Oh, sought of old on misty mountain-tops,

And by the well-heads of long reverenced streams--

Places in which the cool air lapped men so,

And the all-coloured wavings of the trees,

And the soft, dark-blue distance, and the stir

Of black and white upon the ancient stems,

That they forgot their individual heats,

Merging them in the universal; sought

In frozen caves beneath the purple lights!

THEE, not the sounds of timbrel or of yell

In tropic palm-groves, lone among the waves

Displease; THOU dost not shun the narrow faith

That sees thee in misshapen human forms,

Wrought by artificers from fire-wood trunk;

Nor dost THOU hide THEE from the larger pomp

Of stole and alb, and censer-swinging lads,

And aged men who pray in alien tongues,

And fluted swell of organ, when the vaults

Reverberate the clamour, and the heavens

Blush through the tinted oriel, and all else,

Sight, sound, and deed, be ignorant or vain;

And THOU art found by those, austere and hot,

Who sunder from their brethren, and devote

A simple and unsumptuous rite to THEE,

In open field or tabernacle stern:

With each and all I will believe thou art,

Because with each the shrine is still the same,

The matchless temple, made without hands--man.

Life without THEE is life inanimate;

And better far false gods than none at all;

Yet, with them, is it but a fevered sleep

With vague and unintelligible dreams.

Come THOU to me, all lonely; Lo, my heart

Is empty, swept, and garnished, and I bring

There, to thine altar foot, my wingèd thoughts,

My hornèd resolutions, fruits and flowers--

Worthless, unless thy beams have quickened them:

Lo! what I have I sacrifice to THEE.

VIII.

AD SODALES.

The stars are clear in heaven, and all the slopes

Are slumbering in the silence of the night;

I hear a distant noise of waterfalls;

Far to the northward the great hills of snow

Thrust up their moon-kissed pinnacles; deep peace

Is on the happy world--the peace of God.

The peace of God! when comes there such to me?

Yet life has changes; brothers, we know that,

Even from the bygone lustre; did we dream

(When first, amid the glimmer of the moon,

And the unnumbered laughings of the sea,

We launched our little vessel five years past)--

Dream of the voyage before us? Ah, since then

How many barks, as full of hope as ours,

And tended by as favourable winds,

Have perished from our knowledge; some gone down

To darkness, bearing, to the last, the hues

And beams of their destruction; some--ah, worse,

Still drift among the breakers of despair,

Without a compass--mastless, floating wrecks.

While, thanks to God--for surely not of us

The merit or the claim upon His love--

Our path is still upon serener waves,

Our rigging stout, our needle pointing true,

And our eyes fixed upon the Polar Star.

IX.

RESIGNATION.

And is it true? can such sweet dreams not lie?

O true Egeria of a crownless lord!

Not by cool waterfall and mossy grot,

Beneath the mild light of a temperate sun,

With nature for a temple, do we meet;

But, as we parted, in a busy town,

Among the selfish throng of commerce; here,

Where alien schemers buy a chance of fortune

With sacrifice of all; we meet again--

And I who was the worst and least of those

Learned life’s sweet lesson from thy lips of love,

Young Alchemist, whose heaven-directed search

Has found the great Magistrum, oft denied

To wise men and to prophets of the world.

“Thou didst not think to teach me.” What of that?

Feeling is more than knowledge, thought than speech.

The lesson much I needed, and do still;

My life is not as I would; a dull round

Of trivial cares, and sordid, worldly aims,

Intrench’d by poverty, and sunder’d far

From all my spirit values; I, God wot,

To toil long years in this distemper’d clime,

Cut off from art and sweet commerce of books,

When, in the converse of congenial hearts,

A glorious work had crown’d my sinking head.

It was a dream; yet who is there can say,

“I have awakened, and will dream no more”?

Yet here is work too, though the end be far;

And here, even in exile, is a home--

For some short years a home; while yet I see

The roses not all wither’d on your cheek,

Our little ones still round their mother’s knee;

The sunshine of a hearth, though mostly cold,

And Love, that waits on Virtue--here is home.

X.

PEACE.

Call not our mission exile; who shall dare

To carp at independence, or to rail

Because his fate suffers him not to share

The nippings and the throngings of the mart,

The wrestlings of our overcrowded home--

That other far-off home beyond the seas?

Oh, ’tis the poor man’s Paradise to know,

That day succeeding day shall still provide

Its never-failing sustenance for those

His heart is knit to; and to feel that heart,

Uncheck’d by old Convention, freely beat

And thrill with generous thoughts that link mankind,

And worship its own God, nor be coerced

Hither and thither with prescriptions hard,

And oft-resolved tenacious usages,

That loosen’d cling again at every turn

In that maternal isle.

Oh, proudly swell,

Thou breast of every free man--proudly rise,

Thou voice--for none shall check thine utterance;

And though thy hearers may seem few to thee,

Know, that the aftertime may warm thy words,

Till some of them shall ripen into deeds:

Know this in faith, and it shall be to thee

For an abiding sense of deathlessness.

And yet one would not die here; none can be

Without some vision of a cottage home,

Or in the pastures of the fields, or where

The tide of civilised life is eddying round

Some quiet nook, where men of thought repose,

Nursing the labours of their younger brains,

In great, imperial London.

Mine should be

Some rural spot, whence I could see afar

The cloud that rests for ever over her;

And the black towers of that minster old,

Where kings and poets (kings of their own souls),

Sown by the sedulous hand of Goodman Death,

Await the harvest-time HE will not see.

And I would have the immemorial Thames

To sparkle through my tall, surrounding trees;

And I would have the village church hard by,

That I might see the undulating green,

Where I and some of those I loved should lie.

Ah, foolish heart, that it should better thee

To know, that when thy flutterings shall have still’d--

The first repose that they shall ever know--

Thou shouldst rot here or there; the time shall come

(Ay, and is now), when thoughts like these shall be

Less vivid, less important than the dreams

Of long-forgotten slumbers, than the thoughts

Of prememorial childhood--almost less

Than the faint echoes of a former birth;

And thou, O heart, shall be like one of these,

Or as thou hadst been never--Peace, O Peace!

H. G. K.

THACKERAY’S LECTURES--SWIFT.

A good librarian, as well acquainted with the insides of books as the

outsides, made the other day this shrewd observation--that in his

experience every third work he took up was defective, either in the

title or the first sentence. “What,” he continued, “for example, is

the meaning of the word ‘humourist?’ By what authority is it applied

to a writer?--is it not misapplied to a wit? unless it be meant to

degrade him. ‘The wit,’ says Addison in the _Spectator_, ‘sinks

imperceptibly into a humourist.’ A humourist is one whose conduct,

whose ways, are eccentric, ‘his actions seldom directed by reason

and the nature of things,’ says Watts. It is best the word should

be confined according to our dictionaries, to actions, not extended

to authorship. The title of Mr Thackeray’s Lectures would lead a

lover of plain English to expect narratives of eccentricities taken

from real life, and perhaps from the acted buffooneries of itinerant

boards, the dominion of Mr Punch’s dynasty--like other dynasties in

this age of presumed matter of fact, becoming a ‘dissolving view.’”

Mr Thackeray’s English is generally so good, so perfectly to be

understood, of such acceptable circulating coinage, that we are

surprised at this mistake in the title of his book. Montaigne would

head his chapters with any title--as we believe he ushered in one

as “On Coach-horses”--and said nothing about them; and we readily

admit that the privilege of “_Every Man in his Humour_” may be a

fair excuse for the author of _English Humourists of the Eighteenth

Century_.

We wish we could say that this little volume were unobjectionable

in every other respect--but we cannot. We do not see in it a fair,

honest, truth-searching and truth-declaring spirit; yet the style

is so captivating, _so insinuating_ in its deceiving plainness, so

suggestive of every evil in its simplicity, so alluring onward, even

when the passages we have read have left unpleasant impression, that

it is impossible to lay down the book, though we fear to proceed. The

reader may be like to the poor bird under the known fascination: he

never loses sight of the glittering eye--but it looks, even in its

confident gaiety, too much like that which charms, and delights in,

a victim. We did not, it is true, expect from the author of “_Vanity

Fair_” any flattering pictures of men and manners, nor of the world

at large, of any age; but we were not prepared for his so strongly

expressed dislike and condemnation of other people’s misanthropy as

these pages exhibit, particularly in his character of Swift.

And here we think we have a right to protest against Biographical

Lectures. It is hardly possible for a lecturer to be fair to his

subject. He has an audience to court and to please--to put in

good-humour with themselves--to be flattered into a belief of their

own goodness, by a bad portraiture of the eminent of the earth. He

has to dig out the virtues from the grave to show what vices cling

to them--how they look when exhumed in their corruption. Praise is

seldom piquant--commonplace is wearisome--startling novelties must

put truth to a hazard. If the dead must be called up to judgment of

an earthly tribunal, let it not be before a theatrical audience. The

lecturer is under the necessity of being too much of an accuser; and

if from his own nature, or from some misconception of the characters

he takes up, he be a willing one, he has a power to condemn, that the

mere writer has not.

In many passages of the book before us there are examples both of the

lecturer’s danger, and of his power: many things said because of his

audience; and as such audience is generally largely feminine, what

advantage has the over-moralising and for the time over-moralised

lecturer against the dumb and bodiless culprit called up from his

mortal dust, should there be a suspicion of want of tenderness, or

doubt of a fidelity and affection, some hundred and fifty years ago,

and unpardonable for ever? The lecture-table is no fit place, nor

does it offer a fit occasion, to discuss the wondrous intricacies

of any human character. It is not enough that the lecturer should

have thought--there should be a pause, wherein a reader may think;

but an audience cannot: nor is the lecturer, however deeply he may

have thought, likely to have such disinterested self-possession and

caution, in his oral descriptions and appeals for praise or blame, as

are absolutely required for a truthful biographer. It is a bold thing

to bid the illustrious dead come from the sanctity of their graves,

and stand before the judgment-seat of the author of _Vanity Fair_--to

be questioned upon their religion and their morals, and not allowed,

even if they could speak for themselves, to answer. The lecturer

holds in his hand all their written documents, and all that have been

written by scribes of old against them, and he will read, but what he

pleases--he, the scrupulously moral, religious man, doubly sanctified

at all points for his hour’s lecture in that temporary professor’s

garb of proprieties, which he is under no necessity of wearing an

hour after he has dismissed his audience. We are not for a moment

insinuating any dereliction of all the human virtues and graces, as

against Mr Thackeray--but as a lecturer he must put on something of

a sanctimonious or of a moral humbug; he is on his stage, he has to

act his part, to “fret his hour.” He must do it well--he will do it

well; that is, to secure present rapturous applause. The audience is

carried away quite out of its sober judgment by the wit, the wisdom,

the pathos--and even the well-timed bathos--the pity, the satire, and

the satire of all satire, in the pity. The ghosts are dismissed--sent

back, as they should be, in the lecturer’s and audience’s estimation,

to their “dead men’s bones and all rottenness,” no longer to taint

the air of this amiable, judicious, and all-perfect nineteenth

century--epitomised in the audience.

Give Professor Owen part of an old bone or a tooth, and he will on

the instant draw you the whole animal, and tell you its habits and

propensities. What Professor has ever yet been able to classify

the wondrous varieties of human character? How very limited as yet

the nomenclature! We know there are in our moral dictionary the

religious, the irreligious, the virtuous, the vicious, the prudent,

the profligate, the liberal, the avaricious, and so on to a few

names; but the varieties comprehended under these terms--their

mixtures, which, like colours, have no names--their strange

complexities and intertwining of virtues and vices, graces and

deformities, diversified and mingled, and making individualities--yet

of all the myriads of mankind that ever were, not one the same, and

scarcely alike: how little way has science gone to their discovery,

and to mark their delineation! A few sounds, designated by a few

letters, speak all thought, all literature, that ever was or will

be. The variety is infinite, and ever creating a new infinite; and

there is some such mystery in the endless variety of human character.

