicas exist, was mezzotinted from the All Souls' copy in Tickell's day, about 1714. (Bower was the painter.)

How meagre, pale, neglected, worn with care,
What steady sadness and august despair!

says Tickell. The look is one of melancholy scorn rather than of despair. Tickell falls foul of the artist:

Thy steady hands thy savage heart betray,
Near thy bad work the stunn'd spectators faint,
Nor see unmoved what thou unmoved could'st paint.

Bower, in fact, produced the most sympathetic portrait of the King. Tickell proceeds to curse Cromwell, bless the Restoration, and salute Queen Anne as a Stuart.

Not much Whiggery here! But when the Hanoverian dynasty and the Whigs came in, Tickell was strong on the winning side. His "Epistle from a Lady in England to a Gentleman at Avignon," from a Jacobite lady to a gentleman at James's Court, is very prettily written, and the following lines are true.

Then mourn not, hapless prince, thy kingdoms lost;
A crown, though late, thy sacred brows may boast;
Heaven seems, through us, thy empire to decree,
Those who win hearts have given their hearts to thee,

On his side "James reckons half the fair".

Say, will he come again?
Nay, Lady, never.
Say, will he never reign?
Ay, Lady, ever,

sings a modern poet, whose heart is true to George? However, Tickell's lady reflects that the Hanoverian sway is good for trade, and in the end prefers London to Avignon.

In 1717 Addison made Tickell his under-secretary—Tickell had always been his "understudy". In 1740 Tickell died, in the enjoyment of one of these lucrative places which rewarded the loyalty of literary Whigs.

With Tickell, the name of Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) goes naturally. He was a minor light among the wits; was befriended by Swift, and is remembered for "The Hermit," "The Night-Piece on Death," and one or two other effusions.

CHAPTER XXVII.

AUGUSTAN PROSE.

Steele.

Steele and Addison are the Twins among the stars of the age of Queen Anne. Swift impresses us as a greater genius than either Steele or Addison, but he is not loved, and he is not read as they are. Their lives, till two or three years before Addison's death, were united. They were schoolfellows at Charterhouse, fellow-undergraduates at Oxford, each was apt to take a hand in the other's play when the stage attracted them; they wrote together in the two famous journals, "The Tatler" and "The Spectator," which Steele created; some essays therein are a patchwork of pieces from both hands. They were both anxious to cleanse the stage; to bring decent morals and manners into fashion In the original manuscript of Steele's comedy, "The Conscious Lovers" (1722), are rough notes for a preface, written after Addison's death, "The fourth act was the business of the play. The case of duelling I have fought nor shall I ever fight again... Addison told me I had a faculty of drawing tears... Be that as it will, I shall endeavour to do what I can to promote noble things...."

Both men were moralists, but while Addison was the more moral, Steele was infinitely the more greatly given to moralizing. His heart was in the right place. He honoured women and pure affection, and temperance, and the wedded state. But his many brief notes to his second wife "Prue" (Miss Scurlock), written from all manner of places and at all sorts of hours, prove that poor Prue had often to dine alone. Business detained her Richard; he came home with the milk, and had a terrible headache next day. With the posts which he held under Government, with what he gained by his pen (and he was the owner of his own paper, and his own paymaster), with Mrs. Steele's fortune, they had resources enough, but Richard at intervals sends Prue a guinea or two; Richard is constantly in hiding from the bailiffs; is never out of debt; sometimes there is no coal, candle, or meat in the house. Steele was the most affectionate of men and the most generous. He boasted that the world owed Addison's essays to him, because he had made Addison overcome his laziness, and he told the world how greatly Addison was his superior. He wishes that they might write together some work to be called "The Monument," the memorial of their friendship. He took the side of poor discharged soldiers, whipped from parish to parish for their poverty. He adored children; his tears were as ready and heroic as the tears of Homer's warriors. But when he yielded to the temptations of the bottle and of extravagance, his wife and children had to suffer just as much as if Richard, in place of being a Christian Hero, had been no better than the wicked. Like Balzac he was a man of debts and of projects; he even wasted money on alchemy, and had a scheme for getting wealth in connexion with a lottery, a scheme which even then was found to be illegal. Mr. Swinburne called Steele "a sentimental debauchee," and indeed he shone more in preaching than in practice. Addison calls him "poor Dick," he is "poor Dick" to all the world now, if he were Sir Richard "to all Europe". But, when lip preached, he meant what he said, and his pleasant sermons, or rather pleas for goodness, kindness, faith, did "promote noble things," and he left the world more decent and more human than he found it.

