THE FOUR GEORGES. THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. • • • • • • GEOHGE I. THE FOUR GEORGES. THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. By W. M. THACKERAY WJIH PORTHAJTon people and chief? Yet there is something grand about his courage. The battle of 84 THE FOUR GEORGES. the King with his aristocracy remains yet to be told by the historian who shall view the reign of George more justly than the trumpery panegyrists who wrote immediately after his decease. It was he, with the people to back him, who made the war with America ; it was he and the people who refused justice to the Roman Catholics ; and on both questions he beat the patricians. He bribed : he bullied : he darkly dissembled on occasion : he exercised a slippery perseverance, and a vindictive resolution, which one almost admires as one thinks his character over. His_courage was never to be beat. It trampled North under foot : it beat the stiff neck of the younger Pitt : even his illness never conquered that indomitable spirit. As soon as his brain was clear, it resumed the scheme, only laid aside when his reason left liim : as soon as his liands were out of the strait waistcoat, they took up the pen and tlie plan which had engaged him up to the moment of his malady. I believe it is by persons believing themselves in the right that nine-tenths of the tyranny of this world has been perpe- trated. Arguing on that convenient premiss, the Dey of Algiers would cut off twenty heads of a morning ; Father Dominic would burn a score of Jews in the presence of the Most Catholic King, and the Archbishops of Toledo and Salamanca sing Amen. Protestants were roasted, Jesuits hung and quartered at Smithfield, and witches burned at Salem, and all by worthy people, who believed they had the best authority for their actions. And so, with. respect to old George, even Americans, whom he hated and who conquered him, may give him credit for having quite honest reasons for oppressing them. Appended to Lord Brougham's biographical sketch of Lord North are some autograph notes of the King, which let us most curiously into the state of his mind. '' The times certainly require," says he, " the concurrence of all who wish to prevent anarchy. I have no wish but the prosperity of my own dominions, therefore I must look upon all who would not heartily assist me as bad men, as well as bad subjects." That is the way he reasoned, f " I wish nothing but good, therefor^ every man who does not agree with me is a traitor and a scoundrel.") Remember that /lie GEORGE THE THIRD. 85 believed himself anointed by a Divine connnission ; icnicniber that he was a man of slow parts and imperfect education ; that the same awful will of Heaven whicli placed a crown upon his head, which made him tender to his family, pure in his life, courageous and honest, made him dull of comprehension, obstinate of will, and at many times deprived him of reason. He was the father of his jjcopie ; his rebelHous children must be flogged into obedience. He was tlie defender of the Protestant faith i he would rather lay that stout head upon the block than that Catholics should have a sliare in the govern- ment of England. And you do not sup})ose that tliere are not honest bigots enough in all countries to back kings in this kind of statesman- ship ? Without doubt the American war was popular in England. In 1775 the address in favour of coercing the colonies was carried by 304 to 105 in the Commons, by 104 to 29 in the House of Lords. Popular ? — so was the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes popular in Erance : so was the massacre of St. Bartholomew : so was the Inquisition exceedingly popular in Spain. Wars and revolutions are, however, the politician's province. The great events of this long reign, the statesmen and orators who illustrated it, I do not pretend to make the subjects of an hour's light talk."' Let us return to our humbler duty of court gossip. Yonder sits our little Queen, surrounded by many stout sons and fair daughters whom she bore to her faithful George. The history of the daughters, as little Miss Burney has painted them to us, is delightful. They were handsome — she calls them beautiful ; they were most kind, loving, and lady-like ; they were gracious to every person, high and low, who served them. They had many little accomplishments of their own. This one drew : that one played the piano : they all worked most prodigiously, and fitted up whole suites of rooms — pretty, smiling Penelopes, — with their busy little needles. As we picture to ourselves the society of eighty years ago, we must imagine hundreds of thousands of groups of women in great high caps, tight bodies, and * On the next page are tlie figures, as drawn by young Gilray, of Lord North, Mr. Fox, Mr. Pitt, and Mr. Burke. GEORGE THE THIRD. Z-j full skirts, needling away, whilst one of the number, or perhaps a favoured gentleman in a pigtail, reads out a novel to the com- pany. Peep into the cottage at Olney, for example, and sec there Mrs. Unwin and Lady Hesketh, those high-bred ladies, those sweet, pious women, and William Cowper, that delicate wit, that trembling pietist, that refined gentleman, absolutely reading out Jonathan Wild to the ladies ! What a change in our manners, in our amusements, since then ! |Cing George's household was a model of an English gentleman's household. It was early ; it was kindly ; it was charitable ; it was frugal ; it was orderly ; it must have been stupid to a degree which I shudder now to contemplate. No wonder all the princes ran away from the lap of that dreary domestic virtue. It always rose, rode, dined at stated intervals. Day after day was the same. At the same hour at night the King kissed his daughters' jolly cheeks ; the Princesses kissed their mother's hand ; and Madame Thielke brought the royal nightcap. At the same hour the equerries and women in waiting had their little dinner, and cackled over their tea. The King had his backgammon or his evening concert ; the equerries yawned themselves to death in the anteroom ; or the King and his family walked on Windsor slopes, the King holding his darling little Princess Amelia by the hand ; and the people crowded round quite good- naturedly ; and the Eton boys thrust their chubby cheeks under the crowd's elbows ; and the concert over, the King never failed to take his enormous cocked-hat off, and salute his band, and say, " Thank you, gentlemen." A quieter household, a more prosaic life than this of Kew or Windsor, cannot be imagined. Rain or shine, the King rode every day for hours ; poked his red face into hundreds of cottages round about, and showed that shovel hat and Windsor uniform to farmers, to pig-boys, to old women making apple dumplings ; to all sorts of people, gentle and simple, about whom countless stories are told. Nothing can be more undignified than these stories. When Haroun Alraschid visits a subject incog., the latter is sure to be very much 88 THE FOUR GEORGES. the better for the caliph's magnificence. Old George showed no such royal splendour. He used to give a guinea sometimes : some- times feel in his pockets and find he had no money : often ask a man a hundred questions : about the number of his family, about his oats and beans, about the rent he paid for his house, and ride on. On one occasion he played the part of King Alfred, and turned a piece of meat with a string at a cottager's house. When the old woman came home, she found a paper with an enclosure of money, and a note written by the royal i:)encil : " Five guineas to buy a jack." It was not splendid, but it was kind and worthy of Farmer George. One day, when the King and Queen were walking together, they met a little boy — they were always fond of children, the good folks — and patted the little white head. " Whose little boy are you ? " asks the Windsor uniform. " I am the King's beefeater's little boy," replied the child. On which the King said, " Then kneel down, and kiss the Queen's hand." But the innocent offspring of the beefeater declined this treat. " No," said he, " I won't kneel, for if I do, I shall spoil my new breeches." The thrifty King ought to have hugged him and knighted him on the spot. George's admirers wrote pages and pages of such stories about him. One morning, before anybody else was up, the King walked about Gloucester town ; pushed over Molly the housemaid with her pail, who was scrubbing the doorsteps ; ran upstairs and woke all the equerries in their bedrooms ; and then trotted down to the bridge, where, by this time, a dozen of louts were assembled. " What ! is this Gloucester New Bridge ? " asked our gracious monarch ; and the people answered him, " Yes, your Majesty." "Why, then, my boys," said he, " let us have a huzzay ! " After giving them which intellectual gratification, he went home to breakfast. Our fathers read these simple tales with fond pleasure ; laughed at these very small jokes ; liked the old man who poked his nose into every cottage ; who lived on plain wholesome roast and boiled ; who despised your French kickshaws ; who was a true hearty old English gentleman. You may have seen Gilray's famous print of him — in the old wig, in the stout old hideous AVIndsor uniform— as A Lli TLE KtliLL. GEORGE THE THIRD, 91 the King of Brobdingnag, peering at a little Gulliver, whom he huKls up in his hand, whilst in the other he has an opera-glass, through w^hich he surveys the pigmy ? Our fathers chose to set up George as the type of a great king ; and the little Gulliver was the great Napoleon. A\'e prided ourselves on our prejudices; we blustered and bragged with absurd vainglory; we dealt to our enemy a monstrous injustice of contempt and scorn ; we fought him with all weapons, mean as w^ell as heroic. There was no lie we would not believe ; no charge of crime which our furious prejudice would not credit. I thought at one time of making a collection of the lies which the French had written against us, and we had published against them during the war : it would be a strange memorial of popular falsehood. Their Majesties were very sociable potentates : and the Court Chronicler tells of numerous visits which they paid to their subjects, gentle and simple : with whom they dined ; at whose great country- houses they stopped ; or at whose poorer lodgings they affably partook of tea and bread-and-butter. Some of the great folks spent enormous sums in entertaining their sovereigns. As marks of special favour, the King and Queen sometimes stood as sponsors for the children of the nobility. We find Lady Salisbury was so honoured in the year 1786; and in the year 1802, Lady Chesterfield. The Court Neius relates how her ladyship received their Majesties on a state bed '' dressed with white satin and a profusion of lace : the counterpane of white satin embroidered with gold, and the bed of crimson satin lined with white." The child was first brought by the nurse to the Marchioness of Bath, who presided as chief nurse. Then the Marchioness handed baby to the Queen. Then the Queen handed the little darling to the Bishop of Norwich, the officiating clergyman ; and, the ceremony over, a cup of caudle was presented by the Earl to his Majesty on one knee, on a large gold waiter, placed on a crimson velvet cushion. Misfortunes would occur in these interesting genuflectory ceremonies of royal worship. Bubb Dodding- ton, Lord Melcombe, a very fat, puffy man, in a most gorgeous 92 THE FOUR GEORGES. court-suit, had to kneel, Cumberland says, and was so fat and so tight that he could not get up again. " Kneel, sir, kneel ! " cried my lord in waiting to a country mayor who had to read an address, but who went on with his compliment standing. "Kneel, sir, kneel !" cries my lord, in dreadful alarm. " I can't ! " says the mayor, turning round ; " don't you see I have got a wooden leg ? " In the capital *' Burney Diary and Letters," the home and court life of good old King George and good old Queen Charlotte are presented at portentous length. The King rose every morning at six : and had two hours to himself. He thought it efteminate to have a carpet in his bedroom. Shortly before eight, the Queen and the royal family were always ready for him, and they proceeded to the King's chapel in the castle. There were no fires in the passages : the chapel was scarcely alight ; princesses, governesses, equerries grumbled and caught cold : but cold or hot, it was their duty to go : and, wet or dry, light or dark, the stout old George was always in his place to say amen to the chaplain. The Queen's character is represented in " Burney " at full length. She was a sensible, most decorous woman ; a very grand lady on state occasions, simple enough in ordinary life ; well read as times went, and giving shrewd opinions about books ; stingy, but not unjust ; not generally unkind to her dependants, but invinci'ble in her notions of etiquette, and quite angry if her people suffered ill-health in her service. She gave Miss Burney a shabby pittance, and led the poor young woman a life which w^ell-nigh killed her. She never thought but that she was doing Burney the greatest favour, in taking her from freedom, fame, and competence, and killing her off with languor in that dreary court. It was not dreary to her. Had she been servant instead of mistress, her spirit would never have broken down : she never would have put a pin out of place, or been a moment from her duty. She was not weak, and she could not pardon those who were. She was perfectly correct in life, and she hated poor sinners with a rancour such as virtue sometimes has. She must have had awful private trials of her own : not merelv with GEORGE THE THIRD. 93 her children, but witli her husband, in those long days about which nobody will ever know anything now ; when he was not quite insane ; when his incessant tongue was babbling folly, rage, persecution ; and she had to smile and be respectful and attentive under this intoler- able ennui. The Queen bore all her duties stoutly, as she expected others to bear them. At a State christening, the lady who held the infant was tired and looked unwell, and the Princess of Wales asked permission for her to sit down. '' Let her stand," said the Queen, flicking the snuft' off her sleeve. She would have stood, the resolute old woman, if she had had to hold the child till his beard was grown. " I am seventy years of age," the Queen said, facing a mob of ruffians who stopped her sedan : " I have been fifty years Queen of England, and I never was insulted before." Fearless, rigid, unforgiving little queen ! I don't wonder that her sons revolted from hen Of all the figures in that large family group which surrounds George and his Queen, the prettiest, I think, is the father's darling, the Princess Amelia, pathetic for her beauty, her sweetness, her early death, and for the extreme passionate tenderness with which her father loved her. This was his favourite amongst all the children : of his sons, he loved the Duke of York best. Burney tells a sad story of the poor old man at Weymouth, and how eager he was to have this darling son with him. The King's house was not big enough to hold the Prince ; and his father had a portable house erected close to his own, and at huge pains, so that his dear Frederick should be near him. He clung on his arm all the time of his visit : talked to no one else ; had talked of no one else for some time before. The Prince, so long expected, stayed but a single night. He had business in London the next day, he said. The dulness of the old King's court stupefied York and the other big sons of George HI. They scared equerries and ladies, frightened the modest little circle, with their coarse spirits and loud talk. Of little comfort, indeed were the King's sons to the King. But the pretty Amelia was his darling ; and the little maiden, 94 THE FOUR GEORGES. prattling and smiling in the fond arms of that old father, is a sweet image to look on. There is a family picture in Burney, which a man must be very hard-hearted not to like. She describes an after-dinner walk of the royal family at Windsor : — " It was really a mighty pretty procession," she says. " The little Princess, just turned of three years old, in a robe-coat covered with fine muslin, a dressed close cap, white gloves, and fan, walked on alone and first, highly delighted with the parade, and turning from side to side to see everybody as she passed ; for all the terracers stand up against the walls, to make a clear passage for the royal family the moment they come in sight. Then followed the King and Queen, no less delighted with the joy of their little darling. The Princess Royal leaning on Lady Elizabeth Waldegrave, the Princess Augusta holding by the Duchess of Ancaster, the Princess Elizabeth led by Lady Charlotte Bertie, followed. Office here takes place of rank," says Burney, — to explain how it was that Lady E. Waldegrave, as lady of the bed- chamber, walked before a duchess ; — " General Bude, and the Duke of Montague, and Major Price as equerry, brought up the rear of the procession." One sees it ; the band playing its old music, the sun shining on the happy, loyal crowd ; and lighting the ancient batdements, the rich elms, and purple landscape, and bright greensward ; the royal standard drooping from the great tower yonder ; as old George passes, followed by his race, pre- ceded by the charming infant, who caresses the crowd with her innocent smiles. " On sight of Mrs. Delany, the King instantly stopped to speak to her; the Queen, of course, and the little Princess, and all the rest, stood still. They talked a good while with the sweet old lady, during which time the King once or twice addressed himself to me. I caught the Queen's eye, and saw in it a little surprise, but by no means any displeasure, to see me of the party. The little Princess went up to Mrs. Delany, of whom she is very fond, and behaved like a litUe angel to her. She then, with a look of inquiry and recollection, came behind Mrs. Delany to look at me. GEORGE THE THIRD. 95 ' I am afraid,' said I, in a wliisper, and stooping down, ' your Royal Highness does not remember me ? ' Her answer was an arch little smile, and a nearer approach, witli her lii)s pouted out to kiss me." The Princess wrote verses herself, and there are some pretty plaintive lines attributed to her, which are more touching tlian better poetry : — *' Unthinking, idle, wild, and young, I laughed, and danced, and talked, and sun^ : And, proud of health, of freedom vain, Dreamed not of sorrow, care, or pain ; Concluding, in those hours of glee. That all the A\orld was made for me. *' But when the hour of trial came, When sickness shook this trembling fram.e. When folly's gay pursuits were o'er. And I could sing and dance no more. It then occurred, how sad 'twould be. Were this world only made for me. " The poor soul quitted it — and ere yet she was dead the agonized father was in such a state, that the officers round about him were obliged to set watchers over him, and from November, 18 10, George HI. ceased to reign. All the world knows the story of his malady : all history presents no sadder figure than that of the old man, blind and deprived of reason, wandering through tlie rooms of his palace, addressing imaginary parliaments, reviewing fiincied troops, holding ghostly courts. I have seen his picture as it was taken at this time, hanging in the apartment of his daughter, tlv.^ Landgravine of Hesse Hombourg — amidst books and Windsor furniture, and a hundred fond reminiscences of her English home. The poor old father is represented in a purple gown, his snowy beard falling over his breast — the star of his famous Order still idly sliining on it. He was not only sightless : he became utterly deaf All liglit, /all reason, all sound of human voices, all tlie pleasures of this world 96 THE FOUR GEORGES. of God, were taken from him. Some slight kicid moments he had ; in one of which, the Queen, desiring to see him, entered the room, and found him singing a hymn, and accompanying himself at the harpsichord. When he had finished, he knelt down and prayed aloud for her, and then for his family, and then for the nation, con- cluding with a prayer for himself, that it might please God to avert his heavy calamity from him, but if not, to give him resignation to submit. He then burst into tears, and his reason again fled. What preacher need moralize on this story ; what words save the simplest are requisite to tell it ? It is too terrible for tears. The thought of such a misery smites me down in submission before the Ruler of kings and men, the Monarch Supreme over empires and republics, the inscrutable Dispenser of life, death, happiness, victory. " O brothers," I said to those who heard me first in America — *' O brothers ! speaking the same dear mother tongue — O comrades ! enemies no more, let us take a mournful hand together as we stand by this royal corpse, and call a truce to battle ! Low he lies to whom the proudest used to kneel once, and who was cast lower than the poorest : dead, whom millions prayed for in vain. Driven off his throne ; buffeted by rude hands ; with his children in revolt ; the darling of his old age killed before him untimely ; our Lear hangs over her breathless lips and cries, ' Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little ! ' ' Vex not his ghost — oh ! let him pass— he hates him That would upon the rack of this tougli world Stretch him out longer ! ' Hush ! Strife and Quarrel, over the solemn grave ! Sound, trumpets, a mournful march. Fall, dark curtain, upon his pageant, his pride, his grief, his awful tragedy." GEORGE THE FOURTH, J5 GEORGE IV. GEORGE THE FOURTH. men placed themselves behind their chairs, while the footmen left the room. But he ordered us all to sit down, and called the men back to hand about some wine. He was in exceeding high spirits, and in the utmost good humour. He placed himself at the head of the table, next Mrs. Schwellenberg, and looked remarkably well, gay, and full of sport and mischief; yet clever withal, as well as comical. " ' Well, this is the first day I have ever dined with the King at St. James's on his birthday. Pray, have you all drunk his Majesty's health?' " * No, your Royal Highness ; your Royal Highness might make dem do dat,' said Mrs. Schwellenberg. " ' Oh, by , I will ! Here, you " (to the footman), " bring champagne ; I'll drink the King's health again, if I die for it. Yes, I have done it pretty well already ; so has the King, I promise you ! I believe his Majesty was never taken such good care of before ; we have kept his spirits up, I promise you ; we have enabled him to go through his fatigues ; and I should have done more still, but for the ball and Mary ; — I have promised to dance with Mary. I must keep sober for Mary.'" Indefatigable Miss Burney continues for a dozen pages reporting H.R.H.'s conversation, and indicating, with a humour not unworthy of the clever little author of " Evelina," the increasing state of excite- ment of the young sailor Prince, who drank more and more cham- pagne, stopped old Mrs. Schwellenberg's remonstrances by giving the old lady a kiss, and telling her to hold her potato-trap, and who did not " keep sober for Mary." Mary had to find another partner that night, for the royal William Henry could not keep his legs. Will you have a picture of the amusements of another royal prince? It is the Duke of York, the blundering general, the beloved commander-in-chief of the army, the brother with whom George IV. had had many a midnight carouse, and who continued his habits of pleasure almost till death seized his stout body. GEORGE THE FOURTH. ny In Piicklcr Muskau's " Letters," that German Prince describes a bout with H.R.H., who in his best time was such a powerful toper that "six bottles of claret after dinner scarce made a perceptible change in his countenance." '• I remember/' says Piickler, " that one evening, — indeed, it was past midnight, — he took some of his guests, among whom were the Austrian ambassador, Count Meervelt, Count Beroldingen, and myself, into his beautiful armoury. We tried to swing several Turkish sabres, but none of us had a very firm grasp ; whence it happened that the Duke and Meervelt both scratched themselves with a sort of straight Indian sword so as to draw blood. Meervelt then wished to try if the sword cut as well as a Damascus, and attempted to cut through one of the wax candles that stood on the table. The experiment answered so ill, that both the candles, candlesticks and all, fell to the ground and were extinguished. While we were groping in the dark and trying to find the door, the Duke's aide- de-camp stammered out in great agitation, ' By G — , sir, I remember the sword is poisoned ! ' " You may conceive the agreeable feelings of the wounded at this intelligence ! Happily, on further examination, it appeared that claret, and not poison, was at the bottom of the colonel's exclamation." And now I have one more story of the bacchanalian sort, in which Clarence and York, and the very highest personage of the realm, the great Prince Regent, all play parts. The feast took place at the Pavilion at Brighton, and was described to me by a gentleman who was present at the scene. In Gilray's caricatures, and amongst Fox's jolly associates, there figures a great nobleman, the Duke of Norfolk, called Jockey of Norfolk in his time, and celebrated for his table exploits. He had quarrelled with the Prince, like the rest of the Whigs ; but a sort of reconciliation had taken place ; and now, being a very old man, the Prince invited him to dine and sleep at the Pavilion, and the old Duke drove over from his Castle of Arundel with his famous equipage of grey horses, still remembered in Sussex. The Prince of Wales had concocted with his royal brothers a IfS THE FOUR GEORGES, notable scheme for making the old man drunk. Every person at table was enjoined to drink wine with the Duke — a challenge which the old toper did not refuse. He soon began to see that there was a conspiracy against him ; he drank glass for glass ; he overthrew many of the brave. At last the First Gentleman of Europe proposed bumpers of brandy. One of the royal brothers filled a great glass for the Duke. He stood up and tossed off the drink. "Now," says he, " I will have my carriage, and go home." The Prince urged upon him his previous promise to sleep under the roof where he had been so generously entertained. " No," he said ; he had had enough of such hospitality. A trap had been set for him ; he would leave the place at once and never enter its doors more. The carnage was called, and came ; but, in the half-hour's interval, the liquor had proved too potent for the old man ; his host's generous purpose was answered, and the Duke's old grey head lay stupefied on the table. Nevertheless, when his post-chaise was announced, he staggered to it as well as he could, and stumbling in, bade the postilions drive to Arundel. They drove him for half an hour round and round the Pavilion lawn ; the poor old man fancied he was going home. When he awoke that morning he was in bed at the Prince's hideous house at Brighton. You may see the place now for sixpence : they have fiddlers there every day ; and sometimes buffoons and mountebanks hire the Riding House and do their tricks and tumbling there. The trees are still there, and the gravel walks round which the poor old sinner was trotted. "I can fancy the flushed faces of the royal princes as they support themselves at the portico pillars, and look on at old Norfolk's disgrace ; but I can't fancy how the man who perpetrated it continued to be called a gentleman. From drinking, the pleased Muse now turns to gambling, of which in his youth our Prince was a great practitioner. He was a famous pigeon for the play-men ; they lived upon him. Egalite' Orleans, it was believed, punished him severely. A noble lord, whom we shall call the Marquis of Steyne, is said to have mulcted him in immense sums. He frequented the clubs, where play was. GEORGE THE FOURTH. 119 then almost universal ; and, as it was known his debts of nonour were sacred, whilst he was gambling Jews waited outside to purcnase ms notes of hand. His transactions on the turf were unlucky as well as discreditable : though I believe he, and his jocKey, and his horse. Escape, were all innocent in that affair which created so much scandal. Arthur's, Almack's, Boodle's, and White's were the chief clubs of the young men of fashion. There was play at all, and decayed noble- men and broken-down senators fleeced the unwary there. In Seiwyn s " Letters " we find Carlisle, Devonshire, Coventry, Queensberry, all undergoing the probation. Charles Fox, a dreadful gambler, was cheated in very late times — lost 200,000/. at play. Gibbon tells of his playing for twenty-two hours at a sitting, and losing 500/. an hour. That indomitable punter said that the greatest pleasure in life, after winning, was losing. What hours, what nights, what health did he waste over the devil's books ! I was going to say what peace of mind ; but he took his losses very philosophically. After an awful night's play, and the enjoyment of the greatest pleasure but one in life, he was found on a sofa tranquilly reading an Eclogue of Virgil. Play survived long after the wild Prince and Fox had given up the dice-box. The dandies continued it. Byron, Brummeil — how- many names could I mention of men of the world who have suffered by it ! In 1837 occurred a famous trial which pretty nigh put an end to gambling in England. A peer of the realm was found cheating at whist, and repeatedly seen to practise the trick called saiitcr la coupe. His friends at the clubs saw him cheat, and went on playing with him. One greenhorn, who had discovered his foul play, asked an old hand what he should do. " Do," said the jNIammon of Unrighteousness, " Back him, you fooir The best efforts were made to screen him. People wrote him anonymous letters and warned him; but he would cheat, and they were obliged to find him out. Since that day, when my lord's shame was made public, the gammg- table has lost all its splendour. Shabby Jews and blacklegs prowl about racecourses and tavern parlours, and now ana then mveigie 126 THE ]FOUR GEORGES, silly yokels with greasy packs of cards in railroad cars ; but Play is a deposed goddess, her worshippers bankrupt and her table in rags. So is another famous British institution gone to decay — the Ring : the noble practice of British boxing, which in my youth was still almost flourishing. The Prince, in his early days, was a great patron of this national sport, as his grand-uncle Culloden Cumberland had been before him; but, being present at a fight at Brighton, where one of the combatants was killed, the Prince pensioned the boxer's widow, and declared he never would attend another battle. " But, nevertheless," — I read in the noble language of Pierce Egan (whose smaller work on Pugilism I have the honour to possess), — " he thought it a manly and decided English feature, which ought not to be destroyed. His Majesty had a drawing of the sporting characters in the Fives' Court placed in his boudoir, to remind him of his former attachment and support of true courage ; and when any fight of note occurred after he was king, accounts of it were read to him by his desire." That gives one a fine image of a king taking his recreation ; — at ease in a royal dressing-gown ; — too majestic to read himself, ordering the prime minister to read him accounts of battles : how Cribb punched Molyneux's eye, or Jack Randall thrashed the Game Chicken. Where my Prince did actually distinguish himself was in driving. He drove once in four hours and a half from Brighton to Carlton House — fifty-six miles. All the young men of that day were fond of that sport. But the fashion of rapid driving deserted England ; and, I believe, trotted over to America. Where are the amusements of our youth ? I hear of no gambling now but amongst obscure ruffians ; of no boxing but amongst the lowest rabble. One solitary four-in-hand still drove round the parks in London last year ; but that charioteer must soon disappear. He was very old ; he was attired after the fashion of the year 1825. He must drive to the banks of Styx ere long, — where the ferry-boat waits to carry him over to the defunct revellers who boxed and gambled and drank and drove with King George. GEORGE THE FOURTH. 