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My Lady Club will take it ill
If he should fail her at quadrille.
He loved the Dean-(I lead a heart)—
But dearest friends, they say, must part.
His time was come; he ran his race;
We hope he's in a better place.

His "Rhapsody on Poetry," comprising instructions to a dunce how to write verses with success, is one sustained irony throughout. It has much of the keen sarcasm of Butler; and, like the satires of that great wit, it is crowded with ludicrous and apt imagery, drawn from incongruous and remote sources. The following is one example, upon the application of the epithet :

And oft, when epithets you link

In gaping lines to fill a chink;
Like stepping-stones to save a stride
In streets where kennels are too wide;
Or like a heel-piece, to support
A cripple with one foot too short;
Or like a bridge that joins a marish
To moor-lands of a different parish-
So have I seen ill-coupled hounds
Drag different ways in miry grounds.
So geographers in Afric maps
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o'er uninhabitable downs

Place elephants for want of towns.

This is one of the closest imitations of Butler's manner that I could refer to. But the preliminary instructions to the poetaster furnish the most perfect sample of Swift's biting irony; which poem, and the lines on his own death, may upon the whole be accounted his best verse productions; and he himself thought so. Here are a dozen lines taken casually :

Your poem finish'd, next your care

Is needful to transcribe it fair.

In modern wit all printed trash is

Set off with num'rous breaks and dashes.
To statesmen would you give a wipe,
You point it in italic type.

When letters are in vulgar shapes,

'Tis ten to one the wit escapes :
But when in capitals express'd,

The dullest reader smacks the jest :
Or else perhaps he may invent

A better than the poet meant ;

As learned commentators view

In Homer more than Homer knew.

I have somewhere read that the mock eulogy upon the Court of George I., at the close of this satire, beginning, "Fair Britannia, in thy monarch blest," was taken in good, sober earnest by the royal family, and that Swift assured Dr. King he had received their thanks for it. There is nothing remarkable in this when we remember the language of the birthday odes, from the Tudor down to the third in succession of the Guelph dynasty. A gentleman told me that being introduced at a party to one of the galaxy, the first thing the PoetLaureate said, was: "Have you read my birthday ode to-day ?" "No, I have not, indeed." "I am glad of it, for then I can talk with you." If Swift wrote much that deserved to survive, and which will survive, to the latest posterity (for he is a British classic), he has also left a prodigious quantity that no mortal would care to look at twice. Few men perhaps, with equal grasp of mind, have written so much trumpery, and few so many ineffective, uninteresting, and nonsensical verses, as he. Fortunate for his executors and editors that he could not retrace his steps after quitting this world; since they would assuredly have felt the weight of his indignation due to their intemperate zeal in pouring out upon the public all the waifs and strays, scraps, odds and ends, tag-rag and bob-tail, scattered among his books and papers. If they had found a receipt for pickling cabbage, I verily believe that it would have been installed among his "works." Nevertheless, it is neither a fruitless nor a worthless employment to contemplate a mind like that of Swift during its carnival of negligence and frivolity. It is pleasant, in the first place, to notice the stern, unbending patriot, the haughty politician, who kept the Prime Minister, Oxford, at arm's length, and sent him to Coventry till he had apologised for an affront that that lord had passed upon him; for at the Queen's levee he no more noticed that principal officer of the Government than if he had been Silver or Gold Stick; and when alluding to the circumstance in his journal to Stella, he adds, in the spirit of an intellectual autocrat: "If we let these Ministers pretend too much, there will be no governing them." The man who bearded the Viceroy at his own levee in Dublin Castle, and made the roof ring with his indignant remonstrance at the unconstitutional acts of the English Parliament; who, by his own robust sense, unflinching and uncompromising firmness of purpose, and integrity of principle reconciled a bickering and unstable Ministry, and, for months, forcibly, and by his own unaided genius, kept them at the political helm-the eminent Bolingbroke being one of them—it is pleasant, I say, to see such a sturdy spirit bending to the relaxations of a drawing-room dilettante; writing Lilliputian odes, in lines of three

syllables; Latin doggrels, puns and charades to Dr. Sheridan, and slip-shod verses from Mary the cook to the deaf old housekeeper. What pleasant humour in the poem, whether " Hamilton's bawn shall be converted into a barrack or a malt-house." What a spirited sketch of a militia captain, and how genuine (for that age) the soldiers' oaths, and rough handling of the canonical cloth. What excellent travesty upon rural poetry, in what he styles a "Town Eclogue; or, London in a Shower." What magniloquence, too, in the climax! valuable, moreover, as a picture of London in the early part of the seventeenth century :—

Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow,
And bear their trophies with them as they go:
Filths of all hues and odours seem to tell

What street they sail'd from, by their sight and smell.
They, as each torrent drives with rapid force,
From Smithfield or St. Pulchre's shape their course,
And in huge confluence joined at Snow-hill ridge,
Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn bridge.
Sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts and blood,
Drown'd puppies, stinking sprats, all drench'd in mud,

Dead cats and turnip tops come tumbling down the flood.

And lastly, how natural and easy the clack of Mary the cookmaid's letter to Dr. Sheridan, with those prodigious Alexandrine lines, harmonising so happily with the female clatter.

Well, if ever I see such another man since my mother bound my head!

You a gentleman! marry come up, I wonder where you were bred.

I am sure such words doesn't become a man of your cloth;

I wouldn't give such language to a dog, faith and troth.