Steele was born in Dublin in 1672; his family were not Celtic Irish folk; his father was in what is reckoned the less noble branch of the legal profession. When Sir Richard assumed heraldic bearings he calmly annexed those of another family of Steele, as' the elder Osborne, in "Vanity Fair," was supplied by his coachbuilder with the arms of the House of Leeds. Like the cousin of Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, in "The Tatler" (No. 14), he was guilty of "treason against the Kings at Arms". Of his childhood we know only what he tells in that pathetic passage about his father's funeral: "I had a battledore in my hand and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa, for, I know not how, I had some idea that he was locked up there.... My mother 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 what it was to grieve, seized my very soul and has made pity the weakness of my heart ever since" ("Tatler," No. 181). "Hence it is that in me good nature is no merit, but having been so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before I knew the cause of any affliction... I imbibed consideration, remorse, and an unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since ensnared me into ten thousand calamities...." So a "Night of Memories and Sighs" is consecrated by Richard to his beloved dead, "when my servant knocked at the door with a letter, attended by a hamper of wine, of the same sort with that which is to be put on sale at Garraway's coffee house. Upon the receipt of it I sent for three friends.... We drank two bottles a man," and, as Mr. Arthur Pendennis says, found that there "was not a headache in a hogshead".

The fluid, in fact, as we know from the advertisement in this number of "The Tatler," was "extraordinary French claret". Dick conscientiously tested its merits, and gave it a puff in addition to the advertisement which was paid for. Thus he "promoted everything noble," including the vintage of Bordeaux, and, as Thackeray saw, there is no more characteristic essay of Steele's than this meditation on death and grief and loyal memory: à léal souvenir!

Steele lost his mother also in his childhood. He had an uncle, Henry Gascoigne, who, like Swift's uncle, provided for his education, but more generously. Attached to "Erin's high Ormonde," Gascoigne obtained for Steele a nomination to Charterhouse (1684) (Thackeray's school), where Steele met Addison, and their friendship began. In 1689 Steele went up to Christ Church, Addison being at Magdalen; in 1691 Steele gained a "postmastership" (a scholarship) at Merton, a college to which he was warmly attached, presenting its ancient library with the volumes of "The Tatler". He left just before his Schools (that is his examination for a degree). In 1694 he entered the Duke of Ormonde's Guards as a trooper, apparently gentlemen did this as a way of approaching a commission. Steele got his as a reward for a poem on the death of Queen Mary—the piece was dedicated to Lord Cutts, Colonel of the Coldstreams. He befriended Steele, who, stationed at the Tower, made the acquaintance of Congreve and the wits, and defeated Captain Kelly in a duel. Probably the contrast between the delicacy of Steele's sentiments, and his vein of sincere piety, on one hand, with his addiction to mundane pleasures, on the other, made him as notable in his regiment as Aramis, Abbé d'Herblay, among the Musketeers of Louis XIV.

Steele, when once he took a pen in his hand, wrote much against duelling, exposing the ludicrousness of the institution. His remarks had no effect; what killed the duel in England was the use of the pistol: unromantic, fatal, and fortuitous. His duel may have made men more wary of bantering Steele, but his "Christian Hero," a work of military devotion (1701) lowered his character in the regiment. To restore it he wrote his comedy "The Funeral" (1701); to show that blasphemy and intrigue were no necessary components of a play: for he was wholly of the party of Jeremy Collier. The idea of the plot, the revival of Lord Brampton while his coffin is waiting for him, and his watching of the manœuvres of his hateful widow, while his fair ward, Lady Sharlot, escapes in the coffin from her enemies (a common situation in ancient ballads) is too grotesque. But the scenes with the hired mutes, with the poor broken soldiers, with Lady Brampton and her maid, are very amusing. Steele's exposure of the low tricks of lawyers, his appeal for cheap and accessible justice for all, are much in, Dickens's manner, and the loves of Lord Hardy and Lady Sharlot are as pure as bonny Kilmeny, while Lady Sharlot, in her encounter with Lady Brampton, gives proof of high spirit, and Lady Harriet is a flirt as harmless as lively.

Like the other wits, Steele was presented with lucrative posts, such as the editorship of the colourless official "Gazette". In the same year, 1707, he married his second wife, Miss Scurlock, the adored Prue, a woman of some property. He had a house at Hampton Wick, horses, gardeners, footmen, everything handsome about him. In 1709 he founded "The Tatler," a folio sheet of printed matter, appearing thrice a week and containing news, political and social, correspondence, and the charming essays which soon became most important. Steele wrote 188 of these papers, Addison, forty-two, in thirty-six both men took a hand. Swift wrote very seldom. The essays, with those which he wrote in "The Spectator," and in other papers, are the foundation of the fame of Steele. They vary much in theme and style. To digest the "Iliad" into a journal, and reckon up the days of the events, cannot have much amused the public. There is plenty of dramatic criticism. Steele openly avows that he is a member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners; blames the plays of Wycherley and the rest, and calls in the name of Virtue for frequent representations of Shakespeare. "The apt use of the theatre is the most agreeable and easy way of making a polite and moral gentry, which would end in making the rest of the people regular in their behaviour," a pleasing opinion which is not quite justified by experience.

Dick was a constant patron of the best plays, but regular his behaviour was not. Various, excellent, and amiable as are Steele's essays, neither in style nor in thought do they wear quite so well as Addison's. Yet it is scarcely just to draw a distinction which may rest only on individual taste.