121 The bravery of the Brunswicks, that all the family must have it, that George possessed it, are points which all English writers have agreed to admit ; and yet I cannot see how George IV. should have been endowed with this quality. Swaddled in feather-beds all his life, lazy, obese, perpetually eating and drinking, his education was quite unlike that of his tough old progenitors. His grandsires had confronted hardship and war, and ridden up and fired their pistois undaunted into the face of death. fHis father had conquered luxury and overcome indolence. Here was one who never resisted any temptation ; never had a desire but he coddled and pampered it ; if ever he had any nerve, frittered it away among cooks, and tailors, and barbers, and furniture-mongers, and opera-dancers.^ What muscle would not grow flaccid in such a life — a life that was never strung up to any action — aa endless Capua without any campaign — all fiddling, and flowers, and feasting, and flattery, and folly ? When George HI. was pressed by the Catholic question and the India Bill, he said he would retire to Hanover rather than yield upon either point ; and he would have done what he said. But, before yielding, he was determined to fight his Ministers and Parliament ; and he did, and he beat them. The time came when George IV. was pressed too upon the Catholic claims ; the cautious Peel had slipped over to that side; the grim old Wellington had joined it; and Peel tells us, in his " Memoirs," what was the conduct of the King. He at first refused to submit ; whereupon Peel and the Duke offered their resignations, which their gracious master accepted. He did these two gentlemen the honour. Peel says, to kiss them both when they went away. (Fancy old Arthur's grim countenance and eagle beak as the monarch kisses it !) When they were gone he sent after them, surrendered, and wrote to them a letter begging them to remain in office, and allowing them to have their way. Then his Majesty had a meeting with Eldon, which is related at curious length in the latter's " Memoirs." He told Eldon what was not true about his interview with the new Catholic converts ; utterly misled the old ex-Chancellor; cried, whimpered, fell on his neck, and kissed him 122 THE FOUR GEORGES. too. We know old Eldon's own tears were pumped very freely. Did these, two fountains gush together ? I can't fancy a behaviour more unmanly, imbecile, pitiable. This a defender of the t'aith ! This a chief in the crisis of a great nation ! This an inheritor of the courage of the Georges ! Many of my hearers no doubt have journeyed to the pretty old town of Brunswick, in comimny with that most worthy, prudent, and polite gentleman, the Earl of Malmesbury, and fetched away Princess Caroline for her longing husband, the Prince of Wales. Old Queen Charlotte would have had her eldest son marry a niece of her own, that famous Louisa of Strelitz, afterwards Queen of Prussia, and who shares with Marie Antoinette in the last age the sad pre-eminence of beauty and misfortune. But George III. had a niece at Brunswick : she was a richer princess than her Serene Highness of Strelitz : — in fine, the Princess Caroline was selected to marry the heir to the English throne. We follow my Lord Malmes- bury in quest of her ; we are introduced to her illustrious father and royal mother; we witness the balls and fetes of the old court ; we are presented to the Princess herself, with her fair hair, her blue eyes, and her impertinent shoulders — a lively, bouncing, romping Princess, who takes the advice of her courtly English mentor most generously and kindly. We can be present at her very toilette, if we like ; regarding which, and for very good reasons, the British courtier implores her to be particular. What a strange court I What a queer privacy of morals and manners do we look into ! Shall we regard it as preachers and moralists, and cry Woe, against the open vice and selfishness and corruption ; or look at it as we do at the king in the pantomime, with his pantomime wife and pantomime courtiers, whose big heads he knocks together, whom he pokes with his pantomime sceptre, whom he orders to prison under the guard of his pantomime beefeaters, as he sits down to dine on his pantomime pudding ? It is grave, it is sad ; it is theme most curious for moral and political speculation ; it is monstrous, grotesque, laughable, with its prodigious littlenesses, etiquettes, ceremonials, sham moralities : it GEORGE THE FOURTH. 123 is as serious as a sermon, and as absurd and outrageous as Punch's puppet-show. Malmcsbury tells us of the jirivate life of the Duke, Princess Caroline's father who was to die, like iiis warlike son, in arms against the French ; presents us to his courtiers, his favourite ; liis Duzhes-:, George III.'s sister, a grim old Princess, who took the British envoy aside, and told him wicked old stories of wicked old dead people and times; who came to England afterwards when her nephew was regent, and lived in a shabby furnished lodging, old, and dingy, and deserted, and grotesque, but somehow royal. And we go with him to the Duke to demand the Princess's hand in form, and we hear the Brunswick guns fire their adieux of salute, as H.R.H. the Princess of Wales departs in the frost and snow ; and we visit the domains of the Prince Bishop of Osnaburg — the Duke of York of our early time ; and we dodge about from the French revolutionists, whose ragged legions are pouring over Holland and Germany, and gaily trampling down the old world to the tune of ^a ira; and we take shipping at Slade, and we land at Greenwich, where the Princess's ladies and the Prince's ladies are in waiting to receive her Royal Highness. What a history follows ! Arrived in London, the bridegroom hastened eagerly to receive his bride. When she was first presented to him, Lord Malmesbury says she very properly attempted to kneel. He raised her gracefully enough, embraced her, and turning round to me, said, — " Harris, I am not well ; pray get me a glass of brandy." I said, " Sir, had you not better have a glass of water?" Upon which, much out of humour, he said, with an oath, "No: I will go to the Queen." What could be expected from a wedding which had such a beginning — from such a bridegroom and such a bride ? I am not going to carry you through the scandal of that story, or follow the poor Princess through all her vagaries ; her balls and her dances, her 4;ravels to Jerusalem and Naples, her jigs, and her junketings, and her 124 777^ FOUR GEORGES. tears. As I read her trial in history, I vote she is not guilty. I don't say it is an impartial verdict ; but as one reads her story the heart bleeds for the kindly, generous, outraged creature. If wrong there be, let it lie at his door who wickedly thrust her from it. Spite of her follies, the great hearty people of England loved, and pro- THE PRINCE AND PRINCESS OF WALES. tected, and pitied her. " God bless you ! we will bring your husband back to you," said a mechanic one day, as she told Lady Charlotte Bury with tears streaming down her cheeks. They could not bring that husband back ; they could not cleanse that selfish heart. Was hers the only one he had wounded ? \ Steeped in selfishness, impotent GEORGE THE EOURTH. 125 for faithful attachment and manly enduring love, — had it not survived remorse, was it not accustomed to desertion ? Malmesbury gives us the beginning of the marriage story ; — how the Prince reeled into chapel to be married ; how he hiccupped out his vows of fidelity — you know how he kept them ; how he pursued the woman whom he had married ; to what a state he brought her ; with what blows he struck her ; with what malignity he pursued her ; wliat his treatment of his daughter was ; and what his own life. He the first gentleman of Europe ! There is no stronger satire on the proud iMiglish society of that day, than that they admired George. No, thank God, we can tell of better gentlemen ; and whilst our eyes turn away, shocked, from this monstrous image of pride, vanity, weakness, they may see in that England over which the last George pretended to reign, some who merit indeed the title of gentlemen, some who make our hearts beat when we hear their names, and whose memory we fondly salute when that of yonder imperial manikin is tumbled into oblivion. I will take men of my own pro- fession of letters. I will take Walter Scott, who loved the King, and who was his sword and buckler, and championed him like that brave Highlander in his own story, who fights round his craven chief. What a good gentleman ! What a friendly soul, what a generous hand, what an amiable life was that of the noble Sir Walter ! I will take another man of letters, whose life I admire even more, — an English worthy, doing his duty for fifty noble years of labour, day by da)<.storing up learning, day by day working for scant wages, most charitable out of his small means, bravely faithful to the calling which he had chosen, refusing to turn from his path for popular praise or princes' favour ; — I mean Rohei'i SoutJicy. "\\'e have left his old political landmarks miles and miles behind ; we protest against his dogmatism ; nay, we begin to forget it and his politics : but I hope his life will not be forgotten, for it is sublime in its simplicity, its energ}', its honour, its affection. In the combat between Time and Thalaba, I suspect the former destroyer has conquered. Kehama's curse frightens very few readers now; but Southey's private 126 THE FOUR GEORGES. letters are worth piles of epics, and are sure to last among us, as long as kind hearts like to sympathize with goodness and purity, and love and upright life. "If your feelings are like mine," he writes to his wife, " I will not go to Lisbon without you, or I will stay at home, and not part from you. For though not unhappy when away, still without you I am not happy. For your sake, as well as my own and little Edith's, I will not consent to any separation ; the growth of a year's love between her and me, if it please God she should live, is a thing too delightful in itself, and too valuable in its consequences, to be given up for any light inconvenience on your part or mine. . . . On these things we will talk at leisure ; only, dear, dear Edith, 7ue VI list not part !'^ This was a poor literary gentleman. The First Gentleman in Europe had a wife and daughter too. Did he love them so ? Was he faithful to them ? Did he sacrifice ease for them, or show them the sacred examples of religion and honour? Heaven gave the Great P^nglish Prodigal no such good fortune. Peel proposed to make a baronet of Southey ; and to this advancement the King agreed. The poet nobly rejected the offered promotion. " 1 have," he wrote, " a pension of 200/. a year, conferred upon me by the good offices of my old friend C. Wynn, and I have the laureateship. The salary of the latter was immediately appropriated, as far as it went, to a life-insurance for 3,000/., which, with an earlier insurance, is the sole provision I have made for my family. All beyond must be derived from my own industry. Writing for a livelihood, a livelihood is all that I have gained; for, having also something better in view, and never, therefore, having courted popularity, nor written for the mere sake of gain, it has not been possible for me to lay by anything. Last year, for the first time in my life, I was provided with a year's expenditure beforehand. This exposition may show how unbecoming and unwise it would be to accept the rank which, so greatly to my honour, you have solicited for me." How noble his poverty is, compared to the wealth of his m.aster? GEORGE THE FOURTH. 127 His acceptance even of a pension was made the object of his opponents' satire : but think of tlie merit and modesty of this State pensioner ; and that other enormous drawer of pubHc money, who receives 100,000/. a year, and comes to ParHament with a request for 650,000/. more ! Another true knight of those days was Cuthbert ColHngwood; and I think, since heaven made gentlemen, there is no record of a better one than that. Of brighter deeds, I grant you, we may read performed by others ; but where of a nobler, kinder, more beautiful life of duty, of a gentler, truer heart? Beyond dazzle of success and blaze of genius, I fancy shining a hundred and a hundred times higher, the sublime purity of Ccllingwood's gentle glory. His heroism stirs British hearts when we recall it. His love, and goodness, and piety make one thrill with happy emotion. As one reads of him and his great comrade going into the victory with which their names are immortally connected, how the old English word comes up, and that old English feeling of Avhat I should like to call Christian honour ! What gentlemen they were, what great hearts they had ! "We can, my dear Coll," writes Nelson to him, "have no little jealousies ; we have only one great object in view, — that of meeting the enemy, and getting a glorious peace for our country.*' At Trafalgar, when the " Royal Sovereign " was pressing alone into the midst of the combined weets, Lord Nelson said to Captain Blackwood : " See how that noble fellow, Collingwood, takes his ship into action ! How I envy him ! " The very same throb and impulse of heroic generosity was beating in Collingwood's honest bosom. As he led into the fight, he said : " What would Nelson give to be here ! " After the action of the ist of June, he writes : — " We cruised for a few days, like disappointed people looking for what they could not find, imtil the mor?iing of little Sarah's birthday, between eight and nine o'clock, when the French fleet, of twenty-five sail of the line, was discovered to windward. We chased them, and they bore down within about five miles of us. The night was spent in watching and 128 THE FOUR GEORGES, preparation for the succeeding day ; and many a blessing did I send torth to my Sarah, lest I should never bless her more. At dawn, we made our approach on the enemy, then drew up, dressed our ranks, and it was about eight when the admiral made the signal for each ship to engage her opponent, and bring her to close action ; and then down we went under a crowd of sail, and in a manner that would have animated the coldest heart, and struck terror into the most intrepid enemy. The ship we were to engage was two ahead of the French admiral, so we had to go through his fire and that of two ships next to him, and received all their broadsides two or three times, before we fired a gun. It was then near ten o'clock. I observed to the admiral, that about that time our wives were going to church, but that I thought the peal we should ring about the Frenchman's ear would outdo their parish bells." There are no words to tell what the heart feels in reading the simple phrases of such a hero. Here is victory and courage, but love sublimer and superior. Here is a Christian soldier spending the night before battle in watching and preparing for the succeeding day, thinking of his dearest home, and sending many blessings forth to his Sarah, " lest he should never bless her more." Who would not say Amen to his supplication ? It was a benediction to his country — the prayer of that intrepid loving heart. We have spoken of a good soldier and good men of letters as specimens of English gentlemen of the age just past : may we not also — many of my elder hearers, I am sure, have read, and fondly remember his delightful story — speak of a good divine, and mention Reginald Heber as one of the best of English gentlemen? The charming poet, the happy possessor of all sorts of gifts and accom- plishments, birth, wit, fame, high character, competence — he was the beloved parish priest in his own home of Hoderel, " counselling his people in their troubles, advising them in their difficulties, comforting them in distress, kneeling often at their sick beds at the hazard of his own life ; exhorting, encouraging where there was need ; where there was strife the peace-maker ; where there was want the free giver.'* GEORGE THE FOURTH. 129 When the Indian bishopric was offered to him he refused at hrst ; but after communing with himself (and committing his case to the quarter whither such pious men are wont to carry their doubts), he withdrew his refusal, and prepared himself for his mission and to leave his beloved parish. "Little children, love one another, and forgive one another," were the last sacred words he said to his weeping people. He parted with them, knowing, perhaps, he should see them no more. Like those other good men of whom we have just spoken, love and duty were his life's aim. Happy he, happy they who were so gloriously faithful to both ! He writes to his wife those charming lines on his journey : — ** If thou, my love, wert by my side, my babies at my knee, IIow gladly would our pinnace glide o'er Gunga's mimic sea ! I miss thee at the dawning gray, when, on our deck reclined, In careless ease my limbs I lay and woo the cooler wind, I miss thee when by Gunga's stream my twilight steps I guide ; But most beneath the lamp's pale beam I miss thee by my side. I spread my books, my pencil try, the lingering noon to cheer ; But miss thy kind approving eye, thy meek attentive ear. But when of morn and eve the star beholds me on my knee, I feel, though thou art distant far, thy prayers ascend for me. Then on ! then on ! where duty leads my course be onward still, — O'er broad Hindostan's sultry meads, o'er bleak Almorah's hill. That course nor Delhi's kingly gates, nor wild Malwah detain, For sweet the bliss us both awaits by yonder western main. Thy towers, Bombay, gleam bright, they say, across the dark blue sea : But ne'er were hearts so blithe and gay as there shall meet in thee ! " Is it not CoUingwood and Sarah, and Southey and Edith ? His affection is part of his life. What were life without it ? \\'ithout love, I can fancy no gentleman. How touching is a remark Heber makes in his " Travels through India," that on inquiring of the natives at a town, which of the governors of India stood highest in the opinion of the people, he found that, though Lord Wellesley and Warren Hastings were 9 I30 THE FOUR GEORGES. honoured as the two greatest men who had ever ruled this Dart of the world, the people spoke with chief affection of Judge Cleave- land, who had died, aged twenty-nine, in 1784, The people have built a monument over him, and still hold a religious feast in his memory. So does his own country still tend with a heart's regard the memory of the gentle Heber. And Cleaveland died in 1784, and is still loved by the heathen, is he? Why, that year 1784 was remarkable in the life of our friend the First Gentleman of Europe. Do you not know that he was twenty-one in that year, and opened Carlton House with a grand ball to the nobility and gentry, and doubtless wore that lovely pink coat which we have described. I was eager to read about the ball, and looked to the old magazines for information. The entertainment took place on the loth February. In the European Magazine of March, 1784, I came straightway upon it: — " The alterations at Carlton House being finished, we lay before our readers a description of the state apartments as they appeared on the loth instant, when H.R.H. gave a grand ball to the principal nobility and gentry The entrance to the state room fills the mind with an inexpressible idea of greatness and splendour. " The state chair is of a gold frame, covered with crimson damask ; on each corner of the feet is a lion's head, expressive of fortitude and strength ; the feet of the chair have serpents twining round them, to denote wisdom. Facing the throne, appears the helmet of Minerva ; and over the windows, glory is represented by Saint George with a superb gloria. " But the saloon may be styled the chef d'eenvre, and in every ornament discovers great invention. It is hung with a figured lemon satin. The window-curtains, sofas, and chairs are of the same colour. The ceiling is ornamented with emblematical paint- ings, representing the Graces and Muses, together with Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, and Paris. Two ormolu chandeliers are placed here. It is impossible by expression to do justice to the extra- ordinary workmanship, as well as design, of the ornaments. They GEORGE THE EOURTH. 131 each consist of a palm, branching out in five directions for the reception of hghts. A beautiful figure of a rural n}mph is repre- Gented entwining the stems of the tree uith wreaths of llowers. In the centre of the room is a rich chandeher. To see this apartment dans sou plus hcau jou)% it should be viewed in the glass over the chimney-piece. The range of apartments from the saloon to the ball-room, when the doors are open, formed one of the grandest spectacles that ever was beheld." In the Gentleman's Magazine, for the \'ery same month and year — March, 1784 — is an account of another festival, in which another great gentleman of English extraction is represented as taking a principal share : — "According to order, H.E. the Commander-in-Chief was admitted to a public audience of Congress ; and, being seated, the President, after a pause, informed him that the United States assembled were ready to receive his communications. Whereupon he arose, and spoke as follows : — " ' Mr. President, — The great events on which my resignation depended having at length taken place, I present myself before Congress to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the service of my country. " ' Happy in the confirmation of our independence and sovereignty, I resign the appointment I accepted with diffidence ; which, however, was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our cause, the support of the supreme power of the nation, and the patronage of Heaven. I close this last act of my official life, by commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who have the superintendence of them to His holy keeping. Having finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action ; and, bidding an affectionate fare- well to this august body, under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my commission and take my leave of the employments of my public life.' To which the President replied : — 132 THE FOUR GEORGES. " ' Sir, having defended the standard of Hberty in the New World, having taught a lesson useful to those who inflict and those who feel oppression, you retire with the blessings of your fellow- citizens ; though the glory of your virtues will not terminate with your military command, but will descend to remotest ages.' " Which was the most splendid spectacle ever witnessed ; — the opening feast of Prince George in London, or the resignation of Washington ? Which is the noble character for after ages to admire ; — yon fribble dancing in lace and spangles, or yonder hero who sheathes his sword after a life of spotless honour, a purity unre- proached, a courage indomitable, and a consummate victory ? Which of these is the true gentleman ? What is it to be a gentle- man? Is it to have lofty aims, to lead a pure life, to keep your honour virgin ; to have the esteem of your fellow-citizens, and the love of your fireside ; to bear good fortune meekly ; to suffer evil wdth constancy ; and through evil or good to maintain truth always ? Show me the happy man whose life exhibits these qualities, and him we will salute as gentleman, whatever his rank may be ; show me the prince who possesses them, and he may be sure of our love and loyalty. /^The heart of Britain still beats kindly for George III., — not because he was wise and just, but because he was pure in life, honest in intent, and because according to his lights he worshipped heaven. I I think we acknowledge in the inheritrix of his sceptre, a wiser rule, and a life as honourable and pure ; and I am sure the future painter of our manners will pay a willing allegiance to that good life, and be loyal to the memory of that unsullied virtue. THE END OF " THE FOUR GEORQES. THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. SWIFT. THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 5 WIFT. IN treating of the English humourists of the past age, it is of the men and of their Hves, rather than of their books, that I ask ^ " permission to speak to you ; and' in doing so, you are aware that I cannot hope to entertain you with a merely humourous or facetious story. Harlequin without his mask is known to present a very sober countenance, and was himself, the story goes, the melancholy patient whom the Doctor advised to go and see Harlequin '•' — a man full of cares and perplexities like the rest of us, whose Self must always be serious to him, under whatever mask or disguise or uniform he presents it to the public. And as all of you here must needs be grave when you think of your own past and present, you will not look to find, in the histories of those whose lives and feelings I am going to try and describe to you, a story that is otherwise than serious, and often very sad. If Humour only meant laughter, you would scarcely feel more interest about humourous writers than about the private life of poor Harlequin just mentioned, who possesses in common with these the power of making you laugh. But * The anecdote is frequently told of our performer Rich. 136 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. the men regarding whose Hves and stories your kind presence here shows that you have curiosity and sympathy, appeal to a great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of ridicule. The humourous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness — your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture — your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the. best of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks, and feels the truth best, we regard him, esteem him — sometimes love him. And, as his business is to mark other people's lives and peculiarities, we moralize upon his life when he is gone — and yesterday's preacher becomes the text for to-day's sermon. Of English parents, and of a good English family of clerg}^men,* Swift was born in Dublin in 1667, seven months after the death of his father, who had come to practise there as a lawyer. The boy went to school at Kilkenny, and afterwards to Trinity College, Dublin, where he got a degree with difficulty, and was wild, and witty, and poor. In 1688, by the recommendation of his mother, Swift was received into the family of Sir William Temple, who had known * He was from a younger branch of the Swifts of Yorkshire. His grandfather, the Rev. Tliomas Swift, vicar of Goodrich, in Herefordshire, suffered for his loyalty in Charles I.'s time. That gentleman married Elizabeth Dryden, a member of the family of the poet. Sir Walter Scott gives, with his characteristic minuteness in such points, the exact relationship between these famous men. Swift was " the son of Dryden's second cousin." Swift, too, was the enemy of Dryden's reputa- tion. Witness the "Battle of the Books:" — "The difference was greatest among the horse," says he of the moderns, "where every private trooper pretended to the command, from Tasso and Milton to Dryden and Withers." And in "Poetry, a Rhapsody," he advises the poetaster to — ** Read all the Prefaces of Diyden, For these our critics much confide in, Though merely writ, at first for filling, To raise the volume's price a shilling." ** Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet," was the phrase of Dryden to his kins- man, which reixiained alive in a memory tenacious of such matters. SWIFT. 137 Mrs. Swift in Ireland. He left his patron in 1694, and the next year took orders in Dublin. But he threw up the small Irish prefer- ment which he got and returned to Temple, in whose family he remained until Sir William's death in 1699. His hopes of advance- ment in England failing, Swift returned to Ireland, and took the living of Laracor. Hither he invited Hester Johnson,'-' Temple's natural daughter, with whom he had contracted a tender friendship, while they were both dependants of Temple's. And with an occa- sional visit to England, Swift now passed nine years at home. In 1709 he came to England, and, with a brief visit to Ireland, during which he took possession of his deanery of St. Patrick, he now passed five years in England, taking the most distinguished part in the political transactions which terminated with the death of Queen Anne. After her death, his party disgraced, and his hopes of ambition over. Swift returned to Dublin, where he remained twelve years. In this time he wrote the famous " Drapier's Letters " and " Gulliver's Travels." He married Hester Johnson, Stella, and buried Esther Vanhomrigh, Vanessa, who had followed him to Ireland from London, where she had contracted a violent passion for him. In 1726 and 1727 Swift was in England, which he quitted for the last time on hearing of his wife's illness. Stella died in January, 1728, and Swift not until 1745, having passed the last five of the seventy- eight years of his life with an impaired intellect and keepers to watch him.f You know, of course, that Swift has had many biographers ; his life has been told by the kindest and most good-natured of men, * '* jSIiss Hetty " she was called in the family — where her face, and her dress, and Sir William's treatment of her, all made the real fact about her birth plain enough. Sir William left her a thousand pounds. t Sometimes, during his mental affliction, he continued walking about the house for many consecutive hours ; sometimes he remained in a kind of torpor. At times, he would seem to struggle to bring into distinct consciousness, and shape into expression, the intellect that lay smothering under gloomy obstruction in him. A pier-glass falling by accident, nearly fell on him. He said he wished it had ! He once repeated slowly several times, " I am what I am." The last thing he wrote 1 38 ENGLISH HUMO URISTS. Scott, who admires but can't bring himself to love him ; and by stout old Johnson,* who, forced to admit him into the company of poets, receives the famous Irishman, and takes off his hat to him with a bow of surly recognition, scans him from head to foot, and passes over to the other side of the street. Dr. Wilde of Dublin, f who has written a most interesting volume on the closing years of Swift's life, calls Johnson " the most malignant of his biographers : " it is not easy for an English critic to please Irishmen — perhaps to try and was an epigram on the building of a magazine for arms and stores, which was pointed out to him as he went abroad during his mental disease : — " Behold a proof of Irish sense : Here Irish wit is seen : When nothing's left that's worth defence, They build a magazine I " y ^ * Besides these famous books of Scott's and Johnson's, there is a copious ^'Life" by Thomas Sheridan (Dr. Johnson's "Sherry"), father of Richard Brinsley, and son of that good-natured, clever Irish Dr. Thomas Sheridan, / Swift's intimate, who lost his chaplaii^cy by so unluckily choosing for a text on the King's birthday, " Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof ! " Not to mention less important works, there is also the " Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift," by that polite and dignified writer, the Earl of Orrery. His lordship is said to have striven for literary renown, chiefly that he might make up for the slight passed on him by his father, who left his library away from him. It is to be feared that the ink he used to wash out that stain only made it look bigger. He had, however, known Swift, and corresponded with people who knew him. His v/ork (which appeared in 1751) provoked a good deal of controversy, calling out, among other bj-ochurcsy the interesting " Observations on Lord Orrery's Remarks," &c., of Dr. Delany. ^ ^ \ Dr. Wilde's book was written on the occasion of the remains of wSwift and Stella being brought to the light of day — a thing which happened in 1835, when certain works going on in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, afforded an opportunity of their being examined. One hears with surprise of these skulls "going the rounds" of houses, and being made the objects of dilettante curiosity. The larynx of Swift was actually carried off I Phrenologists had a low opinion of his intellect from the observations they took. Dr. Wilde traces the symptoms of ill health in Swift, as detailed in his writings from time to time. He observes, likewise, that the skull gave evidence of " diseased action " of the brain during life — such as would be produced by an increasing tendency to "cerebral congestion." SWIFT. 139 jjlease them. And yet Johnson truly admires Swift : Johnson does not quarrel with Swift's change of politics, or doubt his sincerity of religion : about the famous Stella and Vanessa controversy the Doctor does not bear very hardly on Swift. But he could not give the Dean that honest hand of his ; the stout old man puts it into his breast, and moves oft" from him.