There are the same leading features to all--these we recognise; but

there are hidden individualities that escape research; there is a

large _terra incognita_, hard to find, and harder to make a map of.

And if any would try to be a discoverer, here is his difficulty--can

he see beyond his own ken? How difficult to have a conception of

a character the opposite to one’s-self! What man is so gifted? We

are but portrait-painters, and no portrait-painter ever yet painted

beyond himself--never represented on canvass an intellect greater

than his own. In every likeness there is a something of the artist

too. We look to other men, and think to find our own idiosyncracies,

and we are prepared to love or hate accordingly. As the painter

views his sitter in the glass, he is sure to see himself behind

him. You biographers, you judges, self-appointed of other men, what

a task do you set yourselves!--have you looked well into your own

qualifications? You venture to plunge into the deep dark--to bring up

the light of truth, which, if you could find it, would mayhap dazzle

all your senses. It is far safer for your reputation to go out with

Diogenes’s lantern, or your own little one, and thrust it into men’s

faces, and make oath you cannot find an honest one; and then draw the

glimmer of it close to your own foreheads, and tell people to look

there for honesty. But this is our preface, not Mr Thackeray’s. He

is too bold to need one. He rushes into his subject without excuse

or apology, either for his own defects of delineation, or of his

subject’s character. If you would desire to see with what consummate

ability, and with what perfect reality in an unlikeness he can paint

a monster, read the first life of his Lecture, that of the great

man--and we would fain believe, in spite of any of his biographers, a

good man--Dean Swift.

If we may be allowed to judge from a collection of contradictory

statements respecting Swift, no man’s life can be more difficult

for a new writer to undertake, or for any reader to comprehend. If

we are to judge from the unhesitating tone of the many biographers,

and their ready acceptance of data, no life is so easy. The

essayist of the _Times_ makes Swift himself answerable for all the

contradictions; that they were all _in_ him, and that he was at all

times, from his birth to his death, mad. This is, indeed, to make

short work of it, and save the unravelling the perplexed skein of

his history. Another writer contends that he was never mad at any

period, not even the last of his life. That he was always mad is

preposterous, unless we are to accept as insanity what is out of and

beyond the common rate of men’s thoughts and doings. We certainly

lack in the character of Swift the one prevalent idea, which pervades

and occupies the whole mind of the madman. Such may have one vivid,

not many opposites in him.

But the contradictions ascribed to Swift are more like the

impossibilities of human nature--if they are to be received as

absolute characteristics, and not as occasional exceptions, which are

apt, in the best of mankind, to take the conceit out of the virtues

themselves, and to put them into a temporary abeyance, and mark them

with a small infirmity, that they grow not too proud.

The received histories, then, tell us that Swift was sincerely

religious, and an infidel; that he was the tenderest of men, a brute,

a fiend, a naked unreclaimable savage; a misanthrope, and was the

kindest of benefactors; that he was avaricious, and so judiciously

liberal that he left no great fortune behind him. Such is the

summary; the details are both delightful and odious. The man who owns

these vices and virtues must indeed be a monster or a madman! These

are characters very hard to fathom. Shakespeare has delineated one,

and he has puzzled all the world except Shakespeare, who chose to

make his picture more true by leaving it as a puzzle to the world.

Hamlet has been pronounced mad from his conduct to Ophelia, mainly

if not solely. It is a ready solution of the incomprehensible. Swift

was a Hamlet to Stella and Vanessa; and as there are two against him,

_versus_ Hamlet’s one love, critics pronounce him doubly mad. It is

a very ingenious but not very satisfactory way of getting out of the

difficulty. Mad or in his senses, he is a character that provokes;

provoked writers are apt to be not fair ones; and because they cannot

quite comprehend, they malign: _damnant quod non intelligunt_, is

also a rule guiding biographers. Shall he have the qualities “that

might become an angel,” or shall his portrait be “under the dark

cloud, and every feature be distorted into that of a fiend?” You

have equal liberty from the records to depict him as you please. The

picture, to be seen at large by an assembled lecturer’s audience,

must be strong and coarse in the main, and exhibit some tenderer

tones to the near benches in front.

“For a man of my level,” says Swift of himself, “I have as bad a

name almost as I deserve! and I pray God that those who give it me,

may never have reason to give me a better.” He does not, you see,

set up for perfection, but through his present maligners he slaps

his after-biographers in the face, who, if they be hurt, will deny

the wit or omit it, and prefer instanter a charge of hypocrisy.

Angel or fiend! how charitable or how unmerciful are lecturers and

biographers! and, being so able to distinguish and choose, how very

good they must be themselves! Did the reader ever happen to see a

life of Tiberius with two title-pages, both taken from historical

authorities; two characters of one and the same person; made up,

too, of recorded facts? He is “that inimitable monarch Tiberius,”

during most of his reign “the universal dispenser of the blessings

of peace,” yet “he permitted the worst of civil wars to rage at

Rome!” We may venture to use the words of the essayist, speaking of

Swift--“We doubt whether the histories of the world can furnish, for

example and instruction, for wonder and pity, for admiration and

scorn, for approval and condemnation, a specimen of humanity at once

so illustrious and so small.” We have, from perfect authorities,

Tiberius handed down for detestation and for universal admiration.

The testimonies are not weak; they are alike strong, and equally

accepted standards of historical evidence and literature. “Swift

stood a living enigma.” It should seem there have been many such

enigmas. Shakespeare, who knew all nature, gave the world one to

make out as it can.[19] Grave history offers another. The novelist,

M. de Wailly, has tried his hand at this enigma--Swift; but the

Frenchman, like most French novelists, went altogether out of nature

to establish impossible theories. A dramatist might reduce the tale

within the limits of nature, if he could but once, for a few moments,

be behind the scenes of truth’s theatre--if he knew accurately all

the facts, or perhaps one or two facts, that time has concealed,

and perhaps ever will conceal; and which, discovered, would solve

the enigma at once. Of course, the great enigma lies in Swift’s

amours. These apart, no man would ever have ventured to assert the

life-long madness of Swift. Great men and little have had, and,

as long as the world lasts, will have their amours, honest ones

and dishonest; but, excepting for romance-writing and gossiping of

a day, such themes have been thought unworthy history, and to be

but slightly notable even in biography. Their natural secresy has

hitherto covered the correct ones with a sanctity, and the incorrect

with a darker veil, that it is better not to lift; nor is it easy

at all times to distinguish the right from the wrong. The living

resent the scrutiny: we do not admire the impertinence, nor easily

admit the privilege of an amatorial inquisition upon the characters

of the dead. And what has curiosity gathered, after all, which ought

to justify honest people in maligning Swift, Stella, or Vanessa?

A mass of contradictions. They cannot all be true. Even Stella’s

marriage, stated as a fact by so many writers, is denied, and upon

as fair evidence as its supposition. The first account of it is

given as many as seven years after Swift’s death, and twenty-four

years after Stella’s. There are two versions with respect to the

dying scene, and supposed dialogue regarding the marriage. They

contradict each other; for, in the one, Swift is made brutally to

leave the room, and never to have seen her after; in the other, to

have desired to acknowledge the marriage, and that Stella said, “It

is too late.” Who knows if either be true? and what means “it is

too late?” Do those few simple words, overheard, necessarily imply

any such acknowledgment? But there is proof that one malicious

statement is false. “This behaviour,” says Mr Thomas Sheridan (not

Dr Sheridan, the friend of Swift, for whom he has been mistaken, and

weight accordingly given to his statement), threw Mrs Johnson into

unspeakable agonies; and for a time she sunk under the weight of so

cruel a disappointment. But soon after, roused by indignation, she

inveighed against his cruelty in the bitterest terms; and sending

for a lawyer, made her will, bequeathing her fortune, by her own

name, to charitable uses.” It is said this was done in the presence

of Dr Sheridan; but the narrator was a mere lad when his father,

from whom he is said to have received it, died. But this very will

is, if not of Swift’s dictation, the will he had wished her to make

(compare it with Swift’s own will--the very phraseology is strongly

indicative of his dictation); for he had thus written to Mr Worral

when in London, during Stella’s severe illness: “I wish it could be

brought about that she might make her will. Her intentions are to

leave the interest of all her fortune to her mother and sister during

their lives, afterwards to Dr Stevens’s hospital, to purchase lands

for such uses as she designs it.” Upon this Mr Wilde, author of _The

Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life_, remarks most properly: “Now,

such was not only the tenor, but the very words of the will made two

years afterwards, which Sheridan (Thomas, not Dr Sheridan) would

have his readers believe was made in pique at the Dean’s conduct.”

Then it follows, that if this paragraph in the tale, and told as a

consequence of the previous paragraph, is untrue, as it is proved to

be, the first part, the brutal treatment, falls to the ground. In any

court the evidence would be blotted from the record. It is curious,

and may have possibly some bearing upon the Platonic love of Swift

and Stella, that she should, in this will, have been so enamoured of

celibacy, that she enjoins it upon the chaplain whom she appointed

to read prayers and preach at the hospital. “It is likewise my

will that the said chaplain be an unmarried man at the time of his

election, and so continue while he enjoys the office of chaplain to

the said hospital.” This will is also curious, and worthy of notice,

in another respect. Among the slanders upon Swift and Stella, it had

been circulated that she had been not only his mistress, but had had

a child by him; and an old bellringer’s testimony was adduced for the

fact. There may be in the mind of the reader quite sufficient reasons

to render the story impossible; but one item of the will is a bequest

to this supposed child by name. “I bequeath to Bryan M‘Loglin (a

child who now lives with me, and whom I keep on charity) twenty-five

pounds, to bind him out apprentice, as my executors, or the survivors

of them, shall think fit.” Now, this is the great case of cruelty

against Swift, and we think it is satisfactorily disposed of. Have

we any other notice given that Swift behaved brutally to Stella?

None. Where is there any evidence of her complaining? but there is

evidence of the tenderest affection on Swift’s part. Stella’s letters

have never seen the light; but, if we may judge by the answers to

them, there could have been no charge of cruelty brought against him

by her. The whole is an assumption from this narrative of Sheridan

the son, and, as we have shown, altogether a misconception or a

dream of his. Even with respect to Stella’s parentage authors do not

agree--yet each speaks as positively as if he had been at the birth.

Swift himself says that her father was a younger brother of a good

family in Nottinghamshire, and her mother of a lower degree. Some

assert that she was the natural daughter of Sir Wm. Temple. Johnson

says, the daughter of Sir Wm. Temple’s steward; but, in contradiction

to this, it is pretty clear that her mother did not marry this

steward, whose name was Mosse, till after Sir Wm. Temple’s death,

when Stella was in Ireland. Sir William left her a thousand pounds,

and, it is said, declared to her her parentage. A writer in the

_Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1757, who knew Stella’s mother, and was

otherwise well acquainted with facts, is urged, in indignation at the

treacherous and spiteful narrative by Lord Orrery, to write a defence

of the Dean. From this source, what others had indeed suspected

is strongly asserted--that Swift was himself the natural son of

Temple. He thus continues: “When Stella went to Ireland, a marriage

between her and the Dean could not be foreseen; but when she thought

proper to communicate to her friends the Dean’s proposal, and her

approbation of it, it was then become absolutely necessary for that

person, who alone knew the secret history of the parties concerned,

to reveal what otherwise might have been buried in oblivion. But was

the Dean to blame, because he was ignorant of his natural relation to

Stella? or can he justly be censured because it was not made known

to him before the day of the marriage? He admired her; he loved her;

he pitied her; and when fate placed the everlasting barrier between

them, their affection became a true Platonic love, if not something

yet more exalted.... We are sometimes told, that upon the Hanoverian

family succeeding to the throne of Great Britain, Swift renounced all

hopes of farther preferment; and that his temper became more morose,

and more intolerable every year. I acknowledge the fact in part;

but it was not the loss of his hopes that soured Swift alone; this

was the unlucky epocha of that discovery, that convinced the Dean

that the only woman in the world who could make him happy as a wife,

was the only woman in the world who could not be that wife.” Delany

also entertained a suspicion in agreement with this account. The

supposition would seem to throw light upon a mysterious passage in

Swift’s life, and to be sufficient explanation of all his behaviour

to Stella. “Immediately subsequent to the ceremony (the marriage)

Swift’s state of mind,” says Scott, “appears to have been dreadful.

