are frequently mean. His laurels are entwined with the thorns of hatred. There is as much gall and wormwood in his composition as in that of Archilochus himself, the father of satire. As with the Greek, his motives are mainly personal. His virulent prose satire, The Frenzy of John Dennis,' was written to please Addison, though it failed in its object. His attacks on Theobald were dictated by literary jealousy, on Addison by wounded self-love, on Lady Mary by the savage vindictiveness of rejected admiration. His treatment of women, even his praise of women, is degrading. He had, in fact, like Boileau, a bad heart, and cannot be acquitted of the charge, Lædere gaudes et hoc studio pravus facis.1 Partisan poetry had been severe enough in Dryden's hands, but in the hands of Pope, it became still more personal and bitter. In Dryden we find strong sense, command of the happy word, and wit marked by a certain breadth; in Pope sense as strong, if narrower, a more 'curious felicity,' wit unrivalled in keenness and point. A certain colloquial familiarity lends an air of easy strength to Dryden's satire. His comparisons are usually happy. His work abounds with knowledge, and sparkles with pithy sentences which drop from his pen as if unawares. Pope's art is always peeping out; his comparisons lack grandeur, and often truth also, whilst his expressions are sometimes less accurate than he supposes.

As a delineator of character, as a describer of personal weaknesses, Pope stands unrivalled. Although he boasts that he 'praises a courtier where he can, and even in a bishop can spy desert," he lacks as a rule the discrimination of Dryden.3 Hence

1 Hor., Sat. I., iv., 78, 79. 'You delight to hurt, and do so with zeal by reason of your bad heart.'

2 Dialogue ii., 63, 70.

3 An exception to this is the portrait of Addison.

his detached passages are superior to the complete poems.

Unequalled as a satirist of individuals, and as an ) observer within a limited compass, he is invaluable as a critic of the social life of his own day. His particular portraits are as excellent as his philosophy and his theories are ridiculous. He has no gift for general moralizing. When he declares that the proper study of mankind is man, man means with him Bolingbroke, Walpole, Swift, Curll, and Theobald.1 Dryden is pre-eminent in the reflective vein of satire. Pope, without Dryden's gift of reasoning in verse, displays more than his love of it. He has no consecutive power of argument. His precision of thought is not able to cope with the fascination of a brilliant phrase, and is sacrificed to his method of composition. His epigrams are the quintessence of a volume of reflection; his couplets are the product of incredible toil. To make verses was his first labour; to mend them was his last. He suffered the tumult of imagination to subside, and was never tired of polishing his mosaics until they were finally inserted, too often without due regard to the consistency of the whole.

Dryden, on the other hand, wrote, he says, with very little consideration, to please others, and to make a living. Pope, being independent of money, wrote, without haste, to please himself. Whilst Pope's satire deals only with externals, Dryden's goes to the root of the matter. When Dryden is describing a character satirically, every line adds to or modifies it, but Pope's verses amplify and spin upon the same idea. Dryden excels in comprehension, Pope in minuteness; Dryden in breadth, Pope in compression; Dryden in rugged strength and 1 Leslie Stephen, ' Hours in a Library.'

2 E.g., 'Essay on Man.'

nervous majesty, Pope in smooth uniformity and pungent epigram. We quote, it will be found, the phrases of Pope, and we apply the satire of Dryden. It is possible to love Dryden through his works, but Pope can only compel our admiration. Both alike found the life of a wit a warfare upon earth,"1 and both might justly feel with Horace-sunt quibus in satura videar nimis acer. But while much may be forgiven to the poet whose 'life was one long disease,' we respect the greater self-restraint of him who, 'being naturally vindictive, often suffered in silence, and possessed his soul in quiet."2 1667-1745. Cousin Swift,' said Dryden, you will never be a poet'a verdict which gained him the dislike of that furious and gifted man. The prophecy was correct. But the verses of so striking and original a genius could not be dull or insignificant. Swift had a gift of fluent rhyme: his poems are distinguished by their ease, if not by their elegance; often harsh and uncouth, they are never laboured. Some of his poetical lampoons show an extreme virulence of invective. 'The Legion Club,' in which every line has the sting of a hornet, will serve as an example. The Rhapsody on Poetry,' though it suffers from the inevitable comparison with the 'Dunciad,' yet displays in a high degree that quality of irony in which Swift is preeminent. The trenchant bitterness of the 'Beasts' Confession' likewise betrays the hand of the author of Gulliver's Travels.'