* Would we have liked to live with him? That is a question which, in dealing with these people's works, and thinking of their lives and peculiarities, every reader of biographies must put to himself. Would you have liked to be a friend of the great Dean ? I should like to have been Shakspeare's shoeblack — just to have lived in his house, just to have worshipped him — to have run on his errands, and seen that sweet serene face. I should like, as a young man, to have lived on Fielding's staircase in the Temple, and after helping him up to bed perhaps, and opening his door with his latch-key, to have shaken hands with him in the morning, and heard him talk and crack jokes over his breakfast and his mug of small beer. Who would not give something to pass a night at the club with Johnson, and Cloldsmith, and James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck ? The charm of Addison's companionship and conversation has passed to us by fond tradition — but Swift ? If you had been his inferior in parts (and that, with a great respect for all persons present, I fear is only very likely), his equal in mere social station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you ; if, undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would have quailed before you,t and not had the * "He [Dr. Johnson] seemed to me to have an unaccountable prejudice ai^ainst Swift ; for I once took the lil:)erty to ask him if Swift had personally oflcnded him, and he told me he had not. " — Boswell's Tour to the Hebrides. t Few men, to be sure, dared this experiment, but yet their success was encou- raging. One gentleman made a point of asking the Dean whether his uncle Godwin had not given him his education. Swift, who hated that subject cordially, and, indeed, cared little for his kindred, said, sternly, " Yes ; he gave me the education of a dog." " Then, sir," cried the other, striking his fist on the table, "you have not the gratitude of a dog ! " Other occasions there were when a bold face gave the Dean pause, even after I40 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. pluck to reply, and gone home, and years after written a foul epigram about you — watched for you in a sewer, and come out to assail you with a coward's blow and a dirty bludgeon. If you had been a lord with a blue riband, who flattered his vanity, or could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company in the world. He would have been so manly, so sarcastic, so bright, odd, and original, that you might think he had no object in view but the indulgence of his humour, and that he was ^he most reckless, simple creature in the world. How he would have torn your enemies to pieces for you ! and made fun of the Opposition ! His servility was so boisterous that it looked like independence ; * he would have done your errands, but with the air of patronizing you, and after fighting your battles, masked, in the street or the press, would have kept on his hat before your wife and daughters in the drawing-room, content to take that sort of pay for his tremendous services as a bravo, f his Irish almost-royal position was established. But he brought himself into greater danger on a certain occasion, and the amusing circumstances may be once more repeated here. He had unsparingly lashed the notable Dublin lawyer, Mr. Serjeant Bettesworth — " Thus at the bar, the booby Bettesworth, Though half-a-crown o'er-pays his sweat's worth. Who knows in law nor text nor margent, Calls Singleton his brother-serjeant ! " The Serjeant, it is said, swore to have his life. He presented himself at the deanery. The Dean asked his name. " Sir, I am Serjeant Bett-es-worth." "/// what rcghnejit, pray ? " asked Swift. A guard of volunteers formed themselves to defend the Dean at this time. * " But, my Hamilton, I will never hide the freedom of my sentiments from you. I am much inclined to believe that the temper of my friend Swift might occasion his English friends to wish him happily and properly promoted at a distance. His spirit, for I would give it the softest name, was ever untractable. The motions of his genius were often ir:egalar. He assumed more the air of a patron than of a friend. He affected rather to dictate than advise." — Orrery. t ". . . . Ah anecdote, which, though only told by Mrs. Pilkington, is well attested, bears, that the last time he was in London he went to dine with the Earl of Burlington, who was but newly married. The Earl, it is supposed, being SJVIFT. 141 He says as much himself in one of his letters to Bolingbroke: — '' All my endeavours to distinguish myself were only for want of a great title and fortune, that I might be used like a lord by those who have an opinion of my parts ; whether right or wrong is no great matter. And so the reputation of wit and great learning docs the office of a blue riband or a coach and six." * Could there be a greater candour? It is an outlaw, who says, " These are my brains ; with these I'll win titles and compete with fortune. These are my bullets; these I'll turn into gold;" and he hears the sound of coaches and six, takes the road like Macheath, and makes society stand and deliver. They are all on their knees before him. Down go my lord bishop's apron, and his Grace's blue riband, and my lady's brocade petticoat in the mud. He eases the one of a living, the other of a patent place, the third of a little snug willing to have a little diversion, did not introduce him to his lady nor mention his name. After dinner said the Dean, ' Lady Burlington, I hear you can sing ; sing me a song.' The lady looked on this unceremonious manner of asking a favour with distaste, and positively refused. He said, ' She should sing, or he would make her. Why, madam, I suppose you take me for one of your poor English hedge-parsons ; sing when I bid you.' As the Earl did nothing but laugh at this freedom, the lady was so vexed that she burst into tears and retired. His first compliment to her when he saw her again was, ' Pray, madam, are you as proud and ill natured now as when I saw you last ? ' To which she answered with great good-humour, ' No, Mr. Dean ; I'll sing for you if you please.' From which time he conceived a great esteem for her. " — Scott's Z//d'. ". . . . He had not the least tincture of vanity in his conversation. He was, perhaps, as he said him- self, too proud to be vain. When he was polite, it was in a manner entirely his own. In his friendships he was constant and undisguised. He was the same in his enmities. " — Orrery. * "I make no figure but at court, where I affect to turn from a lord to the meanest of my acquaintances." — Journal to Stella. *' I am plagued with bad authors, verse and prose, who send me their books and poems, the vilest I ever saw ; but I have given their names to my man, never to let them see me." — Journal to Stella. The following curious paragraph illustrates the life of a courtier : — "Did I ever tell you that the Lord Treasurer hears ill with the left ear, just as I do ? . . . . I dare not tell him that I am so, for fear he should think that I counterfeited to make my court ! " — Journal to Stella. 142 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. post about the Court, and gives them over to followers of his own. The great prize has not come yet. The coach with the mitre and crosier in it, which he intends to have for his share, has been delayed on the way from St. James's ; and he waits and waits until nightfall, when his runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different road, and escaped him. So he fires his pistols into the air with a curse, and rides away into his own country.* * The war of pamphlets was carried on fiercely on one side and the other : and the Whig attacks made the Ministry Swift served very sore. Bolingbroke laid hold of several of the Opposition pamphleteers, and bewails their " factitiousness " in the following letter : — "Bolingbroke to the Earl of Strafford. " Whitehall, July 2yd, 1^12. "It is a melancholy consideration that the laws of our country are too weak to punish effectually those factitious scribblers, who presume to blacken the brightest characters, and to give even scurrilous language to those who are in the first degrees of honour. This, my lord, among others, is a symptom of the decayed condition of our Government, and serves to show how fatally we mistake licentiousness for liberty. All I could do was to take up Hart, the printer, to send him to Newgate, and to bind him over upon bail to be prosecuted ; this I have done ; and if I can arrive at legal proof against the author, Ridpath, he shall have the same treatment." Swift was not behind his illustrious friend in this virtuous indignation. In tlie history of the four last years of the Queen, the Dean speaks in the most edifying manner of the licentiousness of the press and the abusive language of the other party : — "It must be acknowledged that the bad practices of printers have been such as to deserve the severest animadversion from the public The adverse party, full of rage and leisure since their fall, and unanimous in their cause, employ a set of writers by subscription, who are well versed in all the topics of defamation, and have a style and genius levelled to the generality of their readers However, the mischiefs of the press were too exorbitant to be cured by such a remedy as a tax upon small papers, and a bill for a much more effectual regulation of it was brought into the House of Commons, but so late in the session that there was no time to pass it, for there always appeared an unwillingness to cramp over- much the liberty of the press." But to a clause in the proposed bill, that the names of authors should be set to every printed book, pamphlet or paper, his Reverence objects altogether ; for, says he, "besides the objection to this clause from the practice of pious men, who, in publishing excellent writings for the service of religion, have chosen, out of an himble Christian spirit, to cojiceal their names, \\. is certain that all persons of true SWIFT. 143 Swift's seems to me to be as good a name to point a moral or adorn a tale of ambition, as any hero's that ever lived and failed. But we must remember that the morality was lax — that other gentle- men besides himself took the road in his day — that public society was in a strange disordered condition, and tlie State was ravaged by odier condottieri. The Boyne was being fought and won, and lost — the bells rung in William's victory, in the very same tone with which they would have pealed for James's. Men were loose upon politics, and had to shift for themselves. They, as well as old beliefs and institutions, had lost their moorings and gone adrift in the storm. As in the South Sea Bubble, almost everybody gambled ; as in the Railway mania — not many centuries ago — almost every one took his unlucky share : a man of that time, of the vast talents and ambition of Swift, could scarce do otherwise than grasp at his prize, and make his spring at his opportunity. His bitterness, his scorn, his rage, his genius or knowledge have an invincible modesty and suspicion of tlieniselves upon first sending their thoughts into the world." This " invincible modesty " was no doubt the sole reason which induced the Dean to keep the secret of the " Drapier's Letters " and a hundred humble Christian works of which he was the author. As for the Opposition, the Doctor was for dealing severely with them : he writes to Stella : Journal, Letter XIX. ^'Loudon, Marc/i 2^th, 1710-11. " . . . . We have let Guiscard be buried at last, after showing him pickled in a trough this fortnight for twopence a piece ; and the fellow that showed would point to his body and say, * See, gentlemen, this is the wound that was given him by his Grace the Duke of Onnond ;' and, ' This is the wound,' &c. ; and then the show was over, and another set of rabble came in. 'Tis hard that our laws would not suffer us to hang his body in chains, because he was not tried ; and in the eye of the law every man is innocent till then " Journal. Letter XXVIL ''Loudon, Jidy 2^i/i, 171 1. " I was this aftenioon with Mr. Secretary at his office, and helped to hinder a man of his pardon, who is condemned for a rape. The Under Secretary was willing to save him ; but I told the Secretary he could not pardon him without i. favourable report from the Judge ; besides, he was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue, and deserved hanging for something else, and so he shall swing." V 144 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. subsequent misanthropy, are ascribed by some panegyrists to a deliberate conviction of mankind's unworthiness, and a desire to amend them by castigating. His youth was bitter, as that of a great genius bound down by ignoble ties, and powerless in a mean depend- ence ; his age was bitter," like that of a great genius that had fought the battle and nearly won it, and lost it, and thought of it afterwards writhing in a lonely exile. A man may attribute to the gods, if he likes, what is caused by his own fury, or disappointment, or self-will. What public man — what statesman projecting a coup — what king determined on an invasion of his neighbour — what satirist meditating an onslaught on society or an individual, can't give a pretext for his move ? There was a French general the other day who proposed to march into this country and put it to sack and pillage, in revenge for humanity outraged by our conduct at Copenhagen : there is always some excuse for men of the aggressive turn. They are of their nature warlike, predatory, eager for fight, plunder, dominion. f As fierce a beak and talon as ever struck — as strong a wing as ever beat, belonged to Swift. I am glad, for one, that fate wrested the prey out of his claws, and cut his wings and chained him. One can gaze, and not without awe and pity, at the lonely eagle chained behind the bars. That Swift was born at No. 7, Hoey's Court, Dublin, on the 30th November, 1667, is a certain fact, of which nobody will deny the sister island the honour and glory; but, it seems to me, he was no more an Irishman than a man born of English parents at Calcutta is a Hindoo. J Goldsmith was an Irishman, and always an * It was his constant practice to keep his birthday as a day of mourning. t "These devils of Grub Street rogues, that write the Flying Post and Medley in one paper, will not be quiet. They are always mauling Lord Treasurer, Lord Bolingbroke, and me. We have the dog under prosecution, but Bolingbroke is not active enough ; but I hope to swinge him. He is a Scotch rogue, one Ridpath. They get out upon bail, and write on. We take them again, and get fresh bail ; so it goes round." — Journal lo Stella. X Swift was by no means inclined to forget such considerations ; and his SJJVFT. 145 Irishman : Steele was an Irishman, and always an Irishman : Swift's heart was English and in England, his habits English, his logic eminently P^nglish ; his statement is elaborately simple ; he shuns tropes and metaphors, and uses his ideas and words with a wise thrift and economy, as he used his money : with which he could be generous and splendid upon great occasions, but which he husbanded when there was no need to spend it. He never indulges in needless extravagance of rhetoric, lavish epithets, profuse imager}'. He lays his opinion before you with a grave simplicity and a perfect neatness.* English birth makes its mark, strikingly enough, every now and then in his writings. Thus in a letter to Pope (Scott's S^vift, vol. xix, p. 97), he says : — " We have had your volume of letters Some of those who highly value yon, and a few who knew you personally, are grieved to tind you make no distinction between the English gentry of this kingdom, and the savage old Irish (who are only the vulgar, and some gentlemen who live in the Irish parts of the kingdom) ; but the English colonies, who are three parts in four, are much more civilized than many counties in England, and speak better English, and are much better bred." And again, in the fourth Drapier's Letter, we have the following : — "A short paper, printed at Bristol, and reprinted here, reports Mr. Wood to say * that he wonders at the impudence and insolence of the Irish in refusing his coin.' When, by the way, it is the true English people of Ireland who refuse it, although we take it for granted that the Irish will do so too whenever they are asked." — ScoTT's ^tc//?, vol. vi. p. 453. He goes further, in a good-humoured satirical paper, "On Barbarous Denomi- nations in Ireland," where (after abusing, as he was wont, the Scotch cadence, as well as expression,) he advances to the " /;-/>// brogue^'''' and speaking of the "censure" which it brings down, says : — "And what is yet worse, it is too well known that the bad consequence of this opinion affects those among us who are not the least liable to such reproaches farther than the misfortune of being born in Ireland, although of English parents, and whose education has been chiefly in that kingdom." — Ibid. vol. vii. p. 149. But, indeed, if we are to make anything of Race at all, we must call that man an Englishman whose father comes from an old Yorkshire family, and his mother from an old Leicestershire one ! * " The style of his conversation was very much of a piece with that of his writings, concise and clear and strong. Being one day at a .Sheriffs feast, who amongst ether toasts called out to him, * Mr. Dean, The Trade of Ireland ! ' he answered quick : ' Sir, I drink no memories ! ' , . . . " Happening to be in company with a petulant young man who prided himself on saying pert things . . . and who cried out-^' You must know, Mr. Dean, that ^9 10 146 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. Dreading ridicule too, as a man of his humour — above all an English- man of his humour — certainly would, he is afraid to use the poetical power which he really possessed ; one often fancies in reading him that he dares not be eloquent when he might ; that he does not speak above his voice, as it were, and the tone of society. His initiation into poHtics, his knowledge of business, his know- ledge of polite life, his acquaintance with literature even, which he could not have pursued very sedulously during that reckless career at Dublin, Swift got under the roof of Sir William Temple. He was fond of telling in after life what quantities of books he devoured there, and how King William taught him to cut asparagus in the Dutch fashion. It was at Shene and at Moor Park, with a salary of twenty pounds and a dinner at the upper servants' table, that this great and lonely Swift passed a ten years' apprenticeship — wore a cassock that was only not a livery — bent down a knee as proud as Lucifer's to supplicate my lady's good graces, or run on his honour's errands.* It was here, as he was writing at Temple's table, or following his patron's walk, that he saw and heard the men who had governed the great world — measured himself with them, looking up from his silent corner, gauged their brains, weighed their wits, turned them, and tried them, and marked them. Ah ! what platitudes he must have heard ! what feeble jokes ! what pompous commonplaces ! what small men they must have seemed under those enormous periwigs, to the swarthy, uncouth, silent Irish secretary. I wonder I set up for a wit ? ' * Do you so ? ' says the Dean. • Take my advice, and sit down again ! ' "At another time, being in company, where a lady whisking her long train [long trains were then in fashion] swept down a fine fiddle and broke it ; Swift cried out — * Mantua vae miserse nimium vicina Cremonse ! ' " — Dr. Delany : Obsei'vations upo7i Lord Orrery's '■^Remarks, ^c. on Simft."^ London, 1754. * " Don't you remember how I used to be in pain when Sir William Temple would look cold and out of humour for three or four days, and I used to suspect a hundred reasons ? I have plucked up my spirits since then, faith : he spoiled a fine gentleman." — Journal to Stelia. SIVIFT. M7 whether it ever struck Temple, tliat that Irishman was his master? I suppose that dismal conviction did not present itself under the ambrosial wig, or Temple could never have lived with Swift. Swift sickened, rebelled, left the service — ate humble pie and came back again ; and so for ten years went on, gathering learning, swallowing scorn, and submitting with a stealthy rage to his fortune. Temple's style is the perfection of practised and easy good- breeding. If he does not penetrate very deeply into a subject, he professes a very gentlemanly acquaintance with it ; if he makes rather a j)arade of Latin, it was the custom of his day, as it was the custom for a gentleman to envelope his head in a periwig and his hands in lace ruffles. If he wears buckles and square-toed shoes, he steps in them with a consummate grace, and you never hear their creak, or find them treading upon any lady's train or any rival's heels in the Court crowd. When that grows too hot or too agitated for him, he politely leaves it. He retires to his retreat of Shene or Moor Park ; and lets the King's party and the Prince of Orange's party battle it out among themselves. He reveres the Sovereign (and no man perhaps ever testified to his loyalty by so elegant a bow) ; he admires the Prince of Orange ; but there is one person whose ease and comfort he loves more than all the princes in Chistendom, and that valuable member of society is himself Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat ; between his study-chair and his tulip- beds,* clipping his apricots and pruning his essays, — the statesman, * ". . . The Epicureans were more intelligible in their notion, and fortunate in their expression, when they placed a man's happiness in the tranquillity of his mind and indolence of body ; for while we are composed of both, 1 doubt both must have a share in the good or ill we feel. As men of several languages say the same things in very different words, so in several ages, countries, constitutions of laws and religion, the same thing seems to be meant by very different expressions : what is called by the Stoics apathy, or dispassion ; by the sceptics, indisturbance ; by the Molinists, quietism ; by common men, peace of conscience, — seems all to mean but great tranquillity of mind. . . . For this reason Epicurus passed his life wholly in his garden ; there he studied, there he exercised, there he taught his philosophy ; and, indeed, no other sort of abode seems to contribute so much to both the tranquillity of mind and indolence of body, which he made his chief ends^ 148 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. the ambassador no more; but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the nne gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty ; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse ; or dallies by the south wall with the ruddy nymph of gardens. Temple seems to have received and exacted a prodigious deal of veneration from his household, and to have been coaxed, and warmed, and cuddled by the people round about him, as delicately as any of the plants which he loved. When he fell ill in 1693, the household was aghast at his indisposition : mild Dorothea his wife, the best companion of the best of men — " Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great, Trembling beheld the doubtful hand of fate." As for Dorinda, his sister, — " Those who would grief describe, might come and trace Its watery footsteps in Dorinda's face. To see her weep, joy every face forsook, And grief flung sables on each menial look. The humble tribe mourned for the quickening soul, That furnished spirit and motion through the whole." The sweetness of the air, the pleasantness of smell, the verdure of plants, the cleanness and lightness of food, the exercise of working or walking ; but, above all, the exemption from cares and solicitude, seem equally to favour and improve both contemplation and health, the enjoyment of sense and imagination, and thereby the quiet and ease both of the body and mind. . . . Where Paradise was, has been much debated, and little agreed ; but what sort of place is meant by it may perhaps easier be conjectured. It seems to have been a Persian word, since Xenophon and other Greek authors mention it as what was much in use and delight among the kings of those eastern countries. Strabo describing Jericho : ' Ibi est palmetum, cui immixtae sunt etiam alias stiq^es hortenses, locus ferax palmis abundans, spatio stadiorum centum, totus irriguus : ibi est Regis Balsami paradisus.'" — Essay on Gardens. In the same famous essay Temple speaks of a friend, whose conduct and prudence he characteristically admires : ". . . . I thought it very prudent in a gentleman of my friends in Stafford- shire, who is a great lover of his garden, to pretend no higher, though his soil be rood enough, than to the perfection of plums ; and in these (by bestowing south walls upon them) he has very well succeeded, which he could never have done in attempts upon peaches and grapes ; and a good plu}7i is certainly better than an ill peach.'''' S IV I FT. T49 Isn't that line in which grief is described as putting tlic menials into a mourning livery, a fine image ? One of the menials wrote it, who did not like that Temple livery nor those twenty-pound wages. Cannot one fancy the uncouth young servitor, with downcast eyes, books and papers in hand, following at his honour's heels in tlie garden walk ; or taking his honour's orders as he stands by the great chair, where Sir William has the gout, and his feet all blistered with moxa ? When Sir William has the gout or scolds it must be hard work at the second table ; * the Irish secretary owned as much afterwards : and when he came to dinner, how he must have lashed and growled and torn the household with his gibes and * Swift's Thoughts on Hanging. ( Direct io)is to Sen-auts. ) "To grow old in the office of a footman is the highest of all indignities ; there- fore, when you find years coming on without hopes of a place at court, a command in the army, a succession to the stewardship, an employment in the revenue (wliich two last you cannot obtain without reading and writing), or running away with your master's niece or daughter, I directly advise you to go upon tlie road, which is the only post of honour left you : there you will meet many of your old comrades, and live a short life and a merry one, and make a figure at your exit, wherein I will give you some instructions. "The last advice I give you relates to your behaviour when you are going to be hanged : which, either for robbing your master, for housebreaking, or going upon the highway, or in a drunken quarrel by killing the first man you meet, may very probably be your lot, and is owing to one of these three qualities : either a love of good-fellowship, a generosity of mind, or too much vivacity of spirits. Your good behaviour on this article will concern your whole community : deny the fact with all solemnity of imprecations : a hundred of your brethren, if they can be admitted, will attend about the bar, and be ready upon demand to give you a character before the Court ; let nothing prevail on you to confess, but the promise of a pardon for discovering your comrades : but I suppose all this to be in vain ; for if you escape now, your fate will be the same another day. Get a speech to be written by the liest author of Newgate : some of your kind wenches will provide you with a holland shirt and white cap, crowned with a ci imson or black ribbon : take leave cheerfully of all your friends in Newgate : mount the cart with courage ; fall on your knees ; lift up your eyes ; hold a book in your hands, although you cannot read a word ; deny the fact at the gallows ! kiss and forgive the hangman, and so farewell ; you shall be buried ii; pomp at the charge of the fraternity : the surgeon shall not touch a limb of you ; and your fame shall continue until a successor of equal renown succeeds in your place. . . ."' ISO ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. scorn ! What would the steward say about the pride of them Irish schollards — and this one had got no great credit even at his Irish college, if the truth were known — and what a contempt his Excellency's own gentleman must have had for Parson Teague from Dublin. (The valets and chaplains were always at war. It is hard to say which Swift thought the more contemptible.) And what must have been the sadness, the sadness and terror, of the housekeeper's little daughter with the curling black ringlets and the sweet smiling face, when the secretary who teaches her to read and write, and whom she loves and reverences above all things — above mother, above mild Dorothea, above that tremendous Sir William in his square-toes and periwig, — when Afr. Siuift comes down from his master with rage in his heart, and has not a kind word even for little Hester Johnson ? Perhaps, for the Irish secretary, his Excellency's condescension was even more cruel than his frowns. Sir William 7Vould perpetually quote Latin and the ancient classics apropos of his gardens and his Dutch statues d.Xi^ plates-bandcs, and talk about Epicurus and Diogenes Laertius, Julius Caesar, Semiramis, and the gardens of the Hesperides, Mcecenas, Strabo describing Jericho, and the Assyrian kings. Apropos of beans, he would mention Pythagoras's precept to abstain from beans, and that this precept probably meant that wise men should abstain from public affairs. He is a placid Epicurean ; he is a Pytha- gorean philosopher ; he is a wise man — that is the deduction. Does not Swift think so? One can imagine the downcast eyes lifted up for a moment, and the flash of scorn which they emit. Swift's eyes .^ were as azure as the heavens ; Pope says nobly (as everything Pope S^ said and thought of his friend was good and noble), "His eyes are as azure as the heavens, and have a charming archness in them." And ^ one person in that household, that pompous, stately, kindly Moor **^^ Park, saw heaven nowhere else. But the Temple amenities and solemnities did not agree with Swift. He was half-killed with a surfeit of Shene pippins ; and in a garden-seat which he devised for himself at Moor Park, and where he devoured greedily the stock of books within his reach, he caught a SWIFT. 151 vertigo and deafness which punished and tormented him through hie. He could not bear the place or the servitude. Even in that poem of courtly condolence, from which we have (juoted a few lines of mock melancholy, he breaks out of the funereal procession with a mad shriek, as it were, and rushes away crying his own grief, cursing his own fate, foreboding madness, and forsaken by fortune, and even hope. I don't know anything more melancholy than the letter to Temple, in which, after having broke from his bondage, the poor wretch crouches piteously towards his cage again, and deprecates his master's anger. He asks for testimonials for orders. " The par- ticulars required of me are what relate to morals and learning ; and the reasons of quitting your honour's family — that is, whether the last was occasioned by any ill action. They are left entirely to your honour's mercy, though in the first I think I cannot reproacli myself for anything further than for infirmities. This is all I dare at present beg from your honour, under circumstances of life not worth your regard : what is left me to wish (next to the health and prosperity of your honour and family) is that Heaven would one day allow me the opportunity of leaving my acknowledgments at your feet. I beg my most humble duty and service be presented to my ladies, your honour's lady and sister." — Can prostration fall deeper? could a slave bow lower ? '^ * " He continued in Sir William Temple's house till the death of that great man." — Anecdotes of t/ie Family of S^vift, by the Dean. *' It has since pleased God to take tliis great and good person to himself" — Preface to Temples Works. On TsW. public occasions, Swift speaks of Sir William in the same tone. But the reader will better understand how acutely he remembered the indignities he suffered in his household, from the subjoined extracts from the Journal to Stella : — " I called at Mr. Secretary the other day, to see what the d ailed him on Sunday : I made him a very proper speech ; told him 1 observed he was much out of temper, that I did not expect he would tell me the cause, but would be glad to see he was in better ; and one thing I warned him of— never to ap]:)ear cold to me, for I would not be treated like a schoolboy ; that I had felt too much of that in my life already*' (nieaJiing Sir William Temple), «S:c. &c. — Jotirnal to Stella. "I am thinking what a veneration we used to have for Sir William Temple 153 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. Twenty years afterwards Bishop Kennet, describing the same man, says, " Dr. Swift came into the coffee-house and had a bow from everybody but me. When I came to the antechamber [at Court] to wait before prayers, Dr. Swift was the principal man of talk and business. He was soliciting the Earl of Arran to speak to his brother, the Duke of Ormond, to get a place for a clergyman. He was promising Mr. Thorold to undertake, with my Lord Treasurer, that he should obtain a salary of 200/. per annum as member of the English Church at Rotterdam. He stopped F. Gwynne, Esq., going into the Queen with the red bag, and told him aloud, he had something to say to him from my Lord Treasurer. He took out his gold watch, and telling the time of day, complained that it was very late. A gentleman said he was too fast. ' How can I help it,' says the Doctor, ' if the courtiers give me a watch that won't go right ? ' Then he instructed a young nobleman, that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a Papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into English, for which he would have them all subscribe : ' For,' says he, ' he shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.' '^ Lord Treasurer, after leaving the Queen, because lie might have been Secretary of State at fifty ; and here is a young fellow hardly thirty in that employment." — Ibid. " The Secretary is as easy with me as Mr. Addison was. I have often thought what a splutter Sir William Temple makes about being Secretary of State."' — Ibid. " Lord Treasurer has had an ugly fit of the rheumatism, but is now quite well. I was playing at one-and-thirty with him and his family the other night. He gave us all twelvepence apiece to begin with ; it put me in mind of Sir William Temple." — Ibid. " I thought I saw Jack Temple yuephew to Sir Willia})i\ and his wife pass by me to-day in their coach ; but I took no notice of them. I am glad I have wholly shaken off that family."