"The Tatler's" last appearance was on 2 January, 1711. Steele ended with a paper in which he generously attributes to his friend the essays which he deemed of most value. On 1 March the first number of "The Spectator" appeared—it ceased to exist on 6 December, 1712. Steele's new journal, "The Guardian," lasted for six months in 1713; he was elected as member for Stockbridge, and then came a quarrel of Whig and Tory with Swift, who wrote in "The Examiner". The arrival of George I from Hanover procured various lucrative posts, a patent for a theatre, and a knighthood for Steele: he edited "The Englishman," and attacked Swift's fallen friends, Harley and St. John; and in 1716 he got an income of £1000 a year as one of the commissioners of the estates forfeited by the Scottish Jacobites who were out for their King in the rising of 1715. This was not a pleasant appointment to a man of feeling. Of the coolness between Steele and Addison we speak elsewhere.

In 1722 Steele's "Conscious Lovers," with another attack on duelling was acted with success, and dedicated to the "gracious and amiable sovereign," George I. Cibber the actor added scenes rather more gay than the rest, for so moral is this drama that Fielding's Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," said "it contains some things almost solemn enough for a sermon". His connexion with the theatre brought Steele into more than one lawsuit; his failing health, and the assiduities of his creditors caused him to prefer to reside in Wales; he died in Carmarthen on I September, 1729. Like Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, Walton, and Scott, he has made all his readers his friends, and if his plays are not acted much, the Lydia Languish of Sheridan, and the Tony Lumpkin of Goldsmith, are reflections from his Biddy and Humphrey in "The Tender Husband," a not successful comedy of 1705.

Addison.

There were few forms of literature, from the sacred hymn to the libretto of an opera, in which Addison did not adventure himself with success more than respectable. It is, however, as an essayist that he survives, and is read and admired. Born on 1 May, 1672, he was the eldest son of the Rev. Lancelot Addison, who, after acting as chaplain to the garrisons of Dunkirk and, later, of Tangier, obtained the small living of Milston, married the sister of a bishop, and in 1683 received the Deanery of Lichfield. He was something of a Jacobite, and as an author had pleasing traits of humour and irony. His son Joseph passed through two local schools, and thence to Charterhouse (Thackeray's school) whence first to Queen's, then to Magdalen, Oxford, where he held a demyship (scholarship), and was later a Fellow.

"Addison's Walk" is in the little wood round which two branches of the Cherwell meander with a mazy motion. Addison was soon admired for the excellence of his Latin verses: he made Dryden's acquaintance, and complimented him in verse; he began a translation of Ovid for Tonson, in the usual ten-syllable rhyming couplets.

Some of the stories of the Metamorphoses remain, with notes of literary criticism, including a compliment to William III. "The smoothness of our English verse," he casually remarks, "is too much lost by the repetition of proper names," which, in fact, are sonorous ornaments of the verse of Milton, Scott, Tennyson, and others. But Addison, bent on "smoothness" had not yet come to appreciate Milton; still less, in his early "Account of the English Poets," Spenser, who

Can charm an understanding age no more.

The young champion of smoothness and common sense unblushingly rhymed "success" to "verse".

Reluctant to take Orders, without which his Fellowship must lapse, Addison, through Congreve, was introduced to Charles Montagu (later Halifax) who, with Somers, wished to enlist Addison for his powers as a writer. They obtained for him a travelling pension of £300 yearly, and in December, 1699, left Marseilles for Italy.

His published remarks on Italy, written in a simple and easy style, are of interest mainly because they are so unlike modern ecstasies about the country. What most pleased Addison was to compare the scenes and towns which he saw, with the descriptions of them which, in Latin authors, he had read. To the natural beauties of the land, and to the works of Christian art, he is almost blind; Paul Veronese leaves him cold; at Verona he says nothing of the tomb of Romeo and Juliet, which, perhaps, was not yet shown. At Venice he is most concerned about the military strength of the place; "Tintoret is in greater esteem than in other parts of Italy," and that is enough about Tintoret! The Venetian comedies "are more lewd than in other countries". Addison paid a good deal of attention to ancient coins; and Pope wrote commendatory verses for his "Dialogues on Medals," and hoped that, on medals, Addison and Craggs will be represented: Craggs's effigy is to have an inscription in six heroic lines. Though the Dialogues be antiquated as archæology the description of collectors of coins is amusing: one of the speakers hastens to add that the science "must appear ridiculous to those who have not taken the pains to examine it". Addison, in a kind humorous way, strove to convince his age that ignorance is not the best judge of the historical, social, and artistic value of numismatics.

Returning to England in 1703 Addison was poor, and had no prospect of employment. The Whigs, however, wanted to make the most of Marlborough's victory at Blenheim. Strange as it seems to us, poetry had influence, a poet was needed, Halifax recommended Addison; the Chancellor of the Exchequer found him "up three pairs of stairs," and "The Campaign" was written. The scene is familiar to readers of "Esmond". Thackeray, devoted to Addison as he was, asks "how many fourth form boys at Mr. Addison's school of Charterhouse could write as well as that now?" as well as Addison writes in several passages of "The Campaign". Probably no fourth form boys would write

With floods of gore that from the vanquished fell,
The marshes stagnate, and the rivers swell.

