Meanwhile there was no slight difference of opinion amongst the

councillors surrounding the prince, as to the plan his highness should

pursue. His female minister at Court, fancying she saw some amelioration

in the queen, was for waiting a few days, or hours it might be, until he

could be brought to her bedside, and acknowledged as her heir. Mr. Esmond

was for having him march thither, escorted by a couple of troops of Horse

Guards, and openly presenting himself to the Council. During the whole of

the night of the 29th-30th July, the colonel was engaged with gentlemen of

the military profession, whom ’tis needless here to name; suffice it to

say that several of them had exceeding high rank in the army, and one of

them in especial was a general, who, when he heard the Duke of Marlborough

was coming on the other side, waved his crutch over his head with a

huzzah, at the idea that he should march out and engage him. Of the three

secretaries of state, we knew that one was devoted to us. The Governor of

the Tower was ours: the two companies on duty at Kensington barrack were

safe; and we had intelligence, very speedy and accurate, of all that took

place at the Palace within.

At noon, on the 30th of July, a message came to the prince’s friends that

the Committee of Council was sitting at Kensington Palace, their graces of

Ormonde and Shrewsbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the three

Secretaries of State, being there assembled. In an hour afterwards,

hurried news was brought that the two great Whig dukes, Argyle and

Somerset, had broke into the Council-chamber without a summons, and taken

their seat at table. After holding a debate there, the whole party

proceeded to the chamber of the queen, who was lying in great weakness,

but still sensible, and the lords recommended his grace of Shrewsbury as

the fittest person to take the vacant place of lord treasurer; her Majesty

gave him the staff, as all know. “And now,” writ my messenger from Court,

“_now or never is the time_.”

Now or never was the time indeed. In spite of the Whig dukes, our side had

still the majority in the Council, and Esmond, to whom the message had

been brought (the personage at Court not being aware that the prince had

quitted his lodging in Kensington Square), and Esmond’s gallant young aide

de camp, Frank Castlewood, putting on sword and uniform, took a brief

leave of their dear lady, who embraced and blessed them both; and went to

her chamber to pray for the issue of the great event which was then

pending.

Castlewood sped to the barrack to give warning to the captain of the guard

there; and then went to the “King’s Arms” tavern at Kensington, where our

friends were assembled, having come by parties of twos and threes, riding

or in coaches, and were got together in the upper chamber, fifty-three of

them; their servants, who had been instructed to bring arms likewise,

being below in the garden of the tavern, where they were served with

drink. Out of this garden is a little door that leads into the road of the

Palace, and through this it was arranged that masters and servants were to

march; when that signal was given, and that Personage appeared, for whom

all were waiting. There was in our company the famous officer next in

command to the Captain-General of the Forces, his grace the Duke of

Ormonde, who was within at the Council. There were with him two more

lieutenant-generals, nine major-generals and brigadiers, seven colonels,

eleven peers of Parliament, and twenty-one members of the House of

Commons. The guard was with us within and without the Palace: the queen

was with us; the Council (save the two Whig dukes, that must have

succumbed); the day was our own, and with a beating heart Esmond walked

rapidly to the Mall of Kensington, where he had parted with the prince on

the night before. For three nights the colonel had not been to bed: the

last had been passed summoning the prince’s friends together, of whom the

great majority had no sort of inkling of the transaction pending until

they were told that he was actually on the spot, and were summoned to

strike the blow. The night before and after the altercation with the

prince, my gentleman, having suspicions of his royal highness, and fearing

lest he should be minded to give us the slip, and fly off after his

fugitive beauty, had spent, if the truth must be told, at the “Greyhound”

tavern, over against my Lady Esmond’s house in Kensington Square, with an

eye on the door, lest the prince should escape from it. The night before

that he had passed in his boots at the “Crown” at Hounslow, where he must

watch forsooth all night, in order to get one moment’s glimpse of Beatrix

in the morning. And fate had decreed that he was to have a fourth night’s

ride and wakefulness before his business was ended.

He ran to the curate’s house in Kensington Mall, and asked for Mr. Bates,

the name the prince went by. The curate’s wife said Mr. Bates had gone

abroad very early in the morning in his boots, saying he was going to the

Bishop of Rochester’s house at Chelsea. But the bishop had been at

Kensington himself two hours ago to seek for Mr. Bates, and had returned

in his coach to his own house, when he heard that the gentleman was gone

thither to seek him.

This absence was most unpropitious, for an hour’s delay might cost a

kingdom; Esmond had nothing for it but to hasten to the “King’s Arms”, and

tell the gentlemen there assembled that Mr. George (as we called the

prince there) was not at home, but that Esmond would go fetch him; and

taking a general’s coach that happened to be there, Esmond drove across

the country to Chelsea, to the bishop’s house there.

The porter said two gentlemen were with his lordship, and Esmond ran past

this sentry up to the locked door of the bishop’s study, at which he

rattled, and was admitted presently. Of the bishop’s guests one was a

brother prelate, and the other the Abbé G——.

“Where is Mr. George?” says Mr. Esmond; “now is the time.” The bishop

looked scared; “I went to his lodging,” he said, “and they told me he was

come hither. I returned as quick as coach would carry me; and he hath not

been here.”

The colonel burst out with an oath; that was all he could say to their

reverences; ran down the stairs again, and bidding the coachman, an old

friend and fellow-campaigner, drive as if he was charging the French with

his master at Wynendael—they were back at Kensington in half an hour.

Again Esmond went to the curate’s house. Mr. George had not returned. The

colonel had to go with this blank errand to the gentlemen at the “King’s

Arms”, that were grown very impatient by this time.

Out of the window of the tavern, and looking over the garden-wall, you can

see the green before Kensington Palace, the Palace gate (round which the

ministers’ coaches were standing), and the barrack building. As we were

looking out from this window in gloomy discourse, we heard presently

trumpets blowing, and some of us ran to the window of the front room,

looking into the High Street of Kensington, and saw a regiment of horse

coming.

“It’s Ormonde’s Guards,” says one.

“No, by God, it’s Argyle’s old regiment!” says my general, clapping down

his crutch.

It was, indeed, Argyle’s regiment that was brought from Westminster, and

that took the place of the regiment at Kensington on which we could rely.

“Oh, Harry!” says one of the generals there present, “you were born under

an unlucky star; I begin to think that there’s no Mr. George, nor Mr.

Dragon either. ’Tis not the peerage I care for, for our name is so ancient

and famous, that merely to be called Lord Lydiard would do me no good; but

’tis the chance you promised me of fighting Marlborough.”

As we were talking, Castlewood entered the room with a disturbed air.

“What news, Frank?” says the colonel, “is Mr. George coming at last?”

“Damn him, look here!” says Castlewood, holding out a paper. “I found it

in the book—the what you call it, _Eikum Basilikum_,—that villain Martin

put it there—he said his young mistress bade him. It was directed to me,

but it was meant for him I know, and I broke the seal and read it.”

The whole assembly of officers seemed to swim away before Esmond’s eyes as

he read the paper; all that was written on it was:—“Beatrix Esmond is sent

away to prison, to Castlewood, where she will pray for happier days.”

“Can you guess where he is?” says Castlewood.

“Yes,” says Colonel Esmond. He knew full well, Frank knew full well: our

instinct told whither that traitor had fled.

He had courage to turn to the company and say, “Gentlemen, I fear very

much that Mr. George will not be here to-day; something hath

happened—and—and—I very much fear some accident may befall him, which must

keep him out of the way. Having had your noon’s draught, you had best pay

the reckoning and go home; there can be no game where there is no one to

play it.”

Some of the gentlemen went away without a word, others called to pay their

duty to her Majesty and ask for her health. The little army disappeared

into the darkness out of which it had been called; there had been no

writings, no paper to implicate any man. Some few officers and members of

Parliament had been invited overnight to breakfast at the “King’s Arms”,

at Kensington; and they had called for their bill and gone home.

Chapter XIII. August 1st, 1714

“Does my mistress know of this?” Esmond asked of Frank, as they walked

along.

“My mother found the letter in the book, on the toilet-table. She had writ

it ere she had left home,” Frank said. “Mother met her on the stairs, with

her hand upon the door, trying to enter, and never left her after that

till she went away. He did not think of looking at it there, nor had

Martin the chance of telling him. I believe the poor devil meant no harm,

though I half killed him; he thought ’twas to Beatrix’s brother he was

bringing the letter.”

Frank never said a word of reproach to me, for having brought the villain

amongst us. As we knocked at the door I said; “When will the horses be

ready?” Frank pointed with his cane, they were turning the street that

moment.

We went up and bade adieu to our mistress; she was in a dreadful state of

agitation by this time, and that bishop was with her whose company she was

so fond of.

“Did you tell him, my lord,” says Esmond, “that Beatrix was at

Castlewood?” The bishop blushed and stammered:

“Well,” says he, “I——”

“You served the villain right,” broke out Mr. Esmond, “and he has lost a

crown by what you told him.”

My mistress turned quite white. “Henry, Henry,” says she, “do not kill

him.”

“It may not be too late,” says Esmond; “he may not have gone to

Castlewood; pray God, it is not too late.” The bishop was breaking out

with some _banales_ phrases about loyalty and the sacredness of the

sovereign’s person; but Esmond sternly bade him hold his tongue, burn all

papers, and take care of Lady Castlewood; and in five minutes he and Frank

were in the saddle, John Lockwood behind them, riding towards Castlewood

at a rapid pace.

We were just got to Alton, when who should meet us but old Lockwood, the

porter from Castlewood, John’s father, walking by the side of the Hexham

flying-coach, who slept the night at Alton. Lockwood said his young

mistress had arrived at home on Wednesday night, and this morning, Friday,

had dispatched him with a packet for my lady at Kensington, saying the

letter was of great importance.

We took the freedom to break it, while Lockwood stared with wonder, and

cried out his “Lord bless me’s”, and “Who’d a thought it’s”, at the sight

of his young lord, whom he had not seen these seven years.

The packet from Beatrix contained no news of importance at all. It was

written in a jocular strain, affecting to make light of her captivity. She

asked whether she might have leave to visit Mrs. Tusher, or to walk beyond

the court and the garden-wall. She gave news of the peacocks, and a fawn

she had there. She bade her mother send her certain gowns and smocks by

old Lockwood; she sent her duty to a certain person, if certain other

persons permitted her to take such a freedom; how that, as she was not

able to play cards with him, she hoped he would read good books, such as

Dr. Atterbury’s sermons and _Eikon Basilike_: she was going to read good

books: she thought her pretty mamma would like to know she was not crying

her eyes out.

“Who is in the house besides you, Lockwood?” says the colonel.

“There be the laundry-maid, and the kitchen-maid, Madam Beatrix’s maid,

the man from London, and that be all; and he sleepeth in my lodge away

from the maids,” says old Lockwood.

Esmond scribbled a line with a pencil on the note, giving it to the old

man, and bidding him go on to his lady. We knew why Beatrix had been so

dutiful on a sudden, and why she spoke of _Eikon Basilike_. She writ this

letter to put the prince on the scent, and the porter out of the way.

“We have a fine moonlight night for riding on,” says Esmond; “Frank, we

may reach Castlewood in time yet.” All the way along they made inquiries

at the post-houses, when a tall young gentleman in a grey suit, with a

light-brown periwig, just the colour of my lord’s, had been seen to pass.

He had set off at six that morning, and we at three in the afternoon. He

rode almost as quickly as we had done; he was seven hours ahead of us

still when we reached the last stage.

We rode over Castlewood Downs before the breaking of dawn. We passed the

very spot where the car was upset fourteen years since; and Mohun lay. The

village was not up yet, nor the forge lighted, as we rode through it,

passing by the elms, where the rooks were still roosting, and by the

church, and over the bridge. We got off our horses at the bridge and

walked up to the gate.

“If she is safe,” says Frank, trembling, and his honest eyes filling with

tears, “a silver statue to Our Lady!” He was going to rattle at the great

iron knocker on the oak gate; but Esmond stopped his kinsman’s hand. He

had his own fears, his own hopes, his own despairs and griefs, too: but he

spoke not a word of these to his companion, or showed any signs of

emotion.

He went and tapped at the little window at the porter’s lodge, gently, but

repeatedly, until the man came to the bars.

“Who’s there?” says he, looking out; it was the servant from Kensington.

“My Lord Castlewood and Colonel Esmond,” we said, from below. “Open the

gate and let us in without any noise.”

“My Lord Castlewood?” says the other; “my lord’s here, and in bed.”

“Open, d—n you,” says Castlewood, with a curse.

“I shall open to no one,” says the man, shutting the glass window as Frank

drew a pistol. He would have fired at the porter, but Esmond again held

his hand.