Delany, as I have heard from a friend of his relict, being pressed

to give his opinion on this strange union, said, that about the

time it took place, he observed Swift to be extremely gloomy and

agitated--so much so, that he went to Archbishop King to mention

his apprehensions. On entering the library, Swift rushed out with

a countenance of distraction, and passed him without speaking. He

found the Archbishop in tears; and upon asking the reason, he said,

‘You have just met the most unhappy man on earth, but on the subject

of his wretchedness you must never ask a question.’” Sir Walter

Scott does not admit this story in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, but

we doubt if the reason of his doubt, or rejection of it, be quite

satisfactory. “It is enough to say that Swift’s parents resided

in Ireland from before 1665 until his birth in 1667, and that

Temple was residing in Holland from April 1666 until January 1668.

Lord Orrery says until 1670.” Dates, it appears, are not always

accurately ascertained. We cannot determine that ambassadors have no

latitude for a little ubiquity; but there is one very extraordinary

circumstance with regard to Swift’s childhood, that seems to involve

in it no small degree of mystery. “It happened, by whatever accident,

that Jonathan was not suckled by his mother, but by a nurse, who

was a native of Whitehaven; and when he was about a year old, her

affection for him was become so strong, that, finding it necessary to

visit a relation who was dangerously sick, and from whom she expected

a legacy, she found means to convey the child on shipboard, without

the knowledge of his mother or his uncle, and carried him with her to

Whitehaven. At this place he continued near three years; for when the

matter was discovered, his mother sent orders not to hazard a second

voyage, till he should be better able to bear it. The nurse, however,

gave other testimonies of her affection to Jonathan, for during his

stay at Whitehaven she had him taught to spell, and when he was five

years old he was able to read a chapter in the Bible.”

This undoubted incident is no small temptation to a novelist to spin

a fine romance, and affiliate the child according to his fancy. It

is a strange story--a very poor widow not suckling her own child!

kept three years away from a parent, lest, having borne one voyage

well, the young child should not be able to bear a second! The said

novelist may find sufficient reason for the mother in after years

recommending him to Sir Wm. Temple, and perhaps weave into his story

that the nominal mother was one intrusted with a charge not her

own. Stella’s mother’s connection with the Temple family may be as

rationally accounted for. The writer in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_,

already quoted, seems to have had this account of Johnston from the

widow herself. “This gentlewoman (Stella’s mother) was the widow

(_as she always averred_) of one Johnston a merchant, who, having

been unfortunate in trade, afterwards became master of a trading

sloop, which ran between England and Holland, and there died.” Then,

again, to revert to the entanglement of this mystery, although it

is received that there was a marriage--a private marriage, as it

is said, in the garden, by the Bishop of Clogher--are there really

sufficient grounds for a decision in the affirmative? It is traced

only to Delany and Sheridan (who could not have known it but by

hearsay), and the assertion, on suspicion, of the worst of all

evidences with regard to Swift, Orrery (he only knew him in his

declining years, as he confesses); but Dr Lyon, Swift’s executor,

denied it; and Mrs Dingley, who came to Ireland, after Sir William

Temple’s death, with Stella, and lived with her till her death,

laughed at it as an idle tale. Mrs Brent, with whom the Dean’s

mother lodged, and who subsequently was his housekeeper, never

believed it, and often told her daughter so, who succeeded her as

housekeeper. It is said the secret was told to Bishop Berkeley by

the Bishop of Clogher. “But,” says Sir Walter Scott, “I must add,

that if, as affirmed by Mr Monck Mason, Berkeley was in Italy from

the period of the marriage to the death of the Bishop of Clogher,

this communication could not have taken place.” With evidence

so conflicting even as to the marriage--so uncertain--and if a

marriage, as to the relationship between the parties--as to the

time of discovery--and with that maddening possibility of Swift’s

physical infirmity alluded to by Scott; it does appear that it is

the assumption of a very cruel critical right, to fasten upon the

character of Swift a charge of fiendishness and brutality towards

Stella. Where there are so many charitable ways of accounting for his

conduct, most of which might well move our admiration and our pity,

and where the tenderness of the parties towards each other cannot

for a moment be doubted (_vide_ Swift’s diary in his letters, and

his most touching letter speaking of her death and burial), there

is nothing more improbable, nothing more out of nature, than the

acquiescence of both Swift and Stella in a condition which might

well have driven both mad, if that condition had been avoidable. We

have a hesitation in believing in self-made monsters. Novelists,

romance-writers, and dramatists, conjure them up for their hour on

the stage, but it is a novelty to admit them into a biography which

professes to be true. As to Lord Orrery, the first slanderer of Swift

after his death, we have a perfect contempt for his character. He

sought the aged Swift for his own ends. His father had bequeathed

away from him his library; in his vexation he thought to vindicate

himself by an ambition to become a literary character. As Alcibiades

sought Socrates, not for Socrates’ virtues, but because his wisdom

might aid him in his political schemes; so Lord Orrery took the

leading literary characters of the day, and especially Swift, into

what companionship he might. He cajoled and flattered the old man,

and at his death maligned him. There was hypocrisy, too; for it was

contemptible in him to have pretended a friendship so warm, with a

man whom he designated as a tyrant, a brute, and irreligious. The

world are keen to follow evil report. The ill life which is told

by _a friend_ is authentic enough for subsequent writers, who, like

sheep, go over the hedge after their leader. The writer in the

_Gentleman’s Magazine_ for November 1757, speaks as one intimately,

and of long continuance, acquainted with all the circumstances of the

case. He says significantly that he thinks _there are some living who

have it in their power, from authentic materials_, to throw light

upon the subject. That he was well acquainted with her mother we

learn from the following passage: “I saw her myself in the autumn

of 1742 (about a year before her death), and although far advanced

in years, she still preserved the remains of a very fine face.” He

minutely describes Stella’s person as one who had seen her. “Let

those judge who have been so happy as to have seen this Stella, this

Hetty Johnston, and let those who have not, judge from the following

description”--and as one who had conversed with her: “Her mind was

yet more beautiful than her person, and her accomplishments were

such as to do honour to the man who was so happy as to call her

daughter.” He tells the anecdote (for which he says “I have undoubted

authority”) of her presence of mind and courage in firing a pistol

at a robber on a ladder about to enter her room at night. He tells

the time, and implies the cause of her leaving Moor Park to reside

in Ireland. “As soon as she was woman enough to be intrusted with

her own conduct, she left her mother, and Moor Park, and went to

Ireland to reside, by the order of Sir William, who was yet alive.

She was conducted thither by Swift; _but of this I am not positive_,

as I am that her mother parted with her as one who was never to see

her again.” Upon that fact, then, he is positive, and scrupulous of

assertion where not so. May it be conjectured he had the information

from the mother herself, when he saw her so near the time of her

death? He asserts that Sir William often “recommended her tender

innocence to the protection of Swift, _as she had no declared male

relation that could be her defender_;” that “from that time when

they received the proper notice of the secrets of the family, they

took care to converse before witnesses, even though they had never

taken such precaution before.” “Can we wonder,” he adds, “that they

should spend one day in the year in fasting, praying, and tears,

from this period to her death? Might it not be the anniversary of

their marriage?” “Swift had more forcible reasons for not owning

Stella for his wife, than his lordship (Orrery) has allowed; and

that it was not his behaviour, but her own unhappy situation, that

might perhaps shorten her days.” The contributor, who signs himself

C.M.P.G.N.S.T.N.S., writes purposely to vindicate the character of

Swift from the double slander of Lord Orrery, who impeaches “the

Dean’s charity, his tenderness, and even his humanity, in consequence

of his hitherto unaccountable behaviour to his Stella, and of his

long resentment shown to his sister.” Lord Orrery had said that Swift

had persisted in not owning his marriage from pride, because he had

reproached his sister for marrying a low man, and would never see

her or communicate with her after her marriage. That as Stella was

also of low origin, he feared his reproaches might be thrown back

upon himself. Then follows an entire contradiction of this unlikely

statement or surmise of Orrery--for that, “after her husband’s

and Lady Gifford’s death, she (the sister, Mrs Fenton) retired to

Farnham, and boarded with Mrs Mayne, Mrs Mosse boarding there at

the same time, with whom she lived in the greatest intimacy; and as

she had not enough to maintain her, the Dean paid her an annuity

as long as she lived--neither was that annuity a trifle.” Another

correspondent in the same Magazine--for December 1757--as desirous

of vindicating the Dean, yet, nevertheless, points out a supposed

error with regard to the passage in which mention is made of “the

unlucky epocha of that discovery,” being that of the accession of

the Hanoverian family, and the loss of Swift’s hopes. “But this,”

he says, “is inconsistent with Swift’s marrying her in 1716, as (in

page 487) we are told he did; or in 1717, in which year, I think,

Lord Orrery places this event.” We think this is being too precise.

Lord Oxford was impeached and sent to the Tower in 1715, which

is sufficiently near to be called the same epocha. Or even if we

take the accession from the death of Queen Anne--August 1714--the

disappointment must have been rankling in the mind of Swift, still

fresh, at the time of the other event. He likewise notices that Sir

Wm. Temple was abroad at and before Swift’s birth; but, for reasons

we have given, we think this objection of no importance. No mention

is made of Vanessa in the article in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_. The

author seems cautiously, conscientiously, to abstain from every item

of Orrery’s narrative, but such as he was assured of from his own

knowledge.

Johnson, in his life of Swift, speaks disparagingly of Stella’s wit

and accomplishments. It was displeasing to the great lexicographer

that a woman should spell badly. Bad spelling was, we apprehend, the

feminine accomplishment of the day. Dr Drake, in his essay on the

literature and manners of that age, says, “It was not wonderful that

our women could not spell, when it may be said that our men had not

yet learnt to read.”