However the simile of the Angel has been reckoned fine, and the poem "fulfilled the purpose for which it was written. It strengthened the position of the Whig Ministry" (what a task for the Muse!) and obtained patent places for the poet. As Under-secretary of State, Addison had leisure to write the libretto of "Rosamond," an opera, in which Queen Eleanor does not poison Rosamond, but gives her, like Juliet, a sleeping draught. The King says

O quickly relate
This riddle of fate!
My impatience forgive
Does Rosamond live?

Eleanor explains the situation:—

Soon the waking nymph shall rise
And, in a convent placed, admire
The cloistered walls and virgin choir:
With them in songs and hymns divine
The beauteous penitent shall join.

Finally the King and Queen sing

Who to forbidden joys would rove
That know the sweets of virtuous love?

Who indeed?

The rise of Blenheim Palace is prophesied, and Marlborough is flattered ingeniously by the Muse of Whiggery. The "understanding age" was not charmed: it was not absolutely destitute of humour. Nor was Addison. The intentionally funny parts of the opera, though not so comic as the serious passages, are not unworthy of Sir W. S. Gilbert. Sir Trusty, finding Rosamond's corpse, as he supposes, says

The King this doleful news shall read
In lines of my inditing;
Great Sir

Your Rosamond is dead,
As I'm at present writing.

Addison's unacknowledged comedy, "The Drummer," based on the famous rapping spirit at Tedworth (1662), was a failure, and died on its third night (1715).

Of his lucky tragedy, "Cato," he seems to have written four acts in Italy. As early as April, 1711, Addison confided his ideas on Tragedy to the Town ("Spectator," No. 39). They show us how far the wits of "the understanding age" of Anne, had moved from the taste of the Restoration stage. Addison is "very much offended when I see a play in rhyme; which is as absurd in English, as a tragedy of hexameters would have been in Greek or Latin". But blank verse is "in such due medium between rhyme and prose that it seems wonderfully adapted to tragedy," as the Elizabethan tragedians had not failed to discover. The thoughts of English tragic writers, especially of Shakespeare, "are often obscured by the sounding phrases, hard metaphors, and forced expressions in which they are clothed". These expressions, however, have been admired by many. The English tragedian is apt to make his hero successful in the fifth act: Addison does not approve of a modernization of "Lear," in which, as in the chronicles which told the story, King Lear and Cordelia triumph in the end. Aristotle says, Addison reports, that the populace preferred tragedies which ended ill (but Addison himself has made the tale of Fair Rosamond end happily). He makes no universal rule, only protests that a tragedy should not be compelled to conclude with comfort. There is "nothing which delights and terrifies our English theatre so much as a ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody shirt. A spectre has very often saved a play." Addison applauds the handling of the ghost in "Hamlet": ghosts, in fact, need delicate handling. For the moving of pity, our principal machine is the handkerchief; and the introduction of an orphan or two, but not of half a dozen fatherless children. "That dreadful butchering of one another," with the use of racks, thumbscrews, and other instruments of torture, gives occasion to French critics to think us a people who delight in blood.

In practice, Addison produced a tragedy which political accidents made highly successful at the moment, and which has enriched the stock of quotations. But Dr. Johnson described it as rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a representation of natural affections.... The events are expected without solicitude, and are remembered without joy or sorrow. The "love interest," Pope says, was a popular after-thought, and Pope told Addison that the play was better fitted to be read than to be acted. Thanks to the habit of mingling literature with politics, the play (13 April, 1713) was "expected" with "solicitude" by Whigs and Tories. "All the foolish industry possible has been used to make it thought a party play," says Pope. The leaders of each party clapped loudly at each remark that might be twisted into a political allusion, while Addison, with Dr. Berkeley and two or three friends, in a side-box "had a table and two or three flasks of Burgundy and champagne, with which the author (though a very sober man) thought necessary to support his spirits". A run of thirty-five nights, a great marvel then, also sustained the spirits of Addison.

Addison does not hold his high and enviable place in our literature by virtue of his plays, poems, and work on Medals, but of his brief Essays in "The Tatler" and "The Spectator". We have already seen how Steele and he worked, in the most pleasant, kindly, and humorous tone, for the improvement of morals and manners in the Court and Town.