“There are more ways than one,” says he, “of entering such a great house

as this.” Frank grumbled that the west gate was half a mile round. “But I

know of a way that’s not a hundred yards off,” says Mr. Esmond; and

leading his kinsman close along the wall, and by the shrubs, which had now

grown thick on what had been an old moat about the house, they came to the

buttress, at the side of which the little window was, which was Father

Holt’s private door. Esmond climbed up to this easily, broke a pane that

had been mended, and touched the spring inside, and the two gentlemen

passed in that way, treading as lightly as they could; and so going

through the passage into the court, over which the dawn was now reddening,

and where the fountain plashed in the silence.

They sped instantly to the porter’s lodge, where the fellow had not

fastened his door that led into the court; and pistol in hand came upon

the terrified wretch, and bade him be silent. Then they asked him

(Esmond’s head reeled, and he almost fell as he spoke) when Lord

Castlewood had arrived? He said on the previous evening, about eight of

the clock.—“And what then?”—His lordship supped with his sister.—“Did the

man wait?” Yes, he and my lady’s maid both waited: the other servants made

the supper; and there was no wine, and they could give his lordship but

milk, at which he grumbled; and—and Madam Beatrix kept Miss Lucy always in

the room with her. And there being a bed across the court in the

chaplain’s room, she had arranged my lord was to sleep there. Madam

Beatrix had come downstairs laughing with the maids, and had locked

herself in, and my lord had stood for a while talking to her through the

door, and she laughing at him. And then he paced the court awhile, and she

came again to the upper window; and my lord implored her to come down and

walk in the room; but she would not, and laughed at him again, and shut

the window; and so my lord uttering what seemed curses, but in a foreign

language, went to the chaplain’s room to bed.

“Was this all?”—“All,” the man swore upon his honour; “all as he hoped to

be saved.—Stop, there was one thing more. My lord, on arriving, and once

or twice during supper, did kiss his sister as was natural, and she kissed

him.” At this Esmond ground his teeth with rage, and wellnigh throttled

the amazed miscreant who was speaking, whereas Castlewood, seizing hold of

his cousin’s hand, burst into a great fit of laughter.

“If it amuses thee,” says Esmond in French, “that your sister should be

exchanging of kisses with a stranger, I fear poor Beatrix will give thee

plenty of sport.”—Esmond darkly thought, how Hamilton, Ashburnham, had

before been masters of those roses that the young prince’s lips were now

feeding on. He sickened at that notion. Her cheek was desecrated, her

beauty tarnished; shame and honour stood between it and him. The love was

dead within him; had she a crown to bring him with her love, he felt that

both would degrade him.

But this wrath against Beatrix did not lessen the angry feelings of the

colonel against the man who had been the occasion if not the cause of the

evil. Frank sat down on a stone bench in the courtyard, and fairly fell

asleep, while Esmond paced up and down the court, debating what should

ensue. What mattered how much or how little had passed between the prince

and the poor faithless girl? They were arrived in time perhaps to rescue

her person, but not her mind; had she not instigated the young prince to

come to her; suborned servants, dismissed others, so that she might

communicate with him? The treacherous heart within her had surrendered,

though the place was safe; and it was to win this that he had given a

life’s struggle and devotion; this, that she was ready to give away for

the bribe of a coronet or a wink of the prince’s eye.

When he had thought his thoughts out he shook up poor Frank from his

sleep, who rose yawning, and said he had been dreaming of Clotilda. “You

must back me,” says Esmond, “in what I am going to do. I have been

thinking that yonder scoundrel may have been instructed to tell that

story, and that the whole of it may be a lie; if it be, we shall find it

out from the gentleman who is asleep yonder. See if the door leading to my

lady’s rooms” (so we called the rooms at the north-west angle of the

house), “see if the door is barred as he saith.” We tried; it was indeed

as the lackey had said, closed within.

“It may have been open and shut afterwards,” says poor Esmond; “the

foundress of our family let our ancestor in that way.”

“What will you do, Harry, if—if what that fellow saith should turn out

untrue?” The young man looked scared and frightened into his kinsman’s

face; I dare say it wore no very pleasant expression.

“Let us first go see whether the two stories agree,” says Esmond; and went

in at the passage and opened the door into what had been his own chamber

now for wellnigh five-and-twenty years. A candle was still burning, and

the prince asleep dressed on the bed—Esmond did not care for making a

noise. The prince started up in his bed, seeing two men in his chamber:

“_Qui est là?_” says he, and took a pistol from under his pillow.

“It is the Marquis of Esmond,” says the colonel, “come to welcome his

Majesty to his house of Castlewood, and to report of what hath happened in

London. Pursuant to the king’s orders, I passed the night before last,

after leaving his Majesty, in waiting upon the friends of the king. It is

a pity that his Majesty’s desire to see the country and to visit our poor

house should have caused the king to quit London without notice yesterday,

when the opportunity happened which in all human probability may not occur

again; and had the king not chosen to ride to Castlewood, the Prince of

Wales might have slept at St. James’s.”

“’Sdeath! gentlemen,” says the prince, starting off his bed, whereon he

was lying in his clothes, “the doctor was with me yesterday morning, and

after watching by my sister all night, told me I might not hope to see the

queen.”

“It would have been otherwise,” says Esmond, with another bow; “as, by

this time, the queen may be dead in spite of the doctor. The Council was

met, a new treasurer was appointed, the troops were devoted to the king’s

cause; and fifty loyal gentlemen of the greatest names of this kingdom

were assembled to accompany the Prince of Wales, who might have been the

acknowledged heir of the throne, or the possessor of it by this time, had

your Majesty not chosen to take the air. We were ready; there was only one

person that failed us, your Majesty’s gracious——”

“_Morbleu! monsieur_, you give me too much Majesty,” said the prince; who

had now risen up and seemed to be looking to one of us to help him to his

coat. But neither stirred.

“We shall take care,” says Esmond, “not much oftener to offend in that

particular.”

“What mean you, my lord?” says the prince, and muttered something about a

_guet-à-pens_, which Esmond caught up.

“The snare, sir,” said he, “was not of our laying; it is not we that

invited you. We came to avenge, and not to compass, the dishonour of our

family.”

“Dishonour! _Morbleu!_ there has been no dishonour,” says the prince,

turning scarlet, “only a little harmless playing.”

“That was meant to end seriously.”

“I swear,” the prince broke out impetuously, “upon the honour of a

gentleman, my lords——”

“That we arrived in time. No wrong hath been done, Frank,” says Colonel

Esmond, turning round to young Castlewood, who stood at the door as the

talk was going on. “See! here is a paper whereon his Majesty hath deigned

to commence some verses in honour, or dishonour, of Beatrix. Here is

_madame_ and _flamme_, _cruelle_ and _rebelle_, and _amour_ and _jour_, in

the royal writing and spelling. Had the gracious lover been happy, he had

not passed his time in sighing.” In fact, and actually as he was speaking,

Esmond cast his eyes down towards the table, and saw a paper on which my

young prince had been scrawling a madrigal, that was to finish his charmer

on the morrow.

“Sir,” says the prince, burning with rage (he had assumed his royal coat

unassisted by this time), “did I come here to receive insults?”

“To confer them, may it please your Majesty,” says the colonel, with a

very low bow, “and the gentlemen of our family are come to thank you.”

“_Malédiction!_” says the young man, tears starting into his eyes with

helpless rage and mortification. “What will you with me, gentlemen?”

“If your Majesty will please to enter the next apartment,” says Esmond,

preserving his grave tone, “I have some papers there which I would gladly

submit to you, and by your permission I will lead the way;” and, taking

the taper up, and backing before the prince with very great ceremony, Mr.

Esmond passed into the little chaplain’s room, through which we had just

entered into the house:—“Please to set a chair for his Majesty, Frank,”

says the colonel to his companion, who wondered almost as much at this

scene, and was as much puzzled by it, as the other actor in it. Then going

to the crypt over the mantelpiece, the colonel opened it, and drew thence

the papers which so long had lain there.

“Here, may it please your Majesty,” says he, “is the patent of Marquis

sent over by your royal father at St. Germains to Viscount Castlewood, my

father: here is the witnessed certificate of my father’s marriage to my

mother, and of my birth and christening; I was christened of that religion

of which your sainted sire gave all through life so shining example. These

are my titles, dear Frank, and this what I do with them: here go baptism

and marriage, and here the marquisate and the august sign-manual, with

which your predecessor was pleased to honour our race.” And as Esmond

spoke he set the papers burning in the brasier. “You will please, sir, to

remember,” he continued, “that our family hath ruined itself by fidelity

to yours: that my grandfather spent his estate, and gave his blood and his

son to die for your service; that my dear lord’s grandfather (for lord you

are now, Frank, by right and title too) died for the same cause; that my

poor kinswoman, my father’s second wife, after giving away her honour to

your wicked perjured race, sent all her wealth to the king; and got in

return that precious title that lies in ashes, and this inestimable yard

of blue ribbon. I lay this at your feet and stamp upon it: I draw this

sword, and break it and deny you; and, had you completed the wrong you

designed us, by Heaven I would have driven it through your heart, and no

more pardoned you than your father pardoned Monmouth. Frank will do the

same, won’t you, cousin?”

Frank, who had been looking on with a stupid air at the papers as they

flamed in the old brasier, took out his sword and broke it, holding his

head down:—“I go with my cousin,” says he, giving Esmond a grasp of the

hand. “Marquis or not, by ——, I stand by him any day. I beg your Majesty’s

pardon for swearing; that is—that is—I’m for the Elector of Hanover. It’s

all your Majesty’s own fault. The queen’s dead most likely by this time.

And you might have been king if you hadn’t come dangling after ’Trix”.

“Thus to lose a crown,” says the young prince, starting up, and speaking

French in his eager way; “to lose the loveliest woman in the world; to

lose the loyalty of such hearts as yours, is not this, my lords, enough of

humiliation?—Marquis, if I go on my knees will you pardon me?—No, I can’t

do that, but I can offer you reparation, that of honour, that of

gentlemen. Favour me by crossing the sword with mine: yours is broke—see,

yonder in the armoire are two;” and the prince took them out as eager as a

boy, and held them towards Esmond:—“Ah! you will? _Merci, monsieur,

merci!_”

Extremely touched by this immense mark of condescension and repentance for

wrong done, Colonel Esmond bowed down so low as almost to kiss the

gracious young hand that conferred on him such an honour, and took his

guard in silence. The swords were no sooner met, than Castlewood knocked

up Esmond’s with the blade of his own, which he had broke off short at the

shell; and the colonel falling back a step dropped his point with another

very low bow, and declared himself perfectly satisfied.

“_Eh bien, vicomte_,” says the young prince, who was a boy, and a French

boy, “_il ne nous reste qu’une chose à faire_:” he placed his sword upon

the table, and the fingers of his two hands upon his breast:—“We have one

more thing to do,” says he; “you do not divine it?” He stretched out his

arms:—“_Embrassons nous!_”

The talk was scarce over when Beatrix entered the room:—What came she to

seek there? She started and turned pale at the sight of her brother and

kinsman, drawn swords, broken sword-blades, and papers yet smouldering in

the brasier.

“Charming Beatrix,” says the prince, with a blush which became him very

well, “these lords have come a-horseback from London, where my sister lies

in a despaired state, and where her successor makes himself desired.

Pardon me for my escapade of last evening. I had been so long a prisoner,

that I seized the occasion of a promenade on horseback, and my horse

naturally bore me towards you. I found you a queen in your little court,

where you deigned to entertain me. Present my homages to your maids of

honour. I sighed as you slept, under the window of your chamber, and then

retired to seek rest in my own. It was there that these gentlemen

agreeably roused me. Yes, milords, for that is a happy day that makes a

prince acquainted, at whatever cost to his vanity, with such a noble heart

as that of the Marquis of Esmond. Mademoiselle, may we take your coach to

town? I saw it in the hangar, and this poor marquis must be dropping with

sleep.”

“Will it please the king to breakfast before he goes?” was all Beatrix

could say. The roses had shuddered out of her cheeks; her eyes were

glaring; she looked quite old. She came up to Esmond and hissed out a word

or two:—“If I did not love you before, cousin,” says she, “think how I

love you now.” If words could stab, no doubt she would have killed Esmond;

she looked at him as if she could.

But her keen words gave no wound to Mr. Esmond; his heart was too hard. As

he looked at her, he wondered that he could ever have loved her. His love

of ten years was over; it fell down dead on the spot, at the Kensington

tavern, where Frank brought him the note out of _Eikon __ Basilike_. The

prince blushed and bowed low, as she gazed at him, and quitted the

chamber. I have never seen her from that day.