We prefer Swift’s account of this matter. She was “versed,” he says,

“in Greek and Roman history--spoke French perfectly--understood

Platonic and Epicurean philosophy, and judged very well of the

defects of the latter. She made judicious abstracts of the books she

had read,” &c. Of her manners: “It was not safe nor prudent in her

presence to offend in the least word against modesty, for she then

gave full employment to her wit, her contempt, and resentment, under

which stupidity and brutality were forced to sink into confusion;

and the guilty person, by her future avoiding him like a bear or a

satyr, was never in a way to transgress again.” She thus replied to

a coxcomb who tried to put the ladies in her company to the blush:

“Sir, all these ladies and I understand your meaning very well,

having, in spite of our care, too often met with those of your sex

who wanted manners and good sense. But, believe me, neither virtuous

nor even vicious women love such kind of conversation. However, I

will leave you, and report your behaviour; and whatever visit I make,

I shall first inquire at the door whether you are in the house,

that I may be sure to avoid you.” “She understood the nature of

government, and could point out all the errors of Hobbes, both in

that and religion.” This letter of Swift’s is full of her praise;

but we know nothing more touching than the passage which speaks of

his sickening feelings at the hour of her burial. “_January 30,

Tuesday._--This is the night of the funeral, which my sickness will

not suffer me to attend. It is now nine at night, and I am removed

into another apartment that I may not see the light in the church,

which is just over against the window of my bed-chamber.” Were these

words written by a _cruel_ man!! Well, if so, we must admire a

woman’s saying--as it is put by Mr Thackeray: “Ah, it was a hard fate

that wrung from them so many tears, and stabbed pitilessly”--(alas,

Mr Thackeray, why will you put in that odious _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.” And why, Mr Thackeray, will you say

of such a man, when he was writing that they had removed him into

another apartment, that he might not see the light in the church,

and was praising her and loving her when he could speak or write a

word--why, we ask, should you say, “in contemplation of her goodness,

his _hard_ heart melts into pathos.” Your own heart was a little

ossifying into hardness when you wrote this. Ah! did you wish your

female audience to think how much more tender you could be yourself?

and so did you offer this little apology for some hard things in your

novels? We wish you had written an essay, and not read a lecture. You

would have been both less _hard_ and less tender,--for, in truth,

your tender passages in this life of Swift, are very well to the

purpose, to catch your audience; but they are “nihil ad rem.” And

your appeal to the “pure and tender bosoms,” all against poor Swift,

as a detestable cannibal,--how, in his _Modest Proposal_, “he rages

against children,” and “enters the nursery with the tread and gaiety

of an ogre,” how he thought the “loving and having children” an

“unreasonableness,” and “love and marriage” a “folly,” because in his

Lilliputian kingdom the state removed children from their parents

and _educated_ them; and you wind up your appeal so lovingly, so

charmingly, so devotedly, so insinuatingly to your fair audience,

upon the blessings of conjugal love and philoprogenitiveness, that

you must be the dearest of lecturers, the pet of families, the

destroyer of ogres; and, as to that monster Swift, the very children

should cry out, as they do in the _Children in the Wood_, “Kill him

again, Mr Thackeray.” And this you did, knowing all the while that

the _Modest Proposal_ was a patriotic and political satire--one of

real kindness to the people, whose children he supposes, in the

depth of his feeling and his satire and bitter irony, the Government

should encourage the getting rid of, rather than, in defiance of all

his (the Dean’s) schemes for the benefit of Ireland, they should be

made a burthen to their parents, and miserable themselves. All this

you knew very well: it was shabby and shameful of you by your mere

eloquence to make this grave irony appear or be felt as a reality

and a cruelty, and tack on to it an importation from Lilliput of

a state edict, as if it were one in Swift’s mind with the _Modest

Proposal_. Yes,--you knew, the while these your words were awakening

detestation of Swift, you were oratorising a very great sham--all

nonsense--stuff--that would never pass current but through the

stamp of lectureship. You knew how the witty Earl Bathurst, a kind

father with his loved children about him, as good-naturedly as you

should have done, received Swift’s benevolently intended satire. “A

man who has nine children to feed,” says Lord Bathurst to Swift,

“can’t long afford _alienos pascere nummos_; but I have four or five

that are very fit for the table. I only wait for the Lord Mayor’s

Day to dispose of the largest, and shall be sure of getting off

the youngest whenever a certain great man (Sir R. Walpole) makes

another entertainment at Chelsea.” Here are your false words to win

all feminine sympathy. “In fact, our great satirist was of opinion

that conjugal love was unadvisable, 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.” How cruel was this in you,

under some of the probabilities, and all the possibilities that may

be, ought to be, charitably referred to Swift’s case--in his loves

or his friendships, be they what they will, for Stella and Vanessa.

Vanessa--have we then all this while forgotten Vanessa? Hers is

indeed a curious story. It is told in Swift’s poem of “Cadenus and

Vanessa,” and published after her death, at the dying orders of

Vanessa herself.

At the time Swift was moving in the higher circles in London, he

appears to have been remarkable for the gracefulness of his manners

and his conversational powers. These accomplishments won for him many

friendships in the female society in which he found himself. Indeed,

in his letters, his female correspondence possesses a great charm,

and speaks very highly in favour of the wit and accomplishments of

the really well-educated women of the day. Swift lived in great

familiarity with the Vanhomrighs. The eldest daughter (another

Esther), ardent by nature, and desirous of improving her mind,

earnestly gave herself up to Swift’s converse and instruction. The

result on her part was love, on Swift’s friendship: it is possible

he may have felt something stronger; but, with an inconsistency,

those who charge him with a tenderer feeling deny him the power of

entertaining it. The story is too well known to be repeated here.

She confessed her passion, and he insisted upon friendship only.

She followed him to Ireland. She so expressed her state of mind to

him by letter, that Swift had certainly reason to apprehend fatal

consequences, if he altogether broke off his intimacy. If it be true

that Swift was by nature cold, it is some excuse for imprudence

that he did not easily suspect, or perhaps know, the dangerous and

seducing power of an attachment warmer than friendship. It is evident

_he_ professed nothing more. Whatever be the case in that respect,

there is no reason to charge upon either an improper intimacy. Mr

Thackeray thinks the two women died, killed by their love for, and

treatment by, Swift. It is possible love, and disappointed love,

may have hastened both their deaths, and made the wretchedness of

Swift. On all sides, the misery was one for compassion, and such

compassion as may charitably cover much blame. But even the story

of Vanessa is told differently. There is little certainty to go

upon, but enough for any man who pleases to write vilely on. Lord

Orrery is very unmerciful on the character of Vanessa. He, in

downright terms, charges her with having thrown away her virtue and

her religion, preferring passion to one and wit to the other. This

certainly gives him a good latitude for maligning his friend. Did he

ever give his friend Swift a piece of his mind, and say to him, he

thought him a rascal, and would discontinue his friendship? Oh, no;

it was pleasanter and very friendly to tell all his spiteful things,

after the Dean was dead, to “his Ham,” that they might be handed

down to the world from “father to son,” and so the world must know

“you would have smiled to have found his house a constant seraglio

of very virtuous women, who attended him from morning till night,

with an obedience, an awe, and an assiduity, that are seldom paid to

the richest or the most powerful lovers; no, not even to the Great

Seignior himself.” Yet the facetious father of “my Ham” never saw

Stella, and knew perhaps as little of the seraglio. Sir Walter Scott

says, as others also, we believe, that, upon Vanessa’s applying to

Stella herself to know the nature of the undefined connection between

her and Swift, she received from Stella an acknowledgment of the

marriage. If this were true, it would of course settle that question;

but Lord Orrery, from whom the first statement of the marriage came,

and who would readily have seized such a confirmation of his tale,

says no such thing. On the contrary, he says Vanessa wrote the letter

to Cadenus, not to Stella, and that Swift brought his own written

reply, and, “throwing down the letter on her table, with great

passion hastened back to his horse, carrying in his countenance the

frowns of anger and indignation.” How are we to trust to accounts so

different? “She did not,” he adds, “survive many days (he should

have said weeks, but days tells more against _his friend_) the letter

delivered to her by Cadenus, but during that short interval she was

sufficiently composed to cancel a will, _made in Swift’s favour_, and

to make another,” &c. Who will not ask the question,--_Was_ there a

will made in Swift’s favour? It is against probability; for be it

remembered, that the same story was told with respect to Stella’s

will, and it has been clearly proved that her will was such as

Swift wished her to make. Nor was it at all consistent with Swift’s

character, proud as he was, and always so cautious to avoid any

scandal on Stella’s account, that he would have allowed _her_ to make

a will in his favour; and it would have been still more revolting to

his pride to have accepted a legacy from Vanessa.

Orrery treats poor Vanessa worse even than he does his friend. He

conjectures her motives as against Swift, and writes of her death,

“under all the agonies of despair,” which, unless he were present

at the last scene, he is not justified in doing, and reviles her

with a cruel uncharitableness. The worst that ought to be said of

this miserable love and perplexing friendship is said by Scott--“It

is easy for those who look back on this melancholy story to blame

the assiduity of Swift or the imprudence of Vanessa. But the first

deviation from the straight line of moral rectitude is, in such a

case, so very gradual, and on the female side the shades of colour

which part esteem from affection, and affection from passion, are so

imperceptibly heightened, that they who fail to stop at the exact

point where wisdom bids, have much indulgence to claim from all who

share with them the frailties of mortality.”

More than a hundred and fifty years ago this sad tale, whatever it

was in reality, yet now a mystery, was acted to the life in this

strange world. The scandal of few real romances seldom lasts so long.

It is time to cease pursuing it with feelings of a recent enmity;

it is a better charity to hope, that all that was of difference, of

vexation, of misery, nay, of wrong, has become as unsubstantial as

their dust, and that they are where all that was of love is sure

to be, for love is eternal. Poor Vanessa’s dust may still rest in

peace. Swift’s and Stella’s have not been allowed the common repose

of the grave. Their bodies have been disturbed. The phrenologists

have been busy with the skulls, and their unhallowed curiosity has

been rewarded with a singular refutation of their doctrine. The

peculiarities of Swift’s skull are--“the extreme lowness of the

forehead, those parts which the phrenologists have marked out _as the

organs of wit, causality, and comparison, being scarcely developed

at all_, but the head rose gradually from benevolence backwards. The

portion of the occipital bone assigned to the animal propensities,

philoprogenitiveness and amativeness, &c., appeared excessive.”

There is something very shocking in this disturbance of the dead.

We are inclined to join in Shakespeare’s imprecation on the movers

of bones. Swift’s larynx has been stolen, and is now, they say, in

possession of the purloiner in America. We wish it had Swift’s human

utterance, that the thief might wish he had no ears. An itinerant

phrenologist is now hawking about Pope’s skull. Matthews’ thigh-bone

has circulated from house to house. If ghosts ever visit nowadays our

earth, we could wish them to come armed each with a stout stick, and

act upon the phrenologists the “Fatal Curiosity.”

Johnson’s line--

“And Swift expires a driveller and a show,”

if it was not justified, as it certainly was not, during the Dean’s

last years, in his melancholy state, may be justified as a prophecy,

and fulfilled when his skull was handed about from fashionable house

and party, and exhibited as a show.

Before we entirely quit the subject of Swift’s amours, it is

necessary to mention a serious offer of marriage which he certainly

made, about the year 1696. The lady--Miss Jane Waring--did not

at first receive his advances very warmly. After four years

the courtship came to an end. It seems Miss Waring became more

complying as Swift cooled. In a letter he complained of her want

of any real affection for him. It is so worded as to imply some

doubts of her temper and judgment. He writes as a man would do who

considers himself rather bound in honour than by love, and still

offers marriage--upon terms. These terms, those who profess to be

conversant in love proprieties, as in other branches of criticism,

say no woman could comply with. We do not profess to determine cases

of that nature. We apprehend all kinds of terms have been complied

with on both sides without impeachment in the Court of Love. This

offer of marriage, however, militates against Sir Walter Scott’s

hypothesis of physical unfitness, and rather strengthens the argument

and statements of the writer in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_. We

believe the exact date of the supposed marriage has not been given.

If it did take place, what if it should be possible it was on the

day--his birthday (or what he pleases to call his birthday)--at the

recurrence of which he bewailed his birth by reading the chapter in

Job? Nor must we omit, as it shows the shallow grounds upon which

defamation often rests, a charge of violation made against Swift at

Kilroot, because such a charge was found to have been really made

against one J. S., as it appeared in a magistrate’s books. J. S.

might have stood for Jonathan Swift--let him, therefore, bear the

iniquity. It might have been fastened upon any or all of the numerous

family of Smith, or any other J. S. in the world. It is curious

that the first propagator, who, possibly with truth, denied having

made the charge, as he might have said the letters J. S. only--as

did the register--and unwittingly left the appropriation to his

listeners;--it is curious, we observe, that this man became raving

mad, and was an inmate in Swift’s hospital. The idle tale has been

disproved, and but one of his worst maligners repeats it.