The aim of Addison was "to temper wit with morality and to enliven morality with wit," and he succeeded so well that, to this day, if one opens a volume of "The Spectator" for any reason, one cannot lay it down. The spectacle of that world comes before us in all its aspects—toy shops, theatres, streets, coffee-houses, masquerades: there are allegories, sportive or serious, reflections at the opera, or among the monuments of the dead at Westminster Abbey; there are letters, real or "done in the office," asking for advice on points of etiquette; there are musical strains of solemn prose, or passages of exquisite banter; there are creations of character, Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Wimble, and the rest. There are criticisms, as of Milton, which led taste back from the fantasies of the Restoration to that great poet who lived lonely, fallen on evil days and evil tongues. Even the folk-poetry of the past, "songs and fables that are come from father to son, and are most in vogue among the common people of the countries through which I passed," give Addison "a particular delight," he says, in his paper on Chevy Chase, "the favourite ballad of the common people of England". In our time, a critic would fall back on the history of the ballad, showing how "Chevy Chase" is a later version of "Otterbourne," a poem common, with patriotic variations, to England and Scotland. For Addison "Chevy Chase" is an heroic poem: as such he treats it, and shows how touches of Nature make it akin to Homer and Virgil.

Here we are far away from the Restoration, and the age of conceits; we are on the way to the romantic movement, to Scott and "The Lay of the Last Minstrel". In quite another style take Addison's musings on a "lady's library," mixed with "a thousand odd figures in China ware," Japanese lacquer, and old silver. Leonora has "all the Classic Authors—in wood," dummies! "A set of Elzevirs," small classic volumes of the famous Dutch press, "by the same hand"—the cabinetmaker's. There are several of the huge wandering heroic French romances, and "Locke of Human Understanding, with a paper of patches in it": "Clelia, which opened of itself in the place that describes two lovers in a bower." Most of the books were bought, not "for her own use," but "because the lady had heard them praised, or because she had seen the authors of them".

Addison, it must be confessed, did not take the learning of the sex very seriously. Now the learning of many of them is serious indeed; but, we ask, are either men or women more seriously inclined, on the whole, to study than they were in Queen Anne's day? Addison, says Thackeray, "walks about the world watching women's pretty humours—fashions, follies, flirtations, rivalries, and noting them with the most charming humour". It was not he, but Steele, who found in a lady's society "a liberal education". But it was Addison whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu proclaimed to be "the best companion in the world".

There is still no better companion: we can still hear him "sweetly talk and sweetly smile" in his Essays. He knows so much, and he is never tedious in giving information. Like Coleridge in talk with Keats, he deals in ghost stories: and this child of an age of reason does not scout them. He makes the judicious remark that Lucretius, the Roman materialist, does not believe that the soul can exist apart from the body, yet "makes no doubt of the reality of apparitions, and that men often appeared after their death... he was so pressed with the matter of fact, which he could not have the confidence to deny...." He explains by "one of the most absurd unphilosophical notions that was ever started"—in a different way of statement this theory of Lucretius has lately been revived.

What a variety of themes Addison illustrates and adorns! His writings are like better conversation than was ever held save in the Fortunate Islands by the happy Dead.

The humour and the drawing of character in the papers on Sir Roger de Coverley, have a delicacy, a minuteness, a happy humour, which we scarcely meet again in our literature till they reappear, a century later, in the novels of Miss Austen. It must be admitted that Addison's manner of writing sent son vieux temps, is not "up to date," but this only lends an agreeable quaintness. Nobody, to-day, in writing of the scene in the "Odyssey" where the hero beholds, in the next world, "the far-renowned brides of ancient song," would speak of them as "a circle of beauties," "the finest women". Nor, when the hero says "each of them gave me an account of her birth and family," would a critic now say "this is a gentle satire upon female vanity"! To give such an account is the universal practice in Homer, when strangers meet, whether men or women.

"The Spectator" was dropped after running for about two years, not before Addison had praised in his paper Pope's "Essay on Criticism". Steele introduced Pope to Addison; perhaps they never were very attached friends, for a man of Addison's sense could not but be watchful of himself in the company of the vain and irritable little satirist. Pope's jealousy and suspicions produced a coldness, and, after Addison was dead, Pope emitted his venom in the poisonous character of "Atticus":—

Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And born to live, converse, and write with ease;

yet,

Bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,"

and so forth. Nothing that inspired skill and spite can do is better than this satire; had Addison been alive when it was given to the world he could not have hit a return blow, for cruelty was not in his nature, and Pope was so sensitive that any retort on him was cruel.

In 1715 Addison conducted for six months another paper, "The Freeholder," in the Whig interest; was made one of the Commissioners for Trade and the Colonies, and married the Dowager-Countess of Warwick. He died in 1719, "three years after that splendid but dismal union," says Thackeray. A dowager-countess is not usually splendid, and we really have no reason to think that the union was "dismal". Addison's position as Secretary of State was sufficiently good, not to speak of his fame, popularity, and genius. In 1719 Addison was matched against Steele in a newspaper controversy: Steele probably was not welcome to Lady Warwick at Holland House, but the two men, says Steele, "still preserved the most passionate concern for their mutual welfare. When they met they were as unreserved as boys...."

Addison with Steele, founded a school of essayists of merit, who never came near the supremacy of their masters: Addison not only delighted his world, but left it better than he found it; not by preaching violent sermons, not by "lashing the vices of the age," but by sensibly lowering the tyranny of the fashion which insisted on the duty of being vicious.