— 6". to S. Sept. 1710. * "Swift must be allowed," says Dr. Johnson, "for a time, to have dictated the political opinions of the English nation. " A conversation on the Dean's pamphlets excited one of the Doctor's liveliest sallies. "One, in particular, praised his 'Conduct of the Allies.' — Johnson: * Sir, his ' Conduct of the Allies ' is a performance of very little ability. . . . Why, sir, Tom Davies might have written the * Conduct of the Allies ! ' " — BosWELL's Lije of Johnson. SWIFT. 153 came through the room, beckoning Dr. Swift to follow him, — both went off just before prayers." There's a little malice in the Bishop's "just before prayers." This picture of the great Dean seems a true one, and is harsh, though not altogether unpleasant. He was doing good, and to deserving men too, in the midst of these intrigues and triumphs. His journals and a thousand anecdotes of him relate his kind acts and rough manners. His hand was constantly stretched out to relieve an honest man — he was cautious about his money, but ready. — If you were in a strait would you like such a benefactor ? I think I would rather have had a potato and a friendly word from Goldsmith than have been beholden to the Dean for a guinea and a dinner.* He insulted a man as he served him, made women cry, guests look foolish, bullied unlucky friends, and flung his benefactions into poor men's faces. No ; the Dean was no Irishman — no Irishman ever gave but with a kind word and a kind heart. It is told, as if it were to Swift's credit, that the Dean of St. Patrick's performed his family devotions every morning regularly, but with such secrecy that the guests in his house were never in the least aware of the ceremony. There was no need surely why a church * " Whenever he fell into the company of any person for the first time, it was his custom to try their tempers and disposition by some abrupt question that bore the appearance of rudeness. If this were well taken, and answered with good humour, he afterwards made amends by his civilities. But if he saw any marks of resentment, from alarmed pride, vanity, or conceit, he dropped all further intercourse with the party. This will be illustrated by an anecdote of that sort related by Mrs. Pilkington. After supper, the Dean having decanted a bottle of wine, poured what remained into a glass, and seeing it was muddy, presented it to Mr. Pilkington' to drink it. ' For,' said he, ' I always keep some poor parson to drink the foul wine for me.' Mr. Pilkington, entering into his humour, thanked him, and told him 'he did not know the difference, but was glad to get a glass at any rate.^ ' Why, then,' said the Dean, 'you shan't, for Til drink it myself. Why, take you, you are wiser than a paltry curate whom I asked to dine with me a few days ago ; for upon my making the same speech to him, he said he did not understand such usage, and so walked off without his dinner. By the same token, I told the gentleman who recommended him to me that the fellow was a blockhead, and i had done with him.'"— Sheridan's Life of Sivift. 154 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. dignitary should assemble his family privily in a crypt, and as if he was afraid of heathen persecution. But I think the world was right, and the bishops who advised Queen Anne, when they counselled her not to appoint the author of the " Tale of a Tub " to a bishopric, gave perfectly good advice. The man who wrote the arguments and illustrations in that wild book, could not but be aware what must be the sequel of the propositions which he laid down. The boon companion of Pope and Bolingbroke, who chose these as the friends of his life, and the recipients of his confidence and affection, must have heard many an "argument, and joined in many a conversation over Pope's port, or St. John's burgundy, which would not bear to be repeated at other men's boards. I know of few things more conclusive as to the sincerity of Swift's religion than his advice to poor John Gay to turn clergyman, and look out for a seat on the Bench. Gay, the author of the " Beggar's Opera" — Gay, the wildest of the wits about toAvn — it was this man that Jonathan Swift advised to take orders — to invest in a cassock and bands — ^just as he advised him to husband his shillings and put his thousand pounds out at interest.* The Queen, and the bishops, and the world, were right in mistrusting the religion of that man. * "From the Archbishop of Cashell. "Dear Sir,— " Cashell, May 3Ij-/, 1735. " I have been so unfortunate in all n\y contests of late, that I am resolved to have no more, especially where I am likely to be overmatched ; and as I have some reason to hope wliat is past will be forgotten, I confess I did endeavour in my last to put the best colour I could think of upon a very bad cause. My friends judge right of my idleness ; but; in reality, it has hitherto proceeded from a hurry and confusion, arising from a thousand unlucky unforeseen accidents rather than mere sloth. I have but one troublesome affair now upon my hands, which, by the help of the prime Serjeant, I hope soon to get rid of; and then you shall see me a true Irish bishop. Sir James Ware has made a very useful collection of the memorable actions of my predecessors. He tells me, they were born in such a town of England or Ireland ; were consecrated such a year ; and if not translated, were buried in the Cathedral church, either on the north or south side. Whence I conclude, that a good bishop has nothing more to do than to eat, drink, grow fat, rich, and die ; which laudable example I propose for the remainder of my life to follow i for to tell you the truth, I have for these four or five years past met SWIFT. 155 I am not here, of course, to speak of any man's religious views-, - excei)t in so far as they influence his hterary character, his Hfe, his humour. The most notorious sinners of all those fellow-mortals whom it is our business to discuss — Harry Fielding and Dick Steele, were especially loud, and I believe really fervent, in their expressions of belief ; they belaboured freethinkers, and stoned imaginary adieists on all sorts of occasions, going out of their way to bawl their own creed, and persecute their neighbour's, and if they sinned and stumbled, as they constantly did with debt, with drink, with all sorts of bad behaviour, they got upon their knees and cried " Peccavi " with a most sonorous orthodoxy. Yes; poor Harry Fielding and poor Dick Steele were trusty and undoubting Church of England men ; they abhorred Popery, Atheism, and woodeji shoes, and idolatries in general ; and hiccupped Church and State with fervour. with so much treachery, baseness, and ingratitude among mankind, that I can hardly think it incumbent on any man to endeavour to do good to so perverse a generation. "I am tnily concerned at the account you give me of your health. Without doubt a southern ramble will prove the best remedy you can take to recover your flesh ; and I do not know, except in one stage, where you can choose a road so suited to your circumstances, as from Dublin hither. You have to Kilkenny a turnpike and good inns, at every ten or twelve miles' end. From Kilkenny hither is twenty long miles, bad road, and no inns at all : but I have an expedient for you. At the foot of a very high hill, just midway, there lives in a neat thatched cabin, a parson, who is not poor ; his wife is allowed to be the best little woman in the world. Her chickens are the fattest, and her ale the best in all the country. Besides, the parson has a little cellar of his own, of which he^ keeps the key, where he always has a hogshead of the best wine that can be got, in bottles well corked, uix)n their side ; and he cleans, and pulls out the cork better, I think, than Robin. Here I design to meet you with a coach ; if you be tired, you shall stay all night ; if not, after dinner, we will set out about four, and be at Cashell by nine ; and by going through fields and by-ways, which the parson will show us, we shall escape all the rocky and stony roads that lie between this place and that, which are certainly very bad. I hope you will be so kind as to let me know a post or two before you set out, the very day you will be at Kilkenny, that I may have all things prepared for you. It may be, if you ask him. Cope will come : he will do nothing for me. Therefore, depending upon your positive promise, I shall add no more arguments to persuade you, and am, with the greatest truth, your most faithful and obedient servant, - .. j^j^o^ Cashell." 1S6 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. But Swift? His mind had had a different schooling, and possessed a very different logical power. He was not bred up in a tipsy guard-room, and did not learn to reason in a Covent Garden tavern. He could conduct an argument from beginning to end. He could see forward with a fatal clearness. In his old age, looking at the " Tale of a Tub," when he said, " Good God, what a genius I had when I wrote that book ! " I think he was admiring not the genius, but the consequences to which the genius had brought him — a vast genius, a magnificent genius, a genius wonderfully bright, and dazzling, and strong, — to seize, to know, to see, to flash upon falsehood and scorch it into perdition, to penetrate into the hidden motives, and expose the black thoughts of men, — an awful, an evil spirit. Ah man ! you, educated in Epicurean Temple's library, you whose friends were Pope and St. John — what made you to swear to fatal vows, and bind yourself to a life-long hypocrisy before the Heaven which you adored with such real wonder, humility, and reverence ? For Swift was a reverent, was a pious spirit — for Swift could love and could pray. Through the storms and tempests of his furious mind, the stars of religion and love break out in the blue, shining serenely, though hidden by the driving clouds and the maddened hurricane of his life. It is my belief that he suffered frightfully from the consciousness of his own scepticism, and that he had bent his pride so far down as to put his apostasy out to hire.* The paper left behind him, called " Thoughts on ReHgion," is merely a set of excuses for not professing disbelief. " He says of his sermons that he preached pamphlets : they have scarce a Christian characteristic ; they might be preached from the steps of a synagogue, or the floor of a mosque, or the box of a coffee-house almost. There is little or no cant — he is too great and too proud for that ; and, in so far as the badness of his sermons goes, * "Mr, Swift lived with him [Sir William Temple] some time, but resolving to settle himself in some way of living, was inclined to take orders. However, although his fortune was very small, he had a scruple of entering into the Church merely for support" — Anecdotes of the Family of Siuift, by the Dean. SJJVFT. 157 he is honest. But liaving put that cassock on, it poisoned him : he was strangled in his bands. He goes through Hfe, tearing, hke a man possessed with a devil. Like Abudah in the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and knows that the night will come and the inevitable hag with it. What a night, my God, it was ! what a lonely rage and long agony — what a vulture that tore the heart of that giant ! '••' It is awful to think of the great sufferings of this great man. Through life he always seems alone, somehow. Goethe was so. I can't fancy Shakspeare otherwise. The giants must live apart. The kings can have no company. But this man suffered so ; and deserved so to suffer. One hardly reads anywhere of such a pain. The " saeva indignatio " of which he spoke as lacerating his heart, and which he dares to inscribe on his tombstone — as if the wretch who lay under that stone waiting God's judgment had a riglit to be angry — breaks out from him in a thousand pages of his writing, and tears and rends him. Against men in office, he having been over-, thrown ; against men in England, he having lost his chance of prefer- ment there, the furious exile never fails to rage and curse. Is it fair to call the famous " Drapier's Letters " patriotism? They are master-pieces of dreadful humour and invective : they are reasoned logically enough too, but the proposition is as monstrous and fabulous as the Lilliputian island. It is not that the grievance is so great, but there is his enemy — the assault is wonderful for its activity and terrible rage. It is Samson, with a bone in his hand, rushing on his enemies and felling them : one admires not the cause so much as the strength, the anger, the fury of the champion. As is the case with madmen, certain subjects provoke him, and awaken his fits of wrath. Marriage is one of these ; in a hundred passages in his writings he rages against it ; rages against children ; an object of constant satire, even more contemptible in his eyes than a lord's chaplain, is a ■■" " Dr. Swift had a natural severity of face, which even his smiles could scarce soften, or his utmost gaiety render placid and serene ; but when that sternness of visage was increased by rage, it is scarce possible to imagine looks or features tliat carried in them more terror and austerity." — Orrery. rcS ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. poor curate with a large family. The idea of this luckless paternity never fails to bring down from him gibes and foul language. Could Dick Steele, or Goldsmith, or Fielding, in his most reckless moment of satire, have written anything like the Dean's famous " modest proposal " for eating children ? Not one of these but melts at the thoughts of childhood, fondles and caresses it. Mr. Dean has no such softness, and enters the nursery with the tread and gaiety of an ogre.* " I have been assured," says he in the " Modest Proposal," " by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled ; and I make no doubt it will equally serve in a ragout.''^ And taking up this pretty joke, as his way is, he argues it with perfect gravity and logic. He turns and twists this subject in a score of different ways : he hashes it ; and he serves it up cold ; and he garnishes it ; and relishes it always. He describes the little animal as " dropped from its dam," advising that the mother should let it suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render it plump and fat for a good table ! " A child," says his Reverence, " will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends ; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish," and so on ; and, the subject being so delightful that he can't leave it, he proceeds to recommend, in place of venison for squires' tables, " the bodies of young lads and maidens not exceeding fourteen or under twelve." Amiable humourist ! laughing castigator of morals ! There was a process well known and practised in the Dean's gay days : when a lout entered the coffee-house, the wags proceeded to what they called "roasting" him. This is roasting a subject with a vengeance. The Dean had a native genius for it. As the " Almanach des Gourmands " says. On nmt rotisseitr. * '■'■London, April lot/i, 1 7 13. ** Lady Masham's eldest boy is very ill : I doubt he will not live ; and she stays at Kensington to nurse him, which vexes us all. She is so excessively fond, it makes me mad. She should never leave the Queen, but leave everything, to stick to what is so much the interest of the public, as well as her own " — Journal. SJVrFT. 159 And it was not merely by the sarcastic mctliod that Swift exposed the unreasonableness of loving and having children. In Gulliver, the folly of love and marriage is urged by graver arguments and advice. In the famous Lilli})utian kingdom, Swift speaks with approval of the practice of instantly removing children from their parents and educating them by the State ; and amongst his favourite horses, a pair of foals are stated to be the very utmost a well- regulated equine couple would permit themselves. In f^ict, our great satirist was of opinion that conjugal love was unadvisablc, and illustrated the theory by his own practice and example — God help him — which made him about the most wretched being in God's world."' The grave and logical conduct of an absurd proposition, as exemplified in the cannibal proposal just mentioned, is our author's constant method through all his works of humour. Gi\'en a country of people six inches or sixty feet high, and by the mere process of the logic, a thousand wonderful absurdities are evolved, at so many stages of the calculation. Turning to the first minister who waited behind him with a white staff near as tall as the mainmast of the " Royal Sovereign," the King of Brobdingnag observes how con- temptible a thing human grandeur is, as represented by such a contemptible little creature as Gulliver. '' The Emperor of Lilliput's features are strong and masculine" (what a surprising humour there is in this description !) — " The Emperor's features," Gulliver says, " are strong and masculine, with an Austrian lip, an arched nose, his com- plexion olive, his countenance erect, his body and limbs well propor- tioned, and his deportment majestic. He is taller by the hreadiJi of 7}iy nail than any of his court, which alone is enough to strike an awe into beholders." What a surprising humour there is in these descriptions ! How noble the satire is here ! how just and honest ! How perfect the image ! Mr, ^lacaulay has quoted the charming lines of the poet, * *' My health is somewhat mended, but at best I have an ill head and on aching heart." — /;/ May^ I7I9' i6o ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. where the king of the pigmies is measured by the same standard. We have all read in Milton of the spear that was like '' the mast of some tall admiral," but these images are surely likely to come to the comic poet originally. The subject is before him. He is turning it in a thousand ways. He is full of it. The figure suggests itself naturally to him, and comes out of liis subject, as in that wonderful passage, when Gulliver's box having been dropped by the eagle into the sea, and Gulliver having been received into the ship's cabin, he calls upon the crew to bring the box into the cabin, and put it on the table, the cabin being only a quarter the size of the box. It is the veracity of the blunder which is so admirable. Had a man come from such a country as Brobdingnag he would have blundered so. But the best stroke of humour, if there be a best in that abounding book, is that where Gulliver, in the unpronounceable country, describes his parting from his master the horse.''' " I took," he * Perhaps the most melancholy sath-e in the whole of the dreadful book, is the description of the very old people in the " Voyage to Laputa." At Lugnag, Gulliver hears of some persons who never die, called the Struldbrugs, and expressing a wish to become acquainted with men who must have so much learning and experience, his colloquist describes the Struldbrugs to him. " He said : They commonly acted like mortals, till about thirty years old, after which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, increasing in both till they came to fourscore. This he learned from their own confession : for otherwise there not being above two or three of that species born in an age, they were too few to form a general observation by. When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more, which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affec- tion, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions. But those objects against which their envy seems principally directed, are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former, they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure ; and whenever they see a funeral, they lament, and repine that others are gone to a harbour of rest, to which they themselves never can hope to arrive. They have no remembrance of anything but \vhat they learned and observed in their youth and middle age, and even that is very imperfect. And for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common tradition than upon their best recollections. The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn SIV/FT. ,6i says, " a second leave of my master, but as I was going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he did me the honour to raise it gently to my lo dotage, and entirely lose their memories ; these meet with more pity and assistance, because they want many bad qualities which abound in others. " If a Struldbrug happen to marry one of his own kind, the marriage is dis- solved of course, by the courtesy of the kingdom, as soon as the younger of the two comes to be fourscore. P'or the law thinks it a reasonable indulgence that those who are condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife. " As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years, they are looked on as dead in law ; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates, only a small pittance is reserved for their support ; and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period, they are held incapable of any employment of trust or profit, they cannot purchase lands or take leases, neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause, either civil or criminal, not even for the decision of meers and bounds. " At ninety they lose their teeth and hair ; they have at that age no distinction of taste, but eat and drink whatever they can get without relish or appetite. The diseases they were subject to still continue, without increasing or diminishing. In talking, they forget the common appellation of things, and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relations. For the same reason, they can never amuse themselves with reading, because their memory will not serve) to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end ; and by this defect they' are deprived of the only entertainment whereof they might otherwise be capable. *' The language of this country being always upon the flux, the Struldbnigs of one age do not understand those of another ; neither are they able, after two hundred years, to hold any conversation (further than by a few general words) with their neighbours, the mortals ; and thus they lie under the disadvantage oi living like foreigners in their own country. *' This was the account given me of the Struldbrugs, as near as I can remember. I afterwards saw five or six of different ages, the youngest not above two hundred years old, who were brought to me at several times by some of my friends ; but although they were told * that I was a great traveller, and had seen all the world,' they had not the least curiosity to ask me a question ; only desired I would give them slumskudask, or a token of remembrance ; which is a modest way of begging, to avoid the law, tliat strictly forbids it, because they are provided for l)y the public, although indeed with a very scanty allowance. •'They are despised and hated by all sorts of people ; when one of them is born, it is reckoned ominous, and their birth is recorded very particularly ; so that you may know their age by consulting the register, which, however, has not been kept above a thousand years past, or at least has been destroyed by time or public disturbances. But the usual way of computing how old they are, is by asking 19 II i62 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. mouth. I am not ignorant how much I have been censured for mentioning this last particular. Detractors are pleased to think it improbable that so illustrious a person should descend to give so great a mark of distinction to a creature so inferior as I. Neither have I forgotten how apt some travellers are to boast of extra- ordinary favours they have received. But if these censurers were better acquainted with the noble and courteous disposition of the Houyhnhnms they would soon change their opinion." The surprise here, the audacity of circumstantial evidence, the astounding gravity of the speaker, who is not ignorant how much he has been censured, the nature of the favour conferred, and the respectful exultation at the receipt of it, are surely complete; it is truth topsy-turvy, entirely logical and absurd. As for the humour and conduct of this famous fable, I suppose there is no person who reads but must admire ; as for the moral, I think it horrible, shameful, unmanly, blasphemous ; and giant and great as this Dean is, I say we should hoot him. Some of this audience mayn't have read the last part of Gulliver, and to such I would recall the advice of the venerable Mr. Punch to persons about to marry, and say " Don't." When Gulliver first lands among the Yahoos, the naked howling wretches clamber up trees and assault him, and he describes himself as "almost stifled with the filth which fell about him." The reader of the fourth part of " Gulliver's Travels " is like the hero himself in this instance. It is Yahoo language : a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against man- kind — tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manli- them what kings or great persons they can remember, and then consulting history ; for infaUibly the last prince in their mind did not begin his reign after they were fourscore years old. ' ' They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld, and the women more horrible than the men ; besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years, which is not to be described ; and among half-a-dozen, I soon distinguished which was the eldest, although there was not above a century or two between them." — Gulliver's Travels. SWIFT, 163 ness and shame ; filthy in word, fikhy in thought, furious, raging, oDscene. And dreadful it is to think that Swift knew the tendency of his creed — the fatal rocks towards which his logic desi)erately drifted. That last part of " Gulliver " is only a consequence of what has gone before ; and the worthlessness of all mankind, the pettiness, cruelty, pride, imbecility, the general vanity, the foolish pretension, the mock greatness, the pompous dulness, the mean aims, the base successes — all these were present to him ; it was with the din of these curses of the world, blasphemies against heaven, shrieking in his ears, that he began to write his dreadful allegory — of which the meaning is that man is utterly wicked, desperate, and imbecile, and his passions are so monstrous, and his boasted powers so mean, that he is and deserves to be the slave of brutes, and ignorance is better than his vaunted reason. What had this man done ? what secret remorse was rankling at his heart ? what fever was boiling in him, that he should see all the world blood-shot? We view the world with our own eyes, each of us ; and we make from within us the world we see. A weary heart gets no gladness out of sunshine; a selfish man is sceptical about friendship, as a man with no ear doesn't care for music. A frightful self-consciousness it must have been, which looked on mankind so darkly through those keen eyes of Swift. A remarkable story is told by Scott, of Delany, who interrupted Archbishop King and Swift in a conversation which left the prelate in tears, and from which Swift rushed away with marks of strong terror and agitation in his countenance, upon which the Archbishop said to Delany, " You have just met the most unhappy man on earth ; but on the subject of his wretchedness you must never ask a question." The most unhappy man on earth ; — Miserrimus — what a character of him ! And at this time all the great wits of England had been at his feet. All Ireland had shouted after him, and worshipped him as a liberator, a saviour, the greatest Irish patriot and citizen. Dean Drapier Bickerstaff Gulliver — the most fam.ous t/ i64 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. statesmen, and the greatest poets of his day, had applauded him, and done him homage ; and at this time, writing over to BoHngbroke from Ireland, he says, " It is time for me to have done with the V world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called i into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a holey We have spoken about the men, and Swift's behaviour to them ; and now it behoves us not to forget that there are certain other persons in the creation who had rather intimate relations with the great Dean.* Two women whom he loved and injured are known by every reader of books so familiarly that if we had seen them, or if they had been relatives of our own, we scarcely could have known them better. Who hasn't in his mind an image of Stella ? Who does not love her ? Fair and tender creature : pure and affectionate heart ! Boots it to you, now that you have been at rest for a hundred and twenty years, not divided in death from the cold heart which caused yours, whilst it beat, such faithful pangs of love and grief — boots it to you now, that the whole world loves and deplores you ? Scarce any man, I believe, ever thought of that grave, that did not cast a flower of pity on it, and write over it a sweet epitaph. Gentle * The name of Varina has been thrown into the shade by those of the famous Stella and Vanessa ; but she had a story of her own to tell about the blue eyes of young Jonathan. One may say that the book of Swift's Life opens at places kept by these bhglited flowers ! Varina must have a paragraph. She was a Miss Jane Waryng, sister to a college chum of his. In 1696, when Swift was nineteen years old, we find him writing a love-letter to her, beginning, "Impatience is the most inseparable quality of a lover." But absence made a great difference in his feelings ; so, four years afterwards, the tone is changed. He writes again, a very curious letter, offering to marry her, and putting the offer in. such a way that nobody could possibly accept it. After dwelling on his poverty, &c. he says, conditionally, "I shall be blessed to have you in my arms, without regarding whether your person be beautiful, or your fortune large. Cleanliness in the first, and competency in the second, is all I ask for ! " The editors do not tell us what became of Varina in life. One would be glad to know that she met with some worthy partner, and lived long enough to see her little boys laughing over Lilliput, without any arrihe pensk of a sad character about the great Dean ! Sir/FT. 165 lady, so lovely, so loving, so unhappy I you have had countless champions ; millions of manly hearts mourning for you. From generation to generation we take up the fond tradition of your beauty ; we watch and follow your tragedy, your bright morning love and purity, your constancy, your grief, your sweet martyrdom. We know your legend by heart. You are one of the saints of English story. And if Stella's love and innocence are charming to contemplate, I will say that in spite of ill-usage, in spite of drawbacks, in spite of mysterious separation and union, of hope delayed and sickened heart — in the teeth of Vanessa, and that little episodical aberration which plunged Swift into such woful pitfalls and quagmires of amorous per- plexity — in spite of the verdicts of most women, I believe, who, as far as my experience and conversation go, generally take Vanessa's part in the controversy — in spite of the tears which Swift caused Stella to shed, and the rocks and barriers which fate and temper interposed, and which prevented the pure course of that true love from running smoothly — the brightest part of Swift's story, the pure star in that dark and tempestuous life of Swift's, is his love for Hester Johnson. It has been my business, professionally of course, to go through a deal of sentimental reading in my time, and to acquaint myself with love-making, as it has been described in various languages, and at various ages of the world ; and I know of nothing more manly, more tender, more exquisitely touching, than some of these brief notes, written in what Swift calls " his little language " in his journal to Stella.