There are no passages in this portion of Mr Thackeray’s Lectures more

odious, and more repugnant to our taste and feeling, than those which

charge Swift with irreligion; nor are they less offensive because

the author says--“I am not here, of course, to speak of any man’s

religious views, except in so far as they influence his literary

character, his life, his humour.” This denying latitude really means

quite the contrary to its preface; for, since religion does concern

every man’s _life_, and he writes or reads the life, he need not have

said he had nothing (of course) to do with it, under any exceptions.

But it serves the purposes of assuming a reluctance to touch upon the

subject, and of charging upon the necessity of the case the many free

and unnecessary animadversions upon Swift’s character as a priest of

the Church of England.

The lecturer far outdoes the false friend Orrery, who, speaking

of his _Gulliver_, says, “I am afraid he glances at religion.” It

is true, he goes rather far to set up his friend the Dean as an

example of punishment by Providence, which punishment he admires

and confesses as according to righteous ways. His lordship might

have pitied, if angels weep. Not a bit of it. “Here,” he says, “a

reflection naturally occurs, which, without superstition, leads

me tacitly to admire and confess the ways of Providence. For this

great genius, this mighty wit, who seemed to scorn and scoff at all

mankind, lived not only to be an example of pride punished in his

own person, and an example of terror to others, but lived to undergo

some of the greatest miseries to which human nature is liable.”

Is this an instance of the charity which “covereth a multitude of

sins,” and which saith, “Judge not”? If his lordship had exercised

on this occasion _his superstition_, which he thus adroitly puts

aside, he would pretty much have resolved Swift’s sins into a

_material_ necessity. Thus he philosophises on vice and virtue

as effects--“These effects take their sources from causes almost

mechanical.”

Mr Thackeray is still more severe--more unjust. He will not allow his

strictness in his religious duties, not even his family devotions,

to pass as current coin; they are shams and counterfeits. The Swift

too proud to lie, was enacting hypocrisy in all this; and how lucidly

conclusive the argument! Would any modern lecturer like to be tried

by it? “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.” “_Must_ have

heard.”!! Had the lecturer been an eye and ear witness, he could

not have said more. Yet this _must_ is a very little must indeed. A

letter of Bolingbroke’s, and another from Pope to Swift, which the

lecturer, as he ought to have done, had doubtless read, perfectly

reduces the little _must_ to nothing at all. Swift, it seems, had

written to Pope in some way to convert him from Popery. Pope’s

reply parries off the Dean’s shafts by wit, and the letter is very

pleasant. Not so Bolingbroke; and as he was of too free a spirit to

be false, and a hypocrite, at the time he wrote his reply he was

not that bold speculator in atheistical arguments which he may have

afterwards been; or if he was a hypocrite, that alternative defends

Swift, for it shows the improbability of the arguments over the

burgundy having been in their familiar converse; for Bolingbroke

was at least no fool to contradict himself before Swift. These are

his remarkable words, defending himself from the appellation of

a freethinker, in its irreligious sense: “For since the truth of

Christianity is as evident as matters of fact, on the belief of

which so much depends, ought to be, and agreeable to all our ideas

of justice, these freethinkers (such as he had described) must needs

be Christians on the best foundation--on that which St Paul himself

established (I think it was St Paul), _Omnia probate, quod bonum est

tenete._” It is not needful for us to vindicate Bolingbroke, nor even

to express any great satisfaction at this passage; our purpose is

to show Swift’s religious sincerity, and the probable nature of the

conversations with Pope and Bolingbroke from these letters.

But to the excess of severity in the lecturer. He contrasts “Harry

Fielding and Dick Steele” with Swift for religious sincerity. These

“were,” he says, “especially loud, and I _believe fervent_, in their

expressions of belief.” He admits them to have been _unreasoning_,

and Church of England men. “But Swift, his mind had had a different

schooling, and possessed a very different logical power. _He_ was

not bred up in a tipsy guardroom, 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:” and yet Mr Thackeray would make this evil

spirit a spirit of truth, of logical power, of brightness to seize,

to know, to see, to flash upon falsehood; in fact, that irreligion

was the natural result of true good logical reasoning, and therefore

Swift had no religion. We have no business to charge the lecturer

with irreligious sentiments; indeed we feel assured that he had

no irreligious motive whatever in the utterance of this passage;

nor could he have had, with any discretion, before a mixed modern

audience: in the hurry of his eloquence, he overlooked the want of

precise nicety of expression due to such a subject. We could wish

that he had otherwise worded this passage, which, to the minds of the

many, will certainly convey a notion that the legitimate conclusion

of reasonable logical arguments is infidelity. Yet more. “Ah! man!

you educated in the 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 Heaven, which you adored

with such real wonder, humility, and reverence? For Swift’s was a

reverent spirit; for Swift could love and could pray.” But his love,

according to the lecturer, was cruelty, and his prayer a sham!! Let

no man ever own a friend, however he became his friend, of dubious

opinions. The lecturer is cautious. Miss Martineau sent her mind

into a diseased cow, and it was healed. Pope and Bolingbroke _must_

have sent theirs into Swift, and he was Bolingbroked and Poped to

the utmost corruption and defilement. We may here as well ask how

poor Swift was positively to know the ultimate sceptical opinions of

Bolingbroke? They were published in his works, by Mallet, after his

lordship’s death.

Johnson doubted not the sincerity of Swift’s religion. He vindicates

the _Tale of a Tub_, which Mr Thackeray makes a text for his

vituperation, from “ill intention.” “He was a Churchman rationally

zealous.” “To his duty as a Dean he was very attentive.” “In his

church he restored the practice of weekly communion, and distributed

the sacramental elements in the most solemn and devout manner with

his own hands. He came to his church every morning, preached commonly

in his turn, and attended the evening anthem, that it might not

be negligently performed.” Swift himself spoke disparagingly of

his sermons. Mr Thackeray does more than take him at his word; he

pronounces that “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 coffeehouse almost. There is little or no

cant; he is too great and too proud for that; and, so far as the

badness of his sermons goes, he is honest.” Is Mr Thackeray really a

judge of “Christian characteristics?” or does he pronounce without

having read Swift’s sermon on the Trinity, so much and so deservedly

admired, and certainly of a Christian character? But of these sermons

quite as good a judge is Samuel Johnson as our lecturer, who says,

“This censure of himself, if judgment be made from those sermons

which have been printed, was unreasonably severe.” Johnson ascribes

the suspicion of irreligion to his dread of hypocrisy. Mr Thackeray

makes hypocrisy his religion. Even the essayist in the _Times_,

who considers him a madman from his birth, admits him to have been

“sincerely religious, scrupulously attentive to the duties of his

holy office, vigorously defending the position and privileges of

his order: he positively played into the hands of infidelity, by

the steps he took, both in his conduct and writings, to expose the

cant and hypocrisy which he detested as heartily as he admired and

practised unaffected piety.” If, then, according to this writer,

there was a mistake, it was not of his heart. What different

judgments, and of so recent dates--a sincerely religious man, of

practical unaffected piety, and, _per contra_, a long-life hypocrite

before Heaven. We may well say, “Look on this picture and on this.”

Reflect, reader, upon the double title-page to _Life of Tiberius_,

on the mysteries of every man’s life; and the seeming contradictions

which can never be explained here. A simple truth might explain them,

but truth hides itself, and historians and biographers cannot afford

time for accurate search, nor the reading world patience for the

delays which truth’s narrative would demand.

The _Tale of a Tub_, it has been said, was the obstacle to Swift’s

preferment--it may have been the ostensible excuse. If the Duchess

of Somerset went down on her knees to prevent a bishopric being

offered him, another excuse was wanted than the real one. It was

ascribed to Swift that he had ridiculed her red hair: such a crime

is seldom forgiven. But the “_spretæ injuria formæ_” will not be

producible as an objection. This _Tale of a Tub_ has been often

condemned and excused, and will be while literature lasts, and is

received amongst persons of different temperaments. There are some

so grave that wit is condemned by them before they know the subject

upon which it is exercised. To many it is folly, because beyond

their conception. We know no reason why the man of wit should not be

religious; if there be, wit is a crime; yet it is a gift of nature,

and so imperative upon the possessor that he can scarcely withhold

it. It is his genius. Wit has its logical forms of argument. Errors

in religion, as in manners, present themselves to the man of wit both

in a serious and ludicrous light; the two views combine, there is

the instant flash for illumination or destruction. The corruptions

in a church, as in that of Rome, being the growth of ages, engrafted

into the habits and manners of a people, are not to be put down by

solemn sermons only: arguments in a new and captivating manner must

be adopted, and applied to the ready understanding and familiar

common-sense of those on whom more grave and sedate argumentation is

lost.

The Reformers were not remiss to take wit as an ally. Even now, those

who are temporarily shocked at the apparent lightness with which it

was employed in former days, as they read works such as the _Tale of

a Tub_ may have received with it solid arguments, never so vividly

put to them, and which are still excellent preservatives against

Romanism. The enemy who does not like it will call it ribaldry,

buffoonery, and magnify it into a deadly sin. The vituperation of it

marks its power. This kind of writing, even on the gravest subjects,

is more defensible than those who are hurt by it will admit. In a

state of warfare, and church is militant, we must not throw away

legitimate arms. If wit be a gift, it is a legitimate weapon, and a

powerful one. It deals terrible blows on the head of hypocrisy. We

owe to it more perhaps than we think. It may be fairly asked, Were

the _Provincial Letters_ injurious to the cause of religion? The

_Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_ helped to demolish some strongholds

of iniquity. Rabelais, disgusting as he is to modern readers in

too many parts, was acceptable to bishops and archbishops. They

pardoned much for the depth of sense, knowledge of mankind, and solid

learning in the curate of Meudon. There are offences against taste,

that are not necessarily offences against religion. There is many

an offensive work, especially in modern literature, where taste is

guarded and religion hurt. Is there a natural antipathy between wit

and religion, or between wit and morals? We trust not; for by it

all mankind may be reached--at least those who can be reached by no

other appeal, to whom that may be the first, though not the last. In

times of controversy all must come into the field, the light-armed

as well as the heavy-armed, and they must use their own weapons.

David slew Goliath with a pebble and a sling. He had tried these;

they were scorned by the giant, but they slew him. But this genius

of art is imperative, and unless you shut the church-doors against

it, and anathematise it (and to do so would be dangerous), it will

throw about its weapons. Danger cannot put it down. It has its minor

seriousness, though you see it not; it has its deep wisdom, and such

an abundance of gravity, that it can afford to play with it. It bids

the man endowed with it use it even upon the scaffold, as did Sir

Thomas More. Admit, that, if it is a power for good or evil, that

very admission legitimatises it. The infidel, the scoffer, will use

it, and he will be in the enemy’s camp. Yes, we must have, in the

gravest cause, our sharpshooters too. There have been buffoons for

the gravest purposes as for the vilest. It is well to be cautious

in condemning all. Demosthenes could not prevail upon the people of

Athens to give attention to him where their safety was concerned, and

he abandoned his seriousness, and told them a story of the “shadow

of an ass.” Buffoonery may be a part put on--the disguise, but the

serious purpose is under it. Brutus was an able actor. A man may

be allowed to put on a madness, when it would be death to proclaim

himself, so as to be believed, in his senses. What shall we say of

the grave buffoon, the wittiest, the wisest, the patriotic, who

risked his life to play the fool, because he knew it was the only

means of convincing the people, when he, Aristophanes, could not get

an actor to take the part of Cleon, and took it himself, not knowing

but that a cup of poison awaited him when the play was ended? It is

as well to come to the conclusion that the wit, even the buffoon, may

be respectable--nay, give them a higher name--even great characters.