Swift.

Concerning the genius, character, and career of Jonathan Swift there are interesting varieties of opinion, but nobody denies that the genius was great or that the career was sad, strange, even mysterious. In an old-fashioned comedy of Humours, Swift would have been cast for the part of Wycherley's Captain Manly in "The Plain Dealer"; the man of tender heart who hates an age and a society that do not come up to his ideals. Swift had, indeed, depths of affection, and a noble capacity for friendship, but, unlike Captain Manly, he would never have made Fidelia, or any other woman, happy. He lived in this world the life of a flogging schoolmaster. He expresses a hope, at about the age of 26, that, in his poems,

Each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire.

He hopes, at the same hopeful period, that

My hate, whose lash just heaven has long decreed,
Shall on a day make Sin and Folly bleed.

He lashed away, but Sin and Folly remained "more than usual calm," they did not hear, they did not heed him; and the presentable part of his most comprehensive and ferocious satire of humanity, the one book published by him which is still generally known, "Gulliver's Travels," has been an innocent source of amusement to many generations of children.

At about the age of 37, Swift, in a private letter, wrote thus of his own case, "I envy very much your prudence and temper, and love of peace and settlement: the reverse of which has been the great uneasiness of my life, and is like to continue so". He recognizes one source of his sorrows. As to "prudence," Swift had even too much of it, if "prudence" were the motive which made him put off marriage with the woman ("Stella," Esther Johnson) whom he loved, and who loved him. But for "peace and settlement," he had no partiality; and his temper was no better than he deemed it.

The curses of Swift were, first, his just consciousness of powers far superior to those of the great politicians who adulated, and used, and failed to reward him. With their wine, and their amours, and their bitter, petty jealousies, they let the great opportunity go by, and, lo! Harley is in the Tower; and Bolingbroke, a fugitive, drinks, and loves, and intrigues in France, vituperating the Prince whose cause he has helped to ruin; while Swift eats out his own heart in that Ireland which he hated.

Another curse was that he had attached himself as a priest to the Church of England; while the author of "The Tale of a Tub," however loyal he might be in practice, certainly cannot have been "a trusty and undoubting Church of England man". Of all the creeds, of all the Churches and Sects, in his heart he thought like the Jupiter of his poem,

You, who in various Sects were shamm'd,
And come to hear each other damn'd.

This bleak lucidity of soul, this consciousness of being able "to see forward with a fatal clearness," this knowledge of the greatness of his own genius,—thwarted by poverty, driven wild by servitude, lacerated by the torments of a mysterious disease, crushed by terrible forebodings of the appointed end; these things drove Swift to cut himself among the tombs, and to curse in the wilderness.

Though born in Dublin (30 Nov. 1667) Swift was no Irishman: his father belonged to an old Yorkshire, his mother to an old Leicestershire family. But on his father's death, his mother being left ill-provided, Swift's was the position of a poor relation. His training at Kilkenny school and Trinity College, Dublin, was paid for by his uncle, Godwin Swift, who was either poor or penurious. Men like Swift seldom yield much attention to their tutors; and Swift, though he did well in Greek and Latin, failed in physics and took no pains with his Latin essay. He was, however, allowed to pass. In 1688 he went to England, to his mother at Leicester, and in the following year entered the household of Sir William Temple, a politician and diplomatist, retired from active life, busy with literature and gardening, but in friendly relations with William III and with men of affairs.

Sir William Temple (1628-1699) was himself a writer admired for his style, especially in his Essay on Poetry. His periods, though long, are graceful and well balanced, but seldom have such brief melancholy cadences as this reflection "when all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over".

Swift's position, at first, was between those of a secretary and an upper servant; he left Temple's house for Ireland, in 1690; returned in 1691: next year obtained a degree at Oxford; and in 1694, in Ireland, took Orders, and received a small benefice, Kilroot, near Belfast, where the people were Presbyterians, and he had no congregation worth mentioning. He entangled himself with a Miss Waring (Varina) and wrote "Pindaric" poems. Dryden, a remote cousin of his, told him that he would never be a poet, and no other reason has been discovered for Swift's flouts and jeers at Dryden's reputation. The anecdote may be untrue, and, as a Catholic, Dryden would be disapproved of by Swift.

In 1696 Swift was reconciled with Temple, and during the next two years was treated with more favour, met politicians, met the King; educated Stella, an inmate of Temple's house, then a girl of 15; read much in Temple's library, and was about to attach himself to the double-dyed traitor, Sunderland, when Sunderland was dismissed from office. Swift went back to Ireland, held a living at Laracor, lived much with Lord Berkeley at the Castle, Dublin; wrote lively verses of the lighter sort, wrote a political pamphlet which was successful, and showed leanings towards the Whig party. In London (1704) his "Tale of a Tub" was published anonymously: it had been composed in 1696-1697.