* He writes to her night and morning often. * A sentimental Cliampollion might find a good deal of matter for his art, in expounding the symbols of the "Little Language." Usually, Stella is "M.D.," but sometimes her companion,- Mrs. Dingley, is included in it. Swift is " Presto ;" also P.D.F.R. We have "Good-night, M.I). ; Night, M.D. ; Little, ^LD. ; Stellakins ; Pretty Stella; Dear, roguish, impudent, pretty >LD." Every now and then he breaks into rhyme, as — " I wish you both a merry new year, Roast-beef, minced-pies, .and good strong beer, And me a share of your good cheer, That I was there, as you were here, And you are a little saucy dear." i66 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. He never sends away a letter to her but he begins a new one on the same day. He can't bear to let go her kind little hand, as it were. He knows that she is thinking of him, and longing for him far away in Dublin yonder. He takes her letters from under his pillow and talks to them, familiarly, paternally, with fond epithets and pretty caresses — as he would to the sweet and artless creature who loved him. "Stay," he writes one morning — it is the 14th of December, 1 7 10 — "Stay, I will answer some of your letter this morning in bed. Let me see. Come and appear, little letter ! Here I am, says he, and what say you to Stella this morning fresh and fasting ? And can Stella read this writing without hurting her dear eyes ? " he goes on, after more kind prattle and fond whispering. The dear eyes shine clearly upon him then — the good angel of his life is with him and blessing him. Ah, it was a hard fate that wrung from them so many tears, and stabbed pitilessly that pure and tender bosom. A hard fate: but would she have changed it? I have heard a woman say that she would have taken Swift's cruelty to have had his tenderness. He had a sort of worship for her whilst he wounded her. He speaks of her after she is gone ; of her wit, of her kindness, of her grace, of her beauty, with a simple love and reverence that are indescribably touching ; in contemplation of her goodness his hard heart melts into pathos ; his cold rhyme kindles and glows into poetry, and he falls down on his knees, so to speak, before the angel whose life he nad iimbittered, confesses his own wretchedness and unworthiness, and adores her with cries of remorse and love : — " When on my sickly couch I lay, Impatient both of night and day, And groaning 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. SWIFT. i(,7 What Stella, by her friend>hip warmed, With vigour and delight performed. Now, with a soft and silent tread, Unheard she moves about my bed : My sinking spirits now supplies With cordials in her hands and eyes. Best pattern of true friends ! beware ; You pay too dearly for your care If, while your tenderness secures My life, it must endanger yours : P'or such a fool was never found Who pulled a palace to the ground, Only to have the ruins made Materials for a house decayed." One little triumph Stella had in her life — one dear little piece of injustice was performed in her favour, for which I confess, for my part, 1 can't help thanking fate and the Dean. That other person was sacrificed to her — that — that young woman, who lived five doors from Dr. Swift's lodgings in Bury Street, and who flattered him, and made love to him in such an outrageous manner — Vanessa was thrown over. Swift did not keep Stella's letters to him in reply to those he wrote to her.* He kept Bolingbroke's, and Pope's, and Harley's, * The following passages are from a paper begun by Swift on the evening of the day of her death, Jan. 28, 1727-8 : — "She was sickly from her childhood, until about the age of fifteen ; but then she grew into perfect health, and was looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young women in London — only a little too fat. Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection. ". . . . Properly speaking " — he goes on, with a calmness which, under the circumstances, is terrible — " she has been dying six months ! .... " Never was any of her sex born with better gifts of the mind, or who more improved them by reading and conversation All of us who had the happiness of her friendship agreed unanimously, that in an afternoon's or evening's conversation she ncv^er failed before we parted of delivering the best thing that was said in the company. Some of us have written down several of her sayings, or what the French call hons inofs, wherein she excelled beyond belief." The specimens on record, however, in the Dean's paper, called *' ]?on> Mots dc Stella," scarcely bear out this last part of the panegyric, liut the following prove her wit : — " A gentleman who had been very silly and pert in her company, at last began i68 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. and Peterborough's : but Stella, " very carefully," the Lives say, kept Swift's. Of course : that is the way of the world : and so we cannot tell what her style was, or of what sort were the little letters which the Doctor placed there at night, and bade to appear from under his pillow of a morning. But in Letter IV. of that famous collection he describes his lodging in Bury Street, where he has the first-floor, a dining-room and bed-chamber, at eight shillings a week ; and in Letter VL he says " he has visited a lady just come to town," whose name somehow is not mentioned; and in Letter VIIL he enters a query of Stella's — " What do you mean ' that boards near me, that I dine with now and then?' What the deuce! You know whom I have dined with every day since I left you, better than I do." Of course she does. Of course Swift has not the slightest idea of what she means. But in a few letters more it turns out that the Doctor has been to dine ''gravely" with a Mrs. Vanhomrigh : then that he has been to " his neighbour : " then that he has been unwell, and means to dine for the whole week with his neighbour ! Stella was quite right in her previsions. She saw from the very first hint, what was going to happen ; and scented Vanessa in the air.'" The rival is at to grieve at remembering the loss of a child lately dead. A bishop sitting by com- forted him — that he should be easy, because ' the child was gone to heaven.' ' No, my lord,' said she ; ' that is it which most grieves him, because he is sure never to see his child there.' ' ' When she was extremely ill, her physician said, * Madam, you are near the bottom of the hill, but we will endeavour to get you up again.' She answered, * Doctor, I fear I shall be out of breath before I get up to the top.' •'A very dirty clergyman of her acquaintance, who affected smartness and repartees, was asked by some of the company how his nails came to be so dirty. He was at a loss ; but she solved the difficulty by saying, ' The Doctor's nails grew dirty by scratching himself. ' " A Quaker apothecary sent her a vial, corked ; it had a broad brim, and a label of paper about its neck. ' What is that ? ' — said she — ' my apothecary's son ! ' The ridiculous resemblance, and the suddenness of the question, set us all a-laughing." — Swift's Works, Scott's Ed. vol. ix. 295-6. * ** I am so hot and lazy after my morning's walk, that I loitered at Mrs. Van- homrigh's, where my best gown and periwig was, and out of mere listlessness diiic there, very often ; so I did to-day." — Journal to Stella. [Mrs. Vanhomrigh, SWIFT. 169 the Dean's feet. The pupil and teacher are reading together, and drinking tea together, and going to prayers together, and learning Latin together, and conjugating amo, amas, amavi together. The little language is over for poor Stella. By the rule of grammar and the course of conjugation, doesn't amavi come after amo and amas ? The loves of Cadenus and Vanessa '^ you may peruse in Cadenus's own poem on the subject, and in poor Vanessa's vehement expostu- latory verses and letters to him; she adores him, implores him, admires him, thinks him something god-like, and only prays to be admitted to lie at his feetf As they are bringing him home from Mrs. Vanhomrigh, "Vanessa's" mother, was the widow of a Dutch merchant who held lucrative appointments in King WilHam's time. The family settled in London in 1709, and had a house in Bury Street, St. James's— a street made notable by such residents as Swift and Steele ; and, in our own time, Moore and C rabbe. * " Vanessa was excessively vain. The character given of her by Cadenus is fine painting, but in general fictitious. She was fond of dress ; impatient to be admired ; very romantic in her turn of mind ; superior, in her own opinion, to all her sex ; full of pertness, gaiety, and pride ; not without some agreeable accom- plishments, but far from being either beautiful or genteel ; . . . . happy in the thoughts of being reported Swift's concubine, but still aiming and intending to be his wife." — Lord Orrery. + "You bid me be easy, and you would see me as often as you could. Vou had better have said, as often as you can get the better of your inclinations so much ; or as often as you remember there was such a one in the world. If you continue to treat me as you do, you will not be made uneasy by me long. It is impossible to describe what 1 have suffered since I saw you last : I am sure I could have borne the rack much better than those killing, killing words of yours. Some- times I have resolved to die without seeing you more ; but those resolves, to your misfortune, did not last long ; for there is something in human nature that ])rompts one so to find relief in this world I must give way to it, and beg you would see me, and speak kindly to me ; for I am sure you'd not condemn any one to sufTer what I hnfve done, could you but know it. The reason I write to you is, because I cannot tell it to you, should I see you ; for when I begin to complain, then you are angr>', and there is something in your looks so awful that it strikes me dumb. Oh ! that you may have but so much regard for me left that this complaint may touch your soul with pity. I say as little as ever I can ; did you but know what I thought, I am sure it would move you to forgive me ; and believe I cannot helj) telling you this and live."— Vanessa. (M. 1714.) I70 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS, church, those divine feet of Dr. Svvift's are found pretty often in Vanessa's parlour. He hkes to be admired and adored. He finds Miss Vanhomrigh to be a woman of great taste and spirit, and beauty and wit, and a fortune too. He sees her every day ; he does not tell Stella about the business : until the impetuous Vanessa becomes too fond of him, until the Doctor is quite frightened by the young woman's ardour, and confounded by her warmth. He wanted to marry neither of them — that I believe was the truth ; but if he had not married Stella, Vanessa would have had him in spite of himself. When he went back to Ireland, his Ariadne, not content to remain in her isle, pursued the fugitive Dean. In vain he protested, he vowed, he soothed, and bullied ; the news of the Dean's marriage with Stella at last came to her, and it killed her — she died of that passion.'' * " If we consider Swift's behaviour, so far only as it relates to women, we shall find that he looked upon them rather as busts than as whole figures. " — Orrery. *' You would have smiled to have found his house a constant seraglio of very virtuous women, who attended him from morning till night." — Orrery. A correspondent of Sir Walter Scott's furnished him with the materials on which to found the following interesting passage about Vanessa — after she had retired to cherish her passion in retreat : — "Marley Abbey, near Celbridge, where Miss Vanhomrigh resided, is J)uilt much in the form of a real cloister, especially in its external appearance. An aged man (upwards of ninety, by his own account) showed the grounds to my corre- spondent. He was the son of Mrs. Vanhomrigh's gardener, and used to work with his father in the garden when a boy. He remembered the un(ortunate Vanessa well ; and his account of her corresponded with the usual description of her person, especially as to her embonpoint. He said she went seldom abroad, and saw little company : her constant amusement was reading, or walking in the garden. . . . She avoided company, and was always melancholy, save when Dean Swift was there, and then she seemed happy. The garden was to an uncommon degree crowded with laurels. The old man said that when Miss Vanhomrigh expected the Dean she always planted with her own hand a laurel or two against his arrival. He showed her favourite seat, still called 'Vanessa's bower.' Three or four trees and some laurels indicate the spot There were two seats and a rude table within the bower, the opening of which commanded a view of the Liffey. In this sequestered spot, according to the eld gardener's account, the Dean and Vanessa used often to sit, with books and writing-materials on the table before them." — Scott's Swift^ vol. i. pp. 246-7. ["..,. But Sir/FT. 171 And when she died, and Stella heard that Swift had written beautifully regarding her, " That doesn't surprise me," said Mrs. Stella, " for we all know the Dean could write beautifully about a broomstick." A woman — a true woman ! Would you have had one of them forgive the other ? In a note in his biography, Scott says that his friend Dr. Take, of Dublin, has a lock of Stella's hair, enclosed in a paper by Swift, on which are written, in the Dean's hand, the words: ''Only a ivonians hairy An instance, says Scott, of the Dean's desire to veil his feelings under the mask of cynical indifference. ". . . . But Miss V.inhomrigh, irritated at the situation in which she found herself, determined on bringing to a crisis those expectations of a union with the object of her affections — to the hope of which she had clung amid every vicissitude of his conduct towards her. The most probable bar was his undefined connec- tion with Mrs. Johnson, which, as it must have been perfectly known to her, had, doubtless, long excited her secret jealousy, although only a single hint to that purpose is to be found in their correspondence, and that so early as 1713, when she writes to him — then in Ireland—' If you are very happy, it is ill-natured of you not to tell me so, except ^ tis zuhai is inconsistent loif/i mine.'' Her silence and patience under this state of uncertainty for no less than eight years, must have been partly owing to her awe for Swift, and partly, perhaps, to the weak state of her rival's health, which, from year to year, seemed to announce speedy dissolution. At length, however, Vanessa's impatience prevailed, and she ventured on the decisive step of writing to Mrs. Johnson herself, requesting to know the nature of that connection. Stella, in reply, informed her of her marriage with the Dean ; and full of the highest resentment against Swift for having given another female such a right in him as Miss Vanhomrigh's inquiries implied, she sent to him her rival's letter of interrogation, and, without seeing him, or awaiting his reply, retired to the house of Mr. Ford, near Dublin. Every reader knows the con- setiuence. Swift, in one of those paroxysms of fury to which he was liable, both from temper and disease, rode instantly to Marley Abbey. As he entered the apartment, the sternness of his countenance, which was peculiarly formed to express the fiercer passions, struck the unfortunate Vanessa with such terror that she could scarce ask whether he would not sit down. He answered by flinging a letter on the table, and, instantly leaving the house, mounted his horse, and returned to Dublin. When Vanessa opened the packet, she only found her own letter to Stella. It was her death-warrant. She sunk at once under the disap- ]iointment of the delayed yet cherished hopes which had so long sickened her heart, and beneath the unrestrained wrath of him for whose sake she had indulged them. How long she survived this last interview is uncertain, but the time does not seem to have exceeded a few weeks." — Scott. 172 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. See the various notions of critics ! Do those words indicate indifference or an attempt to hide feehng ? Did you ever hear or read four words more pathetic? Only a woman's hair: only love, only fidelity, only purity, innocence, beauty ; only the tenderest heart in the world stricken and wounded, and passed away now out of reach of pangs of hope deferred, love insulted, and pitiless deser- tion : — only that lock of hair left ; and memory and remorse, for the guilty, lonely wretch, shuddering over the grave of his victim. And yet to have had so much love, he must have given some. Treasures of wit and wisdom, and tenderness, too, must that man have had locked up in the caverns of his gloomy heart, and shown fitfully to one or two whom he took in there. But it was not good to visit that place. People did not remain there long, and suffered for having been there.* He shrank away from all affections sooner or later. Stella and Vanessa both died near him, and away from him. He had not heart enough to see them die. He broke from his fastest friend, Sheridan ; he slunk away from his fondest admirer. Pope. His laugh jars on one's ear after seven score years. He was always atone — alone and gnashing in the darkness, except when Stella's sweet smile came and shone upon him. When that went, silence and utter night closed over him. An immense genius : an awful downfall and ruin. So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling. We have other great names to mention — none I think, however, so great or so gloomy. * " M. Swift est Rabelais dans son bon sens, et vivant en bonne compagnie. II n'a pas, a la verite, la gaite du premier, mais il a toute la finesse, la raison, le choix, le bon gout qui manquent a notre cure de INIeudon. Ses vers sont d'un gout singulier, et presque inimitable ; la bonne plaisanterie est son partage en vers et en prose ; mais pour le bien entendre il faut faire un petit voyage dans son pays."— Voltaire : Lettres sur les Andais. Let. 22. CONGREVE. C 11. CONG RE VE AND ADDISON A GREAT number of years ago, before the passing of the Reibrm Kill, there existed at Cambridge a certain debating-club. called the " Union ; " and I remember that there was a tradition amongst the undergraduates who frequented that renowned school of oratory, that the great leaders of the Opposition and Government had their eyes upon the University Debating-Club, and that if a man distinguished himself there he ran some chance of being returned to Parliament as a great nobleman's nominee. So Jones of John's, or Thomson of Trinity, would rise in their might, and draping themselves in their gowns, rally round the monarchy, or hurl defiance at priests and kings, with the majesty of Pitt or the fire of Mirabeau, fancying all the while that the great nobleman's emissary was listening to the debate from the back bench-es, where he was sitting with the family seat in his pocket. Indeed, the legend said that one or two young Cambridge men, orators of the " Union," were actually caught up thence, and carried down to Cornwall or old Sarum, and so into Parliament. And many a young fellow deserted the jogtrot University curriculum, to hang on in the dust behind the fervid wheels of the parliamentary chariot. Where, I have often wondered, were the sons of Peers and Members of Parliament in Anne's and George's time ? Were they all in the army, or hunting in the country, or boxing the watch ? How was it that the young gentlemen from the • University got such a prodigious number of places ? A lad composed a neat copy of verses at Christchurch or Trinity, in which the death of a great personage was bemoaned, the French king assailed, the Dutch or Prince Eugene complimented, or the reverse ; and the party in power 174 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. was presently to provide for the young poet ; and a commissionership, or a post in the Stamps, or the secretaryship of an Embassy, or a clerkship in the Treasury, came into the bard's possession. A wonderful fruit-bearing rod was that of Busby's. What have men of letters got in our time ? Think, not only of Swift, a king fit to rule in any time or empire — but Addison, Steele, Prior, Tickell, Congreve, John Gay, John Dennis, and many others, who got public employment, and oretty little pickings out of the public purse.* The wits of whose names we shall treat in this lecture and two following, all (save one) touched the King's coin, and had, at some period of their lives, a happy quarter-day coming round for them. They all began at school or college in the regular way, producing panegyrics upon public characters, what were called odes upon public events, battles, sieges, court marriages and deaths, in which the gods of Olympus and the tragic muse were fatigued with invocations, according to the fashion of the time in France and in England. " Aid us. Mars, Bacchus, Apollo," cried Addison, or Congreve, singing of William or Marlborough. '^ Accourez, cJiastes nymphes du Pcrmesse',^ says Boileau, celebrating the Grand Monarch. ^^ Des sons que via * The following is a conspectus of them : — Addison. — Commissioner of Appeals ; Under Secretary of State ; Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland ; Keeper of the Records in Ireland ; Lord of Trade ; and one of the Principal Secretaries of State, successively. Steele. — Commissioner of the Stamp Office ; Surveyor of the Royal Stables at Hampton Court ; and Governor of the Royal Company of Comedians ; Commissioner of ** Forfeited Estates in Scotland." Prior. — Secretary to the Embassy at the Hague ; Gentleman of the Bedchamber to King William ; Secretary to the Embassy in France ; Under Secretary of State ; Ambassador to France. TiCKELL.— Under Secretary of State ; Secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland. Congreve. — Commissioner for licensing Hackney Coaches ; Commissioner for Wine Licences ; place in the Pipe Office ; post in the Custom House ; Secretary of Jamaica. Gay.— Secretary to the Earl of Clarendon (when Ambassador to Hanover). John Dennis. — A place in the Custom House. " En Angleterre .... les lettres sont plus en honneur qu'ici," — VoLTAiRE : Lettres sur Us Andais. Let. 20. CONGREVE AND ADDISON. 175 lyre e7ifa?ite marquez en bien la cadence, d vous vents ^faites silence! je vais purler de Louis I " Schoolboys' themes and foundation exercises are the only relics left now of this scholastic fashion. The Olympians are left quite undisturbed in their mountain. What man of note, what contributor to the poetry of a country newspai)er, would now think of writing a congratulatory ode on the birth of the heir to a dukedom, or the marriage of a nobleman ? In the past century the young gentlemen of the Universities all exercised themselves at these queer compositions ; and some got fame, and some gained patrons and places for life, and many more took nothing by these eftbrts of what they were pleased to call their muses. William Congreve's * Pindaric Odes are still to be found in " Johnson's Poets," that now unfrequented poets'-corner, in which so many forgotten big-wigs have a niche ; but though he was also voted to be one of the greatest tragic poets of any day, it was Congreve's wit and humour which first recommended him to courtly fortune. And it is recorded that his first play, the " Old Bachelor," brought our author to the notice of that great patron of English muses, Charles Montague Lord Halifax — who, being desirous to place so eminent a wit in a state of ease and tranquillity, instantly made him one of the Commissioners for licensing hackney-coaches, bestowed on him soon after a place in the Pipe Office, and likewise a post in the Custom House of the value of 600/. A commissionership of hackney-coaches — a post in the Custom House— a place in the Pipe Office, and all for writing a comedy ! Doesn't it sound like a fable, that place in the Pipe Office ? f " Ah, * He was the son of Colonel William Congreve, and grandson of Richard Congreve, Esq., of Congreve and Stretton in Staffordshire — a very ancient family. t " Pipe, — Pipa, in law, is a roll in the Exchequer, called also \\\g: great roll. '■^ Pipe Office is an office in which a person called the Clerk of the Pipe makes out leases of Crown lands, by warrant from the Lord Treasurer, or Commissioners of the Treasury, or Chancellor of the Exchequer. "Clerk of the Pipe makes up all accounts of sheriffs, &c." — Rees : Cyclopird. Art. Pipe. [/•/>• Office 176 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. rheureux temps que celui de ces fables ! " Men of letters there still be : but 1 doubt whether any Pipe Offices are left. The public has smoked them long ago. Words, like men, pass current for a while with the public, and being known everywhere abroad, at length take their places in society ; so even the most secluded and refined ladies here present will have heard the phrase from their sons or brothers at school, and will permit me to call William Congreve, Esquire, the most eminent literary "swell" of his age. In my copy of "Johnson's Lives" Congreve's wig is the tallest, and put on with the jauntiest air of all the laurelled worthies. " I am the great Mr. Congreve," he seems to say, looking out from his voluminous curls. People called him the great Mr. Congreve.'"' From the beginning of his career until the^ end everybody admired him. Having got his education in Ireland, at the same school and college with Swift, he came to live in the Middle Temple, London, where he luckily bestowed no attention to the law ; but splendidly frequented the coffee-houses and theatres, and appeared in the side-box, the tavern, the Piazza, and the Mall, brilliant, beautiful, and victorious from the first. Everybody acknowledged the young chieftain. The great Mr. Dryden f declared *' Pipe Office. — Spelman thinks so called, because the papers were kept in a large pipe or cask. '* ' These be at last brought into that office of Her Majesty's Exchequer, which we, by a metaphor, do call the pipe .... because the whole receipt is finally conveyed into it by means of divers small pipes or quills.' — Bacon : The Office of Alienations. " [We are indebted to Richardson's Dictionary for this fragment of erudition. But a modern man of letters can know little on these points — by experience.] * "It has been observed that no change of Ministers affected him in the least ; nor was he ever removed from any post that was given to him, except to a better. His place in the Custom House, and his office of Secretary in Jamaica, are said to have brought him in upwards of twelve hundred a year." — Biog. Brit.y Art. Congreve. t Dryden addressed his " twelfth epistle "to " My dear friend, Mr. Congreve," on his comedy called the " Double Dealer," in which he says : — " Great Jonson did by strength of judgment please ; Yet, doubling Fletcher "s force, he wants liis ease, rjn CONGREVE AND ADD ISO X. 177 that he was equal to Shakspeare, and bequeathed to him his own undisputed poetical crown, and writes of him : " Mr. Congreve has done me the favour to review the ' ^neis,' and comi)arc my version with the original. I shall never be ashamed to own that this excellent young man has showed me many faults which I have endeavoured to correct." The ''excellent young man" was but three or four and twenty when the great Dryden thus spoke of him : the greatest literary chief in England, the veteran field-marshal of letters, himself the marked man of all Europe, and the centre of a school of wits who daily gathered round his chair and tobacco-pii)e at Will's. Pope dedicated his " Iliad " to him ; * Swift, Addison, Steele, all acknowledge In differing talents both adorned their age : One for the study, t'other for the stage. But both to Congreve justly shall submit, One match'd in judgment, both o'ermatched in wit. In him all beauties of this age we see," &c. «S:c. The ** Double Dealer," however, was not so palpable a hit as the " Old Bachelor," but, at first, met with opposition. The critics havin^i fallen foul of it, our "Swell" applied the scourge to that presumptuous body, in the " Epistle Dedicatory " to the " Right Honourable Charles Montague." " I was conscious," said he, " where a true critic might have put n>e upon my defence. I was prepared for the attack, .... but I have not heard anything said sufficient to provoke an answer." He goes on — " But there is one thing at which I am more concerned than all the false criti- cisms that are made upon me ; and that is, some of the ladies are offended. I am heartily sorry for it ; for I declare, I would rather disoblige all the critics in the world than one of the fair sex. They are concerned that I have represented some women vicious and affected. How can I help it ? It is the business of a comic ])oet to paint the vices and follies of human kind I should be very glad of nn opportunity to make my compliments to those ladies who are offended. But they can no more expect it in a comedy, than to be tickled by a surgeon when he is letting their blood. " * "Instead of endeavouring to raise a vain monument to myself, let me leave behind me a memorial of my friendship with one of the most valuable men as well as finest writers of my age and country — one who has tried, and knows by his own experience, how hard an undertaking it is to do justice to Homer — and one who, I am sure, seriously rejoices with me at the period of my labours. T(i him, there- ^9 12 178 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. Congreve's rank, and lavish compliments upon him. Voltaire went to wait upon him as on one of the Representatives of Literature ; and the man who scarce praises any other living person — who flung abuse at Pope, and Swift, and Steele, and Addison — the Grub Street Timon, old John Dennis,* was hat in hand to Mr. Con- greve ; and said that when he retired from the stage, Comedy went with him. Nor was he less victorious elsewhere. He was admired in the drawing-rooms as Avell as the coffee-houses ; as much beloved in the side-box as on the stage. He loved, and conquered, and jilted the beautiful Bracegirdle,f the heroine of all his plays, the favourite of all the town of her day; and the Duchess of Marlborough, Marlborough's daughter, had such an admiration of him, that when he died she had an ivory figure made to imitate him,i and a large wax doll with gouty feet to be dressed just as the great Congreve's gouty feet were dressed in his great lifetime. He saved some money by his Pipe Office, and his Custom House office, and his Hackney Coach office, and nobly fore, having brought this long work to a conclusion, I desire to dedicate it, and to have the honour and satisfaction of placing together in this manner the names of Mr. Congreve and of— A. Pope." — Postscript to Translation of the Iliad of Home)' Mar. 25, 172 * "When asked why he listened to the praises of Dennis, he said he had much rather be flattered than abused. Swift had a particular friendship for our author, and generously took him under his protection in his high authoritative manner." — Thos. Davies : Drajuatic Miscellanies. + " Congreve was very intimate for years with Mrs. Rracegirdle, and lived in the same street, his house very near hers, until his acquaintance with the young Duchess of Marll:)orough. He then quitted that house. The Duchess showed me a diamond necklace (which Lady Di. used afterwards to wear) that cost seven thousand pounds, and was purchased with the money Congreve left her. How much better would it have been to have given it to poor Mrs. Bracegirdle. " — Dr. Young. Spence's Anecdotes. % "A glass was put in the hand of the statue, which was supposed to bow to her Grace and to nod in approbation of what she spoke to it." — Thos. Davies -■ JPramatic Miscellanies, CONGREVE AND ADDISON. 