Horses were fetched and put to the chariot presently. My lord rode

outside, and as for Esmond he was so tired that he was no sooner in the

carriage than he fell asleep, and never woke till night, as the coach came

into Alton.

As we drove to the “Bell Inn” comes a mitred coach with our old friend

Lockwood beside the coachman. My Lady Castlewood and the bishop were

inside; she gave a little scream when she saw us. The two coaches entered

the inn almost together; the landlord and people coming out with lights to

welcome the visitors.

We in our coach sprang out of it, as soon as ever we saw the dear lady,

and above all, the doctor in his cassock. What was the news? Was there yet

time? Was the queen alive? These questions were put hurriedly, as Boniface

stood waiting before his noble guests to bow them up the stair.

“Is she safe?” was what Lady Castlewood whispered in a flutter to Esmond.

“All’s well, thank God,” says he, as the fond lady took his hand and

kissed it, and called him her preserver and her dear. _She_ wasn’t

thinking of queens and crowns.

The bishop’s news was reassuring: at least all was not lost; the queen yet

breathed or was alive when they left London, six hours since. (“It was

Lady Castlewood who insisted on coming,” the doctor said;) Argyle had

marched up regiments from Portsmouth, and sent abroad for more; the Whigs

were on the alert, a pest on them (I am not sure but the bishop swore as

he spoke), and so too were our people. And all might be saved, if only the

prince could be at London in time. We called for horses, instantly to

return to London. We never went up poor crestfallen Boniface’s stairs, but

into our coaches again. The prince and his prime minister in one, Esmond

in the other, with only his dear mistress as a companion.

Castlewood galloped forwards on horseback to gather the prince’s friends,

and warn them of his coming. We travelled through the night. Esmond

discoursing to his mistress of the events of the last twenty-four hours;

of Castlewood’s ride and his; of the prince’s generous behaviour and their

reconciliation. The night seemed short enough; and the starlit hours

passed away serenely in that fond company.

So we came along the road; the bishop’s coach heading ours; and, with some

delays in procuring horses, we got to Hammersmith about four o’clock on

Sunday morning, the first of August, and half an hour after, it being then

bright day, we rode by my Lady Warwick’s house, and so down the street of

Kensington.

Early as the hour was, there was a bustle in the street, and many people

moving to and fro. Round the gate leading to the palace, where the guard

is, there was especially a great crowd. And the coach ahead of us stopped,

and the bishop’s man got down to know what the concourse meant?

There presently came from out of the gate: Horse Guards with their

trumpets, and a company of heralds with their tabards. The trumpets blew,

and the herald-at-arms came forward and proclaimed GEORGE, by the grace of

God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith.

And the people shouted, “God save the King!”

Among the crowd shouting and waving their hats, I caught sight of one sad

face, which I had known all my life, and seen under many disguises. It was

no other than poor Mr. Holt’s, who had slipped over to England to witness

the triumph of the good cause; and now beheld its enemies victorious,

amidst the acclamations of the English people. The poor fellow had forgot

to huzzah or to take his hat off, until his neighbours in the crowd

remarked his want of loyalty, and cursed him for a Jesuit in disguise,

when he ruefully uncovered and began to cheer. Sure he was the most

unlucky of men: he never played a game but he lost it; or engaged in a

conspiracy but ’twas certain to end in defeat. I saw him in Flanders after

this, whence he went to Rome to the head quarters of his Order; and

actually reappeared among us in America, very old, and busy, and hopeful.

I am not sure that he did not assume the hatchet and moccasins there; and,

attired in a blanket and warpaint, skulk about a missionary amongst the

Indians. He lies buried in our neighbouring province of Maryland now, with

a cross over him, and a mound of earth above him; under which that unquiet

spirit is for ever at peace.

-------------------------------------

With the sound of King George’s trumpets, all the vain hopes of the weak

and foolish young pretender were blown away; and with that music, too, I

may say, the drama of my own life was ended. That happiness, which hath

subsequently crowned it, cannot be written in words; ’tis of its nature

sacred and secret, and not to be spoken of, though the heart be ever so

full of thankfulness, save to Heaven and the One Ear alone—to one fond

being, the truest and tenderest and purest wife ever man was blessed with.

As I think of the immense happiness which was in store for me, and of the

depth and intensity of that love which, for so many years, hath blessed

me, I own to a transport of wonder and gratitude for such a boon—nay, am

thankful to have been endowed with a heart capable of feeling and knowing

the immense beauty and value of the gift which God hath bestowed upon me.

Sure, love _vincit omnia_; is immeasurably above all ambition, more

precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows

not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not

enjoyed it. In the name of my wife I write the completion of hope, and the

summit of happiness. To have such a love is the one blessing, in

comparison of which all earthly joy is of no value; and to think of her,

is to praise God.

It was at Bruxelles, whither we retreated after the failure of our

plot—our Whig friends advising us to keep out of the way—that the great

joy of my life was bestowed upon me, and that my dear mistress became my

wife. We had been so accustomed to an extreme intimacy and confidence, and

had lived so long and tenderly together, that we might have gone on to the

end without thinking of a closer tie; but circumstances brought about that

event which so prodigiously multiplied my happiness and hers (for which I

humbly thank Heaven), although a calamity befell us, which, I blush to

think, hath occurred more than once in our house. I know not what

infatuation of ambition urged the beautiful and wayward woman, whose name

hath occupied so many of these pages, and who was served by me with ten

years of such a constant fidelity and passion; but ever after that day at

Castlewood, when we rescued her, she persisted in holding all her family

as her enemies, and left us, and escaped to France, to what a fate I

disdain to tell. Nor was her son’s house a home for my dear mistress; my

poor Frank was weak, as perhaps all our race hath been, and led by women.

Those around him were imperious, and in a terror of his mother’s influence

over him, lest he should recant, and deny the creed which he had adopted

by their persuasion. The difference of their religion separated the son

and the mother: my dearest mistress felt that she was severed from her

children and alone in the world—alone but for one constant servant on

whose fidelity, praised be Heaven, she could count. ’Twas after a scene of

ignoble quarrel on the part of Frank’s wife and mother (for the poor lad

had been made to marry the whole of that German family with whom he had

connected himself), that I found my mistress one day in tears, and then

besought her to confide herself to the care and devotion of one who, by

God’s help, would never forsake her. And then the tender matron, as

beautiful in her autumn, and as pure as virgins in their spring, with

blushes of love and “eyes of meek surrender”, yielded to my respectful

importunity, and consented to share my home. Let the last words I write

thank her, and bless her who hath blessed it.

By the kindness of Mr. Addison, all danger of prosecution, and every

obstacle against our return to England, was removed; and my son Frank’s

gallantry in Scotland made his peace with the king’s Government. But we

two cared no longer to live in England; and Frank formally and joyfully

yielded over to us the possession of that estate which we now occupy, far

away from Europe and its troubles, on the beautiful banks of the Potomac,

where we have built a new Castlewood, and think with grateful hearts of

our old home. In our Transatlantic country we have a season, the calmest

and most delightful of the year, which we call the Indian summer: I often

say the autumn of our life resembles that happy and serene weather, and am

thankful for its rest and its sweet sunshine. Heaven hath blessed us with

a child, which each parent loves for her resemblance to the other. Our

diamonds are turned into ploughs and axes for our plantations; and into

negroes, the happiest and merriest, I think, in all this country: and the

only jewel by which my wife sets any store, and from which she hath never

parted, is that gold button she took from my arm on the day when she

visited me in prison, and which she wore ever after, as she told me, on

the tenderest heart in the world.

Appendix

Book I, chap, viii, p. 80, line 9: “mist” was wrongly altered in revised

edition to “midst”.

Book I, chap, xii, p. 130, line 2 from foot: “through” was wrongly altered

in revised edition to “to”.

Book II, chap, ii, p. 179, line 7 from foot: “guests,” though never

altered, should clearly be “hosts”.

Book II, chap, xv, p. 307, line 8: the following passage was omitted in

the edition of 1858:—

“I always thought that paper was Mr. Congreve’s,” cries Mr. St.

John, showing that he knew more about the subject than he

pretended to Mr. Steele, and who was the original Mr. Bickerstaffe

drew.

“Tom Boxer said so in his _Observator_. But Tom’s oracle is often

making blunders,” cries Steele.

“Mr. Boxer and my husband were friends once, and when the captain

was ill with the fever, no man could be kinder than Mr. Boxer, who

used to come to his bedside every day, and actually brought Dr.

Arbuthnot who cured him,” whispered Mrs. Steele.

“Indeed, madam! How very interesting,” says Mr. St. John.

“But when the captain’s last comedy came out, Mr. Boxer took no

notice of it—you know he is Mr. Congreve’s man, and won’t ever

give a word to the other house—and this made my husband angry.”

“Oh! Mr. Boxer is Mr. Congreve’s man!” says Mr. St. John.

“Mr. Congreve has wit enough of his own,” cries out Mr. Steele.

“No one ever heard me grudge him or any other man his share.”

Book III, chap, i, p. 326, line 19: for “Frank”, Thackeray by an

interesting reminiscence of _Pendennis_ wrote “Arthur”.

THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS

OF THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

A Series of Lectures

DELIVERED IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

[First edition, 1853; second edition, revised, 1853]

Lecture The First. Swift

In treating of the English humourists of the past age, it is of the men

and of their lives, rather than of their books, that I ask permission to

speak to you; and in doing so, you are aware that I cannot hope to

entertain you with a merely humorous or facetious story. Harlequin without

his mask is known to present a very sober countenance, and was himself,

the story goes, the melancholy patient whom the Doctor advised to go and

see Harlequin(21)—a man full of cares and perplexities like the rest of

us, whose Self must always be serious to him, under whatever mask, or

disguise, or uniform he presents it to the public. And as all of you here

must needs be grave when you think of your own past and present, you will

not look to find, in the histories of those whose lives and feelings I am

going to try and describe to you, a story that is otherwise than serious,

and often very sad. If Humour only meant laughter, you would scarcely feel

more interest about humorous writers than about the private life of poor

Harlequin just mentioned, who possesses in common with these the power of

making you laugh. But the men regarding whose lives and stories your kind

presence here shows that you have curiosity and sympathy, appeal to a

great number of our other faculties, besides our mere sense of ridicule.

The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity,

your kindness—your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture—your

tenderness for the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best

of his means and ability he comments on all the ordinary actions and

passions of life almost. He takes upon himself to be the week-day

preacher, so to speak. Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks, and feels the

truth best, we regard him, esteem him—sometimes love him. And, as his

business is to mark other people’s lives and peculiarities, we moralize

upon _his_ life when he is gone—and yesterday’s preacher becomes the text

for to-day’s sermon.

Of English parents, and of a good English family of clergymen,(22) Swift

was born in Dublin in 1667, seven months after the death of his father,

who had come to practise there as a lawyer. The boy went to school at

Kilkenny, and afterwards to Trinity College, Dublin, where he got a degree

with difficulty, and was wild, and witty, and poor. In 1688, by the

recommendation of his mother, Swift was received into the family of Sir

William Temple, who had known Mrs. Swift in Ireland. He left his patron in

1693, and the next year took orders in Dublin. But he threw up the small

Irish preferment which he got and returned to Temple, in whose family he

remained until Sir William’s death in 1699. His hopes of advancement in

England failing, Swift returned to Ireland, and took the living of

Laracor. Hither he invited Hester Johnson,(23) Temple’s natural daughter,

with whom he had contracted a tender friendship, while they were both

dependants of Temple’s. And with an occasional visit to England, Swift now

passed nine years at home.