Their gifts are instincts, are meant for use. As the poet says, they

cut in twain weighty matters: “_Magnas plerumque secant res_.” We

fear that if we were to drive the lighter soldiers of wit out of the

religious camp, those enlisted on the opposite side would set up a

shout, rush in, and, setting about them lustily, have things pretty

much their own way. Apply this as at least an apology for Swift. You

must have the man with his wit--it was his uncontrollable passion.

And, be it remembered, when he conceived, if not wrote, the _Tale of

a Tub_, he was in the riotous spirit of his youth. And abstract from

it its wondrous argument, deep sense of illustration, and weigh them,

how ponderous the mass is, how able to crush the long age-constructed

machinery of designing Popery! But heavy as is the abstract, it would

have lain inert matter, but for those nicely-adjusted springs of wit,

which, light as they seem, lift buoyantly the ponderous power, that

it may fall where directed. If any have a Romish tendency, we would

recommend him to read the _Tale of a Tub_, without fear that it will

take religion out of his head or his heart. We perfectly agree with

Johnson as to the _intention_, in contradiction to Mr Thackeray, who

says, “The man who wrote that wild book could not but be aware what

must be the sequel of the propositions he laid down.” And thus is it

cruelly added, “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 apostacy out to hire.” Charity, which

“believeth all things,” never believed that.

The virtues reign by turns in this world of ours. Each one is the

Queen Quintessence of her time, and commands a fashion upon her

subjects. They bear the hue of her livery in their aspects. What

is in their bosoms it is not so easy to determine; their tongues

are obedient to the fashion, and often join in chorus of universal

cant. Philanthropy is now the common language, we doubt if it is the

common doing, of the age. We are rather suspicious of it, not very

well liking its connections, equality and fraternity, and suspect

it to be of a spurious breed, considering some of its exhibitions

on the stage of the world within the memory of many of us. As the

_aura popularis_ has been long, and is still blowing rather strong

from that quarter, it may appear “brutal” to say a syllable _per

contra_. There never was a fitter time to lift up the hands and eyes

in astonishment at Swift’s misanthropy. See the monster, how he hated

mankind! Perhaps he was a misanthrope. That he was a good hater we

verily believe, but for a misanthrope he was one of the kindest to

those who deserved and needed his assistance. It is said of him that

he made the fortunes of forty families--that when he had power, he

exerted it to the utmost, perseveringly, to advance the interests

of this or that man, and did many acts of benevolence secretly and

delicately;--witness his payment to Mrs Dingley of £52 per annum,

which he made her believe was her own; and he paid it as her agent

for money in the funds, and took her receipt accordingly, and this

was not known till after his death. Very numerous are the anecdotes

of this nature, but here we have no space for them. Such misanthropes

are not very bad people--even though, detesting the assumption of

uncommon philanthropy, they put on now and then a little roughness,

as Swift undoubtedly did, and many very kind people very often do.

But he wrote _Gulliver_, that bitter satire on mankind, for which Mr

Thackeray the lecturer is greatly shocked at him. “As for the moral,

I think it is horrible, shameful, unmanly, blasphemous; and, giant

and great as this Dean is, I say we should hoot him.” Certainly hoot

him--pelt him out of your _Vanity Fair_, which, though bad enough,

is far too good for him, for the law there is to treat bad mankind

very tenderly, and to make the good come off but second best, and

look a trifle ridiculous. There have been strong vigorous satirists,

universally read and admired, and made the stock literature of all

countries too, and the authors have been hitherto thought highly

moral and dignified characters; and they were personal, too, as

ever Swift was (not that we admire his personalities--they were

part his, and part belonged to his time), and their language as

coarse. What are we to say of Juvenal, if we condemn Swift on that

score? What of his sixth and tenth satires? The yahoo for mankind

is not more hideous than the Tabraca monkey, which so frightfully

represents men’s old age, in that famous tenth satire on the “Vanity

of Human Wishes.” It is, indeed, a morbid philanthropy, a maudlin

philanthropy, that will not give detested vices the lash. What

is brutal vice?--degraded human nature, such as our police courts

have of late exhibited it, our Cannons, and kickers, and beaters

of women--the burkers of our times, murderers for the sake of

body-selling, to whom yahoos are as far better creatures. Yet, in our

philanthropic days, we must not compare man to low animals. Indeed,

we make companion of the faithful dog--we pet the obedient horse--we

love them--and we are better for the affection we bestow, and it is

in a great degree perhaps reciprocal; but such brutes in human shape,

we shrink from comparing our dumb friends with them. They have made

themselves an antipathy to human nature, and our nature an antipathy

to them.

One would think, to hear some people talk about this _Gulliver_,

that Swift had originated such hideous comparisons with the brute

creation, and that he alone had brought his _animali parlanti_ on the

stage. Chaucer, whom everybody loves, makes the cock say, as thus

Dryden says it for him:--

“And I with pleasure see

Man strutting on two legs, and aping me.”

_Cock and Fox._

But let us put the matter thus: In depicting the lowest vices of

human nature, Swift, like Hogarth, made them appear more odious, and

the former less offensive, by at least ideally or rather formally

removing them from our species. The transforming them to brutes in

something _like_ human shape, renders the human image less distinct;

covers them with a gauze, through which you can bear the sight, and

contemplate what brutalised human nature may become. The satirist

Hogarth is as strong, and by too near a resemblance, more disgusting,

yet is he a great moralist. Is the Yahoo of Swift worse, or so

offensive to our pride, as the heroes and heroines of “Beer and Gin

Alley,” or the cruelty scenes of Hogarth? Yet who ever called these

doings of the painter-satirist “shameful, unmanly, blasphemous.”

Hoot _him_, Mr Lecturer, hoot both or neither. No--the hoot of the

Lecturer was nothing but a little oratorical extravagance, for

an already indignant audience, touched upon that tender modern

virtue, general philanthropy. Out of his lectures, the lecturer is

a true, good, loving, kind-hearted, generous man; his real “hoot”

would sound as gently as the “roar” of any “sucking dove.” But at a

lecture-table, the audience must be indulged in their own ways. The

lecturer puts by his nature and puts on his art. He is acting the

magician for the moment, and not himself, and thus his art excuses to

him this patting on the back our mock philanthropy; _mock_, for it

is out of nature, and not real. Honest genuine nature is indignant,

and has an impulse as its instinct to punish villany. Who ever read

history, and did not wish a Cæsar Borgia hanged? Philanthropists are

very near being nuisances; they go out of the social course, which

runs in circles--at first small ones too, home. There is room for the

exercise of plenty of charity, amiableness, goodness; where is the

need a man should burthen himself with the whole census? We live for

the most part in circles, and if we do good, true, and serviceable

duty within them, it little matters if some, with a pardonable

eccentricity, deem them magic circles, and that all on the outside

of the circumference are fiends ready to leap in open-mouthed to

devour them. Professing philanthropists are apt to have too little

thought of what is nearest, and to stretch out beyond the natural

reach of their arms. They are breakers into other people’s circles,

and perpetually guilty of a kind of affectionate burglary--and

therefore not punishable, but to be pitied as a trifle insane. Poor

Swift! how his friends wept at his last sad condition, which the

hard hearts who knew him not, a century and a half after, choose to

call Heaven’s punishment, and his misery a “remorse.” How his true

friends grieved for him! and such friends, too--men of generous

natures that lift humanity out of that, its vexatious condition,

which provokes universal satire. He had a circle of friends whom he

dearly loved, and who as dearly loved him. No matter how many yahoos

go to the whipping-post. Take care of the home circles, and ever

keep the temper sweet in that temperate zone, which the natural

course of society has provided for you; and be sure the world won’t

be a bit worse off, if you light your cigar at your own hearth, and

pleasantly write a pretty sharp satire on the world at large. We know

not if it is not a fair position to lay down, that all satirists are

amiable men; our best have been eminently so. Poor gentle Cowper, in

his loving frenzy, wielded the knout stoutly, and had it been in his

religion, would have whipped himself like a pure Franciscan; and yet

he loved his neighbour. And it is our belief that Swift was good and

amiable, and as little like a yahoo as those who depict him as one.

Nature gave him a biting power, and it was her instinct that made him

use it; and what if he exaggerated? It is the poet’s licence. What

did Juvenal? and what did he more than Juvenal? Oh, this at once bold

and squeamish age!--bold to do bad things, and to cry out against

having them told or punished, but delighting in dressing up an

imaginary monster and ticketing it with the name of Jonathan Swift,

dead a century ago!!

And was there so little vice and villany in the world in Swift’s

time, or in Hogarth’s time, that it should have been allowed to

escape? Party was virulent and merciless, and divided men, so that

statesmen had no time to care for good public morals. To be a

defeated minister was to be sent to the Tower, as Swift’s friend

Harley was, and kept there two years. They were corrupt times--yahoo

times. What says the sober historian, the narrator of facts, about

1717? There are accounts of the “Mug-houses,” when the Whig and

Tory factions divided the nation. There was the attack on these

Mug-houses, retaliations and riots, and there were “Mohocks,” of

which we read too pleasantly now in the _Spectator_, who went about

with drawn swords, and kept the city in terror. It is somewhere

about the year 1730 of which the historian speaks thus:--“A great

remissness of government prevailed at this time in England. Peace

both at home and abroad continued to be the great object of the

minister. Prosperity in commerce introduced luxury--hence necessities

were created, and these drove the lower classes of people into the

most abandoned wickedness. Averse to all penal and sanguinary

measures, the minister gave not that encouragement to the ordinary

magistrates that would enable them to give an effectual check to vice

among the multitude. This produced a very pernicious effect among

the higher class, so that almost universal degeneracy of manners

prevailed. It was not safe to travel the roads or walk the streets;

and often the civil officers themselves dared neither to repel the

violences nor punish the crimes that were committed. A species

of villains now started up, unknown to former times, who made it

their business to write letters to men of substance, threatening to

set fire to their houses in case they refused their demands; and

sometimes their threats were carried into execution. In short, the

peculiar depravity of the times became at length so alarming that

the government was obliged to interpose, and a considerable reward

was offered for discovering the ruffians concerned in such execrable

practices.”[20]

If Swift’s miseries were so large as to make Archbishop King shed

tears, and pronounce him the most unhappy man on earth, on the

subject of whose wretchedness no question may be asked; and if,

remembering this, we reflect upon his great and active doings, it

will not be without admiration that we shall see how manfully he

strove against being overwhelmed with inevitable calamities; and if

we think him too much inclined to view mankind ill, we should reflect

that he lived in such times as we have been describing, and had

ill-treatment enough from mankind to render his best struggles for

contentment at times hard, and that he preserved his friendships to

the last.

The fortuitous disappointments of life may be borne with a humble

patience, the virtue in misery; the disappointments which our

fellow-creatures inflict by their falseness and wickedness, are

apt in a degree to make generous natures misanthropic; but even

then their best feelings do but retreat from their advanced

posts--retire within, and cling with greater love and resolution to

the home fortress, fortified and sustained by a little army of dear

friends. So it was with Swift: out in the world he was the traveller

Gulliver--but the best friendships made his world his home. Even

in the strictest sense of _home_, such a home as Swift had, of so

strange a home-love, we know not to what great degree we should look

on that with pity. It is to be hoped, not one of his revilers have

had his miseries--which even his friend was with tears requested not

to look into.