179 left it, not to Bracegirdle, who wanted it,* but to the Duchess of Marlborough, who didn't. f How can I introduce to you that merry and shameless Comic Aluse who won him such a reputation ? Nell Gwynn's servant fought the other footman for having called his mistress a bad name ; and in like manner, and with pretty like epithets, Jeremy Collier attacked that godless, reckless Jezebel, the pjiglish comedy of his time, and called her what Nell Gwynn's man's fellow-servants called Nell Gwynn's man's mistress. The servants of the theatre, Dryden, Congreve,:j: and others, defended themselves with the same success, * The sum Congreve left Mrs. Bracegirdle was 200/., as is said in the •' Dramatic Miscellanies" of Tom Davies ; where are some particulars about this charming actress and beautiful woman. She had a " lively aspect," says Tom, on the authority of Gibber, and "such a glow of health and cheerfulness in her countenance, as inspired everybody with desire." " Scarce an audience saw her that were not half of them her lovers." Congreve and Rowe courted her in the persons of their lovers. '* In Tamerlane, Rowe courted her Selima, in the person of Axalla. . . . ; Congreve insinuated his addresses in his Valentine to her Angelica, in ' Love for Love ; " in his Osmyn to her Almena, in the ' Mourning Bride ; ' and, lastly, in his Mirabel to her Millamant, in the 'Way of the World.' Mirabel, the fine gentleman of the play, is, I believe, not very distant from the real character of Congreve." — Dramatic Miscellanies^ vol. iii, 1 784, She retired from the stage when Mrs. Oldfield began to be the public favourite. She died in 1748, in the eighty-fifth year of her age. + Johnson calls his legacy the "accumulation of attentive parsimony, which," he continues, "though to her (the Duchess) superfluous and useless, might have given great assistance to the ancient family from which he descended, at that time, by the imprudence of his relation, reduced to difficulties and distress." — Lives of the Poets. X He replied to Collier, in the pamphlet called "Amendments of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations," &c. A specimen or two are subjoined : — "The greater part of these examples which he has produced are only demonstrations of his own impurity : they only savour of his utterance, and were sweet enough till tainted by his breath. " Wliere the expression is unblameable in its own pure and genuine signification, he enters into it, himself, like the evil spirit ; he possesses the innocent phrase, and makes it bellow forth his own blasphemies. " If I do nut return him civiUties in calling him names, it is because I am not i8o ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. and for the same cause which set Nell's lackey fighting. She was a disreputable, daring, laughing, painted French baggage, tbut Comic Muse. She came over from the Continent with Charles (who chose many more of his female friends there) at the Restoration — a wud, dishevelled Lais, with eyes bright with wit and wine — a saucy court- favourite that sat at the King's knees, and iaughed in his face, and when she showed her bold cheeks at her chariot-window, had some of the noblest and most famous people of the land bowing round her wheel. She was kind and popular enough, that daring Comedy, that audacious poor Nell : she was gay and generous, kind, frank, as such people can afford to be : and the men who lived with her and laughed with her, took her pay and drank her wine, turned out when the Puritans hooted her, to fight and defend her. But the jade wa?. indefensible, and it is pretty certain her servants knew it. There is life and death going on in every thing : truth and lies always at battle. Pleasure is always warring against self-restraint. Doubt is always crying Psha ! and sneering. A man in life, a humourist, in writing about life, sways over to one principle or the other, and laughs with the reverence for right and the love of truth in his heart, or laughs at these from the other side. Didn't I tell you tliat dancing was a serious business to Harlequin ? I have read two or three of Congreve's plays over before speaking of him ; and my feelings were rather like those, which I dare say most of us here have had, at Pompeii, looking at Sallust's house and the relics of an orgy: a dried wine-jar or two, a charred supper-table, the breast of a dancing-girl pressed against the ashes, the laughing skull of a jester: a perfect stillness round about, as the cicerone twangs his moral, and very well versed in his nomenclatures. ... I will only call him Mr. Collier, and that I will call him as often as I think he shall deserve it. "The corruption of a rotten divine is the generation of a sour critic." " Congreve," says Dr Johnson, " a very young man, elated with success, and impatient of censure, assumed an air of confidence and security. . . . The dispute was protracted through ten years ; but at last Comedy grew more modest, and Collier lived" to see the reward of his labours in the reformation of the theatre." — Life of Congreve. CONGREVE AND ADD/SON. i8i the blue sky shines calmly over the ruin. The Congrevc Aluse \9 dead, and her song choked in Time's ashes. We gaze at tiie skeleton, and wonder at the Hfe which once revelled in its mad veins. We take the skuli up, and muse over the frolic and daring, the wit, scorn, passion, hope, desire, with which that empty bowl once fermented. We think of the glances that allured, the tears that melted, of the bright eyes that shone in those vacant sockets ; and of lips whispering love, and cheeks dimpling with smiles, that once covered yon ghastly yellow framework. They used to call those teeth pearls once. See ! there 's the cup she drank from, the gold- chain she wore on her neck, the vase which held the rouge for her cheeks, her looking-glass, and the harp she used to dance to. Instead of a feast we find a gravestone, and in place of a mistress, a few bones ! Reading in these plays now, is like shutting your ears and looking at people dancing. What does it mean? the measures, the grimaces, the bowing, shuffling and retreating, the cavalier seul advancing upon those ladies — those ladies and men twirling round at the end in a mad galop, after which everybody bows and the quaint rite is celebrated. Without the music we can't understand that comic dance of the last century — its strange gravity and gaiety, its decorum or its indecorum. It has a jargon of its own quite unlike life ; a sort of moral of its own quite unlike life too. I'm afraid it's a Heathen mystery, symbolizing a Pagan doctrine ; protesting — as the Pompeians very likely were, assembled at their theatre and laughing at their games ; as Sallust and his friends, and their mistresses, protested, crowned with flowers, with cups in their hands — against the new, hard, ascetic, pleasure-hating doctrine whose gaunt disciples, lately passed over from the Asian shores of the Mediterranean, were for breaking the fair images of Venus and flinging the altars of Bacchus down. i fancy poor Congreve's theatre is a temple of Pagan delights, and mysteries not permitted except among heathens. I fear the theatre carries down that ancient tradition and worship, as masons nave i82 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. carried their secret signs and rites from temple to temple. When the libertine hero carries off the beauty in the play, and the dotard is laughed to scorn for having the young wife : in the ballad, when the poet bids his mistress to gather roses while she may, and warns her that old Time is still a-flying : in the ballet, when honest Corydon courts Phillis under the treillage of the pasteboard cottage, and leers at her over the head of grandpapa in red stockings, who is opportunely asleep ; and when seduced by the invitations of the rosy youth she comes forward to the footlights, and they perform on each other's tiptoes that pas which you all know, and which is only interrupted by old grandpapa awaking from his doze at the pasteboard chalet (whither he returns to take another nap in case the young people get an encore) : when Harlequin, splendid in youth, strength, and agility, arrayed in gold and a thousand colours, springs over the heads of countless perils, leaps down the throat of bewildered giants, and, dauntless and splendid, dances danger down : when Mr. Punch, that godless old rebel, breaks every law and laughs at it with odious triumph, outwits his lawyer, bullies the beadle, knocks his wife about the head, and hangs the hangman — don't you see in the comedy, in the song, in the dance, in the ragged little Punch's puppet-show — the Pagan protest ? Doesn't it seem as if Life puts in its plea and sings its comment ? Look how the lovers walk and hold each other's hands and whisper ! Sings the chorus — " There is nothing like love, there is nothing like youth, there is nothing like beauty of your spring- time. Look ! how old age tries to meddle with merry sport ! Beat him with his own crutch, the wrinkled old dotard ! There is nothing like youth, there is nothing like beauty, there is nothing like strength. Strength and valour win beauty and youth. Be brave and conquer. Be young and happy. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy ! Would you know the Sei^reto per esser felicc ? Here it is, in a smiling mistress and a cup of Falernian." As the boy tosses the cup and sings his song — hark ! what is that chaunt coming nearer and nearer? What is that dirge which mill disturb us ? The lights of the festival burn dim — the cheeks turn pale — the voice quavers — and the cup drops on the CONGREVE AM) ADDISON. 183 floor. Who's there ? Death and P\ite are at the gate, and they wiil come in, Congreve's comic feast flares with lights, and round the table, emptying their flaming bowls of drink, and exchanging the wildest jests and ribaldry, sit men and women, waited on by rascally valets and attendants as dissolute as their mistresses — perhaps the very worst company in the world. There doesn't seem to be a pretence of morals. At the head of the table sits Mirabel or Belmour (dressed in the French fashion and waited on by English imitators of Scapin and Frontin). Their calHng is to be irresistible, and to conquer every- where. Like the heroes of the chivalry story, whose long-winded loves and combats they were sending out of fashion, they are always splendid and triumphant — overcome all dangers, vanquish all enemies, and win the beauty at the end. Fathers, husbands, usurers are the foes these champions contend with. They are merciless in old age, invariably, and an old man plays the part in the dramas which the wicked enchanter or the great blundering giant performs in the chivalry tales, who threatens and grumbles and resists — a huge stupid obstacle always overcome by the knight. It is an old man with a money-box : Sir Belmour his son or nephew spends his money and laughs at him. It is an old man with a young wife whom he locks up : Sir Mirabel robs him of his wife, trips up his gouty old heels and leaves the old hunks. The old fool, what business has he to hoard his money, or to lock up blushing eighteen ? Money is for youth, love is for youth, away with the old people. When Millamant is sixty, having of course divorced the first Lady Millamant, and married his friend Doricourt's granddaughter out of the nursery — it will be his turn ; and young Belmour will make a fool of him. All this pretty morality you have in the comedies of William Congreve, Esq. They are full of wit. Such manners as he observes, he observes with great Immour ; but ah ! it's a weary feast, tliat banquet of wit where no love is. It palls very soon ; sad indigestions follow it and lonely blank headaches in the morning. I can't pretend to quote scenes from the splendid Congreve's i84 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. plays '•' — which are undeniably bright, witty, and daring — any more than I could ask you to hear the dialogue of a witty bargeman and a * The scene of Valentine's pretended madness in "Love for Love" is a splendid specimen of Congreve's daring manner : — " Scandal. — And have you given your master a hint of their plot upon him ? " yeremy. — Yes, Sir ; he says he'll favour it, and mistake her for Angelica. ^^ Scandal. — It may make us sport. •' Foresight. — Mercy on us ! " Valentine. — Husht — interrupt me not — I'll whisper predictions to thee, and thou shalt prophesie ;— I am truth, and can teach thy tongue a new trick,— I have told thee what's passed— now I'll tell what's to come :— Dost thou know what will happen to-morrow ? Answer me not — for I will tell thee. To-morrow knaves will thrive thro' craft, and fools thro' fortune ; and honesty will go as it did, frost- nipt in a summer suit. Ask me questions concerning to-morrow. ' ' Scandal. — Ask him, Air. Foresight. " Foresight. — Pray what will be done at Court ? " Valentine. — Scandal will tell you ; — I am truth, I never come there. ^^ Foresight. — In the city? " Valentine. — Oh, prayers will be said in empty churches at the usual hours. Yet you will see such zealous faces behind counters as if religion were to be sold in every shop. Oh, things will go methodically in the city, the clocks will strike twelve at noon, and the horn'd herd buzz in the Exchange at two. Husbands and wives will drive distinct trades, and care and pleasure separately occupy the family. Coffee-houses will be full of smoke and stratagem. And the cropt 'prentice that sweeps his master's shop in the morning, may, ten to one, dirty his sheets before night. But there are two things, that you will see very strange ; which are, wanton wives with their legs at liberty, and tame cuckolds with chains about their necks. But hold, I must examine you before I go further ; you look suspiciously. Are you a husband ? * ' Foresight. — I am married. *' Valentine. — Poor creature ! Is your wife of Covent-garden Parish ? '' Foresight.— 'No ; St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. " Valentine. — Alas, poor man ! his eyes are sunk, and his hands shrivelled; his *?gs dwindled, and his back bow'd. Pray, pray for a metamorphosis — change thy shape, and shake off age ; get thee Medea's kettle and be boiled anew ; come forth ■with lab'ring callous hands, and chine of steel, and Atlas' shoulders. Let Taliacotius trim the calves of twenty chairmen, and make thee pedestals to stand erect upon, and look matrimony in the face. Ha, ha, ha ! That a man should have a stomach to a wedding-supper, when the pidgeons ought rather to be laid to his feet ! Ha, ha, ha ! ^'■Foresight. — His frenzy is very high now, Mr. Scandal. *^ Scandal. — I believe it is a spring-tide. '* Foresight. — V ciy Ukely— truly; you understand these matters. Jllr. Scandal, CONGREVE AND ADDISON. 185 brilliant fishwomaii exchanging compliments at Billingsgate ; but some of his verses — they were amongst the most famous lyrics of the I shall be very glad to confer with you about these things he has uttered. His sayings are very mysterious and hieroglyphical. '* I'aleriinc. — Oh ! why would Angelica be absent from my eyes so long ? " Jeremy. — She's here, Sir. " Mrs. Foresight. — Now, Sister I " J^-j. FraiK — O Lord ! what must I say? ^^ Scandal. — Humour him. Madam, by all means. •* Valentine. — Where is she? Oh ! I see her : she comes, like Riches, Health, and Liberty at once, to a despairing, starving, and abandoned wretch. Oh — welcome, welcome ! " Mrs. Frail. — How d'ye, Sir? Can I serve you ? ♦' Valentine. — Hark'ee — I have a secret to tell you. Endymion and th.e moon shall meet us on Mount Latmos, and we'll be married in the dead of night. But say not a word. Hymen shall put his torch into a dark lanthorn, that it may be secret ; and Juno shall give her peacock poppy-water, that he may fold his ogling tail ; and Argus's hundred eyes be shut — ha I Nobody shall know, but Jeremy. *' Mrs. Frail. — No, no ; we'll keep it secret ; it shall be done presently. '* Valentine. — The sooner the better. Jeremy, come hither — closer — that none may overhear us. Jeremy, I can tell you news : Angelica is turned nun, and I am turning friar, and yet we'll marry one another in spite of the Pope. Get me a cowl and beads, that I may play my part ; for she'll meet me two hours hence in black and white, and a long veil to cover the project, and we won't see one another's faces 'till we have done something to be ashamed of, and then we'll blush once for all. . . . ''Enter Tattle. " Tattle. — Do you know me, Valentine J *' Valentine. — You I — who are you? No, I hope not. " Tattle. — I am Jack Tattle, your friend. '* Valentine. — My friend I What to do ? I am no married man, and thou canst not lye with my wife ; I am very poor, and thou canst not borrow money of me. Then, what employment have I for a friend ? *' Tattle. — Hah ! A good open speaker, and not to be trusted with a secret. *' Angelica. — Do you know me, Valentine ? *' Valentine. — Oh, very well. '* Angelica. — Who am I ? " Valentine. — You're a woman, one to whom Heaven gave beauty when it grafted roses on a brier. You are the reflection of Heaven in a pond ; and he that leaps at you is sunk. You are all white — a sheet of spotless paper — when you first are born ; but you are to be scrawled and blotted by every goose's quill. I know you ; for I loved a woman, and loved her so long that I found out a strange thing : I found out what a woman was good for. *' Tattle. — Ay ! pr'ythee, what's that? [Valentine 1 86 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. time, and pronounced equal to Horace by his contemporaries — may give an idea of his power, of his grace, of his daring manner, his " Valentine. — Why, to keep a secret. *' Tattle.— O Lord ! " Valentine. — Oh, exceeding good to keep a secret ; for, though she should tell, yet she is not to be believed. 'Trt/Z/d'.— Hah! Good again, faith. ** Valentine. — I would have musick. Sing me the song that I like." — CoNGREVE : Love for Love. There is a Mrs. Nickleby, of the year 1700, in Congreve's Comedy of " The Double Dealer," in whose character the author introduces some wonderful traits of roguish satire. She is practised on by the gallants of the play, and no more knows how to resist them than any of the ladies above quoted could resist Congreve. " Lady Fly ant. — Oh ! reflect upon the horror of your conduct ! Offering to pervert me " [the joke is that the gentleman is pressing the lady for her daughter's hand, not for her own] — " perverting me from the road of virtue, in which I have trod thus long, and never made one trip — not ovlq fail x pas. Oh, consider it : what would you have to answer for, if you should provoke me to frailty ! Alas ! humanity is feeble, heaven knows ! Very feeble, and unable to support itself. "J/t'/Ztyt^///.— Where am I ? Is it day? and am I awake? Madam " Lady Plyaut. — O Lord, ask me the question ! I'll swear I'll deny it — there- fore don't ask me ; nay, you shan't ask me, I swear I'll deny it. O Gemini, you have brought all the blood into my face ; I warrant I am as red as a turkey-cock. fie, cousin Mellefont ! *^ Mellefont. — Nay, Madam, hear me ; I mean ^^ Lady Plyant. — Hear you? No, no ; I'll deny you first, and hear you after- wards. For one does not know how one's mind may change upon hearing — hearing is one of the senses, and all the senses are fallible. I won't trust my honour, I assure you ; my honour is infallible and uncomatable. '■'■ Alellcfoni. — For heaven's sake. Madam ^'' Lady Plyant. — Oh, name it no more. Bless me, how can you talk of heaven, and have so much wickedness in your heart? May be, you don't think it a sin. They say some of you gentlemen don't think it a sin ; but still, my honour, if it were no sin But, then, to marry my daughter for the convenience of frequent opportunities — I'll never consent to that : as sure as can be, I'll break the match. ^^ Mellefont. — Death and amazement ! Madam, upon my knees *^ Lady Plyant. — Nay, nay, rise up ! come, you shall see my good-nature. I know love is powerful, and nobody can help his passion. 'Tis not your fault ; nor 1 swear, it is not mine. How can I help it, if I have charms ? And how can you help it, if you are made a captive ? I swear it is pity it should be a fault ; but, my honour. Well, but your honour, too — but the sin ! Well, but the necessity. O Lord, here's somebody coming. I dare not stay. Well, you must consider of CONGREVE AND ADDISON. 187 magnificence in compliment, and his polished sarcasm. He writes as if he was ?o accustomed to conquer, that he has a poor opinion of his victims. Nothing's new except their faces, says he : " every woman is the same." He says this in his first comedy, which he wrjte languidly * in illness, when he was an " excellent joung man." Richelieu at eighty could have hardly said a more excellent thing. When he advances to make one of his conquests, it is with a splendid gallantry, in full uniform and with the fiddles playing, like Grammont's French dandies attacking the breach of Lerida. " Cease, cease to ask her name," he writes of a young lady at the Wells at Tunbridge, whom he salutes with a magnificent compliment — " Cease, cease to ask her name, The crowned Muse's noblest theme, Whose glory by immortal fame Shall only sounded be. But if you long to know, Then look round yonder dazzling row : Who most does like an angel show, You may be sure 'tis she." Here are lines about another beauty, who perhaps was not so well pleased at the poet's manner of celebrating her — *' When Lesbia first I saw, so heavenly fair, With eyes so bright and \\ith that awful air, I thought my heart which durst so high aspire As bold as his who snatched celestial fire. your crime ; and strive as much as can be against it — strive, be sure ; but don't be melancholick — don't despair ; but never think that I'll grant you anything. O Lord, no ; but be sure you lay aside all thoughts of the marriage, for though I know you don't love Cynthia, only as a blind to your passion for me — yet it will make me jealous. O Lord, what did I say ? Jealous! No, no, I can't be jealous ; lor I must not love you. Therefore, don't hope ; but don't despair neither. Oh, they're coming ; I must fly." — The Double Dealer : Act 2, sc. v. page 156. * "There seems to be a strange affectation in authors of ai)pearing to have done everything by chance. The ' Old Bachelor ' was written for amusement in the languor of convalescence. Vet it is apparently composed with great elaborateness of dialogue and incessant ambition of wit." — Johnson : Lives of the Poets. i8S ENGLISH HUMOURISTS, But soon as e'er the beauteous idiot spoke, i* orth from her coral lips such folly broke : Like balm the trickling nonsense heal'd my wound, And what her eyes enthralled, her tongue unbound. Amoret is a cleverer woman than the lovely Lesbia, but the poet does not seem to respect one much more than the other ; ar.d describes both with exquisite satirical humour — ** Fair Amoret is gone astray : Pursue and seek her every lover. I'll tell the signs by which you may The wandering shepherdess discover. Coquet and coy at once her air, Both studied, though both seem neglected ; Careless she is with artful care. Affecting to seem unaffected. With skill her eyes dart every glance, Yet change so soon you 'd ne'er suspect them , For she'd persuade they wound by chance, Though certain aim and art direct them. She likes herself, yet others hates For that which in herself she prizes ; And, while she laughs at them, forgets She is the thing that she despises." VVhat could Amoret have done to bring down such shafts of ridicule upon her ? Could she have resisted the irresistible Mr. Congreve ? Could anybody ? Could Sabina, when she woke and heard such a bard singing under her window ? " See," he writes — *' See ! see, she wakes — Sabina wakes ! And now the sun begins to rise ? Less glorious is the morn, that breaks From his bright beams, than her fair eyes. Vv' ith light united, day they give ; But different fates ere night fulfil : Kow many by his warmth will live I How many will her coldness kill ! " COKGREVE AND ADDISOX. 189 Are you melted? Don't you think him a divine man? It not touched by the briUiant Sabina, licar tlie devout Sehnda : — *' Pious Selinda goes to prayers, If I but ask the fiwour ; And yet the tender fool's in tears, When she believes I'll leave h.er : Would I were free from this restraint, Or else had hopes to win her : Would she could make of me a saint. Or I of her a sinner ! '' What a conquering air there is about these ! What an irresistible Mr. Congreve it is ! Sinner ! of course he will be a sinner, the delightful rascal ! Win her ! of course he will win her, the victorious rogue ! He knows he will : he must — with such a grace, with such a fashion, with such a splendid embroidered suit. You see him with red-heeled shoes deliciously turned out, passing a fair jewelled hand through his dishevelled periwig, and deHvering a killing ogle along with his scented billet. And Sabina ? What a comparison that is between the nymph and the sun ! The sun gives Sabina \\\k these tender-constitutioned ladies, why they should require more cooling than their mothers before them ? " I find several speculative persons are of opinion that our sex has of late years been very saucy, and that the hoop-petticoat is made use of to keep us at a distance. It is most certain that a woman's honour cannot be better entrenched than after this manner, in circle within circle, amidst such a variety of outworks of lines and circumvallation. A female who is thus invested in whalebone is sufficiently secured against the approaches of an ill-bred fellow, who might as well think of Sir George Etheridge's way of making love in a tub as in the midst of so many hoops. *' Among these various conjectures, there are men of superstitious tempers who look upon the hoop-petticoat as a kind of prodigy. Some will have it that it por- tends the downfall of the French king, and observe, that the farthingale appeared in EngliDid a little before the ruin of the Spanish monarchy. Others arc of opinion that it foretells battle and bloodshed, and believe it of the same prognosti- cation as the tail of a blazing star. For my part, I am apt to think it is a sign that multitudes are coming into the world rather than going out of it," »:\:c. i^c. — Spectator ^ No. 127. 20A ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. bead : or a citizen's wife for caring too much for the puppet-show, and too little for her husband and children : every one of the little sinners brought before him is amusing, and he dismisses each with the pleasantest penalties and the most charming words of admonition. Addison wrote his papers as gaily as if he was going out for a holiday. When Steele's " Tatler " first began his prattle, Addison, then in Ireland, caught at his friend's notion, poured in paper after paper, and contributed the stores of his mind, the sweet fruits of his reading, the delightful gleanings of his daily observation, with a wonderful profusion, and as it seemed an almost endless fecundity. He was six-and-thirty years old : full and ripe. He had not worked crop after crop from his brain, manuring hastily, subsoiling indifferently, cutting and sowing and cutting again, like other luckless cultivators of letters. He had not done much as yet ; a few Latin poems — graceful prolusions \ a polite book of travels ; a dissertation on medals, not very deep ; four acts of a tragedy, a great classical exercise ; and the " Campaign," a large prize poem that won an enormous prize. But with his friend's discovery of the "Tatler,' Addison's calling was found, and the most delightful talker in the world began to speak. He does not go very deep : let gentlemen oi a profound genius, critics accustomed to the plunge of the bathos, console themselves by thinking that he couldn't go very deep. There are no traces of suffering in his writing. He was so good, so honest so healthy, so cheerfully selfish, if I must use the word. There is nc deep sentiment. I doubt, until after his marriage, perhaps, whethei he ever lost his night's rest or his day's tranquillity about any womar in his life ; * whereas poor Dick Steele had capacity enough to melt and to languish, and to sigh, and to cry his honest old eyes out, foi a dozen. His writings do not show insight into or reverence for the love of women, which I take to be, one the consequence of the other He walks about the world watching their pretty humours, fashions * ' ' Mr. Addison has not had one epithalamium that I can hear of, and mus' even be reduced, Hke a poorer and a better poet, Spenser, to make his own."— Pope's Letters. CONGREVE AXD ADDISOX. 205 follies, flirtations, rivalries : and noting them witli the most charming archness. He sees them in public, in the theatre, or the assembly, or the puppet-show ; or at the toy-shop higgling for gloves and lace ; or at the auction, battling together over a blue porcelain dragon, or a darling monster in Japan ; or at church, eyeing the width of their rival's hoops, or the breadth of their laces, as they sweep down the aisles. Or he looks out of his window at the " Garter" in St. James's Street, at Ardelia's coach, as she blazes to the drawing-room with her coronet and six footmen ; and remembering that her father was a Turkey merchant in the city, calculates how many sponges went to purchase her earring, and how many drums of figs to build her coach- box ; or he demurely watches behind a tree in Spring Garden as Saccharissa (whom he knows under her mask) trips out of her chair to the alley Avhere Sir Fopling is waiting. He sees only the public life of women. Addison was one of the most resolute club-men of his day. He passed many hours daily in those haunts. Besides drinking — which alas ! is past praying for — you must know it, he owned, too, ladies, that he indulged in that odious practice of smoking. Poor fellow ! He was a man's man, remember. Tlie only woman he did know, he didn't write about. I take it there would not have been much humour in that story. He likes to go and sit in the smoking-room at the " Grecian," or the "Devil;" to pace 'Change and the Mall* — to mingle in that * "I have observed that a reader seldom peruses a book ^vith pleasure till he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or a choleric disposition, married or a bachelor; with other particulars of a like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author. To {^ratify this curiosity, which is so natural to a reader, I design this paper and my next as pre- fatory discourses to my following wriiings ; and shall give some account in them of the persons that are engaged in this work. As the chief trouble of compiling, digesting, and correcting will fall to my share, I must do myself the justice to open the work with my own history Tliere runs a story in the family, that when my mother was gone with child of me about three months, she dreamt that she was brought to bed of a judge. Whether this might proceed from a lawsuit which was then depending in the Himily, or my father's being a Justice of the peace. I cannot determine; for 1 am not so vain as to think it presaged any dignity that 2o6 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. great club of the world — sitting alone in it somehow : having good- will and kindness for every single man and woman in it — having need of some habit and custom binding him to some few ; never doing any man a wrong (unless it be a wrong to hint a little doubt I should arrive at in my future life, though that was the interpretation which the neighbourliood put upon it, Tlie gravity of my behaviour at my very first appear- ance in the world, and all the time that I sucked, seemed to favour my mother's dream ; for, as she has often told me, I threw away my rattle before I was two months old, and would not make use of my coral till they had taken away the bells from it. ** As for the rest of my infancy, there being nothing in it remarkable, I shall pass it over in silence. I find that during my nonage I had the reputation of a very sullen youth, but was always the favourite of my schoolmaster, who used to say that my parts 7vere solid and would wear ivell. I had not been long at the university before I distinguished myself by a most profound silence ; for during the space of eight years, excepting in the public exercises of the college, I scarce uttei-ed the quantity of an hundred words; and, indeed, I do not remember that I ever spoke three sentences together in my whole life ** I have passed my latter years in this city, where I am frequently seen . in most public places, though there are not more than half-a-dozen of my select friends that know me There is no place of general resort wherein I do not often make my appearance ; sometimes I am seen thrusting my head into a round of politicians at 'Will's,' and listening with great attention to the narratives that are made in these little circular audiences. Sometimes I smoke a pipe at 'Child's,' and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Postman^ overhear the conversation of every table in the room, I appear on Tuesday night at * St. James's Coffee-house ;' and sometimes join the little committee of politics in the inner room, as one who comes to hear and improve. My face is likewise very well known at the 'Grecian,' the 'Cocoa-tree,' and in the theatres both of Drury Lane and the Haymarket. I have been taken for a merchant upon the Exchange for above these two years; and sometimes pass for a Jew in the assembly of stock-jobbers at 'Jonathan's.' In short, wherever 1 see a cluster of people, I mix with them, though I never open my lips but in my own club. "Thus I live in the world rather as a ^Spectator'' of mankind than as one of the species ; by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artizan, without ever meddling in any practical part in life. I am very well versed in the theory of a husband or a father, and can discern the errors in the economy, business, and diversions of others, better than those who are engaged in them — as standers-by discover blots which are apt to escape those who are in the game In short, I have acted, in all the parts of my life, as a looker-on, which is the character I intend to preserve in this paper."