In 1709 he came to England, and, with a brief visit to Ireland, during

which he took possession of his deanery of St. Patrick, he now passed five

years in England, taking the most distinguished part in the political

transactions which terminated with the death of Queen Anne. After her

death, his party disgraced, and his hopes of ambition over, Swift returned

to Dublin, where he remained twelve years. In this time he wrote the

famous _Drapier’s Letters_ and _Gulliver’s Travels_. He married Hester

Johnson (Stella) and buried Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa) who had followed

him to Ireland from London, where she had contracted a violent passion for

him. In 1726 and 1727 Swift was in England, which he quitted for the last

time on hearing of his wife’s illness. Stella died in January, 1728, and

Swift not until 1745, having passed the last five of the seventy-eight

years of his life with an impaired intellect and keepers to watch him.(24)

You know, of course, that Swift has had many biographers; his life has

been told by the kindest and most good-natured of men, Scott, who admires

but can’t bring himself to love him; and by stout old Johnson,(25) who,

forced to admit him into the company of poets, receives the famous

Irishman, and takes off his hat to him with a bow of surly recognition,

scans him from head to foot, and passes over to the other side of the

street. Dr. Wilde, of Dublin,(26) who has written a most interesting

volume on the closing years of Swift’s life, calls Johnson “the most

malignant of his biographers”: it is not easy for an English critic to

please Irishmen—perhaps to try and please them. And yet Johnson truly

admires Swift: Johnson does not quarrel with Swift’s change of politics,

or doubt his sincerity of religion: about the famous Stella and Vanessa

controversy the Doctor does not bear very hardly on Swift. But he could

not give the Dean that honest hand of his; the stout old man puts it into

his breast, and moves off from him.(27)

Would we have liked to live with him? That is a question which, in dealing

with these people’s works, and thinking of their lives and peculiarities,

every reader of biographies must put to himself. Would you have liked to

be a friend of the great Dean? I should like to have been Shakespeare’s

shoeblack—just to have lived in his house, just to have worshipped him—to

have run on his errands, and seen that sweet serene face. I should like,

as a young man, to have lived on Fielding’s staircase in the Temple, and

after helping him up to bed perhaps, and opening his door with his

latchkey, to have shaken hands with him in the morning, and heard him talk

and crack jokes over his breakfast and his mug of small beer. Who would

not give something to pass a night at the club with Johnson, and

Goldsmith, and James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck? The charm of Addison’s

companionship and conversation has passed to us by fond tradition—but

Swift? If you had been his inferior in parts (and that, with a great

respect for all persons present, I fear is only very likely), his equal in

mere social station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you; if,

undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would,

have quailed before you,(28) and not had the pluck to reply, and gone

home, and years after written a foul epigram about you—watched for you in

a sewer, and come out to assail you with a coward’s blow and a dirty

bludgeon. If you had been a lord with a blue ribbon, who flattered his

vanity, or could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful

company in the world. He would have been so manly, so sarcastic, so

bright, odd, and original, that you might think he had no object in view

but the indulgence of his humour, and that he was the most reckless,

simple creature in the world. How he would have torn your enemies to

pieces for you! and made fun of the Opposition! His servility was so

boisterous that it looked like independence;(29) he would have done your

errands, but with the air of patronizing you, and after fighting your

battles masked in the street or the press, would have kept on his hat

before your wife and daughters in the drawing-room, content to take that

sort of pay for his tremendous services as a bravo.(30)

He says as much himself in one of his letters to Bolingbroke:—“All my

endeavours to distinguish myself were only for want of a great title and

fortune, that I might be used like a lord by those who have an opinion of

my parts; whether right or wrong is no great matter. And so the reputation

of wit and great learning does the office of a blue ribbon or a

coach-and-six.”(31)

Could there be a greater candour? It is an outlaw, who says, “These are my

brains; with these I’ll win titles and compete with fortune. These are my

bullets; these I’ll turn into gold”; and he hears the sound of

coaches-and-six, takes the road like Macheath, and makes society stand and

deliver. They are all on their knees before him. Down go my lord bishop’s

apron, and his grace’s blue ribbon, and my lady’s brocade petticoat in the

mud. He eases the one of a living, the other of a patent place, the third

of a little snug post about the Court, and gives them over to followers of

his own. The great prize has not come yet. The coach with the mitre and

crosier in it, which he intends to have for _his_ share, has been delayed

on the way from St. James’s; and he waits and waits until nightfall, when

his runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different road,

and escaped him. So he fires his pistols into the air with a curse, and

rides away into his own country.(32)

Swift’s seems to me to be as good a name to point a moral or adorn a tale

of ambition, as any hero’s that ever lived and failed. But we must

remember that the morality was lax—that other gentlemen besides himself

took the road in his day—that public society was in a strange disordered

condition, and the State was ravaged by other condottieri. The Boyne was

being fought and won, and lost—the bells rung in William’s victory, in the

very same tone with which they would have pealed for James’s. Men were

loose upon politics, and had to shift for themselves. They, as well as old

beliefs and institutions, had lost their moorings and gone adrift in the

storm. As in the South Sea Bubble almost everybody gambled; as in the

Railway mania—not many centuries ago—almost every one took his unlucky

share; a man of that time, of the vast talents and ambition of Swift,

could scarce do otherwise than grasp at his prize, and make his spring at

his opportunity. His bitterness, his scorn, his rage, his subsequent

misanthropy, are ascribed by some panegyrists to a deliberate conviction

of mankind’s unworthiness, and a desire to amend them by castigating. His

youth was bitter, as that of a great genius bound down by ignoble ties,

and powerless in a mean dependence; his age was bitter,(33) like that of a

great genius that had fought the battle and nearly won it, and lost it,

and thought of it afterwards writhing in a lonely exile. A man may

attribute to the gods, if he likes, what is caused by his own fury, or

disappointment, or self-will. What public man—what statesman projecting a

_coup_—what king determined on an invasion of his neighbour—what satirist

meditating an onslaught on society or an individual, can’t give a pretext

for his move? There was a French general the other day who proposed to

march into this country and put it to sack and pillage, in revenge for

humanity outraged by our conduct at Copenhagen—there is always some excuse

for men of the aggressive turn. They are of their nature warlike,

predatory, eager for fight, plunder, dominion.(34)

As fierce a beak and talon as ever struck—as strong a wing as ever beat,

belonged to Swift. I am glad, for one, that fate wrested the prey out of

his claws, and cut his wings and chained him. One can gaze, and not

without awe and pity, at the lonely eagle chained behind the bars.

That Swift was born at No. 7, Hoey’s Court, Dublin, on the 30th November,

1667, is a certain fact, of which nobody will deny the sister island the

honour and glory, but, it seems to me, he was no more an Irishman than a

man born of English parents at Calcutta is a Hindoo.(35) Goldsmith was an

Irishman, and always an Irishman: Steele was an Irishman, and always an

Irishman: Swift’s heart was English and in England, his habits English,

his logic eminently English; his statement is elaborately simple; he shuns

tropes and metaphors, and uses his ideas and words with a wise thrift and

economy, as he used his money; with which he could be generous and

splendid upon great occasions, but which he husbanded when there was no

need to spend it. He never indulges in needless extravagance of rhetoric,

lavish epithets, profuse imagery. He lays his opinion before you with a

grave simplicity and a perfect neatness.(36) Dreading ridicule too, as a

man of his humour—above all an Englishman of his humour—certainly would,

he is afraid to use the poetical power which he really possessed; one

often fancies in reading him that he dares not be eloquent when he might;

that he does not speak above his voice, as if were, and the tone of

society.

His initiation into politics, his knowledge of business, his knowledge of

polite life, his acquaintance with literature even, which he could not

have pursued very sedulously during that reckless career at Dublin, Swift

got under the roof of Sir William Temple. He was fond of telling in

after-life what quantities of books he devoured there, and how King

William taught him to cut asparagus in the Dutch fashion. It was at Shene

and at Moor Park, with a salary of twenty pounds and a dinner at the upper

servants’ table, that this great and lonely Swift passed a ten years’

apprenticeship—wore a cassock that was only not a livery—bent down a knee

as proud as Lucifer’s to supplicate my lady’s good graces, or run on his

honour’s errands.(37) It was here, as he was writing at Temple’s table, or

following his patron’s walk, that he saw and heard the men who had

governed the great world—measured himself with them, looking up from his

silent corner, gauged their brains, weighed their wits, turned them, and

tried them, and marked them. Ah, what platitudes he must have heard! what

feeble jokes! what pompous commonplaces! what small men they must have

seemed under those enormous periwigs, to the swarthy, uncouth, silent

Irish secretary. I wonder whether it ever struck Temple that that Irishman

was his master? I suppose that dismal conviction did not present itself

under the ambrosial wig, or Temple could never have lived with Swift.

Swift sickened, rebelled, left the service—ate humble pie and came back

again; and so for ten years went on, gathering learning, swallowing scorn,

and submitting with a stealthy rage to his fortune.

Temple’s style is the perfection of practised and easy good-breeding. If

he does not penetrate very deeply into a subject, he professes a very

gentlemanly acquaintance with it; if he makes rather a parade of Latin, it

was the custom of his day, as it was the custom for a gentleman to envelop

his head in a periwig and his hands in lace ruffles. If he wears buckles

and square-toed shoes, he steps in them with a consummate grace, and you

never hear their creak, or find them treading upon any lady’s train or any

rival’s heels in the Court crowd. When that grows too hot or too agitated

for him, he politely leaves it. He retires to his retreat of Shene or Moor

Park; and lets the King’s party, and the Prince of Orange’s party battle

it out among themselves. He reveres the Sovereign (and no man perhaps ever

testified to his loyalty by so elegant a bow); he admires the Prince of

Orange; but there is one person whose ease and comfort he loves more than

all the princes in Christendom, and that valuable member of society is

himself, Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat;

between his study-chair and his tulip-beds,(38) clipping his apricots and

pruning his essays,—the statesman, the ambassador no more; but the

philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James’s

as at Shene; where, in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court

to the Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or

dallies by the south wall with the ruddy nymph of gardens.

Temple seems to have received and exacted a prodigious deal of veneration

from his household, and to have been coaxed, and warmed, and cuddled by

the people round about him, as delicately as any of the plants which he

loved. When he fell ill in 1693, the household was aghast at his

indisposition; mild Dorothea, his wife, the best companion of the best of

men—

Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great,

Trembling beheld the doubtful hand of fate.

As for Dorinda, his sister,—

Those who would grief describe, might come and trace

Its watery footsteps in Dorinda’s face.

To see her weep, joy every face forsook,

And grief flung sables on each menial look.

The humble tribe mourned for the quickening soul,

That furnished life and spirit through the whole.

Isn’t that line in which grief is described as putting the menials into a

mourning livery, a fine image? One of the menials wrote it, who did not

like that Temple livery nor those twenty-pound wages. Cannot one fancy the

uncouth young servitor, with downcast eyes, books and papers in hand,

following at his Honour’s heels in the garden walk; or taking his Honour’s

orders as he stands by the great chair, where Sir William has the gout,

and his feet all blistered with moxa? When Sir William has the gout or

scolds it must be hard work at the second table;(39) the Irish secretary

owned as much afterwards: and when he came to dinner, how he must have

lashed and growled and torn the household with his gibes and scorn! What

would the steward say about the pride of them Irish schollards—and this

one had got no great credit even at his Irish college, if the truth were

known—and what a contempt his Excellency’s own gentleman must have had for

Parson Teague from Dublin. (The valets and chaplains were always at war.

It is hard to say which Swift thought the more contemptible.) And what

must have been the sadness, the sadness and terror, of the housekeeper’s

little daughter with the curling black ringlets and the sweet smiling

face, when the secretary who teaches her to read and write, and whom she

loves and reverences above all things—above mother, above mild Dorothea,

above that tremendous Sir William in his square-toes and periwig,—when

_Mr. Swift_ comes down from his master with rage in his heart, and has not

a kind word even for little Hester Johnson?

Perhaps, for the Irish secretary, his Excellency’s condescension was even

more cruel than his frowns. Sir William _would_ perpetually quote Latin

and the ancient classics à propos of his gardens and his Dutch statues and

_plates-bandes_, and talk about Epicurus and Diogenes Laertius, Julius

Caesar, Semiramis, and the gardens of the Hesperides, Maecenas, Strabo

describing Jericho, and the Assyrian kings. A propos of beans, he would

mention Pythagoras’s precept to abstain from beans, and that this precept

probably meant that wise men should abstain from public affairs. _He_ is a

placid Epicurean; _he_ is a Pythagorean philosopher; _he_ is a wise

man—that is the deduction. Does not Swift think so? One can imagine the

downcast eyes lifted up for a moment, and the flash of scorn which they

emit. Swift’s eyes were as azure as the heavens; Pope says nobly (as

everything Pope said and thought of his friend was good and noble), “His

eyes are as azure as the heavens, and have a charming archness in them.”

And one person in that household, that pompous, stately, kindly Moor Park,

saw heaven nowhere else.

But the Temple amenities and solemnities did not agree with Swift. He was

half-killed with a surfeit of Shene pippins; and in a garden-seat which he

devised for himself at Moor Park, and where he devoured greedily the stock

of books within his reach, he caught a vertigo and deafness which punished

and tormented him through life. He could not bear the place or the

servitude. Even in that poem of courtly condolence, from which we have

quoted a few lines of mock melancholy, he breaks out of the funereal

procession with a mad shriek, as it were, and rushes away crying his own

grief, cursing his own fate, foreboding madness, and forsaken by fortune,

and even hope.