The animosities of Whigs and Tories were extreme. Swift declared

himself a Whig in politics, a Tory as high-churchman. In the course

of political experience, it is evident one of the principles must

give way. Swift saw to what the Whig policy tended: the higher

interests prevailed with him--he joined the Tories. Giant as he was,

we are not surprised at the strong expressions of the essayist whom

we have before quoted, “under Harley, Swift reigned, Swift was the

Government, Swift was Queen, Lords, and Commons. There was tremendous

work to do, and Swift did it all.” We do not mean to say Swift was

not a thorough man of the world; nor that he did not look to his own

interests, as men of the world do; but at the same time, it would be

hard to show that he was profligate as to political principle. He

may have changed his views, or political principles may have shifted

themselves. We firmly believe him to have been honest. But he left

the Whig ranks. Having done so, he was too great not to be feared,

and so hated--and is it too much to say that this Whig hatred with

regard to him has come down to our day, and unforgiving as it is,

as it cannot persecute the man, persecutes his memory? It is next

to impossible not to see that political rancour has directed and

dipped into its own malignant gall the pen of Lord Jeffrey, who

in that essay, which has now become cheap railway reading, heaps

all possible abuse on Swift, ascribing to him all bad motives--is

furiously wroth with him even now, because he abandoned the Whigs.

It is the very burthen of his vituperative essay. He (Swift) is

a political apostate, and a libeller of the Whigs against his

conscience; and this Lord Jeffrey gathers from his letters. Indeed!

and was it in Lord Jeffrey’s mind so dreadful an offence (if true)

this writing against his conscience, and to be discovered in private

letters, at supposed variance with published documents, by this said

Dean? We fear Lord Jeffrey was not aware that he was passing a very

severe censure upon his own conduct when he wrote thus of Swift;

for we remember reading a letter by the said Lord Jeffrey in entire

contradiction to that which, as Editor of the _Edinburgh Review_, he

had given out to the world. In this private letter, published in his

“Life,” he writes in perfect terror, and in the deepest despair of

the nation, arising from the dangerous tendency of articles in that

_Review_, with, as we conceive, a very poor apology, that he could

not restrain his ardent writers. Party blinded him then, and thus

he vents his rancour further, forgetful of the lampoons of the Whig

Tom Moore, the _Twopenny Post-bag_, and a long list--and of the Whig

Byron, and his doings in that line. “In all situations the Tories

have been the greatest libellers, and, as is fitting, the great

prosecutors of libels.” Lord Jeffrey, when he wrote this, was as

forgetful of his own party as of himself in particular--of the many

personalities in his own review, as of Whig writings. Unfortunately

for them, they were not so gifted with wit as their opponents, but

their malignity on that account was the greater. What is to be said

of Lord Holland’s note-book? But Lord Jeffrey was not the one to

condemn, however others might be justified in doing so, even personal

libels, which, in his own case, as editor and political Whig agent,

he justifies, and, more than that, sets up a principle to maintain

his justification. It would appear that one of his contributors

had been shocked at the personal libels in the _Edinburgh_, and

had remonstrated. Jeffrey thus defends the practice: “To come, for

instance, to the attacks on the person of the Sovereign. Many people,

and I profess myself to be one, may think such a proceeding at

variance with the dictates of good taste, of dangerous example, and

repugnant to good feelings; and therefore will not themselves have

recourse to it.” (Here his memory should have hinted--

“Qui facit per alium facit per se.”)

“Yet,” he continues, “it would be difficult to deny that it is, or

may be, a lawful weapon to be employed in the great and eternal

contest between the court and the country. Can there be any doubt

that the personal influence and personal character of the Sovereign

is an element, and a pretty important element, in the practical

constitution of the government, and always forms part of the strength

or weakness of the administration he employs? In the abstract,

therefore, I cannot think that attempts to weaken that influence,

to abate a dangerous popularity, or even to excite odium towards a

corrupt and servile ministry, by making the prince, on whose favour

they depend, generally contemptible or hateful, are absolutely to be

interdicted or protested against. Excesses no doubt may be committed.

But the system of attacking abuses of power, by attacking the

person who instigates or carries them through by general popularity

or personal influence, is lawful enough, I think, and may _form

a large scheme of Whig opposition_--not the best or the noblest

part, certainly, but one not without its use, and that may, on some

occasions, be altogether indispensable.”--_Letter to Francis Horner,

Esq., 12th March 1815._

The semi-apologetic qualifying expressions “against good taste and

feeling,” only make one smile, as showing the clear sin against

conscience, in thus falling into or recommending the large scheme

of Whig opposition. One might imagine him to have been one of Mr

Puff’s conspirators in his tragedy, who had manufactured from the

play a particularly Whig party-prayer--a prayer to their god of

battle, whoever he was,--certainly one a mighty assistant in such

conspiracies.

“Behold thy votaries submissive beg,

That thou wilt deign to grant them all they ask;

Assist them to accomplish all their ends,

And sanctify whatever means they use

To gain them.”--_The Critic._

Every one will now agree, of course, with Lord Jeffrey, that the

Tories have ever been the great libellers!!!

Was it ever known that Tom Moore, or even the editor of the

_Edinburgh Review_, were prosecuted!! We do not justify Swift in

all his libels--some bad enough. They were strange times, and of no

common licence; and who was more licentiously attacked than Swift

himself? And he knew how to retaliate, and he did it terribly and

effectually. Many badly-written things were ascribed to Swift which

he did not write. But we must not take the code of manners of one

age, and a more refined age, and utterly condemn, by reference to

them, the manners of another, as a chargeable offence against an

individual. Much that Swift wrote could not be written now; much that

was written by Mr Thackeray’s other “Humourists” could not be written

now; and yet the objections are on the score of manners wanting in

refinement, and not that morals were offended. In Swift’s time, both

in literature and politics, men wrote coarsely, and acted somewhat

coarsely too; for they wrote in disgust, which was scarcely lessened

by a fear of the pillory. Retaliations were severe. De Foe, who knew

well what political prosecution was, wrote thus on Lord Haversham’s

speech: “But fate, that makes footballs of men, kicks some up stairs

and some down; some are advanced without honour, others suppressed

without infamy; some are raised without merit, some are crushed

without crime; and no man knows, by the beginning of things, whether

his course shall issue in a peerage or a pillory”--in most witty and

satiric allusion to Lord Haversham’s and his own condition. Swift’s

“_Account of the Court and Empire of Japan_,” written in 1728, is no

untrue representation of the factions and ministerial profligacy of

that period. The Dean, as an Irish patriot--for he heartily took up

the cause of Ireland--was persecuted, and a reward of £300 offered

for the discovery of the author of one of the Drapier’s Letters. The

anecdote told on this occasion is very characteristic of Swift. He

was too proud to live in fear of any man. His butler, whom alone he

trusted, conveyed these letters to the printer. When the proclamation

of reward came out, this servant strolled from the house, and staid

out all night and part of next day. It was feared he had betrayed his

master. When he returned, the Dean ordered him instantly to strip

himself of his livery, and ordered him to leave the house; “For,”

says he, “I know my life is in your power, and I will not bear, out

of fear, either your insolence or negligence.” The man was, however,

honest and humble, and even desired to be confined till the danger

should be over. But his master turned him out. The sequel should

be told. When the time of information had expired, he received the

butler again; and “soon afterwards ordered him and the rest of the

servants into his presence, without telling his intentions, and bade

them take notice that their fellow-servant was no longer Robert the

butler, but that his integrity had made him Mr Blakeney, Verger of St

Patrick’s, whose income was between thirty and forty pounds a-year.”

As it has fallen in the way to give this narrative of his conduct to

a deserving servant, it may not be amiss, in this place, to offer a

pendant; and it may be given the more readily, as those who wish to

view him as a misanthropic brute, and they who would commend him for

his humanity, may make it their text for their praise or their abuse.

“A poor old woman brought a petition to the deanery; the servant read

the petition, and turned her about her business. Swift saw it, and

had the woman brought in, warmed and comforted with bread and wine,

and dismissed the man for his inhumanity.”

To revert, however, to his political course. When the Tory Ministry

was broken up, he never swerved from his friendships, nor did he

court one probable future minister at the expense of the other.

Indeed, at the beginning of the break-up, he clung the more closely

to Harley, the dismissed minister. But even this conduct has been

misrepresented, by those who viewed all his actions upside down, as

a deep policy, that he might be sure of a friend at court whichever

side might ultimately win.

That he might appear wanting in no _possible impossible_ vice,

avarice has been added to the number adduced. Even Johnson charges

his economy upon his “love of a shilling.” This does appear to us,

after much examination of data, a very gratuitous accusation. His

early habits were necessarily those of a poor man; he never was a

rich one; and he was far above the meanness of enlarging his means

at the expense of his deanery, its present interests, or of his

successor, by any selfish regard to fines. Due economy is often taken

to be avarice. Nor does it follow that reasonable parsimony, when

constantly practised for a worthy purpose, _is_ avarice. Such avarice

is at least not uncommon in great and good minds. Swift so often made

it known that he had a good object, and which he fulfilled, that it

seems quite malicious to forget his motives, and to ascribe his by

no means large accumulations to a miserly disposition. He did not in

fact, after all, leave a very ample endowment for his hospital for

the insane. The first £500 which he could call his own he devoted

to loans, in small sums, to poor yet industrious men. Had he been

avaricious, he might have accumulated a fortune by his writings. A

very small sum (we believe for his _Gulliver_) was the only payment

received for all his writings. Had he been naturally avaricious, he

would not have returned, with marked displeasure, a donation sent him

by Harley. There was a sturdy manliness in his pride which forbade

him to incur serious debt; and this pride caused him to measure

nicely, or rather say frugally, his expenditure. He had, indeed, a

“love of a shilling,” as he ought to have had, for he knew for what

purpose he husbanded it. We know an instance of seeming parsimony

that originated in, and was itself, an admirable virtue. It was in

rather humble life. The man had given up his little patrimony--his

all--to the maintenance of two sisters, whom he truly loved; and when

he went out into the world, trusting to his industry alone, he made a

vow to himself that the half of every shilling he could save should

go to his sisters. This man drove hard bargains; by habit he came

to think that what he spent idly was a half robbery. Many a hard

name, doubtless, was cast at this tender-hearted man in his progress

through little-knowing and ill-judging society.

We do not attempt a delineation of Swift’s character. We are

conscious that it was too great for our pen. It must be a deep

philosophy that is able to search into such a mind, and bring all the

seeming contradictions into order, and sift his best qualities, from

their mixtures of eccentricities, from a real or imaginary insanity.

This part of the subject has been ably treated, and with medical

discrimination, by Mr Wilde in his _Closing Years of Dean Swift’s

Life_, from whose work we gladly quote some just animadversions upon

his vituperators.

“To the slights thrown upon his memory by the Jeffreys, Broughams,

Macaulays, De Quinceys, and other modern _literati_, answers and

refutations have been already given. Of these attacks, which exhibit

all the bitterness of contemporary and personal enmity, it is only

necessary to request a careful analysis, when they will be found to

be gross exaggerations of some trivial circumstances, but written in

all the unbecoming spirit of partisanship; while the opinions of his

contemporaries, Harley, Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Delany, &c.,

are a sufficient guarantee for the opinion which was entertained of

Swift by those who knew him best and longest.”

It was well said, with reference to Jeffrey’s article in the

_Edinburgh Review_, “But Swift is dead, as Jeffrey well knew when he

reviewed his works.” If men of mark will be so unjust, unscrupulous,

uncharitable, as to apply “base perfidy” to such a man as Swift, no

wonder if the small fry of revilers, whose lower minds could never by

any possibility rise to the conception of such a character as Swift,

should lift their shrieking voices to the same notes, as if they

would claim a vain consequence by seeming to belong to the pack. Mr

Howitt odiously alludes to the discarded story which we have noticed,

the slander at Kilroot, and grounds upon it a charge of “dissipated

habits” in his youth. This writer, lacking the ability and influence

of the superior libellers, as is common with such men, yelps his

shrill vulgarities the louder in such expressions as “selfish

tyranny,” “wretched shuffler,” “contemptible fellow.”