—" Spectator, No. i. CONGREVE AND ADDIS OX. 207 about a man's parts, and to damn liim witli faint praise) ; and so ne looks on the world and plays with the ceaseless humours of all of us — laughs the kindest laugh — points our neighbour's foible or eccen- tricity out to us with the most good-natured, smiling confidence ; and then, turning over his shoulder, whispers our foibles to our neighbour. \Miat would Sir Roger de Coverley be without his follies and his charming little brain-cracks ? * If the good knight did not call out to the people sleeping in church, and say " Amen " with such a delightful pomposity : if he did not make a speech in the assize-court a/>ropos dc bottcs, and merely to show his dignity to Mr. Spectator : ! if he did not mistake Madam Doll Tearsheet for a lady of quality in Temple Garden : if he were wiser than he is : if he had not his humour to salt his life, and were but a mere English gentleman and game-preserver — of what worth were he to us ? We love him for his vanities as much as his virtues. What is ridiculous is delightful in him ; we are so fond of him because we laugh at him so. And out of that laughter, and out of that sweet weakness, and out of those * "So efifectually, indeed, did he retort on vice the mockery whicli had recently b^en directed against virtue, that, since his time, the open violation of decency has always been considered, amongst us, the sure mark of a fool." — Macau LAV. t "The Court was sat before Sir Roger came; but, notwithstanding all the justices had taken their places upon the bench, they made rooni for the old kniglit at the head of them; who for his reputation in the country took occasion to whisper in the judge's ear that he was glad his lordship had vwt with so much good weather in his circuit. I was listening to the proceedings of the Court with much attention, and infinitely pleased with that great api:)earance and solemnity which so properly accompanies such a public administration of our laws ; when, after about an hour's sitting, I observed, to my great surprise, in the midst of a trial, that my friend Sir Roger was getting up to speak. I was in some pain for him, till I found he had acquitted himself of two or three sentences, with a look of much business and great intrepidity. " Upon his first rising, the Court was hushed, and a general whisper ran among the countiy people that Sir Roger was up. The speech he made was so little to the purpose, that I shall not trouble my readers with an account of it, and I believe was not so much designed by the knight himself to inform the Court as to give him a figure in my eyes, and to keep up his credit in the countr)'."— Spectator, No. 122. 2o8 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. harmless eccentricities and follies, and out of that touched brain, and out of that honest manhood and simplicity — we get a result of happiness, goodness, tenderness, pity, piety ; such as, if my audience will think their reading and hearing over, doctors and divines but seldom have the fortune to inspire. And why not ? Is the glory of Heaven to be sung only by gentlemen in black coats ? Must the truth be only expounded in gown and surplice, and out of those two vestments can nobody preach it ? Commend me to this dear preacher without orders — this parson in the tye-wig. When this man looks from the world, whose weaknesses he describes so benevolently, up to the Heaven which shines over us all, I can hardly fancy a human face lighted up with a more serene rapture : a human intellect thrilling with a purer love and adoration than Joseph Addison's. Listen to him : from your childhood you have known the verses : but who can hear their sacred music without love and awe ?— " Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth ; Whilst all the stars that round her burn, And all the planets in their turn. Confirm the tidings as they roll, And spread the truth from pole to pole. What though, in solemn silence, all Move round the dark terrestrial ball ; What though no real voice nor sound Amid their radiant orbs be found ; In reason's ear they all rejoice, And utter forth a glorious voice, For ever singing as they shine, The hand that made us is divine." It seems to me those verses shine like the stars. They shine out of a great deep calm. When he turns to Heaven, a Sabbath comes over that man's mind : and his face lights up from it with a glory of thanks and prayer. His sense of religion stirs through his whole being. In the fields, in the town : looking at the birds in the trees : at the children in the streets : in the morning or in the moon- CONGREVE AND ADDISON. 209 light : over his books in his own room : in a happy party at a country merry-making or a town assembly, good-will and peace to God's creatures, and love and awe of Him who made them, fill his jnir-e heart and shine from his kind face. If Swift's life was the most wretched, I think Addison's was one of the most enviable. A life prosperous and beautiful — a calm death — an immense fame and atifection afterwards for his happy and spotless name.'*' * " Garth sent to Addison (of whom he had a very higli opinion) on his deUli- bed, to ask him whether the Christian rehgion was true." — Dr. VoUNG. Spaicis Anecdotes. " I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as an habit of the mind. jNIirth is short and transient, cheerfuhiess fixed and permanent. Those are often raised into the greatest transports of mirth who are subject to the greatest depression of melancholy : on the contrary, cheer- fulness, though it does not give the mind such an exquisite gladness, prevents us from falling into any depths of sorrow. Mirth is like a flash of lightning that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment ; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity." — Addison : Spedatoi-, No. 381. 19 2IO ENGLISH HUMOURISTS, STEELE, WHAT do we look for in studying the history of a past age ? Is it to learn the political transactions and characters of the leading public men ? is it to make ourselves acquainted with the life and being of the time ? If we set out with the former grave purpose, where is the truth, and who believes that he has it entire? What cha- racter of what great man is known to you ? You can but make guesses as to character more or less happy. In common life don't you often judge and misjudge a man's whole conduct, setting out from a wrong impression ? The tone of a voice, a word said in joke, or a trifle in behaviour — the cut of his hair or the tie of his neckcloth may disfigure him in your eyes, or poison your good opinion ; or at the end of years of intimacy it may be your closest friend says something, reveals something which had previously been a secret, which alters all your views about him, and shows that he has been acting on quite a different motive to that which you fancied you knew. And if it is so with those you know, how much more with those you don't know ? Say, for example, that I want to understand the character of the Duke of Marlborough. I read Swift's history of the times in which he took a part ; the shrewdest of observers and initiated, one would think, into the politics of the age — he hints to me that Marlborough was a coward, and even of doubtful military capacity : he speaks of Walpole as a contemptible boor, and scarcely mentions, except to flout it, the great intrigue of the Queen's latter days, which was to have ended in bringing back the Pretender. Again, I read Marlborough's life by a copious archdeacon, who has the command of inmiense papers, of sonorous language, of what is called the best information ; and I get little or no insight into this secret niotive which, I believe, influenced STEELE. 211 the whole of Marlborougli's career, wliich caused his turnings and windings, his opportune fidelity and treason, stopped his army almost at Paris gate, and 4anded him finally on the Hanoverian side — the winning side : I get, I say, no truth, or only a portion of it, in the narrative of either writer, and believe that Coxe's portrait, or Swift's portrait, is quite unlike the real Churchill. I take this as a single instance, prepared to be as sceptical about any other, and say to the Muse of History, " O venerable daughter of Mnemosyne, 1 doubt every single statement you ever made since your ladyship was a Muse ! For all your grave airs and high pretensions, you are not a whit more trustworthy than some of your lighter sisters on v/hom your partisans look down. You bid me listen to a general's oration to his soldiers : Nonsense ! He no more made it than Turpin made his dying speech at Newgate. You pronounce a panegyric of a hero : I doubt it, and say you flatter outrageously. You utter the con- demnation of a loose character : I doubt it, and think you arc prejudiced and take the side of the Dons. You offer me an autobio- graphy : I doubt all autobiographies I ever read ; except those, perhaps, of Mr. Robinson Crusoe, Mariner, and writers of his class. These have no object in setting themselves right with the public or their own consciences ; these have no motive for concealment or half- truths ; these call for no more confidence than I can cheerfully give, and do not force me to tax my credulity or to fortify it by evidence. I take up a volume of Dr. Smollett, or a volume of the Spectator, and say the fiction carries a greater amount of truth in solution than the volume which purports to be all true. Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the Hfe of the time ; of the manners, of the movement, the dress, the pleasures, the laughter, the ridicules of society — the old times live again, and I travel in the old country of England. Can the heaviest historian do more for me ? *' As we read in these delightful volumes of the Tatler and Spectator the ])ast age returns, the England of our ancestors is revivified. The Maypole rises in the Strand again in London ; the cliurches are thronged with daily worshippers ; the beaux are gather- 212 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. ing in the coffee-houses ; the gentry are gohig to the Drawing-room ; the ladies are thronging to the toy-shops ; the chairmen are jostling in the streets ; the footmen are running with Hnks before the chariots, or fighting round the theatre doors. In the country I see the young Squire riding to Eton with his servants behind him, and Will Wimble, the friend of the family, to see him safe. To make that journey from the Squire's and back, Will is a week on horseback. The coach takes five days between London and Bath. The judges and the bar ride the circuit. If my lady comes to town in her post-chariot, her people carry pistols to fire a salute on Captain Macheath if he should appear, and her couriers ride ahead to prepare apartments for her at the great caravanserais on the road ; Boniface receives her under the creaking sign of the " Bell " or the " Ram," and he and his chamber, lains bow her up the great stair to the state-apartments, whilst her carriage rumbles into the court-yard, where the " Exeter Fly" is housed that performs the journey in eight days, God willing, having achieved its daily flight of twenty miles, and landed its passengers for supper and sleep. The curate is taking his pipe in the kitchen, where the Captain's man — having hung up his masters half pike — is at his bacon and eggs, bragging of Ramillies and Malplaquet to the town's- folk, who have their club in the chimney-corner. The Captain is ogling the chambermaid in the wooden gallery, or bribing her to know who is the pretty young mistress that has come in the coach. The pack-horses are in the great stable, and the drivers and ostlers carousing in the tap. And in Mrs. Landlady's bar, over a glass of strong waters, sits a gentleman of military appearance, who travels with pistols, as all the rest of the world does, and has a rattling grey mare in the stables which will be saddled and away with, its owner half an hour before the " Fly " sets out on its last day's flight. And some five miles on the road, as the " Exeter Fly" comes jingling and creaking onwards, it will suddenly be brought to a halt by a gentle^ man on a grey mare, with a black vizard on his face, who thrusts a long pistol into the coach window, and bids the company to hand out their purses. ... It must have been no small pleasure even to STEELE. 213 sit in tiic great kitclicn in tliosc tlays, and sec the tide of humankind pass by. AVe arrive at i^hices now, but we tra\el no more. Addison talks jocularly of a difference of manner and costume being (juite perceivable at Staines, where there passed a young fellow " with a very tolerable periwig," though, to be sure, his hat was out of fashion, and had a Ramillies cock. I would have liked to travel in those days (being of that class of travellers who are proverbially pretty easy coram latronibus) and have seen my friend with the grey mare and the black vizard. Alas I there always came a day in the life of that warrior when it was the flishion to accompany him as he passed— without his black mask, and with a nosegay in his hand, accompanied by halberdiers and attended by the sheriff, — in a carriage without springs, and a clergyman jolting beside him, to a spot close by Cumberland Gate and the Marble Arch, where a stone still records that here Tyburn turnpike stood. What a change in a century ; in a few years ! A\'ithin a few yards of that gate the fields began : the fields of his exploits, behind the hedges of which he lurked and robbed. A great and wealthy city has grown over those meadows. Were a man brought to die there now, the windows would be closed and the inhabitants keep their houses in sickening horror. A hundred years back, people crowded to see that last act of a highwayman's life, and make jokes on it. Swift laughed at him, grimly advising him to provide a Holland shirt and white cap crowned with a crimson or black ribbon for his exit, to mount the cart cheerfully — shake hands with the hangmaif, and so — farewell. Gay wrote the most delightful ballads, and made merry over the same hero. Contrast these with the writings of our present humourists ! Compare those morals and ours— those manners and ours ! We can't tell — you would not bear to be told the whole trutli regarding those men and manners. You could no more suffer in a British drawing-room, under the reign of Queen Victoria, a fine gentleman or fine lady of Queen Anne's time, or hear what they heard and said, than you would receive an ancient Briton. It is as one reads about savages, that one contemplates the wild ways, the 214 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. barbarous feasts, the terrific pastimes, of the men of pleasure of that age. We have our fine gentlemen, and our " fast men ; " permit me to give you an idea of one particularly fast nobleman of Queen Anne's days, whose biography has been preserved to us by the law reporters. In 1 69 1, when Steele was a boy at school, my Lord Mohun was tried by his peers for the murder of William Mountford, comedian. In " Howell's State Trials," the reader will find not only an edifying account of this exceedingly fast nobleman, but of the times and manners of those days. My lord's friend, a Captain Hill, smitten with the charms of the beautiful Mrs. Bracegirdle, and anxious to marry her at all hazards, determined to carry her off, and for this purpose hired a hackney-coach with six horses, and a half-dozen of soldiers, to aid him in the storm. The coach with a pair of horses (the four leaders being in waiting elsewhere) took its station opposite my Lord Craven's house in Drury Lane, by which door Mrs. Brace- girdle was to pass on her way from the theatre. As she passed in company of her mamma and a friend, Mr. Page, the Captain seized her by the hand, the soldiers hustled Mr. Page and attacked him sword in hand, and Captain Hill and his noble friend endeavoured to force Madam Bracegirdle into the coach. Mr. Page called for help : the population of Drury Lane rose : it was impossible to effect the capture ; and bidding the soldiers go about their business, and the coach to drive off, Hill let go of his prey sulkily, and waited for other opportunities of revenge. The man of whom he was most jealous was Will Mountford, the comedian ; Will removed, he thought ]Mrs. Bracegirdle might be his : and accordingly the Captain and his lordship lay that night in wait for Will, and as he was coming out of a house in Norfolk Street, while Mohun engaged him in talk. Hill, in the words of the Attorney-General, made a pass and ran him clean through the body. Sixty-one of my lord's peers finding him not guilty of murder, while but fourteen found him guilty, this very fast nobleman was discharged : and made his appearance seven years after in another STEKLt:, 215 trial for murder — when he, my Lord Warwick, and three gentlemen of the military profession, were concerned in the fight which ended in the death of Captain Cootc. This jolly company were drinking together at " Lockit's " in Charing Cross, when angry words arose between Captain Coote and Captain Frencli ; whom my Lord Mohun and my Lord the P^arl of Warwick '^ and Holland endeavoured to pacify. My Lord "Warwick was a dear friend of Captain Coote, lent him a hundred pounds to buy his commission in the Guards ; once wlien the captain was arrested for 13/. by his tailor, my lord lent him five guineas, often paid his reckoning for him, and showed him other offices of friend- ship. On this evening the disputants, French and Coote, being separated whilst they were upstairs, unluckily stopped to drink ale again at the bar of " Lockit's." The row began afresh — Coote lunged at French over the bar, and at last all six called for chairs, and went to Leicester Fields, where they fell to. Their lordships engaged on the side of Captain Coote. My Lord of Warwick was severely wounded in the hand, Mr. French also was stabbed, but honest Captain Coote got a couple of wounds — one especially, " a wound in the left side just under the short ribs, and piercing through the diaphragma," which did for Captain Coote. Hence tlie trials of my Lords Warwick and Mohun : hence the assemblage of * The husband of the Lady Warwick wlio married Addison, and the father of the young Earl, who was brought to his stepfather's bed to see " how a Christian could die. " He was amongst the wildest of the nobility of that day ; and in the curious collection of Chap- Books at the British Museum, I have seen more than one anecdote of the freaks of the gay lord. He was popular in London, as such daring spirits have been in our time. The anecdotists speak very kindly of his practical jokes. Mohun was scarcely out of prison for his second homicide, when he went on Lord Macclesfield's embassy to the Elector of Hanover, when Queen Anne sent the garter to H. E. Highness. The chronicler of the expedition speaks of his lordship as an amiable young man, who had been in bad company, but was quite repentant and reformed. He and Macartney afterwards murdered the Duke of Hamilton between them, in which act Lord Mohun died. This amiable baron's name was Charles, and not Henr}', as a recent novelist has christefied him. 2i6 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. peers, the report of the transaction, in which these defunct fast men still live for the observation of the curious. My Lord of Warwick is brought to the bar by the Deputy Governor of the Tower of London, having the axe carried before him by the gentleman gaoler, who stood with it at the bar at the right hand of the prisoner, turning the edge from him ; the prisoner, at his approach, making three bows, one to his Grace the Lord High Steward, the other to the peers on each hand; and his Grace and the peers return the salute. And besides these great personages, august in periwigs, and nodding to the right and left, a host of the small come up out of the past and pass before us — the jolly captains brawling in the tavern, and laughing and cursing over their cups — the drawer that serves, the bar-girl that waits, the bailiff on the prowl, the chairmen trudging through the black lampless streets, and smoking their pipes by the railings, whilst swords are clashing in the garden within. " Help there ! a gentle- man is hurt ! " The chairmen put up their pipes, and help the gentleman over the railings, and carry him, ghastly and bleeding, to the Bagnio in Long Acre, where they knock up the surgeon — a pretty tall gentleman : but that wound under the short ribs has done for him. Surgeon, lords, captains, bailiffs, chairmen, and gentleman gaoler with your axe, where be you now ? The gentleman axeman's head is off his own shoulders ; the lords and judges can wag theirs no longer; the bailiff's writs have ceased to run; the honest chair- men's pipes are put out, and with their brawny calves they have walked away into Hades — all as irrecoverably done for as Will Mountford or Captain Coote. The subject of our night's lecture saw all these people — rode in Captain Coote's company of the Guards very probably — wrote and sighed for Bracegirdle, went home tipsy in many a chair, after many a bottle, in many a tavern — fled from many a bailiff. In 1709, when the publication of the Tatler began, our great- great-grandfathers must have seized upon that new and delightful paper with much such eagerness as lovers of light literature in a later day exhibited when the Waverley novels appeared, upon which the public rushed, forsaking that feeble entertainment of which the Miss STEELE. 217 Porters, the Anne of Swanseas, and worthy Mrs. "RaclcHtTc herself, with her dreary castles and exploded old ghosts, had had pretty much the monopoly. I have looked over many of the comic books with which our ancestors amused themselves, from the novels of Swift's coadjutrix, Mrs. Manley, the delectable author of the " New Atlantis," to the facetious productions of Tom Durfey, and Tom Brown, and Ned Ward, writer of the " London Spy " and several other volumes of ribaldry. The slang of the taverns and ordinaries, the wit of the Bagnios, form the strongest part of the farrago of which these libels are composed. In the excellent newspaper collection at the British Museum, you may see, besides, the Craftsmen and Postboy specimens, and queer specimens they are, of the higher literature of Queen Anne's time. Here is an abstract from a notable journal bearing date, Wednesday, October 13th, 1708, and entitled The British Apollo; or, curious ainusements for the ingenious, by a society of gent/enien.'' The British J polio invited and professed to answer questions upon all subjects of wit, morality, science, and even religion ; and two out of its four pages are filled with queries and replies much like some of the oracular penny prints of the present time. One of the first querists, referring to the passage that a bishop should be the husband of one wife, argues that polygamy is justifiable in the laity. The society of gentlemen conducting the British Apollo are posed by this casuist, and promise to give him an answer. Celinda then wishes to know from " the gentlemen," concerning the souls of the dead, whether they shall have the satisfaction to know those whom they most valued in this transitory life. The gentlemen of the Apollo give but cold comfort to poor Celinda. They are inclined to think not : for, say they, since every inhabitant of those regions will be infinitely dearer than here are our nearest relatives — what have we to do with a partial friendship in that happy place ? Poor Celinda ! it may have been a child or a lover whom she had lost, and was pining after, when the oracle of British Apollo gave her this dismal answer. She has solved the question for herself by this time, and knows quite as well as the society of gentlemen. 2i8 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. From theology we come to physics, and Q. asks, "Why does hot water freeze sooner than cold ? " Apollo replies, " Hot water cannot be said to freeze sooner than cold ; but water once heated and cold, may be subject to freeze by the evaporation of the spirituous parts of the water, which renders it less able to withstand the power of frosty weather." The next query is rather a delicate one. " You, Mr. Apollo, who are said to be the God of wisdom, pray give us the reason why kissing is so much in fashion : what benefit one receives by it, and who was the inventor, and you will oblige Corinna." To this queer demand the lips of Phoebus, smiling, answer : '' Pretty innocent Corinna ! Apollo owns that he was a little surprised by your kissing question, particularly at that part of it where you desire to know the benefit you receive by it. Ah ! madam, had you a lover, you would not come to Apollo for a solution ; since there is no dispute but the kisses of mutual lovers give infinite satisfaction. As to its invention? 'tis certain nature was its author, and it began with the first courtship." After a column more of questions, follow nearly two pages of poems, signed by Philander, Armenia, and the like, and chiefly on the tender passion ; and the paper wound up with a letter from Leghorn, an account of the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene before Lille, and proposals for publishing two sheets on the present state of ^.thiopia, by Mr. Hill : all of which is printed for the authors by J. Mayo, at the Printing Press against Water Lane in Fleet Street. What a change it must have been — how Apollo's oracles must have been struck dumb, when the Taller appeared, and scholars, gentlemen, men of the world, men of genius, began to speak ! Shortly before the Boyne was fought, and young Swift had begun to make acquaintance with English court manners and English servi- tude, in Sir William Temple's family, another Irish youth was brought to learn his humanities at the old school of Charterhouse, near Smithfteld j to which foundation he had been appointed by James STEELE. 219 Duke of Ormonil, ^ governor of tlie House, and a patron of tnc lad's £imily. The boy was an orphan, and described, twenty years after, with a sweet pathos and simpHcity, some of the earhest recollections of a life which was destined to be chequered by a strange variety of good and evil fortune. I am afraid no good report could be given by his masters and ushers of that thick-set, sc|uare-faced, black-eyed, soft-hearted little Irish boy. He was very idle. He was whipped deservedly a great number of times. Though he had very good parts of his own, he got other boys to do his lessons for him, and only took just as much trouble as should enable him to scuffle through his exercises, and by good fortune escape the flogging-block. One hundred and fifty years after, I have myself inspected, but only as an amateur, that instru- ment of righteous torture still existing, and in occasional use, in a secluded private apartment of the old Charterhouse School ; and have no doubt it is the very counterpart, if not the ancient and interesting machine itself, at which poor Dick Steele submitted himself to the tormentors. Besides being very kind, lazy, and good-natured, this boy went invariably into debt with the tart-woman ; ran out of bounds, and entered into pecuniary, or rather promissory, engagements with die neighbouring lollipop-vendors and piemen — exhibited an early fond- ness and capacity for drinking mum and sack, and borrowed from all his comrades who had money to lend. I have no sort of authority for the statements here made of Steele's early life ; but if the child is father of the man, the father of young Steele of Merton, who left Oxford without taking a degree, and entered the Life Guards — the father of Captain Steele of Lucas's Fusiliers, who got his company tlirough the patronage of my Lord Cutts — the father of Mr. Steele the Commissioner of Stamps, the editor of the Gazette, tlie Tatler, and Spectator^ the expelled Member of Parliament, and the author of the "Tender Husband" and the " Conscious Lovers;" if man and boy resembled each other, Dick Steele the schoolboy must have been one of the most generous, good-for-nothing, amiable little creatures 220 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. that ever conjugated the verb tiipto^ I beat, tuptoniai^ I am whipped, in any school in Great Britain. Ahiiost every gentleman who does me the honour to hear me will remember that the very greatest character which he has seen in the course of his life, and the person to whom he has looked up widi the greatest wonder and reverence, was the head boy at his school. The schoolmaster himself hardly inspires such an awe. The head boy construes as well as the schoolmaster himself. When he begins to speak the hall is hushed, and every little boy listens. He writes off copies of Latin verses as melodiously as Virgil. He is good- natured, and, his own masterpieces achieved, pours out other copies of verses for other boys with an astonishing ease and fluency ; the idle ones only trembling lest they should be discovered on giving in their exercises, and whipped because their poems were too good. I have seen great men in my time, but never such a great one as that head boy of my childhood : we all thought he must be Prime Minister, and I was disappointed on meeting him in after life to find he was no more than six feet high. Dick Steele, the Charterhouse gownboy, contracted such an admiration in the years of his childhood, and retained it faithfully through his life. Through the school and through the world, whither- soever his strange fortune led this erring, wayward, affectionate creature, Joseph Addison was always his head boy. Addison wrote his exercises. Addison did his best themes. He ran on Addison's messages : fagged for him and blacked his shoes : to be in Joe's company was Dick's greatest pleasure ; and he took a sermon or a caning from his monitor with the most boundless reverence, acqui- escence, and affection.''' Steele found Addison a stately college Don at Oxford, and himself * "Steele had the greatest veneration for Addison, and used to show it, in all companies, in a particular manner. Addison, now and then, used to play a little upon him ; but he always took it well." — Pope. Spends Anecdotes. " Sir Richard Steele was the best-natured creature in the world : even in his worst state of health, he seemed to desire nothing but to please and be pleased." —Dr. Young. Spcnce''s Anecdotes. STEELE. 