I don’t know anything more melancholy than the letter to Temple, in which,

after having broke from his bondage, the poor wretch crouches piteously

towards his cage again, and deprecates his master’s anger. He asks for

testimonials for orders. “The particulars required of me are what relate

to morals and learning—and the reasons of quitting your Honour’s

family—that is, whether the last was occasioned by any ill action. They

are left entirely to your Honour’s mercy, though in the first I think I

cannot reproach myself for anything further than for _infirmities_. This

is all I dare at present beg from your Honour, under circumstances of life

not worth your regard: what is left me to wish (next to the health and

prosperity of your Honour and family) is that Heaven would one day allow

me the opportunity of leaving my acknowledgements at your feet. I beg my

most humble duty and service be presented to my ladies, your Honour’s lady

and sister.”—Can prostration fall deeper? Could a slave bow lower?(40)

Twenty years afterwards, Bishop Kennet, describing the same man, says,

“Dr. Swift came into the coffee-house and had a bow from everybody but me.

When I came to the antechamber [at Court] to wait before prayers, Dr.

Swift was the principal man of talk and business. He was soliciting the

Earl of Arran to speak to his brother, the Duke of Ormond, to get a place

for a clergyman. He was promising Mr. Thorold to undertake, with my Lord

Treasurer, that he should obtain a salary of 200_l._ per annum as member

of the English Church at Rotterdam. He stopped F. Gwynne, Esq., going in

to the Queen with the red bag, and told him aloud, he had something to say

to him from my Lord Treasurer. He took out his gold watch, and telling the

time of day, complained that it was very late. A gentleman said he was too

fast. ‘How can I help it,’ says the doctor, ‘if the courtiers give me a

watch that won’t go right?’ Then he instructed a young nobleman, that the

best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a Papist), who had begun a translation

of Homer into English, for which he would have them all subscribe; ‘For,’

says he, ‘he shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for

him.’(41) Lord Treasurer, after leaving the Queen, came through the room,

beckoning Dr. Swift to follow him,—both went off just before prayers.”

There’s a little malice in the Bishop’s “just before prayers”.

This picture of the great Dean seems a true one, and is harsh, though not

altogether unpleasant. He was doing good, and to deserving men too, in the

midst of these intrigues and triumphs. His journals and a thousand

anecdotes of him relate his kind acts and rough manners. His hand was

constantly stretched out to relieve an honest man—he was cautious about

his money, but ready.—If you were in a strait would you like such a

benefactor? I think I would rather have had a potato and a friendly word

from Goldsmith than have been beholden to the Dean for a guinea and a

dinner.(42) He insulted a man as he served him, made women cry, guests

look foolish, bullied unlucky friends, and flung his benefactions into

poor men’s faces. No; the Dean was no Irishman—no Irishman ever gave but

with a kind word and a kind heart.

It is told, as if it were to Swift’s credit, that the Dean of St.

Patrick’s performed his family devotions every morning regularly, but with

such secrecy, that the guests in his house were never in the least aware

of the ceremony. There was no need surely why a church dignitary should

assemble his family privily in a crypt, and as if he was afraid of heathen

persecution. But I think the world was right, and the bishops who advised

Queen Anne, when they counselled her not to appoint the author of the

_Tale of a Tub_ to a bishopric, gave perfectly good advice. The man who

wrote the arguments and illustrations in that wild book, could not but be

aware what must be the sequel of the propositions which he laid down. The

boon companion of Pope and Bolingbroke, who chose these as the friends of

his life, and the recipients of his confidence and affection, must have

heard many an argument, and joined in many a conversation over Pope’s

port, or St. John’s burgundy, which would not bear to be repeated at other

men’s boards.

I know of few things more conclusive as to the sincerity of Swift’s

religion than his advice to poor John Gay to turn clergyman, and look out

for a seat on the Bench. Gay, the author of the _Beggar’s Opera_—Gay, the

wildest of the wits about town—it was this man that Jonathan Swift advised

to take orders—to invest in a cassock and bands—just as he advised him to

husband his shillings and put his thousand pounds out at interest.(43) The

Queen, and the bishops, and the world, were right in mistrusting the

religion of that man.

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. The

most notorious sinners of all those fellow mortals whom it is our business

to discuss—Harry Fielding and Dick Steele, were especially loud, and I

believe really fervent, in their expressions of belief; they belaboured

freethinkers, and stoned imaginary atheists on all sorts of occasions,

going out of their way to bawl their own creed, and persecute their

neighbour’s, and if they sinned and stumbled, as they constantly did with

debt, with drink, with all sorts of bad behaviour, they got up on their

knees, and cried “Peccavi” with a most sonorous orthodoxy. Yes; poor Harry

Fielding and poor Dick Steele were trusty and undoubting Church of England

men; they abhorred Popery, atheism, and wooden shoes, and idolatries in

general; and hiccupped “Church and State” with fervour.

But Swift? _His_ mind had had a different schooling, and possessed a very

different logical power. _He_ was not bred up in a tipsy guard-room, and

did not learn to reason in a Covent Garden tavern. He could conduct an

argument from beginning to end. He could see forward with a fatal

clearness. In his old age, looking at the _Tale of a Tub_, when he said,

“Good God, what a genius I had when I wrote that book!” I think he was

admiring not the genius, but the consequences to which the genius had

brought him—a vast genius, a magnificent genius, a genius wonderfully

bright, and dazzling, and strong,—to seize, to know, to see, to flash upon

falsehood and scorch it into perdition, to penetrate into the hidden

motives, and expose the black thoughts of men,—an awful, an evil spirit.

Ah, man! you, educated in Epicurean Temple’s library, you whose friends

were Pope and St. John—what made you to swear to fatal vows, and bind

yourself to a lifelong hypocrisy before the Heaven which you adored with

such real wonder, humility, and reverence? For Swift was a reverent, was a

pious spirit—for Swift could love and could pray. Through the storms and

tempests of his furious mind, the stars of religion and love break out in

the blue, shining serenely, though hidden by the driving clouds and the

maddened hurricane of his life.

It is my belief that he suffered frightfully from the consciousness of his

own scepticism, and that he had bent his pride so far down as to put his

apostasy out to hire.(44) The paper left behind him, called _Thoughts on

Religion_, is merely a set of excuses for not professing disbelief. He

says of his sermons that he preached pamphlets: they have scarce a

Christian characteristic; they might be preached from the steps of a

synagogue, or the floor of a mosque, or the box of a coffee-house almost.

There is little or no cant—he is too great and too proud for that; and, in

so far as the badness of his sermons goes, he is honest. But having put

that cassock on, it poisoned him: he was strangled in his bands. He goes

through life, tearing, like a man possessed with a devil. Like Abudah in

the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and knows that

the night will come and the inevitable hag with it. What a night, my God,

it was! what a lonely rage and long agony—what a vulture that tore the

heart of that giant!(45) It is awful to think of the great sufferings of

this great man. Through life he always seems alone, somehow. Goethe was

so. I can’t fancy Shakespeare otherwise. The giants must live apart. The

kings can have no company. But this man suffered so; and deserved so to

suffer. One hardly reads anywhere of such a pain.

The “saeva indignatio” of which he spoke as lacerating his heart, and

which he dares to inscribe on his tombstone—as if the wretch who lay under

that stone waiting God’s judgement had a right to be angry—breaks out from

him in a thousand pages of his writing, and tears and rends him. Against

men in office, he having been overthrown; against men in England, he

having lost his chance of preferment there, the furious exile never fails

to rage and curse. Is it fair to call the famous _Drapier’s Letters_

patriotism? They are masterpieces of dreadful humour and invective: they

are reasoned logically enough too, but the proposition is as monstrous and

fabulous as the Lilliputian island. It is not that the grievance is so

great, but there is his enemy—the assault is wonderful for its activity

and terrible rage. It is Samson, with a bone in his hand, rushing on his

enemies and felling them: one admires not the cause so much as the

strength, the anger, the fury of the champion. As is the case with madmen,

certain subjects provoke him, and awaken his fits of wrath. Marriage is

one of these; in a hundred passages in his writings he rages against it;

rages against children; an object of constant satire, even more

contemptible in his eyes than a lord’s chaplain, is a poor curate with a

large family. The idea of this luckless paternity never fails to bring

down from him gibes and foul language. Could Dick Steele, or Goldsmith, or

Fielding, in his most reckless moment of satire, have written anything

like the Dean’s famous “modest proposal” for eating children? Not one of

these but melts at the thoughts of childhood, fondles and caresses it. Mr.

Dean has no such softness, and enters the nursery with the tread and

gaiety of an ogre.(46) “I have been assured,” says he in the _Modest

Proposal_, “by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that

a young healthy child, well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious,

nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled;

and I make no doubt it will equally serve in a _ragoût_.” And taking up

this pretty joke, as his way is, he argues it with perfect gravity and

logic. He turns and twists this subject in a score of different ways: he

hashes it; and he serves it up cold; and he garnishes it; and relishes it

always. He describes the little animal as “dropped from its dam’” advising

that the mother should let it suck plentifully in the last month, so as to

render it plump and fat for a good table! “A child,” says his reverence,

“will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family

dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish,” and so

on; and, the subject being so delightful that he can’t leave it—he

proceeds to recommend, in place of venison for squires’ tables, “the

bodies of young lads and maidens not exceeding fourteen or under twelve.”

Amiable humourist! laughing castigator of morals! There was a process well

known and practised in the Dean’s gay days: when a lout entered the

coffee-house, the wags proceeded to what they called “roasting” him. This

is roasting a subject with a vengeance. The Dean had a native genius for

it. As the _Almanach des Gourmands_ says, _On nait rôtisseur_.

And it was not merely by the sarcastic method that Swift exposed the

unreasonableness of loving and having children. In Gulliver, the folly of

love and marriage is urged by graver arguments and advice. In the famous

Lilliputian kingdom, Swift speaks with approval of the practice of

instantly removing children from their parents and educating them by the

State; and amongst his favourite horses, a pair of foals are stated to be

the very utmost a well-regulated equine couple would permit themselves. In

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.(47)

The grave and logical conduct of an absurd proposition, as exemplified in

the cannibal proposal just mentioned, is our author’s constant method

through all his works of humour. Given a country of people six inches or

sixty feet high, and by the mere process of the logic, a thousand

wonderful absurdities are evolved, at so many stages of the calculation.

Turning to the first minister who waited behind him with a white staff

near as tall as the mainmast of the _Royal Sovereign_, the King of

Brobdingnag observes how contemptible a thing human grandeur is, as

represented by such a contemptible little creature as Gulliver. “The

Emperor of Lilliput’s features are strong and masculine” (what a

surprising humour there is in this description!)—“the Emperor’s features,”

Gulliver says, “are strong and masculine, with an Austrian lip, an arched

nose, his complexion olive, his countenance erect, his body and limbs

well-proportioned, and his deportment majestic. He is taller _by the

breadth of my nail_ than any of his court, which alone is enough to strike

an awe into beholders.”

What a surprising humour there is in these descriptions! How noble the

satire is here! how just and honest! How perfect the image! Mr. Macaulay

has quoted the charming lines of the poet, where the king of the pygmies

is measured by the same standard. We have all read in Milton of the spear

that was like “the mast of some tall admiral”, but these images are surely

likely to come to the comic poet originally. The subject is before him. He

is turning it in a thousand ways. He is full of it. The figure suggests

itself naturally to him, and comes out of his subject, as in that

wonderful passage, when Gulliver’s box having been dropped by the eagle

into the sea, and Gulliver having been received into the ship’s cabin, he

calls upon the crew to bring the box into the cabin, and put it on the

table, the cabin being only a quarter the size of the box. It is the

_veracity_ of the blunder which is so admirable. Had a man come from such

a country as Brobdingnag he would have blundered so.

But the best stroke of humour, if there be a best in that abounding book,

is that where Gulliver, in the unpronounceable country, describes his

parting from his master the horse.(48) “I took,” he says, “a second leave

of my master, but as I was going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he

did me the honour to raise it gently to my mouth. I am not ignorant how

much I have been censured for mentioning this last particular. Detractors

are pleased to think it improbable that so illustrious a person should

descend to give so great a mark of distinction to a creature so inferior

as I. Neither am I ignorant how apt some travellers are to boast of

extraordinary favours they have received. But if these censurers were

better acquainted with the noble and courteous disposition of the

Houyhnhnms they would soon change their opinion.”

The surprise here, the audacity of circumstantial evidence, the astounding

gravity of the speaker, who is not ignorant how much he has been censured,

the nature of the favour conferred, and the respectful exultation at the

receipt of it, are surely complete; it is truth topsy-turvy, entirely

logical and absurd.

As for the humour and conduct of this famous fable, I suppose there is no

person who reads but must admire; as for the moral, I think it horrible,

shameful, unmanly, blasphemous; and giant and great as this Dean is, I say

we should hoot him. Some of this audience mayn’t have read the last part

of Gulliver, and to such I would recall the advice of the venerable Mr.