Whatever the merit or interest of his poetry, it is as the prince of prose satirists that Swift claims our attention. He ranks with Lucian and Voltaire, rivalling the former in irony, and surpassing the latter in originality. His power was tremendous. 1 Pope, Preface.

2 'Essay on Origin and Progress of Satire,' Dryden's Works, vol. iii., p. 171 (Malone's edition).

Even to-day his writings affect us as, sometimes, his presence affected Vanessa.1 No satirist ever scored such exquisite triumphs. Concerning 'Gulliver's Travels,' we have it on his own authority-whatever that is worth-that 'a bishop here said that book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it; and so much for Gulliver.'2 Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff's 'Predictions' were burnt in all seriousness by the Inquisition in Portugal. In the Rhapsody on Poetry' the irony of his censure is so perfect and so admirably sustained that he received, at the hands of the Royal Family he had satirized, thanks for the passages of praise. No political writer ever had such power. Each pamphlet was worth hundreds of votes to the Tories, and the author of the Drapier Letters' could boast that he had but to raise his hand to bring about an Irish rebellion. His political and personal satire has much of the freedom and point of Junius; but he is not a mere carper. Since he lived in an epoch of party literature and unbridled slander, when all the best writers were retained for the purpose of exalting or defaming the Whig or Tory leaders, his writings are necessarily to a certain extent bound up with the politics of his time, but they touch none the less the wider human interests. of all ages. His suggestions are often eminently practical, and much in advance of his day.1

1 'There is something in your look so awful that it strikes me dumb.' 'You strike me with that prodigious awe I tremble with fear.'-Letters of Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift.

Cf. the story of the barber who besought him on his knees not to put him into print, for that he was a poor barber, and had a large family to maintain (vol. i., p. 415).

2 Letter to Pope, November 17, 1726, written from Ireland. 3 E.g., 'A short character of Thomas, Earl of Wharton.' 4 Cf. the very remarkable passage on the early closing of public-houses and the serving of intoxicated persons: ' Project

1704.

6

It was in the Bentley-Boyle quarrel-a quarrel which was soon developed into a violent dispute as to the relative superiority of the Ancients or Moderns -that Swift, with his 'Battle of the Books,' made his reputation as the wittiest of controversialists, a reputation he confirmed in the following year by the Tale of a Tub,' a sort of Hudibras' in prose, in which he shows the happy gift of satirical allegory, which was brought to perfection in Gulliver's Travels.' The Tale of a Tub' ridicules, 'with all the rash dexterity of wit," superstition and fanaticism, but not the essentials of religion. Though pleading for charity in argument, Swift's own strong feeling for Martin' renders him somewhat uncharitable to 'Peter' and 'Jack." Voltaire recommended this work as a masterly satire against religion in general, and Thackeray denies Swift's belief in that Christian religion which he had defended with such perfect irony in his 'Argument against abolishing Christianity.' But neither in the 'Tale' nor in the politico-religious pamphlets is any reason to be found for a charge which reduces Swift to the level of the hypocrites he satirized. His hatred of cant and his dread of the imputation of cant have caused his attitude to be misconstrued into that of mere irreligion. His loathing of hypocrisy was so intense that he ran into the opposite extreme, and exhibited the vice which Bolingbroke termed hypocrisy reversed. Like Plato, he has often fallen a victim to his own irony.

for the Advancement of Religion,' vol. iii., pp. 297, 298. Cf. also his views on the education of women, which he put into practice with Stella. 'G. T.,' IV., chap. viii., My master thought it monstrous in us to give the females a different kind of education from the males.'

1 Pope, 'Essay on Man,' ii. 83.

2 Church of England, Church of Rome, Dissenters.