221 did not make much figure at this place. He wrote a comedy, which, by the advice of a friend, the humble fellow burned there ; and some verses, which I dare say are as sublime as other gentlemen's com- position at that age ; but being smitten with a sudden love for military glor}-, he threw u}) the cap and gown for the saddle and bridle, and rode privately in the Horse Guards, in the Duke of Ormond's troop — the second — and, probably, with the rest of the gentlemen of his troop, "all mounted on black horses with white feathers in their hats, and scarlet coats richly laced," marched by King William, in Hyde Park, in November, 1699, and a great show of the nobility, besides twenty thousand people, and above a thousand coaches. " The Guards had just got their new clothes," the Lojidon Post said : "they are extraordinary grand, and thought to be the finest body of horse in the world." But Steele could hardly have seen any actual service. He who wrote about himself, his mother, his wife, his loves, his debts, his friends, and the wine he drank, would have told us of his battles if he had seen any. His old patron, Ormond, probably got him his cornetcy in the Guards, from which he was promoted to be a captain in Lucas's Fusiliers, getting his company through the patronage of Lord Cutts, whose secretary he was, and to whom he dedicated his work called the " Christian Hero." As for Dick, whilst writing this ardent devotional work, he was deep in debt, in drink, and in all the follies of the town ; it is related that all the officers of Lucas's, and the gentlemen of the Guards, laughed at Dick.* And in truth a theologian in liquor is not a respectabl-e * The gaiety of his dramatic tone may be seen in this little scene between two brilliant sisters, from his comedy " The P\meral, or Grief a la Mode." Dick wrote this, he said, from "a necessity of enlivening his character," which, it seemed, the " Christian Hero " had a tendency to make too decorous, grave, and respectable in the eyes of readers of that pious piece. \Scl'hc dnni's and disan'crs Lady Charlottk, nadiitg at a tabic, — Lady Harriet, playing at a glass, to and fro, and viewing hcrsclf.\ *' Z. Ha. — Nay, good sister, you may as well talk to me {looking at herself as j-/c' x/^m/'j] as sit staring at a book whicli I know you can't attend. — Good Dr. Lucas may have writ there what he pleases, but there's no putting Francis, Lord 222 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. object, and a hermit, though he may be out at elbows, must not be in debt to the tailor. Steele says of himself that he was always sinning Hardy, now Earl of Brumpton, out of your head, or making him absent from your eyes. Do but look on me, now, and deny it if you can. " L. Ch. — You are the maddest girl \s}niHng\. "Z. Ila. — Look ye, I knew you could not say it and forbear laughing {looking over CJiarlottc'\. — Oh! I see his name as plain as you do — F-r-a-n, Fran,— c-i-s, cis, Francis, 'tis in every line of the book. " L. Ch. \rising\ — It's in vain, I see, to mind anything in such impertinent company — but granting 'twere as you say, as to my Lord Hardy — 'tis more excusable to admire another than oneself. " L. Ha. — No, I think not, — yes, I grant you, than really to be vain of one's person, but I don't admire myself — Pish ! I don't believe my eyes to have that softness. {Looking in the glass.'\ They a'n't so piercing: no, 'tis only stuff, the men will be talking. — Some people are such admirers of teeth — Lord, what signifies teeth ! \_Shoioing her teeth. ^ A very black-a-moor has as white a set of teeth as L — No, sister, I don't admire myself, but I've a spirit of contradiction in me : I don't know I'm in love with myself, only to rival the men. " Z. Ch. — Ay, but Mr. Campley will gain ground ev'n of that rival of his, your dear self. * ' Z. Ha. — Oh, what have I done to you, that you should name that insolent intruder ? A confident, opinionative fop. No, indeed, if I am, as a poetical lover of mine sighed and sung of both sexes. The public envy and the public care, I shan't be so easily catched — I thank him — I Avant but to be sure I should heartily torment him by banishing him, and then consider whether he should depart this life or not. " Z. Ch. — Indeed, sister, to be serious with you, this vanity in your humour does not at all become you. "Z. Ha. — Vanity ! All the matter is, we gay people are more sincere than you wise folks: all your life's an art. —Speak your soul. — Look you there. — [Hauling her to the glass. ] Are you not struck with a secret pleasure when you view that bloom in your look, that harmony in your shape, that promptitude in your mien ? " Z. Ch. — Well, simpleton, if I am at first so simple as to be a little taken with myself, I know it a fault, and take pains to correct it. " Z. Ha. — Pshaw ! Pshaw ! Talk this musty tale to old Mrs. Fardingale, 'tis too soon for me to think at that rate. " Z. Ch. — They that think it too soon to understand themselves will very soon find it too late. — But tell me honestly, don't you like Campley ? "Z. Ila. — The fellow is not to be abhorred, if the forward thing did not think of getting me so easily.— (Jh, I hate a heart I can't break when I please. — What STEELE. 223 and repenting. He beat his breast and cried most piteously when he did repent : but as soon as crying had made him thirsty, he fell to sinning again. In that charming paper in the Tatlcr, in which he records his father's death, his mother's griefs, his own most solemn and tender emotions, he says he is inteiTupted by the arrival of a hamper of wine, " the same as is to be sold at Garraway's, next week;" upon the receipt of which he sends for three friends, and they fliU to instantly, '' drinking two bottles apiece, with great benefit to themselves, and not separating till two o'clock in the morning." His life was so. Jack the drawer was always interrupting it, bringing him a bottle from the *' Rose," or inviting him over to a bout there with Sir Plume and Mr. Diver; and Dick wiped his eyes, which were whimpering over his papers, took down his laced hat, put on his sword and wig, kissed his wife and children, told them a lie about pressing business, and went oft' to the "Rose" to the jolly fellows. While Mr. Addison was abroad, and after he came home in rather a dismal way to wait upon Providence in his shabby lodging in the Haymarket, young Captain Steele was cutting a much smarter figure than that of his classical friend of Charterhouse Cloister and Maudlin Walk. Could not some painter give an interview between the gallant captain of Lucas's, with his hat cocked, and his lace, and his face too, a trifle tarnished with drink, and that poet, that philosopher, pale, proud, and poor, his friend and monitor of school- days, of all days ? How Dick must have bragged about his chances and his hopes, and the fine company he kept, and the charms of the reigning toasts and popular actresses, and the number of bottles that he and my lord and some other pretty fellows had cracked over- night at the *' Devil," or the " Garter ! " Cannot one fimcy Joseph makes the value of dear china, but tliat 'tis so brittle ? — were it not for that, you might as well have stone mugs in your closet." — 77/t' Funeral, Oct. 2ncl. " We knew the obHgations the stage had to his writings [Steele's] ; there being scarcely a comedian of merit in our wliole company whom his Tatlcrs liad not made better by his recommendation of them." — Cibder. 224 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. Addison's calm smile and cold grey eyes following Dick for an instant, as he struts down the Mall, to dine with the Guard at St. James's, before he turns, with his sober pace and threadbare suit, to walk back to his lodgings up the two pair of stairs ? Steele's name was down for promotion, Dick always said himself, in the glorious, pious, and immortal William's last table-book. Jonathan Swift's name had been written there by the same hand too. Our worthy friend, the author of the " Christian Hero," continued to make no small figure about town by the use of his wits.* He was appointed Gazetteer: he wrote, in 1703, "The Tender Husband," his second play, in which there is some delightful farcical writing, and of which he fondly owned in after-life, and when Addison was no more, that there were " many applauded strokes " from Addison's beloved hand.t Is it not a pleasant partnership to remember? Can't one fancy Steele full of spirits and youth, leaving his gay company to go to Addison's lodging, where his friend sits in the shabby sitting-room, quite serene, and cheerful, and poor? In 1704, Steele came on the town with another comedy, and behold it was so moral and religious, as poor Dick insisted, — so dull the town thought, — that the " Lying Lover " was damned. * " There is not now in his sight that excellent man, whom Heaven made his friend and superior, to be at a certain place in pain for what he should say or do. I will go on in his further encouragement. The best woman that ever man had cannot now lament and pine at his neglect of himself" — Steele [of himself]: The Theatre. No. 12, Feb. 1719-20. + "The Funeral" supplies an admirable stroke of humour, — one which Sydney Smith has used as an illustration of the faculty in his Lectures. The undertaker is talking to his employes about their duty. Sable. — *' Ha, you ! — A little more upon the dismal [^forming their coiinte- nances\ ; this fellow has a good mortal look, — place him near the corpse : that wainscot-face must be o' top of the stairs ; that fellow's almost in a fright (that looks as if he were full of some strange misery) at the end of the hall. So — But I'll fix you all myself Let's have no laughing now on any provocation. Look yonder, — that hale, well-looking puppy! You ungrateful scoundrel, did not I pity you, take you out of a great man's service, and show you the pleasure of receiving wages ? Did itot I give you ten, then fifteen, and twenty shillings a week to he sorrozufnl ? — and the more I give yon I think the gladder you are! " STEELE. 225 Addison's liour of success now came, and he was able to help our friend the " Christian Hero " in such a way, that, if there had been any chance of keeping that poor tipsy champion upon his legs, his fortune was safe, and his competence assured. Steele procured the place of Commissioner of Stamps : he wrote so richly, so gracefully often, so kindly always, with such a pleasant wit and easy frankness, with such a gush of good spirits and good humour, that his early papers may be compared to Addison's own, and are to be read, by a male reader at least, with quite an equal pleasure.* * '■^ From my cnon Apart men f, .\\k'. 16. "There are several persons who have n\any pleasures and entertainments in their possession, which they do not enjoy ; it is, therefore, a kind and good office to acquaint them with their own happiness, and turn their attention to such instances of their good fortune as they are apt to overlook. Persons in the married state often want such a monitor ; and pine away their days by looking upon the same condition in anguish and murmurnig, which carries with it, in the opinion of others, a complication of all the pleasures of life, and a retreat from its in- quietudes. • ' I am led into this thought by a visit I made to an old friend who was formerly my schoolfellow. He came to town last week, with his family, for the winter ; and yesterday morning sent me word his wife expected me to dinner. I am, as it were, at home at that house, and every member of it knows me for their well-wisher, I cannot, indeed, express the pleasure it is to be met by the children with so much joy as I am when I go thither. The boys and girls strive who shall come first, when they think it is I that am knocking at the door; and that child which loses the race to me runs back again to tell the father it is Mr. Bickerstaff. This day I was led in by a pretty girl that we all thought must have forgot me ; for the family has been out of town these two years. Her knowing me again was a mighty subject with us, and took up our discourse at the first entrance ; after which, they began to rally me upon a thousand little stories they heard in the country, about my marriage to one of my neighbours' daughters ; upon which, the gentleman, my friend, said, * Nay ; if Mr. Bickerstaff marries a child of any of his old companions, I hope mine shall have the preference : there is Mrs. Mary is now sixteen, and would make him as fine a widow as the best of them. But 1 know him too well ; he is so enamoured with the very memory of those who flourished in our youth, that he will not so much as look upon the modem beauties. I remember, old gentleman, how often you went home in a day ta refresh your countenance and dress when Teraminta reigned in your heart. As we came up in the coach, I repeated to my wife some of your verses on her.' With such reflections on little passages which happened long ago, we passed our time .luring a cheerful and elegant meal. AAlt dinner his lady left the room, as did 19 15 2?.6 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. After the Taller in 17 ii, the famous Spectator made its appear- ance, and this was followed, at various intervals, by many periodicals also the children. As soon as we were alone, he took me by the hand : * Well, my good frioid,' says he, ' I am heartily glad to see thee ; I was afraid you would never have seen all the company that dined with you to-day again. Do not you think the good woman of the house a little altered since you followed her from the playhouse to find out who she was for me ? ' I perceived a tear fall down his cheek as he spoke, which moved me not a little. But, to turn the discourse, I said, * She is not, indeed, that creature she was when she returned me the letter I carried from you, and told me, " She hoped, as I was a gentleman, I would be employed no more to trouble her, who had never offended me ; but would be so much the gentleman's friend as to dissuade him from a pursuit which he could never succeed in." You may remember I thought her in earnest, and you were forced to employ your cousin Will, who made his sister get acquainted with her for you. You cannot expect her to be for ever fifteen. ' ' Fifteen ! ' replied my good friend. ' Ah ! you little understand— you, that have lived a bachelor — how great, how exquisite a pleasure there is in being really beloved ! It is impossible that the most beauteous face in nature should raise in me such pleasing ideas as when I look upon that excellent woman. That fading in her countenance is chiefly caused by her watching with me in my fever. This was followed by a fit of sickness, which had like to have carried me off last winter. I tell you, sincerely, I have so many obligations to her that I cannot, with any sort of moderation, think of her preserit state of health. But, as to what you say of fifteen, she gives me every day pleasure beyond what I ever knew in the possession of her beauty when I was in the vigour of youth. Every moment of her life brings me fresh instances of her complacency to my inclinations, and her prudence in regard to my fortune. Her face is to me much more beautiful than when I first saw it ; there is no decay in any feature which I cannot trace from the very instant it was occasioned by some anxious concern for my welfare and interests. Thus, at the same time, methinks, the love I conceived towards her for what she was, is heightened by my gratitude for what she is. The love of a wife is as much above the idle passion commonly called by that name, as the loud laughter of buffoons is inferior to the elegant mirth of gentlemen. Oh ! she is an inestimable jewel ! In her examina- tion of her household affairs, she shows a certain fearfulness to find a fault, which makes her servants obey her like children ; and the meanest we have has an ingenuous shame for an offence not always to be seen in children in other families. I speak freely to you, my old friend ; ever since her sickness, things that gave me the quickest joy before turn now to a certain anxiety. As the children play in the next room, I know the poor things by their steps, and am considering what they must do should they lose their mother in their tender years. The pleasure I used to take in telling my boy stories of battles, and asking my girl questions about the disposal of her baby, and the gossipping of it, is turned into inward reflection and melancholy.' ["He STEELE. 227 under the same editor — the Guardian — the E?igiis/u/ian — the Lovers whose love was rather insipid — the Reader^ of whom the public "lie would have gone on in this tender way, when the good lady entered, and, with an inexpressil^le sweetness in her countenance, told us ' she had been searching her closet for something very good to treat such an old friend as I was.* Her husband's eyes sparkled with pleasure at the cheerfulness of her countenance ; and 1 saw all his fears vanish in an instant. The lady observing something in our looks which showed we had been more serious than ordinary, and seeing her husband receive her with great concern under a forced cheerfulness, immediately guessed at what we had been talking of; and applying herself to me, said, with a smile, ' Mr. Bickerstaff, do not believe a word of what he tells you ; I shall still live to have you for my second, as I have often promised you, unless he takes more care of himself than he has done since his coming to town. You must know he tells me, that he finds London is a much more healthy place than the country ; for he sees several of his old acquaintances and schoolfellows are here — young fdlcnvs with fair, full-bottomed pcrmngs. I could scarce keep him this morning from going out open-breasted.'' My friend, who is always extremely delighted with her agreeable humour, made her sit down with us. She did it with that easiness which is peculiar to women of sense ; and to keep up the good humour she had brought in with her, turned her raillery upon me. ' Mr. Bickerstaff, you remember you followed me one night from the playhouse ; suppose you should carry me thither to-morrow night, and lead me in the front box.' This put us into a long field of discourse about the beauties who were the mothers to the present, and shined in the boxes twenty years ago. I told her, ' I was glad she had transferred so many of her charms, and I did not question but her eldest daughter was within half-a-year of being a toast,' "We were pleasing ourselves with this fantastical preferment of the young lady, when, on a sudden, we were alarmed with the noise of a drum, and imme- diately entered my little godson to give me a point of war. His mother, between laughing and chiding, would have him put out of the room ; but I would not part with him so. I found, upon conversation with him, though he was a little noisy in his mirth, that the child had excellent parts, and was a great master of all the learning on the other side of eight years old. I perceived him a very great historian in ' /Esop's Fables ; ' but he frankly declared to me his mind, * that he did not delight in that learning, because he did not believe they were true ; ' for which reason I found he had very much turned his studies, for about a twelvemonth past, into the lives of Don Bellianis of Greece, Guy of Warwick, * the Seven Champions,' and other historians of that age. I could not but observe the satis- faction the father took in the forwardness of his son, and that these diversions might turn to some profit. I found the boy had made remarks which might be of service to him during the course of his whole life. He would tell you the mis- management of John Hickerthrift, find fault with the passionate temper in Bevis of Southampton, and loved St. George for being the champion of England ; and 228 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. saw no more after his second appearance — the Theatre, under the pseudonym of Sir John Edgar, which Steele wrote while Governor of the Royal Company of Comedians, to which post, and to that of Surveyor of the Royal Stables at Hampton Court, and to the Commission of the Peace for Middlesex, and to the honour of knighthood, Steele had been preferred soon after the accession of George 1. ; whose cause honest Dick had nobly fought, •through disgrace, and danger, against the most formidable enemies, against traitors and bullies, against Bolingbroke and Swift in the last reign. With the arrival of the King, that splendid conspiracy broke up ;. and a golden opportunity came to Dick Steele, whose hand, alas, was too careless to gripe it. \ Steele married twice ; and outlived his places, his schemes, his wife, his income, his health, and almost everything but his kind heart. That ceased to trouble him in 1729, when he died, worn out and almost forgotten by his contemporaries, in Wales, Avhere he had the remnant of a property. Posterity has been kinder to this amiable creature ; all women especially are bound to be grateful to Steele, as he was the first of our writers who really seemed to admire and respect them. Congreve the Great, who alludes to the low estimation in which women were held in Elizabeth's time, as a reason why the women of Shakspeare by this means had his thoughts insensibly moulded into the notions of discretion, virtue, and honour. I was extolling his accomphshments, when his mother told me * that the little giil who led me in this morning was, in her way, a better scholar than he. Betty,' said she, 'deals chiefly in fairies and sprights ; and sometimes in a winter night will terrify the maids with her accounts, until they are afraid to go up to bed.' "I sat with them until it was very late, sometimes in merry sometimes in serious discourse, with this particular pleasure, which gives the only true relish to all conversation, a sense that 'ivery one of us liked each other. I went home, considering the different conditions of a married life and that of a bachelor ; and I must confess it struck me with a secret concern, to reflect, that whenever I go off I shall leave no traces behind me. In this pensive mood I return to my family ; that is to say, to my maid, my dog, my cat, who only can be the better or worse for what happens to me," — The Tatler, STEELE. 2?9 make so small a figure in the poet's dialogues, though he can himself pay splendid compliments to women, yet looks on them as mere instruments of gallantry, and destined, like the most consummate fortifications, to fall, after a certain time, before the arts and bravery of tile besieger, man. There is a letter of Swift's, entitled " Advice to a very Young IMarried Lady," which shows the Dean's opinion of the female society of his day, and that if he despised man he utterly scorned women too. No lady of our time could be treated by any man, were he ever so much a wit or Dean, in such a tone of insolent patronage and vulgar protection. In this performance, Swift hardly takes pains to hide his opinion that a woman is a fool : tells her to read books, as if reading was a novel accomplishment ; and informs her that " not one gentleman's daughter in a thousand has been brought to read or understand her own natural tongue." Addison laughs at women equally; but, with the gentleness and politeness of his nature, smiles at them and watches them, as if they were harmless, half-witted, amusing, pretty creatures, only made to be men's play- things. It was Steele who first began to pay a manly homage to their goodness and understanding, as well as to their tenderness and beauty.'^ In his comedies, the heroes do not rant and rave about the divine beauties of Gloriana or Statira, as the characters were made to do in the chivalry romances and the high-flown dramas just going out of vogue ; but Steele admires women's virtue, acknowledges their sense, and adores their purity and beauty, with an ardour and strength which should win the goodwill of all women to their hearty * " As to the pursuits after affection and esteem, the fair sex are happy in this particular, tliat with them the one is much more nearly related to the other th»n in men. The love of a woman is inseparahle from some esteem of her ; and as she is naturally the_oh]ect_of jiffectipn, the woman who has your esteem has also some degree of your love. A man that dotes on a woman for her heauty, will whisper his friend, 'That creature has a great deal of wit when you are well acquainted with her.' And if you examine the bottom of your esteem for a woman, you will find you have a greater opinion of her beauty than anybody else. As to us men, I design to pass most of my time with the facetious Harry IJickcr- staff ; but William Bickerstaff, the most prudent man of our family, shall be my executor." — Tatlcr, No. 206. 230 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. and respectful champion. It is this ardour, this respect, this man- liness, which makes his comedies so pleasant and their heroes such fine gentlemen. He paid the finest compliment to a woman that perhaps ever was offered. Of one woman, whom Congreve had also admired and celebrated, Steele says, that " to have loved her was a liberal education." " How often," he says, dedicating a volume to his wife, " how often has your tenderness removed pain from my sick head, how often anguish from my afflicted heart ! If there are such beings as guardian angels, they are thus employed. I cannot believe one of them to be more good in inclination, or more charming in form than my wife." His breast seems to warm and his eyes to kindle when he meets with a good and beautiful woman, and it is with his heart as well as with his hat that he salutes her. About children, and all that relates to home, he is not less tender, and more than once speaks in apology of what he calls his softness. He would have been nothing without that delightful weakness. It is that which gives his works their worth and his style its charm. It, like his life, is full of faults and careless blunders; and redeemed, like that, by his sweet and compassionate nature. We possess of poor Steele's wild and chequered life some of the most curious memoranda that ever were left of a man's biography.* * The Correspondence of Steele passed after his death into the possession of his daughter Elizabeth, by his second wife, Miss Scurlock, of Carmarthenshire. She married the Hon. JoTin, afterwards third Lord Trevor. At her death, part of the letters passed to Mr. Thomas, a grandson of a natural daughter of Steele's ; and part to Lady Trevor's next of kin, Mr, vScurlock. They were published by the learned Nichols — from whose later edition of them, in 1 809, our specimens are quoted. Hei'e we have him, in his courtship — which was not a very long one :— ^ "To Mrs. Scurlock. "Madam, — ''Aug. 30, 1707, " I BEG pardon that my paper is not finer, but I am forced to write from a coffee-house, where I am attending about business. There is a dirty crowd of busy faces all around me, talking of money ; while all my ambition, all my wealth, is love ! Love which animates my heart, sweetens my humour, enlarges my soul, and affects every action of my life. It is to my lovely charmer I owe, that many noble ideas are continually affixed to my words and actions; it is the natural STEELE. 231 Most men's letters, from Cicero down to Walpole, or down to the, great men of our own time, if you will, are doctored compositions, and written with an eye suspicious towards posterity. That dedication of Steele's to his wife is an artificial performance, possibly ; at least, effect of that generous passion to create in the admirer some simiKtude of the object admired. Thus, my dear, am I every day to improve from so sweet a com- panion. Look up, my fair one, to that Heaven which made thee such ; and join with me to implore its influence on our tender innocent hours, and beseech the Author of love to bless the rites He has ordained — and mingle with our happi- ness a just sense of our transient condition, and a resignation to His will, which only can regulate our minds to a steady endeavour to please Him and each other. " I am for ever your faithful servant, " Rich. Steele." Some few hours afterwards, apparently. Mistress Scurlock received the next one — obviously written later in the day !- "Dear, Lovely Mrs. Scurlock,— ^' Saturday night {Aug. 30, 1707). "I HAVE been in very good company, where your health, under the character of the ivoman I loved best, has been often drunk ; so that I may say that I am dead drunk for your sake, which is mure than I die for you. "Rich. Steele." " To Mrs. Scurlock. "Madam,— ''Sept. i, 1707. " It is the hardest thing in the world to be in love, and yet attend busi- ness. As for me, all who speak to me find me out, and I must lock myself up, or other people will do it for me. "A gentleman asked me this morning, 'What news from Lisbon?' and I answered, ' She is exquisitely handsome.' Another desired to know ' when I had last been at Hampton Court?' I replied, ' It will be on Tuesday come se'nnight.' Pr'ythee allow me at least to kiss your hand before that day, that my mind may be in some composure. O Love ! ' A thousand torments dwell about thee, Yet who could live, to live without thee ? ' " Methinks I could write a volume to you ; but all the language on earth would fail in saying how much, and with what disinterested passion, m *' I am ever yours, *' Rich. Steele." Two days after this, he is found expounding his circumstances and prospects to the young lady's mamma. He dates from " Lord Sunderland's office, White- hall ; " and states his clear income at 1,025/. P^'*" •'^'I'linn' "I promise myself," says he, " the i)leasurc of an industrious and virtuous life, in studying to do things agreeable to you." [They 232 ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. it is written with that degree of artifice which an orator uses in arranging a statement for the House, or a poet employs in preparing a sentiment in verse or for the stage. But there are some 400 letters They were married, according to the most probable conjectures, about the 7th Sept. There are traces of a tiff about the middle of the next month ; she being prudish and fidgety, as he was impassioned and reckless. General pro- gress, however, may be seen from the following notes. The " house in Bury Street, St. James's," was now taken. "To Mrs. Steele. "Dearest Being on Earth, — ''Oct. 16, 1707. " Pardon me if you do not see me till eleven o'clock, having met a school- fellow from India, by whom I am to be informed on things this night which expressly concern your obedient husband, "Rich. Steele." " To Mrs. Steele. '^ Eight o'clock. Fountain Tavern, "My Dear, — Oct. 22, 1707. " I BEG of you not to be uneasy; for I have done a great deal of business to-day very successfully, and wait an hour or two about my Gazette.'''' "My dear, dear Wife, — ''Dec 22, 1707. " I write to let you know I do not come home to dinner, being obliged to attend some business abroad, of which I shall give you an account (when I see you in the evening), as becomes your dutiful and obedient husband." * ' Devil Tavern, Temple Bar, "Dear Prue, — Jun. 2,, 1707-8. " I HAVE partly succeeded in my business to-day, and inclose two guineas as earnest of more. Dear Prue, I cannot come home to dinner. I languish for your welfare, and will never be a moment careless more. " Your faithful husband," &c. "Dear Wife,— ''Jan. 14, 1707-8. "Mr. Edgecombe, Ned Ask, and Mr. Lumley have desired me to sit an hour with them at the ' George,' in Pall Mall, for which I desire your patience till twelve o'clock, and that you will go to bed," &c. "Dear Prue,— " Gray's Inn, Feb. 3, 1708. " If the man who has my shoemaker's bill calls, let him be answered that I shall call on him as I come home. I stay here in order to get Jonson to discount a bill for me, and shall dine with him for that end. He is expected at home every minute. Your most humble, obedient servant," &c. ["Dear STEELE. 233 of Dick Steele's to his wife, wliich that thrifty woman preserved accurately, and which could have been written but for her and her alone. They contain details of the business, pleasures, quarrels, reconciliations of the pair ; they have all the genuineness of conver- sation ; they are as artless as a child's pratUe, and as confidential as a curtain-lecture. Some are written from the printing-office, where he is waiting for the proof-sheets of his Gazette^ or his Tatler ; some are written from the tavern, whence he promises to come to his wife " within a pint of wine," and where he has given a rendezvous to a friend, or a money-lender : some are composed in a high state of vinous excitement, when his head is flustered with burgundy, and his heart abounds with amorous warmth for his darling Prue : some are under the influence of the dismal headache and repentance next morning : some, alas, are from the lock-up house, wliere the lawyers have impounded him, and where he is waiting for bail. You trace ** Dear Wife,— " Tennis-court Coffcc-housc, May 5, 1708. " I HOTE I have done this day what will be pleasing to you ; in the mean- time shall lie this night at a baker's, one Leg, over against the ' Devil Tavern,' at Charing Cross. I shall be able to confront the fools who wish me uneasy, and shall have the satisfaction to see thee cheerful and at ease. " If the printer's boy be at home, send him hither; and let Mrs. Todd send by the boy my night-gown, slippers, and clean linen. You shall hear from me early in the morning,"