Punch to persons about to marry, and say “Don’t”. When Gulliver first

lands among the Yahoos, the naked howling wretches clamber up trees and

assault him, and he describes himself as “almost stifled with the filth

which fell about him”. The reader of the fourth part of _Gulliver’s

Travels_ is like the hero himself in this instance. It is Yahoo language;

a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against

mankind—tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness

and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.

And dreadful it is to think that Swift knew the tendency of his creed—the

fatal rocks towards which his logic desperately drifted. That last part of

Gulliver is only a consequence of what has gone before; and the

worthlessness of all mankind, the pettiness, cruelty, pride, imbecility,

the general vanity, the foolish pretension, the mock greatness, the

pompous dullness, the mean aims, the base successes—all these were present

to him; it was with the din of these curses of the world, blasphemies

against Heaven, shrieking in his ears, that he began to write his dreadful

allegory—of which the meaning is that man is utterly wicked, desperate,

and imbecile, and his passions are so monstrous, and his boasted powers so

mean, that he is and deserves to be the slave of brutes, and ignorance is

better than his vaunted reason. What had this man done? what secret

remorse was rankling at his heart? what fever was boiling in him, that he

should see all the world bloodshot? We view the world with our own eyes,

each of us; and we make from within us the world we see. A weary heart

gets no gladness out of sunshine; a selfish man is sceptical about

friendship, as a man with no ear doesn’t care for music. A frightful

self-consciousness it must have been, which looked on mankind so darkly

through those keen eyes of Swift.

A remarkable story is told by Scott, of Delany, who interrupted Archbishop

King and Swift in a conversation which left the prelate in tears, and from

which Swift rushed away with marks of strong terror and agitation in his

countenance, upon which the archbishop said to Delany, “You have just met

the most unhappy man on earth; but on the subject of his wretchedness you

must never ask a question.”

The most unhappy man on earth;—_Miserrimus_—what a character of him! And

at this time all the great wits of England had been at his feet. All

Ireland had shouted after him, and worshipped as a liberator, a saviour,

the greatest Irish patriot and citizen. Dean Drapier Bickerstaff

Gulliver—the most famous statesmen, and the greatest poets of his day, had

applauded him, and done him homage; and at this time writing over to

Bolingbroke, from Ireland, he says, “It is time for me to have done with

the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called

into the best, _and not to die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a

hole_.”

We have spoken about the men, and Swift’s behaviour to them; and now it

behoves us not to forget that there are certain other persons in the

creation who had rather intimate relations with the great Dean.(49) Two

women whom he loved and injured are known by every reader of books so

familiarly that if we had seen them, or if they had been relatives of our

own, we scarcely could have known them better. Who hasn’t in his mind an

image of Stella? Who does not love her? Fair and tender creature: pure and

affectionate heart! Boots it to you, now that you have been at rest for a

hundred and twenty years, not divided in death from the cold heart which

caused yours, whilst it beat, such faithful pangs of love and grief—boots

it to you now, that the whole world loves and deplores you? Scarce any

man, I believe, ever thought of that grave, that did not cast a flower of

pity on it, and write over it a sweet epitaph. Gentle lady, so lovely, so

loving, so unhappy! you have had countless champions; millions of manly

hearts mourning for you. From generation to generation we take up the fond

tradition of your beauty; we watch and follow your tragedy, your bright

morning love and purity, your constancy, your grief, your sweet martyrdom.

We know your legend by heart. You are one of the saints of English story.

And if Stella’s love and innocence are charming to contemplate, I will say

that in spite of ill-usage, in spite of drawbacks, in spite of mysterious

separation and union, of hope delayed and sickened heart—in the teeth of

Vanessa, and that little episodical aberration which plunged Swift into

such woful pitfalls and quagmires of amorous perplexity—in spite of the

verdicts of most women, I believe, who, as far as my experience and

conversation go, generally take Vanessa’s part in the controversy—in spite

of the tears which Swift caused Stella to shed, and the rocks and barriers

which fate and temper interposed, and which prevented the pure course of

that true love from running smoothly—the brightest part of Swift’s story,

the pure star in that dark and tempestuous life of Swift’s, is his love

for Hester Johnson. It has been my business, professionally of course, to

go through a deal of sentimental reading in my time, and to acquaint

myself with love-making, as it has been described in various languages,

and at various ages of the world; and I know of nothing more manly, more

tender, more exquisitely touching, than some of these brief notes, written

in what Swift calls “his little language” in his journal to Stella.(50) He

writes to her night and morning often. He never sends away a letter to her

but he begins a new one on the same day. He can’t bear to let go her kind

little hand, as it were. He knows that she is thinking of him, and longing

for him far away in Dublin yonder. He takes her letters from under his

pillow and talks to them, familiarly, paternally, with fond epithets and

pretty caresses—as he would to the sweet and artless creature who loved

him. “Stay,” he writes one morning—it is the 14th of December, 1710—“stay,

I will answer some of your letter this morning in bed—let me see. Come and

appear, little letter! Here I am, says he, and what say you to Stella this

morning fresh and fasting? And can Stella read this writing without

hurting her dear eyes?” he goes on, after more kind prattle and fond

whispering. The dear eyes shine clearly upon him then—the good angel of

his life is with him and blessing him. Ah, it was a hard fate that wrung

from them so many tears, and stabbed pitilessly that pure and tender

bosom. A hard fate: but would she have changed it? I have heard a woman

say that she would have taken Swift’s cruelty to have had his tenderness.

He had a sort of worship for her whilst he wounded her. He speaks of her

after she is gone; of her wit, of her kindness, of her grace, of her

beauty, with a simple love and reverence that are indescribably touching;

in contemplation of her goodness his hard heart melts into pathos; his

cold rhyme kindles and glows into poetry, and he falls down on his knees,

so to speak, before the angel, whose life he had embittered, confesses his

own wretchedness and unworthiness, and adores her with cries of remorse

and love:—

When on my sickly couch I lay,

Impatient both of night and day,

And groaning in unmanly strains,

Called every power to ease my pains,

Then Stella ran to my relief,

With cheerful face and inward grief,

And though by Heaven’s severe decree

She suffers hourly more than me,

No cruel master could require

From slaves employed for daily hire,

What Stella, by her friendship warmed,

With vigour and delight performed.

Now, with a soft and silent tread,

Unheard she moves about my bed:

My sinking spirits now supplies

With cordials in her hands and eyes.

Best patron of true friends! beware;

You pay too dearly for your care

If, while your tenderness secures

My life, it must endanger yours:

For such a fool was never found

Who pulled a palace to the ground,

Only to have the ruins made

Materials for a house decayed.

One little triumph Stella had in her life—one dear little piece of

injustice was performed in her favour, for which I confess, for my part, I

can’t help thanking fate and the Dean. _That other person_ was sacrificed

to her—that—that young woman, who lived five doors from Dr. Swift’s

lodgings in Bury Street, and who flattered him, and made love to him in

such an outrageous manner—Vanessa was thrown over.

Swift did not keep Stella’s letters to him in reply to those he wrote to

her.(51) He kept Bolingbroke’s, and Pope’s, and Harley’s, and

Peterborough’s: but Stella, “very carefully,” the _Lives_ say, kept

Swift’s. Of course: that is the way of the world: and so we cannot tell

what her style was, or of what sort were the little letters which the

doctor placed there at night, and bade to appear from under his pillow of

a morning. But in Letter IV of that famous collection he describes his

lodging in Bury Street, where he has the first floor, a dining-room and

bedchamber, at eight shillings a week; and in Letter VI he says “he has

visited a lady just come to town”, whose name somehow is not mentioned;

and in Letter VIII he enters a query of Stella’s—“What do you mean ‘that

boards near me, that I dine with now and then?’ What the deuce! You know

whom I have dined with every day since I left you, better than I do.” Of

course she does. Of course Swift has not the slightest idea of what she

means. But in a few letters more it turns out that the doctor has been to

dine “gravely” with a Mrs. Vanhomrigh: then that he has been to “his

neighbour”: then that he has been unwell, and means to dine for the whole

week with his neighbour! Stella was quite right in her previsions. She saw

from the very first hint what was going to happen; and scented Vanessa in

the air.(52) The rival is at the Dean’s feet. The pupil and teacher are

reading together, and drinking tea together, and going to prayers

together, and learning Latin together, and conjugating _amo_, _amas_,

_amavi_ together. The “little language” is over for poor Stella. By the

rule of grammar and the course of conjugation, doesn’t _amavi_ come after

_amo_ and _amas_?

The loves of Cadenus and Vanessa(53) you may peruse in Cadenus’s own poem

on the subject, and in poor Vanessa’s vehement expostulatory verses and

letters to him; she adores him, implores him, admires him, thinks him

something godlike, and only prays to be admitted to lie at his feet.(54)

As they are bringing him home from church, those divine feet of Dr.

Swift’s are found pretty often in Vannessa’s parlour. He likes to be

admired and adored. He finds Miss Vanhomrigh to be a woman of great taste

and spirit, and beauty and wit, and a fortune too. He sees her every day;

he does not tell Stella about the business: until the impetuous Vanessa

becomes too fond of him, until the doctor is quite frightened by the young

woman’s ardour, and confounded by her warmth. He wanted to marry neither

of them—that I believe was the truth; but if he had not married Stella,

Vanessa would have had him in spite of himself. When he went back to

Ireland, his Ariadne, not content to remain in her isle, pursued the

fugitive Dean. In vain he protested, he vowed, he soothed, and bullied;

the news of the Dean’s marriage with Stella at last came to her, and it

killed her—she died of that passion.(55)

And when she died, and Stella heard that Swift had written beautifully

regarding her, “That doesn’t surprise me,” said Mrs. Stella, “for we all

know the Dean could write beautifully about a broomstick.” A woman—a true

woman! Would you have had one of them forgive the other?

In a note in his biography, Scott says that his friend Dr. Tuke, of

Dublin, has a lock of Stella’s hair, enclosed in a paper by Swift, on

which are written in the Dean’s hand, the words: “_Only a woman’s hair_.”

An instance, says Scott, of the Dean’s desire to veil his feelings under

the mask of cynical indifference.

See the various notions of critics! Do those words indicate indifference

or an attempt to hide feeling? Did you ever hear or read four words more

pathetic? Only a woman’s hair; only love, only fidelity, only purity,

innocence, beauty; only the tenderest heart in the world stricken and

wounded, and passed away now out of reach of pangs of hope deferred, love

insulted, and pitiless desertion:—only that lock of hair left; and memory

and remorse, for the guilty, lonely wretch, shuddering over the grave of

his victim.

And yet to have had so much love, he must have given some. Treasures of

wit and wisdom, and tenderness, too, must that man have had locked up in

the caverns of his gloomy heart, and shown fitfully to one or two whom he

took in there. But it was not good to visit that place. People did not

remain there long, and suffered for having been there.(56) He shrank away

from all affections sooner or later. Stella and Vanessa both died near

him, and away from him. He had not heart enough to see them die. He broke

from his fastest friend, Sheridan; he slunk away from his fondest admirer,

Pope. His laugh jars on one’s ear after sevenscore years. He was always

alone—alone and gnashing in the darkness, except when Stella’s sweet smile

came and shone upon him. When that went, silence and utter night closed

over him. An immense genius: an awful downfall and ruin. So great a man he

seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling.

We have other great names to mention—none, I think, however, so great or

so gloomy.

Lecture The Second. Congreve And Addison

A great number of years ago, before the passing of the Reform Bill, there

existed at Cambridge a certain debating club, called the “Union”; and I

remember that there was a tradition amongst the undergraduates who

frequented that renowned school of oratory, that the great leaders of the

Opposition and Government had their eyes upon the University Debating

Club, and that if a man distinguished himself there he ran some chance of

being returned to Parliament as a great nobleman’s nominee. So Jones of

John’s, or Thomson of Trinity, would rise in their might, and draping

themselves in their gowns, rally round the monarchy, or hurl defiance at

priests and kings, with the majesty of Pitt or the fire of Mirabeau,

fancying all the while that the great nobleman’s emissary was listening to

the debate from the back benches, where he was sitting with the family

seat in his pocket. Indeed, the legend said that one or two young

Cambridge men, orators of the Union, were actually caught up thence, and

carried down to Cornwall or old Sarum, and so into Parliament. And many a

young fellow deserted the jogtrot University curriculum, to hang on in the

dust behind the fervid wheels of the Parliamentary chariot.