It is a vile thing, this vice of modern times--this love of pulling

down the names of great men of a past age--of blotting and slurring

over every decent epitaph written in men’s hearts about them. That

men of note themselves should fall into it, is but a sad proof that

rivalry and partisanship in politics make the judgment unjust. We

remember the reproof Canning gave to Sir Samuel Romilly, no common

man, who indeed acknowledged Mr Pitt’s talents, but denied that he

was a great man. “Heroic times are these we live in,” said Canning,

“with men at our elbow of such gigantic qualities as to render those

of Pitt ordinary in the comparison. Ah! who is there living, in this

house or out of it, who, taking measure of his own mind or that of

his coevals, can be justified in pronouncing that William Pitt was

not a great man?” Of all our modern revilers of Swift, the pullers to

pieces of his fame and character, is there any that might not shrink

from putting his own measure of either to the comparison? Political

hatred lasts too long--it reverses the law of canonisation: if there

is to be worship, it must be immediate. A century destroys it; but

enmity survives.

“Lightly they’ll talk of the spirit that’s gone,

And o’er his cold ashes upbraid him,

But little he’ll reck, if they let him sleep on,” &c.

We commenced with the intention of reviewing Mr Thackeray’s Lectures,

but have stopped short at his life of Swift, and yet feel that we

have but touched upon the subject-matter relating to that great man;

and hope to refer to it, with some notice and extracts from his

works, at a future time.

And what is Swift? What is any dead man that we should defend his

name, which is nothing but a name--and not that to _him_? What

is Swift to us, more than “Hecuba” to the poor player, or “he to

Hecuba,” that we should rise with indignation to plead his cause?

Praise or blame to the man dead a century and more, is nothing for

him, no, nor to any one of his race (for affections of that kind

are lost in a wide distribution). Shakespeare makes even honour of

a shorter date. “What is honour to him who died o’ Wednesday?” Very

soon individual man melts away from his individuality, and merges

into the general character; he becomes quite an undistinguishable

part of the whole generation; his appearance unknown. Could the great

and the small visit us from the dead--they who “rode on white asses,”

and they who were gibbeted--they whom the “king delighted to honour,”

and they whom the hangman handled--there is no “usher of black rod”

that could call them out by their names. Their individualities are

gone--their names must go in search of them in vain--they will fasten

nowhere with certainty--none know which is which. Let Cæsar come with

his murderers, and who shall tell which is Cæsar? After a generation,

there is no one on earth to grieve for the guilty or unfortunate,

unless in a fiction or tale. We laugh at the weeping lady who

puts her tears to the account of the “anniversary of the death of

poor dear Queen Elizabeth.” Feelings and affections of past ages

are all gone, and become but a cold history, that the poet or the

romance-writer may warm again in their sport. They no longer belong

to those who had them. While memory and affection lasts there is a

kind of vitality, but it soon goes. “Non omnis moriar” is a motto

to be translated elsewhere. The atmosphere of fame, for this earth,

rises, like that we breathe, but a little way above it, and is ever

shifting.

But if the individual thus melts away, not so the general character;

that will remain--and in that the living are concerned. We deem it

a part of a true philanthropy if we can pull out one name from the

pit of defamation into which it has been unhandsomely thrust, and

can place it upon the record of our general nature, that our common

humanity may be raised, and, as much as may be, glorified thereby.

Such has been our motive (for with this motive alone is Swift

anything to us), and we hope we have succeeded in rescuing one of

nature’s great men from unmerited obloquy.

We have spoken freely of Mr Thackeray’s Lectures, with reference to

his character of Swift.

We believe that he has unfortunately followed a lead; and, in so

doing, has been encouraged to a bias by his natural gift--satire. We

say not this to his dispraise. Like other natural gifts, the satiric

puts out ever its polyp feelers, and appropriates whatever comes

within its reach, and promises nutriment. It is not indeed likely,

in this our world, to be starved for lack of sustenance; nor would

society be the better if it were. But we do doubt if it be quite the

talent required in a biographer. We would not have Mr Thackeray abate

one atom of the severity of his wit; and we believe him to have an

abhorrence of everything vicious, mean, and degrading, and that his

purpose in all his writings is to make vice odious. He habitually

hunts that prey: having seen the hollowness of professions, he drives

his merciless pen through it, and sticks the culprit upon its point,

and draws him out upon the clean sheet, and blackens him, and laughs

at the figure he has made of him. A writer of such a stamp ought to

be considered, what he really is, a moralist--therefore a benefactor

in our social system.

But with this power, let him touch the living vices till they

shrink away cowed. The portraiture of the vices of men who lived a

century or more ago, real or imaginary, may only serve to feed the

too flagrant vice of the living--self-congratulating vanity. If

then he must write, or lecture, on biography, we would earnestly

recommend him to do it with a fear of himself. His other works

have contributed many hours of delight to the days of most of us;

and in the little volume before us, setting aside his lecture on

Swift, there is much to amuse and to instruct. The sharp contrasting

choice of his positions, and easy natural manner, not forcing but

enticing the reader to reflection, must ever make Mr Thackeray a

popular writer. Were he less sure of the public ear, and the public

voice in his favour, we should not have endeavoured to rescue the

character of Swift from his grasp; and we believe him to be of that

generous nature to rejoice, if we have, as we hope, been successful

in the attempt. We cannot speak too highly of Mr Thackeray as one

most accomplished in his art: his style, eminently English, is

unmistakably plain and energetic. It is original--so curt, yet so

strong; there is never amplification without a purpose, nor without

the charm of a new image. Thoughts are clad in the words that best

suit them. With him, pauses speak; and often a full stop, unexpected

in a passage, is eloquent. You think that he has not said all,

because he has said so little: yet that little is all; and there

is left suggestion for feelings which words would destroy. He is

never redundant. So perfect is this his art that his very restraint

seems an _abandon_. He knows when and how to gain the credit of

forbearance, where in fact there is none. In his mastery over this

his peculiar manner, he brings it to bear upon the pathetic or the

ridiculous with equal effect; and, like a consummate satirist, makes

even the tragic more tragic, more ghastly, by a slight connection

with the light, the ridiculous, a certain air of indifference. We

instance the passage of the death of Rawdon, in his _Vanity Fair_.

Few are the words, but there is a history in them. The apparent

carelessness in dismissing his hero reminds one of that in Richard

the Third.

“The Lady Anne hath bade the world good night.”

His strongest ridicule is made doubly ridiculous by the gravity he

tacks to it. It sticks like a burr upon the habit of his unfortunate

victim. He puts the rags of low motives upon seeming respectability,

and makes presumption look beggarly--effecting that which the Latin

satirist says real poverty does--_ridiculos homines facit_. Most

severe in his indifference, his light playfulness is fearfully

Dantesque; it is ever onward, as if sure of its catastrophe. We do

not know any author who can say so much in few common words. These

are characteristics of genius. It has often been said, and perhaps

with truth, that the reader shuts the book uncomfortable, not very

much in love with human nature: we are by no means sure that this

is absolutely wrong; such is the feeling on looking at Hogarth’s

pictures. It was the author’s intention, in both cases, to be a

moral satirist, not a romance-writer. It has been objected that he

allows the vicious too much success; but he may plead that so it is

in life: even the Psalmist expressed his surprise at the prosperity

of the wicked. There is truth to the life in this treatment; a

certain seeming success tells not the whole. It is a more serious

charge that he has made virtue and goodness insipid. We wish he could

persuade himself that there is romance in real life, and that it is

full of energies; its true portraiture would give a grace to his

works. Cervantes and Le Sage were not all satire; their beautiful

touches of romance hurt not the general character of their works; the

fantastic frame-lines mar not the pathos of the picture. With this

recommendation we close our article, with trust in the good sense and

good feeling of Mr Thackeray, rejoiced to think that his powerful

genius is in action: whatever vein he may be in, he will be sure to

instruct and amuse, and accumulate fame to himself. If the virtues

do not look their very best, when he ushers them into company, at

least vice will never have to boast of gentle treatment--he will make

it look as it deserves; and if he does not always thrust it out of

doors in rags and penury, he will set upon it, and leave its further

punishment for conjecture.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] It is curious this twofold character of Tiberius--surprising

that historians should have credited this single existence of a

civilised cannibal--this recorded “eater of human flesh, and drinker

of human blood.” The learned writer of this volume on Tiberius,

with truthful scrutiny, sifts every evidence, weighs testimony

against testimony, and testimony of the same authority against

itself, and after patient investigation concludes, as the reasonable

solution of the historical enigma, that Tiberius was not only “of

all kings or autocrats the most venerable,” but that he was, “in

the fourteenth year of his reign, a believer in the divinity of

Jesus Christ,” and, “during the last eight years of his reign, the

nursing-father of the infant Catholic Church.” It will be readily

perceived that the supposition of Tiberius being a Christian, at

a time when Christianity was universally held to be an odious and

justly-persecuted superstition, must have presented, through known

facts and rumours, to the world at large, and to the philosophic

minds of historians in particular, an idea of human character so

novel and so confused, as to be, in the absence of a clue, and a

test which they could not admit, altogether incomprehensible. What

could they do with the sacramental fact--the eating human flesh and

drinking human blood, by one known for his abstemiousness?

“Τοσαυτης δ’εν τοτε της καταζασεως εοης, και μηδ’ απαρνησασθαι τινος

δυναμενε το μη ε και των σαρκων αυτε ηδεως εμφαγειν.”--DION. C.

“Fastidit vinum, quia jam bibit iste cruorem

Tam bibit hunc avide quam bibit iste merum.”--SUET.

The sacramental fact discovered, and undeniable, yet not known as the

sacramental fact, must have made up a riddle of contradictions, which

it was not in the power of that age to solve. In its ignorance it

made a monster. Men are apt to see more than nature ever exhibits.

[20] RUSSELL’S _History of England_.

NOTE TO THE ARTICLE ON THE NEW READINGS IN SHAKESPEARE.

We have received, although only at the eleventh hour, a copy of

_Notes and Queries_ (September 17, 1853), in which ICON animadverts

with proper severity on the unwarrantable conduct of A. E. B.

in attacking our harmless selves in the manner he did. He also

compliments our article in a strain which makes us blush even deeper

than we did when the “gnat” stung us. We thank both him and the

editor for the handsome apology which has been made to us--for such

we consider it--in the name of _Notes and Queries_; and we confess

that, had we been aware of their friendly disposition sooner, we

might have modified some of the remarks made at the opening of this

paper. Let the excellent concern, however, take our remarks as kindly

as we did theirs; and let all who are connected with it consider,

that when a man is struck at in the dark, he must defend himself in

the dark, fall his blows where they may. The worthy editor seems

to be much more pestered by the fussiness and irritability of his

little tribe of correspondents than we are. He complains of this

very sorely. He will perhaps find that we have given them a lesson

how to behave; and if he passes the remainder of his days in peace

and quiet, untormented by the small hornets whom he has in charge,

he will know whom he has to thank for it, and will feel grateful

accordingly. May _Notes and Queries_ go on and prosper; for, when it

commits a mistake, it has the manliness and good sense to avow it,

and to make all suitable reparation.

_Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh._

Transcriber’s Note:

Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent

hyphenation in the text. These have been left unchanged. Obsolete and

alternative spellings were left unchanged. Eight misspelled words

were corrected.

Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like

this_. Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and were moved to the

end of the article. Missing anchors to Footnotes were added where

they may have belonged.

Obvious printing errors, such as backwards, upside down, or partially

printed letters and punctuation, were corrected. Missing or duplicate

punctuation was corrected.

Changed:

“scene” to “Scene” in Shakespeare references

added space to “i. e.” for consistency