Yes, you called my master a knave: fie, Mr. Sheridan! 'tis a shame

For a parson who should know better things to come out with such a name :
Knave in your teeth, Mr. Sheridan! 'tis both a shame and a sin;

And the Dean, my master, is an honester man than you and all your kin:
He has more goodness in his little finger than you have in your whole body :-
My master's a personable man, and not a spindle-shank'd hoddy-doddy.
And now, whereby I find you would fain make an excuse,
Because my master one day in anger called you a goose;

Which, and I am sure, I have been his servant four years since October,
And he never called me worse than "sweetheart "-drunk or sober.

Not that I know his reverence was ever concern'd to my knowledge,

Though you and your come-rogues keep him out so late in your wicked college. You say you will eat grass on his grave-a Christian eat grass !

Whereby you now confess yourself to be a goose or an ass;

But that's as much as to say that my master should die before ye.

Well, well, that's as God pleases, and I don't believe that's a true story;

And so say I told you so, and you may go tell my master; what care I?
And I don't care who knows it; 'tis all one to Mary;

Everybody knows that I love to tell truth and shame the devil.

I am but a poor servant; but I think gentlefolks should be civil.
Besides, you found fault with our victuals one day that you was here;
I remember it was on a Tuesday, of all days in the year.

And Saunders, the man, says you are always jesting and mocking:
"Mary," said he, one day, as I was mending my master's stocking,
"My master is so fond of that minister that keeps the school;

I thought my master a wise man, but that man makes him a fool."
"Saunders," said I, "I would rather than a quart of ale

He would come into our kitchen, and I would pin a dish-clout to his tail.”
And now I must go and get Saunders to direct this letter;

For I write but a sad scrawl; but my sister, Marget, she writes better.
Well, but I must run and make the bed before my master comes from prayers;
And, see now, it strikes ten, and I hear him coming up the stairs ;
Whereof I could say more to your verses if I could write written hand;
And so I remain in a civil way your servant to command, MARY.

In these, his harmless relaxations, he comes before us in the character of a pleasant-tempered companion, who was too wise to disdain good feeling. In the same category (with a wholesome moral appended to them) may be included his "Polite Conversations," "Advice to Servants;" and, at the fag-end of an essay, it were a sinister compliment to speak of his famous "Martinus Scriblerus," for I must come to a close.

So little concern did this remarkable man evince for his literary fame that, of all his works, not one was subscribed with his name, except the letter upon the English language, and that he addressed to the Earl of Oxford, the Prime Minister. Not one of his most intimate friends was aware of his being the author of the "Gulliver's Travels." Gay wrote over to him in Ireland, describing the sensation the book was producing in all circles, telling him that even the publisher was ignorant of its author, and adding, "If you are the man, as we suspect, your friends have reason to feel disobliged at your giving them no hint of the matter." Swift had none of the coquetry or pettiness of authorship; he could afford to wait till the world found him out; and he was even less regardful of the author's pecuniary emolument; for in one of his letters he declared that he never got a farthing for anything he had written, except once, and then he was indebted to the vigilance of Pope; and even this sum he abandoned to his friend. It is plausible to infer that the history of authorship does not furnish a parallel to the extent of this sacrifice. He never asked a favour (for himself) of king or statesman; still less would he condescend to dandle palms with the critics. Swift was the most stubbornly proud man of his age; and this bearing he supported in his tone of thought as well as action; for, in directing his genius, he followed no man as a model. In short, he was not

only the most original, but, take him in all his phases of authorship, he was the most powerful and perhaps the most various writer of the century in which he flourished.

To sum up his character in few words, he was, as Sir Walter Scott says in his Life of him, a compound of anomaly and paradox. He was a strenuous believer, and yet was refused a diocese through the instrumentality of the Archbishop of York, who told Queen Anne that she ought to be certain that the man she was going to create a bishop was a Christian. This opposition arose from his irrepressible spirit of satirical levity, both in speaking and writing. The wonder is, that the Archbishop did not pronounce him a subtle Atheist.

In his politics he adhered to the Tory party-he was a sublime Tory. And yet no man has said or done stronger things in behalf of democratic freedom. Had he adhered to his first party and principles, he would have been as sublime a Whig. He entertained a rugged antipathy to his countrymen; and yet he seized the first opportunity to vindicate their rights and liberties, and to rescue them from unjust oppression. And this he did after the most disgraceful outrages on their part offered to his own person. When he first went over to Dublin to occupy his living, the Whig party pursued him there; and such was the coarse political spirit of the age that he was not unfrequently pelted with mud as he walked the streets.

He lay all his life under the stigma of being penurious (this charge arose from his being orderly and strict in the employment of his revenue), and yet he was greatly and secretly bountiful.

He was avowedly the most classical writer of his day, and yet he could not take his degree at college.

He was the sole prop and stay of the Tory Administration; he had obtained promotion for numbers in the Church, and yet could not compass for himself the only place he desired.

He was actuated by strong impulses of kindness and affection— upon one occasion hurrying into a closet to weep when he saw the pictures taken down at his friend Sheridan's, who was removing from him; yet this friend he arrested for debt, and broke the hearts of two amiable women, whom there is little doubt he sincerely respected, if not loved; for all those poems to Stella, and that constant journal, proclaim him to have been-for the time, at all events, and for a long time, too—a sincere man; or, indeed, he was an astounding and gratuitous hypocrite, a charge that no one will be hardy enough to file against him. But, in fact, no man was more wilful, and less patient of dictation; and this, it may be, was the dormant seed in his nature, which in latter life, fungus-like, overgrew and smothered his reason. We may feel for him in his secret thoughts-which at times must have

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