Where, I have often wondered, were the sons of peers and Members of

Parliament in Anne’s and George’s time? Were they all in the army, or

hunting in the country, or boxing the watch? How was it that the young

gentlemen from the University got such a prodigious number of places? A

lad composed a neat copy of verses at Christchurch or Trinity, in which

the death of a great personage was bemoaned, the French king assailed, the

Dutch or Prince Eugene complimented, or the reverse; and the party in

power was presently to provide for the young poet; and a commissionership,

or a post in the Stamps, or the secretaryship of an embassy, or a

clerkship in the Treasury, came into the bard’s possession. A wonderful

fruit-bearing rod was that of Busby’s. What have men of letters got in

_our_ time? Think, not only of Swift, a king fit to rule in any time or

empire—but Addison, Steele, Prior, Tickell, Congreve, John Gay, John

Dennis, and many others, who got public employment, and pretty little

pickings out of the public purse.(57) The wits of whose names we shall

treat in this lecture and two following, all (save one) touched the king’s

coin, and had, at some period of their lives, a happy quarter-day coming

round for them.

They all began at school or college in the regular way, producing

panegyrics upon public characters, what were called odes upon public

events, battles, sieges, court marriages and deaths, in which the gods of

Olympus and the tragic muse were fatigued with invocations, according to

the fashion of the time in France and in England. “Aid us Mars, Bacchus,

Apollo,” cried Addison, or Congreve, singing of William or Marlborough.

“_Accourez, chastes nymphes de Parnasse_,” says Boileau, celebrating the

Grand Monarch. “_Des sons que ma lyre enfante_, marquez-en bien la

cadence, _et vous, vents, faites silence! je vais parler de __ Louis!_”

Schoolboys’ themes and foundation exercises are the only relics left now

of this scholastic fashion. The Olympians are left quite undisturbed in

their mountain. What man of note, what contributor to the poetry of a

country newspaper, would now think of writing a congratulatory ode on the

birth of the heir to a dukedom, or the marriage of a nobleman? In the past

century the young gentlemen of the Universities all exercised themselves

at these queer compositions; and some got fame, and some gained patrons

and places for life, and many more took nothing by these efforts of what

they were pleased to call their muses.

William Congreve’s(58) Pindaric Odes are still to be found in _Johnson’s

Poets_, that now unfrequented poets’ corner, in which so many forgotten

bigwigs have a niche—but though he was also voted to be one of the

greatest tragic poets of any day, it was Congreve’s wit and humour which

first recommended him to courtly fortune. And it is recorded, that his

first play, the _Old Bachelor_, brought our author to the notice of that

great patron of English muses, Charles Montague Lord Halifax, who being

desirous to place so eminent a wit in a state of ease and tranquillity,

instantly made him one of the Commissioners for licensing hackney-coaches,

bestowed on him soon after a place in the Pipe-office, and likewise a post

in the Custom-house of the value of 600_l._

A commissionership of hackney-coaches—a post in the Custom-house—a place

in the Pipe-office, and all for writing a comedy! Doesn’t it sound like a

fable, that place in the Pipe-office?(59) _Ah, l’heureux temps que celui

de ces fables!_ Men of letters there still be: but I doubt whether any

Pipe-offices are left. The public has smoked them long ago.

Words, like men, pass current for a while with the public, and being known

everywhere abroad, at length take their places in society; so even the

most secluded and refined ladies here present will have heard the phrase

from their sons or brothers at school, and will permit me to call William

Congreve, Esquire, the most eminent literary “swell” of his age. In my

copy of _Johnson’s Lives_ Congreve’s wig is the tallest, and put on with

the jauntiest air of all the laurelled worthies. “I am the great Mr.

Congreve,” he seems to say, looking out from his voluminous curls. People

called him the great Mr. Congreve.(60) From the beginning of his career

until the end everybody admired him. Having got his education in Ireland,

at the same school and college with Swift, he came to live in the Middle

Temple, London, where he luckily bestowed no attention to the law; but

splendidly frequented the coffee-houses and theatres, and appeared in the

side-box, the tavern, the Piazza, and the Mall, brilliant, beautiful, and

victorious from the first. Everybody acknowledged the young chieftain. The

great Mr. Dryden(61) declared that he was equal to Shakespeare, and

bequeathed to him his own undisputed poetical crown, and writes of him,

“Mr. Congreve has done me the favour to review the _Aeneis_, and compare

my version with the original. I shall never be ashamed to own that this

excellent young man has showed me many faults which I have endeavoured to

correct.”

The “excellent young man” was but three- or four-and-twenty when the great

Dryden thus spoke of him: the greatest literary chief in England, the

veteran field-marshal of letters, himself the marked man of all Europe,

and the centre of a school of wits, who daily gathered round his chair and

tobacco-pipe at Will’s. Pope dedicated his _Iliad_ to him;(62) Swift,

Addison, Steele, all acknowledge Congreve’s rank, and lavish compliments

upon him. Voltaire went to wait upon him as on one of the Representatives

of Literature—and the man who scarce praises any other living person, who

flung abuse at Pope, and Swift, and Steele, and Addison—the Grub Street

Timon, old John Dennis,(63) was hat in hand to Mr. Congreve; and said,

that when he retired from the stage, Comedy went with him.

Nor was he less victorious elsewhere. He was admired in the drawing-rooms

as well as the coffee-houses; as much beloved in the side-box as on the

stage. He loved, and conquered, and jilted the beautiful Bracegirdle,(64)

the heroine of all his plays, the favourite of all the town of her day—and

the Duchess of Marlborough, Marlborough’s daughter, had such an admiration

of him, that when he died she had an ivory figure made to imitate him,(65)

and a large wax doll with gouty feet to be dressed just as the great

Congreve’s gouty feet were dressed in his great lifetime. He saved some

money by his Pipe-office, and his Custom-house office, and his

Hackney-coach office, and nobly left it, not to Bracegirdle, who wanted

it,(66) but to the Duchess of Marlborough, who didn’t.(67)

How can I introduce to you that merry and shameless Comic Muse who won him

such a reputation? Nell Gwynn’s servant fought the other footman for

having called his mistress a bad name; and in like manner, and with pretty

like epithets, Jeremy Collier attacked that godless, reckless Jezebel, the

English comedy of his time, and called her what Nell Gwynn’s man’s

fellow-servants called Nell Gwynn’s man’s mistress. The servants of the

theatre, Dryden, Congreve,(68) and others, defended themselves with the

same success, and for the same cause which set Nell’s lackey fighting. She

was a disreputable, daring, laughing, painted French baggage, that Comic

Muse. She came over from the Continent with Charles (who chose many more

of his female friends there) at the Restoration—a wild, dishevelled Laïs,

with eyes bright with wit and wine—a saucy court-favourite that sat at the

king’s knees, and laughed in his face, and when she showed her bold cheeks

at her chariot-window, had some of the noblest and most famous people of

the land bowing round her wheel. She was kind and popular enough, that

daring Comedy, that audacious poor Nell—she was gay and generous, kind,

frank, as such people can afford to be: and the men who lived with her and

laughed with her, took her pay and drank her wine, turned out when the

Puritans hooted her, to fight and defend her. But the jade was

indefensible, and it is pretty certain her servants knew it.

There is life and death going on in everything: truth and lies always at

battle. Pleasure is always warring against self-restraint. Doubt is always

crying Psha, and sneering. A man in life, a humourist in writing about

life, sways over to one principle or the other, and laughs with the

reverence for right and the love of truth in his heart, or laughs at these

from the other side. Didn’t I tell you that dancing was a serious business

to Harlequin? I have read two or three of Congreve’s plays over before

speaking of him; and my feelings were rather like those, which I daresay

most of us here have had, at Pompeii, looking at Sallust’s house and the

relics of an orgy, a dried wine-jar or two, a charred supper-table, the

breast of a dancing girl pressed against the ashes, the laughing skull of

a jester, a perfect stillness round about, as the cicerone twangs his

moral, and the blue sky shines calmly over the ruin. The Congreve muse is

dead, and her song choked in Time’s ashes. We gaze at the skeleton, and

wonder at the life which once revelled in its mad veins. We take the skull

up, and muse over the frolic and daring, the wit, scorn, passion, hope,

desire, with which that empty bowl once fermented. We think of the glances

that allured, the tears that melted, of the bright eyes that shone in

those vacant sockets; and of lips whispering love, and cheeks dimpling

with smiles, that once covered yon ghastly yellow framework. They used to

call those teeth pearls once. See! there’s the cup she drank from, the

gold chain she wore on her neck, the vase which held the rouge for her

cheeks, her looking-glass, and the harp she used to dance to. Instead of a

feast we find a gravestone, and in place of a mistress, a few bones!

Reading in these plays now, is like shutting your ears and looking at

people dancing. What does it mean? the measures, the grimaces, the bowing,

shuffling and retreating, the _cavalier seul_ advancing upon those

ladies—those ladies and men twirling round at the end in a mad galop,

after which everybody bows and the quaint rite is celebrated. Without the

music we can’t understand that comic dance of the last century—its strange

gravity and gaiety, its decorum or its indecorum. It has a jargon of its

own quite unlike life; a sort of moral of its own quite unlike life too.

I’m afraid it’s a heathen mystery, symbolizing a Pagan doctrine;

protesting, as the Pompeians very likely were, assembled at their theatre

and laughing at their games—as Sallust and his friends, and their

mistresses protested—crowned with flowers, with cups in their hands,

against the new, hard, ascetic, pleasure-hating doctrine, whose gaunt

disciples, lately passed over from the Asian shores of the Mediterranean,

were for breaking the fair images of Venus, and flinging the altars of

Bacchus down.

I fancy poor Congreve’s theatre is a temple of Pagan delights, and

mysteries not permitted except among heathens. I fear the theatre carries

down that ancient tradition and worship, as masons have carried their

secret signs and rites from temple to temple. When the libertine hero

carries off the beauty in the play, and the dotard is laughed to scorn for

having the young wife: in the ballad, when the poet bid his mistress to

gather roses while she may, and warns her that old Time is still a-flying:

in the ballet, when honest Corydon courts Phillis under the treillage of

the pasteboard cottage, and leers at her over the head of grandpapa in red

stockings, who is opportunely asleep; and when seduced by the invitations

of the rosy youth she comes forward to the footlights, and they perform on

each other’s tiptoes that _pas_ which you all know, and which is only

interrupted by old grandpapa awaking from his doze at the pasteboard

chalet (whither he returns to take another nap in case the young people

get an encore): when Harlequin, splendid in youth, strength, and agility,

arrayed in gold and a thousand colours, springs over the heads of

countless perils, leaps down the throat of bewildered giants, and,

dauntless and splendid, dances danger down: when Mr. Punch, that godless

old rebel, breaks every law and laughs at it with odious triumph, outwits

his lawyer, bullies the beadle, knocks his wife about the head, and hangs

the hangman—don’t you see in the comedy, in the song, in the dance, in the

ragged little Punch’s puppet-show—the Pagan protest? Doesn’t it seem as if

Life puts in its plea and sings its comment? Look how the lovers walk and

hold each other’s hands and whisper! Sings the chorus—“There is nothing

like love, there is nothing like youth, there is nothing like beauty of

your spring-time. Look! how old age tries to meddle with merry sport! Beat

him with his own crutch, the wrinkled old dotard! There is nothing like

youth, there is nothing like beauty, there is nothing like strength.

Strength and valour win beauty and youth. Be brave and conquer. Be young

and happy. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy! Would you know the _segreto per esser

felice_? Here it is, in a smiling mistress and a cup of Falernian.” As the

boy tosses the cup and sings his song—hark! what is that chaunt coming

nearer and nearer? What is that dirge which _will_ disturb us? The lights

of the festival burn dim—the cheeks turn pale—the voice quavers—and the

cup drops on the floor. Who’s there? Death and Fate are at the gate, and

they _will_ come in.

Congreve’s comic feast flares with lights, and round the table, emptying

their flaming bowls of drink, and exchanging the wildest jests and

ribaldry, sit men and women, waited on by rascally valets and attendants

as dissolute as their mistresses—perhaps the very worst company in the

world. There doesn’t seem to be a pretence of morals. At the head of the

table sits Mirabel or Belmour (dressed in the French fashion and waited on

by English imitators of Scapin and Frontin). Their calling is to be

irresistible, and to conquer everywhere. Like the heroes of the chivalry

story, whose long-winded loves and combats they were sending out of

fashion, they are always splendid and triumphant—overcome all dangers,

vanquish all enemies, and win the beauty at the end. Fathers, husbands,

usurers are the foes these champions contend with. They are merciless in

old age, invariably, and an old man plays the part in the dramas, which

the wicked enchanter or the great blundering giant performs in the

chivalry tales, who threatens and grumbles and resists—a huge stupid

obstacle always overcome by the knight. It is an old man with a money-box:

Sir Belmour his son or nephew spends his money and laughs at him. It is an

old man with a young wife whom he locks up: Sir Mirabel robs him of his

wife, trips up his gouty old heels and leaves the old hunx—the old fool,

what business has he to hoard his money, or to lock up blushing eighteen?