In "An Apology" (1709) Swift, still, as always, anonymous, writes "the book seems calculated to live as long as our language and our taste admit no great alterations". In taste great alterations have been admitted. Though excellent judges still applaud this whimsical allegory, few readers who approach it with high expectations are likely to escape disappointment. The allegory of Peter (Rome) Martin (Anglicans and Lutherans) and Jack (Presbyterians and all other Protestant sects), is utterly incoherent. At present no self-respecting person would write of the religions of Islam and Buddha in such terms and such temper as Swift wrote about the Churches and sects of Christianity. Whatever we may think of Transubstantiation and Vestments, we do not make uproarious fun of them.

Already Swift indulges his half-insane delight in malodorous references; the wit of the dirty schoolboy scrawling on the walls. Few things in the work are more witty than this on Dryden: "he has often said to me in confidence, that the world would never have suspected him to be so great a poet, if he had not assured them so frequently in his prefaces, that it was impossible they could ever doubt or forget it".

Thackeray remarks, "I think the world was right, and the Bishops who advised Queen Anne not to appoint the author of 'The Tale of the Tub' to a Bishopric, gave perfectly good advice". James IV did not give Dunbar a benefice: the line must be drawn somewhere. Swift, in his "Apology," denied that he had attacked religion: be it so, he had written on matters ecclesiastical with amazingly bad taste. His "Argument against Abolishing Christianity" (1708) is not the sort of argument that we expect from a bishop-postulant, but its irony seems as charming and dexterous now as it did two centuries ago. In "The Tale of a Tub," on the other hand, we seldom find a passage that wins a smile, except in "those fine curses" which Peter spoke, and in some of the gambols of Jack. The apologue, in feet, is heavy-handed; the author does not clearly know where he is making for; the perfect clearness of his later style is absent. (These observations, entirely candid, are at odds with the usual applause of "The Tale of a Tub".)

With "The Tale of a Tub" was published, in the same volume, "The Battle of the Books," written about 1697; this was a now belated contribution to the controversy as to the relative merits of the Ancients and the Moderns, begun in France by Charles Perrault, the author of our most familiar fairy tales. As it happened, Temple, in an essay, had taken up the cause of the Ancients, and had chosen, as proofs of superiority of the oldest books, the Fables ascribed to Æsop, and the Letters attributed to Phalaris, the half-mythical tyrant of Agrigentum. The matter of the fables is prehistoric, but the crooked slave, Æsop, did not contribute their form; and the Letters of Phalaris were a literary exercise composed long after the tyrant's date. Wotton, with some help from the greatest scholar of his day, Richard Bentley, King's Librarian, and (1700) Master of Trinity, Cambridge, replied to Temple, and Charles Boyle, of Christ Church, Oxford, introduced a personal squabble with Bentley. The Christ Church wits, including the formidable Atterbury, sided with Boyle,—there was a war between elegant scholars, on Boyle's side; and the nascent science of the Royal Society allied with perfect scholarship and Bentley, on the other. Boyle did not insist that the Letters of Phalaris were genuine; Bentley displayed his sagacious learning in his proof that they were not. Temple was discreetly silent, but Swift espoused the cause of the wits in "The Battle of the Books". The Books in the King's Library, Ancient and Modern, meet in a parody of a fight in Homer. The goddess, Dulness, befriends the Moderns, as Aphrodite, in Homer, protects Paris and Æneas. The mock-Homeric manner was not then outworn, and it amused; while Swift heaped personal scorn on Bentley, and, of course, on Dryden, who is ridiculed for being old. Bentley, crooked-legged and hump-backed, is armed with a flail, and "a vessel full of ordure". Boyle transfixes Bentley and Wotton as a cook spits a brace of woodcocks—and that is the humour of it.

Infinitely more amusing were Swift's predictions of the death of a prophetic almanac-maker, Partridge (1708), and the sequel of that jest. Swift styled himself Isaac Bickerstaff, and lent the name to Steele, for use in his new paper "The Tatler". He lived in close friendship with Addison, Steele, Congreve, and Prior; and began his love affair with Miss Vanhomrigh, the unfortunate Vanessa, rival of Stella. Like Lord Foppington, Swift probably coveted nothing less than her heart, which she gave, and his difficulty was "to get rid of the rest of her body".

After a visit to Ireland, Swift returned to find the Tories in power, "a new world" (September, 1710). He met Harley (Lord Oxford), took service under him, and for three years was the Achitophel of the Tories, writing for them lampoons and political pamphlets which "were cried up to the skies". For half a year (1710-1711) Swift's papers appeared in "The Examiner". Swift dined with Harley and St. John—they called him, "Jonathan"; he snubbed their attempts to treat him as a mere gentleman of the Press; and in the delightful pages of his familiar "Journal to Stella," he paints the age, and himself, triumphant, adulated, powerful, but "seeing all his own mischance"; "I believe they will leave me Jonathan as they found me".

Among the pamphlets of this period are "The Hue and Cry after Dismal" (Lord Nottingham,'ancestor of Horace Walpole's "black funereal Finches"), and the more important "Conduct of the Allies". By 1713 Swift hoped "that the present age and posterity would learn who were the real enemies of the country". The old question of Tory Short and Whig Codlin! But he had cruelly offended the Duchess of Somerset by "The Windsor Prophecy"; and the Queen could not endure the author of "The Tale of a Tub". He asked for his reward, and with much trouble obtained the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin (June, 1713). He went to Ireland, but he could not get rid of Vanessa. Her letters pursued him; other letters called him to town—Harley and St. John were at odds, and he was needed. He engaged in a paper war with Steele, now an enemy; he wrote "The Public Spirit of the Whigs"; he offended the Scottish members, and the Duke of Argyll, the hero of Malplaquet, an ill man to meddle with. He was consoled by the friendship of Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, a good man and a great humorist. They founded the Martinus Scriblerus Club, for the writing of facetious papers: but politics went ill, Harley and St. John quarrelled in the Queen's presence: her death was near; Harley was overthrown by St. John; St. John had no courage, and, on the death of Anne, was checked by Argyll and his regiment. Bishop Atterbury would have proclaimed the King, King James over the Water; the laymen dared not back him; the Elector of Hanover occupied the throne; and of Swift's great friends St. John fled to France, and Harley was imprisoned in the Tower; while Swift, hooted by the pressmen whom he had bullied, made for Ireland. The Jacobite Cause was lost, and we cannot here ask, would Swift (as St. John says in "Esmond") have accepted the Primacy of England from la bonne cause, the young Catholic King?

My life is now a burden grown
To others, ere it be my own,

Swift wrote. He corresponded (1716) with Atterbury, and Atterbury was at the head of the Jacobite party in England. In 1719 Swift dedicated to a Swedish diplomatist, Count Gyllenborg, a History of England. "My intention was to inscribe it to the King, your late Master, for whose great virtues I had ever the highest admiration, as I shall continue to bear to his memory." This King, Charles XII, in 1716 meant to land in Britain with an army in support of the Jacobites, and Gyllenborg, his ambassador, managed the plot in England. Charles had invited Swift, at an earlier date, to Sweden: now Swift dwells "in a most obscure disagreeable country" (Ireland), "and among a most profligate and abandoned people".

All this does not look like zeal for the Protestant succession.

The years 1719-1723 saw the completion of Swift's ambiguous poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa," and the arrival of Vanessa in Swift's neighbourhood. "In vain he protested, he vowed, he soothed and bullied; the news of the Dean's marriage to Stella at last reached her; and it killed her,—Vanessa died of that passion" (Thackeray). The marriage is still matter of controversy.

In 1724 Swift, who hated the English Government if he did not love Ireland, wrote the famous "Drapier's Letters" against a job in copper currency, and gained high popularity.

In 1726 he gave to the world the most famous of his books, "Gulliver's Travels," in which his gift of narrative, his amazing power of being truthful in the minutest details of the most extravagant imaginations, his misanthropy, his irony, and his delight in unsavoury things, are all carried to the highest perfection. In 1729 came the "Modest Proposal" for eating Irish children; in 1738 his "Polite Conversation" and "Directions to Servants," with the same merit of humour, and the same inveterate fault.

In visits to London (1726, 1727) Swift had enjoyed the society of his old friends and comrades in letters; and hoped there, perhaps, to find a Fountain of Youth. He felt himself slipping into the vice of hoarding; and rusting in a second-rate society. Bolingbroke had been allowed to return from exile; the banished King had found him worthless as a statesman: he had said his worst against the banished King; nobody wanted Bolingbroke and nobody was afraid of him. He played the philosopher, and Swift did not believe in his affectation of philosophy. Arbuthnot, Swift loved, Pope he had always admired; and he tried to protect Gay from his own reckless improvidence. He ridiculed, in "Gulliver," the proofs brought against Atterbury as a Jacobite agent: if Swift was not convinced by the evidence he must have shut his eyes very hard.

In January, 1728, Stella died: Swift tried to fill the gap in his life by activity in Irish politics. His disease, apparently some malady of the ear which gradually affected the brain, became more unendurable, but he had still to write some of his most powerful satires in verse. Then his memory began to fail, and he drifted slowly into the half-unconscious dotage of his last five years, dying on 19 October, 1745, unconscious, probably, of the meteoric adventure of Prince Charles.

The failure of his party, of his political ambition, and measureless hopes of greatness, gave Swift the retirement and the leisure to produce his greatest works. If fortune had "bantered us" as Bolingbroke said, he turned and bantered Fate and mankind. In the long array of his volumes, so seldom opened, are many brief flights, in verse and prose, which are full of entertainment, of wild fancy, orderly and gravely presented; and there is the "Journal to Stella," with its infinite tenderness of affection; and the Letters, the confidences of the wits from romantic Charles Wogan, who rescued from prison the bride of a King, and died as Governor of the appropriate province of La Mancha, to those of Pope and Arbuthnot and Gay. The works of Swift are a library in themselves.