Money is for youth, love is for youth; away with the old people. When

Millamant is sixty, having of course divorced the first Lady Millamant,

and married his friend Doricourt’s granddaughter out of the nursery—it

will be his turn; and young Belmour will make a fool of him. All this

pretty morality you have in the comedies of William Congreve, Esq. They

are full of wit. Such manners as he observes, he observes with great

humour; but ah! it’s a weary feast that banquet of wit where no love is.

It palls very soon; sad indigestions follow it and lonely blank headaches

in the morning.

I can’t pretend to quote scenes from the splendid Congreve’s

plays(69)—which are undeniably bright, witty, and daring—any more than I

could ask you to hear the dialogue of a witty bargeman and a brilliant

fishwoman exchanging compliments at Billingsgate; but some of his

verses—they were amongst the most famous lyrics of the time, and

pronounced equal to Horace by his contemporaries—may give an idea of his

power, of his grace, of his daring manner, his magnificence in compliment,

and his polished sarcasm. He writes as if he was so accustomed to conquer,

that he has a poor opinion of his victims. Nothing’s new except their

faces, says he: “every woman is the same.” He says this in his first

comedy, which he wrote languidly(70) in illness, when he was an “excellent

young man”. Richelieu at eighty could have hardly said a more excellent

thing.

When he advances to make one of his conquests it is with a splendid

gallantry, in full uniform and with the fiddles playing, like Grammont’s

French dandies attacking the breach of Lerida.

“Cease, cease to ask her name,” he writes of a young lady at the Wells at

Tunbridge, whom he salutes with a magnificent compliment—

Cease, cease to ask her name,

The crowned Muse’s noblest theme,

Whose glory by immortal fame

Shall only sounded be.

But if you long to know,

Then look round yonder dazzling row,

Who most does like an angel show

You may be sure ’tis she.

Here are lines about another beauty, who perhaps was not so well pleased

at the poet’s manner of celebrating her—

When Lesbia first I saw, so heavenly fair,

With eyes so bright and with that awful air,

I thought my heart would durst so high aspire

As bold as his who snatched celestial fire.

But soon as e’er the beauteous idiot spoke,

Forth from her coral lips such folly broke;

Like balm the trickling nonsense heal’d my wound,

And what her eyes enthralled, her tongue unbound.

Amoret is a cleverer woman than the lovely Lesbia, but the poet does not

seem to respect one much more than the other; and describes both with

exquisite satirical humour—

Fair Amoret is gone astray,

Pursue and seek her every lover;

I’ll tell the signs by which you may

The wandering shepherdess discover.

Coquet and coy at once her air,

Both studied, though both seem neglected;

Careless she is with artful care,

Affecting to be unaffected.

With skill her eyes dart every glance,

Yet change so soon you’d ne’er suspect them;

For she’d persuade they wound by chance,

Though certain aim and art direct them.

She likes herself, yet others hates

For that which in herself she prizes;

And, while she laughs at them, forgets

She is the thing which she despises.

What could Amoret have done to bring down such shafts of ridicule upon

her? Could she have resisted the irresistible Mr. Congreve? Could anybody?

Could Sabina, when she woke and heard such a bard singing under her

window. See, he writes—

See! see, she wakes—Sabina wakes!

And now the sun begins to rise:

Less glorious is the morn, that breaks

From his bright beams, than her fair eyes.

With light united day they give;

But different fates ere night fulfil:

How many by his warmth will live!

How many will her coldness kill!

Are you melted? Don’t you think him a divine man? If not touched by the

brilliant Sabina, hear the devout Selinda:—

Pious Selinda goes to prayers,

If I but ask her favour;

And yet the silly fool’s in tears,

If she believes I’ll leave her:

Would I were free from this restraint,

Or else had hopes to win her:

Would she could make of me a saint,

Or I of her a sinner!

What a conquering air there is about these! What an irresistible Mr.

Congreve it is! Sinner! of course he will be a sinner, the delightful

rascal! Win her; of course he will win her, the victorious rogue! He knows

he will: he must—with such a grace, with such a fashion, with such a

splendid embroidered suit—you see him with red-heeled shoes deliciously

turned out, passing a fair jewelled hand through his dishevelled periwig,

and delivering a killing ogle along with his scented billet. And Sabina?

What a comparison that is between the nymph and the sun! The sun gives

Sabina the _pas_, and does not venture to rise before her ladyship: the

morn’s _bright beams_ are less glorious than her _fair eyes_: but before

night everybody will be frozen by her glances: everybody but one lucky

rogue who shall be nameless: Louis Quatorze in all his glory is hardly

more splendid than our Phoebus Apollo of the Mall and Spring Garden.(71)

When Voltaire came to visit the great Congreve, the latter rather affected

to despise his literary reputation, and in this perhaps the great Congreve

was not far wrong.(72) A touch of Steele’s tenderness is worth all his

finery—a flash of Swift’s lightning—a beam of Addison’s pure sunshine, and

his tawdry play-house taper is invisible. But the ladies loved him, and he

was undoubtedly a pretty fellow.(73)

We have seen in Swift a humorous philosopher, whose truth frightens one,

and whose laughter makes one melancholy. We have had in Congreve a

humorous observer of another school, to whom the world seems to have no

moral at all, and whose ghastly doctrine seems to be that we should eat,

drink, and be merry when we can, and go to the deuce (if there be a deuce)

when the time comes. We come now to a humour that flows from quite a

different heart and spirit—a wit that makes us laugh and leaves us good

and happy; to one of the kindest benefactors that society has ever had,

and I believe you have divined already that I am about to mention

Addison’s honoured name.

From reading over his writings, and the biographies which we have of him,

amongst which the famous article in the _Edinburgh Review_(74) may be

cited as a magnificent statue of the great writer and moralist of the last

age, raised by the love and the marvellous skill and genius of one of the

most illustrious artists of our own; looking at that calm, fair face, and

clear countenance—those chiselled features pure and cold, I can’t but

fancy that this great man, in this respect, like him of whom we spoke in

the last lecture, was also one of the lonely ones of the world. Such men

have very few equals, and they don’t herd with those. It is in the nature

of such lords of intellect to be solitary—they are in the world but not of

it; and our minor struggles, brawls, successes, pass under them.

Kind, just, serene, impartial, his fortitude not tried beyond easy

endurance, his affections not much used, for his books were his family,

and his society was in public; admirably wiser, wittier, calmer, and more

instructed than almost every man with whom he met, how could Addison

suffer, desire, admire, feel much? I may expect a child to admire me for

being taller or writing more cleverly than she; but how can I ask my

superior to say that I am a wonder when he knows better than I? In

Addison’s days you could scarcely show him a literary performance, a

sermon, or a poem, or a piece of literary criticism, but he felt he could

do better. His justice must have made him indifferent. He didn’t praise,

because he measured his compeers by a higher standard than common people

have.(75) How was he who was so tall to look up to any but the loftiest

genius? He must have stooped to put himself on a level with most men. By

that profusion of graciousness and smiles, with which Goethe or Scott, for

instance, greeted almost every literary beginner, every small literary

adventurer who came to his court and went away charmed from the great

king’s audience, and cuddling to his heart the compliment which his

literary majesty had paid him—each of the two good-natured potentates of

letters brought their star and ribbon into discredit. Everybody had his

majesty’s orders. Everybody had his Majesty’s cheap portrait, on a box

surrounded with diamonds worth twopence a-piece. A very great and just and

wise man ought not to praise indiscriminately, but give his idea of the

truth. Addison praises the ingenious Mr. Pinkethman: Addison praises the

ingenious Mr. Doggett the actor, whose benefit is coming off that night:

Addison praises Don Saltero: Addison praises Milton with all his heart,

bends his knee and frankly pays homage to that imperial genius.(76) But

between those degrees of his men his praise is very scanty. I don’t think

the great Mr. Addison liked young Mr. Pope, the Papist, much; I don’t

think he abused him. But when Mr. Addison’s men abused Mr. Pope, I don’t

think Addison took his pipe out of his mouth to contradict them.(77)

Addison’s father was a clergyman of good repute in Wiltshire, and rose in

the Church.(78) His famous son never lost his clerical training and

scholastic gravity, and was called “a parson in a tye-wig”(79) in London

afterwards at a time when tye-wigs were only worn by the laity, and the

fathers of theology did not think it decent to appear except in a full

bottom. Having been at school at Salisbury, and the Charterhouse, in 1687,

when he was fifteen years old he went to Queen’s College, Oxford, where he

speedily began to distinguish himself by the making of Latin verses. The

beautiful and fanciful poem of _The Pigmies and the Cranes_ is still read

by lovers of that sort of exercise; and verses are extant in honour of

King William, by which it appears that it was the loyal youth’s custom to

toast that sovereign in bumpers of purple Lyaeus; and many more works are

in the collection, including one on the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697, which

was so good that Montague got him a pension of 300_l._ a year, on which

Addison set out on his travels.

During his ten years at Oxford, Addison had deeply imbued himself with the

Latin poetical literature, and had these poets at his fingers’ ends when

he travelled in Italy.(80) His patron went out of office, and his pension

was unpaid: and hearing that this great scholar, now eminent and known to

the _literati_ of Europe (the great Boileau,(81) upon perusal of Mr.

Addison’s elegant hexameters, was first made aware that England was not

altogether a barbarous nation)—hearing that the celebrated Mr. Addison, of

Oxford, proposed to travel as governor to a young gentleman on the grand

tour, the great Duke of Somerset proposed to Mr. Addison to accompany his

son, Lord Hartford.

Mr. Addison was delighted to be of use to his grace and his lordship, his

grace’s son, and expressed himself ready to set forth.

His grace the Duke of Somerset now announced to one of the most famous

scholars of Oxford and Europe that it was his gracious intention to allow

my Lord Hartford’s tutor one hundred guineas per annum. Mr. Addison wrote

back that his services were his grace’s, but he by no means found his

account in the recompense for them. The negotiation was broken off. They

parted with a profusion of _congees_ on one side and the other.

Addison remained abroad for some time, living in the best society of

Europe. How could he do otherwise? He must have been one of the finest

gentlemen the world ever saw: at all moments of life serene and courteous,

cheerful and calm.(82) He could scarcely ever have had a degrading

thought. He might have omitted a virtue or two, or many, but could not

have had many faults committed for which he need blush or turn pale. When

warmed into confidence, his conversation appears to have been so

delightful that the greatest wits sat wrapt and charmed to listen to him.

No man bore poverty and narrow fortune with a more lofty cheerfulness. His

letters to his friends at this period of his life, when he had lost his

Government pension and given up his college chances, are full of courage

and a gay confidence and philosophy: and they are none the worse in my

eyes, and I hope not in those of his last and greatest biographer (though

Mr. Macaulay is bound to own and lament a certain weakness for wine, which

the great and good Joseph Addison notoriously possessed, in common with

countless gentlemen of his time), because some of the letters are written

when his honest hand was shaking a little in the morning after libations

to purple Lyaeus overnight. He was fond of drinking the healths of his

friends: he writes to Wyche,(83) of Hamburgh, gratefully remembering

Wyche’s “hoc”. “I have been drinking your health to-day with Sir Richard

Shirley,” he writes to Bathurst. “I have lately had the honour to meet my

Lord Effingham at Amsterdam, where we have drunk Mr. Wood’s health a

hundred times in excellent champagne,” he writes again. Swift(84)

describes him over his cups, when Joseph yielded to a temptation which

Jonathan resisted. Joseph was of a cold nature, and needed perhaps the

fire of wine to warm his blood. If he was a parson, he wore a tye-wig,

recollect. A better and more Christian man scarcely ever breathed than

Joseph Addison. If he had not that little weakness for wine—why, we could

scarcely have found a fault with him, and could not have liked him as we

do.(85)

At thirty-three years of age, this most distinguished wit, scholar, and

gentleman was without a profession and an income. His book of _Travels_

had failed: his _Dialogues on Medals_ had had no particular success: his

Latin verses, even though reported the best since Virgil, or Statius at

any rate, had not brought him a Government place, and Addison was living

up two shabby pair of stairs in the Haymarket (in a poverty over which old

Samuel Johnson rather chuckles), when in these shabby rooms an emissary

from Government and Fortune came and found him.(86)

A poem was wanted about the Duke of Marlborough’s victory of Blenheim.

Would Mr. Addison write one? Mr. Boyle, afterwards Lord Carleton, took

back the reply to the Lord Treasurer Godolphin, that Mr. Addison would.

When the poem had reached a certain stage, it was carried to Godolphin;

and the last lines which he read were these: