But O my muse! what numbers wilt thou find

To sing the furious troops in battle join’d?

Methinks I hear the drum’s tumultuous sound,

The victors’ shouts and dying groans confound;

The dreadful burst of cannon rend the skies,

And all the thunders of the battle rise.

’Twas then great Marlborough’s mighty soul was proved,

That, in the shock of charging hosts unmoved,

Amidst confusion, horror, and despair,

Examined all the dreadful scenes of war:

In peaceful thought the field of death surveyed,

To fainting squadrons lent the timely aid,

Inspired repulsed battalions to engage,

And taught the doubtful battle where to rage.

So when an angel by divine command,

With rising tempests shakes a guilty land

(Such as of late o’er pale Britannia passed),

Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;

And, pleased the Almighty’s orders to perform,

Rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm.

Addison left off at a good moment. That simile was pronounced to be of the

greatest ever produced in poetry. That angel, that good angel, flew off

with Mr. Addison, and landed him in the place of Commissioner of

Appeals—vice Mr. Locke providentially promoted. In the following year, Mr.

Addison went to Hanover with Lord Halifax, and the year after was made

Under-Secretary of State. O angel visits! you come “few and far between”

to literary gentlemen’s lodgings! Your wings seldom quiver at second-floor

windows now!

You laugh? You think it is in the power of few writers nowadays to call up

such an angel? Well, perhaps not; but permit us to comfort ourselves by

pointing out that there are in the poem of the _Campaign_ some as bad

lines as heart can desire: and to hint that Mr. Addison did very wisely in

not going further with my Lord Godolphin than that angelical simile. Do

allow me, just for a little harmless mischief, to read you some of the

lines which follow. Here is the interview between the Duke and the King of

the Romans after the battle:—

Austria’s young monarch, whose imperial sway

Sceptres and thrones are destined to obey,

Whose boasted ancestry so high extends

That in the pagan gods his lineage ends,

Comes from afar, in gratitude to own

The great supporter of his father’s throne.

What tides of glory to his bosom ran

Clasped in th’ embraces of the godlike man!

How were his eyes with pleasing wonder fixt,

To see such fire with so much sweetness mixt!

Such easy greatness, such a graceful port,

So learned and finished for the camp or court!

How many fourth-form boys at Mr. Addison’s school of Charterhouse could

write as well as that now? The _Campaign_ has blunders, triumphant as it

was; and weak points like all campaigns.(87)

In the year 1718 _Cato_ came out. Swift has left a description of the

first night of the performance. All the laurels of Europe were scarcely

sufficient for the author of this prodigious poem.(88) Laudations of Whig

and Tory chiefs, popular ovations, complimentary garlands from literary

men, translations in all languages, delight and homage from all—save from

John Dennis in a minority of one—Mr. Addison was called the “great Mr.

Addison” after this. The Coffee-house Senate saluted him Divus: it was

heresy to question that decree.

Meanwhile he was writing political papers and advancing in the political

profession. He went Secretary to Ireland. He was appointed Secretary of

State in 1717. And letters of his are extant, bearing date some year or

two before, and written to young Lord Warwick, in which he addresses him

as “my dearest lord”, and asks affectionately about his studies, and

writes very prettily about nightingales, and birds’-nests, which he has

found at Fulham for his lordship. Those nightingales were intended to

warble in the ear of Lord Warwick’s mamma. Addison married her ladyship in

1716; and died at Holland House three years after that splendid but dismal

union.(89)

But it is not for his reputation as the great author of _Cato_ and the

_Campaign_, or for his merits as Secretary of State, or for his rank and

high distinction as my Lady Warwick’s husband, or for his eminence as an

Examiner of political questions on the Whig side, or a Guardian of British

liberties, that we admire Joseph Addison. It is as a Tatler of small talk

and a Spectator of mankind, that we cherish and love him, and owe as much

pleasure to him as to any human being that ever wrote. He came in that

artificial age, and began to speak with his noble, natural voice. He came,

the gentle satirist, who hit no unfair blow; the kind judge who castigated

only in smiling. While Swift went about, hanging and ruthless—a literary

Jeffries—in Addison’s kind court only minor cases were tried: only

peccadilloes and small sins against society: only a dangerous libertinism

in tuckers and hoops;(90) or a nuisance in the abuse of beaux’ canes and

snuff-boxes. It may be a lady is tried for breaking the peace of our

sovereign lady Queen Anne, and ogling too dangerously from the side-box:

or a Templar for beating the watch, or breaking Priscian’s head: or a

citizen’s wife for caring too much for the puppet-show, and too little for

her husband and children: every one of the little sinners brought before

him is amusing, and he dismisses each with the pleasantest penalties and

the most charming words of admonition.

Addison wrote his papers as gaily as if he was going out for a holiday.

When Steele’s _Tatler_ first began his prattle, Addison, then in Ireland,

caught at his friend’s notion, poured in paper after paper, and

contributed the stores of his mind, the sweet fruits of his reading, the

delightful gleanings of his daily observation, with a wonderful profusion,

and as it seemed an almost endless fecundity. He was six-and-thirty years

old: full and ripe. He had not worked crop after crop from his brain,

manuring hastily, subsoiling indifferently, cutting and sowing and cutting

again, like other luckless cultivators of letters. He had not done much as

yet; a few Latin poems—graceful prolusions; a polite book of travels; a

dissertation on medals, not very deep; four acts of a tragedy, a great

classical exercise; and the _Campaign_, a large prize poem that won an

enormous prize. But with his friend’s discovery of the _Tatler_, Addison’s

calling was found, and the most delightful talker in the world began to

speak. He does not go very deep: let gentlemen of a profound genius,

critics accustomed to the plunge of the bathos, console themselves by

thinking that he _couldn’t_ go very deep. There are no traces of suffering

in his writing. He was so good, so honest, so healthy, so cheerfully

selfish, if I must use the word. There is no deep sentiment. I doubt,

until after his marriage, perhaps, whether he ever lost his night’s rest

or his day’s tranquillity about any woman in his life:(91) whereas poor

Dick Steele had capacity enough to melt, and to languish, and to sigh, and

to cry his honest old eyes out, for a dozen. His writings do not show

insight into or reverence for the love of women, which I take to be, one

the consequence of the other. He walks about the world watching their

pretty humours, fashions, follies, flirtations, rivalries; and noting them

with the most charming archness. He sees them in public, in the theatre,

or the assembly, or the puppet-show; or at the toy-shop higgling for

gloves and lace; or at the auction, battling together over a blue

porcelain dragon, or a darling monster in japan; or at church, eyeing the

width of their rivals’ hoops, or the breadth of their laces, as they sweep

down the aisles. Or he looks out of his window at the “Garter” in St.

James’s Street, at Ardelia’s coach, as she blazes to the Drawing-room with

her coronet and six footmen; and remembering that her father was a Turkey

merchant in the City, calculates how many sponges went to purchase her

ear-ring, and how many drums of figs to build her coach-box; or he

demurely watches behind a tree in Spring Garden as Saccharissa (whom he

knows under her mask) trips out of her chair to the alley where Sir

Fopling is waiting. He sees only the public life of women. Addison was one

of the most resolute club-men of his day. He passed many hours daily in

those haunts. Besides drinking, which, alas! is past praying for; you must

know it, he owned, too, ladies that he indulged in that odious practice of

smoking. Poor fellow! He was a man’s man, remember. The only woman he

_did_ know, he didn’t write about. I take it there would not have been

much humour in that story.

He likes to go and sit in the smoking-room at the Grecian, or the Devil;

to pace “Change and the Mall”(92)—to mingle in that great club of the

world—sitting alone in it somehow: having goodwill and kindness for every

single man and woman in it—having need of some habit and custom binding

him to some few; never doing any man a wrong (unless it be a wrong to hint

a little doubt about a man’s parts, and to damn him with faint praise);

and so he looks on the world and plays with the ceaseless humours of all

of us—laughs the kindest laugh—points our neighbour’s foible or

eccentricity out to us with the most good-natured, smiling confidence; and

then, turning over his shoulder, whispers _our_ foibles to our neighbour.

What would Sir Roger de Coverley be without his follies and his charming

little brain-cracks?(93) If the good knight did not call out to the people

sleeping in church, and say “Amen” with such a delightful pomposity: if he

did not make a speech in the assize-court _à propos de bottes_, and merely

to show his dignity to Mr. Spectator:(94) if he did not mistake Madam Doll

Tearsheet for a lady of quality in Temple Garden: if he were wiser than he

is: if he had not his humour to salt his life, and were but a mere English

gentleman and game-preserver—of what worth were he to us? We love him for

his vanities as much as his virtues. What is ridiculous is delightful in

him: we are so fond of him because we laugh at him so. And out of that

laughter, and out of that sweet weakness, and out of those harmless

eccentricities and follies, and out of that touched brain, and out of that

honest manhood and simplicity—we get a result of happiness, goodness,

tenderness, pity, piety; such as, if my audience will think their reading

and hearing over, doctors and divines but seldom have the fortune to

inspire. And why not? Is the glory of Heaven to be sung only by gentlemen

in black coats? Must the truth be only expounded in gown and surplice, and

out of those two vestments can nobody preach it? Commend me to this dear

preacher without orders—this parson in the tye-wig. When this man looks

from the world, whose weaknesses he describes so benevolently, up to the

Heaven which shines over us all, I can hardly fancy a human face lighted

up with a more serene rapture: a human intellect thrilling with a purer

love and adoration than Joseph Addison’s. Listen to him: from your

childhood you have known the verses: but who can hear their sacred music

without love and awe?

Soon as the evening shades prevail,

The moon takes up the wondrous tale,

And nightly to the listening earth,

Repeats the story of her birth;

And all the stars that round her burn,

And all the planets in their turn,

Confirm the tidings as they roll,

And spread the truth from pole to pole.

What though, in solemn silence, all

Move round this dark terrestrial ball;

What though no real voice nor sound,

Among their radiant orbs be found;

In reason’s ear they all rejoice,

And utter forth a glorious voice,

For ever singing as they shine,

The hand that made us is divine.

It seems to me those verses shine like the stars. They shine out of a

great deep calm. When he turns to Heaven, a Sabbath comes over that man’s

mind: and his face lights up from it with a glory of thanks and prayer.

His sense of religion stirs through his whole being. In the fields, in the

town: looking at the birds in the trees: at the children in the streets:

in the morning or in the moonlight: over his books in his own room: in a

happy party at a country merry-making or a town assembly, goodwill and

peace to God’s creatures, and love and awe of Him who made them, fill his

pure heart and shine from his kind face. If Swift’s life was the most

wretched, I think Addison’s was one of the most enviable. A life

prosperous and beautiful—a calm death—an immense fame and affection

afterwards for his happy and spotless name.(95)

Lecture The Third. Steele

What do we look for in studying the history of a past age? Is it to learn

the political transactions and characters of the leading public men? Is it

to make ourselves acquainted with the life and being of the time? If we

set out with the former grave purpose, where is the truth, and who

believes that he has it entire? What character of what great man is known

to you? You can but make guesses as to character more or less happy. In

common life don’t you often judge and misjudge a man’s whole conduct,

setting out from a wrong impression? The tone of a voice, a word said in

joke, or a trifle in behaviour—the cut of his hair or the tie of his

neckcloth may disfigure him in your eyes, or poison your good opinion; or

at the end of years of intimacy it may be your closest friend says

something, reveals something which had previously been a secret, which

alters all your views about him, and shows that he has been acting on

quite a different motive to that which you fancied you knew. And if it is

so with those you know, how much more with those you don’t know? Say, for

example, that I want to understand the character of the Duke of

Marlborough. I read Swift’s history of the times in which he took a part;

the shrewdest of observers and initiated, one would think, into the

politics of the age—he hints to me that Marlborough was a coward, and even

of doubtful military capacity: he speaks of Walpole as a contemptible

boor, and scarcely mentions, except to flout it, the great intrigue of the

Queen’s latter days, which was to have ended in bringing back the

Pretender. Again, I read Marlborough’s life by a copious archdeacon, who

has the command of immense papers, of sonorous language, of what is called

the best information; and I get little or no insight into this secret

motive which, I believe, influenced the whole of Marlborough’s career,

which caused his turnings and windings, his opportune fidelity and

treason, stopped his army almost at Paris gate, and landed him finally on

the Hanoverian side—the winning side; I get, I say, no truth, or only a

portion of it, in the narrative of either writer, and believe that Coxe’s

portrait or Swift’s portrait is quite unlike the real Churchill. I take

this as a single instance, prepared to be as sceptical about any other,

and say to the Muse of History, “O venerable daughter of Mnemosyne, I

doubt every single statement you ever made since your ladyship was a Muse!

For all your grave airs and high pretensions, you are not a whit more

trustworthy than some of your lighter sisters on whom your partisans look

down. You bid me listen to a general’s oration to his soldiers: Nonsense!

He no more made it than Turpin made his dying speech at Newgate. You

pronounce a panegyric of a hero: I doubt it, and say you flatter

outrageously. You utter the condemnation of a loose character: I doubt it,

and think you are prejudiced and take the side of the Dons. You offer me

an autobiography: I doubt all autobiographies I ever read except those,

perhaps, of Mr. Robinson Crusoe, Mariner, and writers of his class.

_These_ have no object in setting themselves right with the public or

their own consciences; these have no motive for concealment or

half-truths; these call for no more confidence than I can cheerfully give,

and do not force me to tax my credulity or to fortify it by evidence. I

take up a volume of Dr. Smollett, or a volume of the _Spectator_, and say

the fiction carries a greater amount of truth in solution than the volume

which purports to be all true. Out of the fictitious book I get the

expression of the life of the time; of the manners, of the movement, the

dress, the pleasures, the laughter, the ridicules of society—the old times

live again, and I travel in the old country of England. Can the heaviest

historian do more for me?”

As we read in these delightful volumes of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_,

the past age returns, the England of our ancestors is revivified. The

Maypole rises in the Strand again in London; the churches are thronged

with daily worshippers; the beaux are gathering in the coffee-houses; the

gentry are going to the Drawing-room; the ladies are thronging to the

toy-shops; the chairmen are jostling in the streets; the footmen are

running with links before the chariots, or fighting round the theatre

doors. In the country I see the young Squire riding to Eton with his

servants behind him, and Will Wimble, the friend of the family, to see him

safe. To make that journey from the Squire’s and back, Will is a week on

horseback. The coach takes five days between London and Bath. The judges

and the bar ride the circuit. If my lady comes to town in her

post-chariot, her people carry pistols to fire a salute on Captain

Macheath if he should appear, and her couriers ride ahead to prepare

apartments for her at the great caravanserais on the road; Boniface

receives her under the creaking sign of the “Bell” or the “Ram”, and he

and his chamberlains bow her up the great stair to the state-apartments,

whilst her carriage rumbles into the courtyard, where the Exeter “Fly” is

housed that performs the journey in eight days, God willing, having

achieved its daily flight of twenty miles, and landed its passengers for

supper and sleep. The curate is taking his pipe in the kitchen, where the

Captain’s man—having hung up his master’s half-pike—is at his bacon and

eggs, bragging of Ramillies and Malplaquet to the townsfolk, who have

their club in the chimney-corner. The Captain is ogling the chambermaid in

the wooden gallery, or bribing her to know who is the pretty young

mistress that has come in the coach? The pack-horses are in the great

stable, and the drivers and ostlers carousing in the tap. And in Mrs.

Landlady’s bar, over a glass of strong waters, sits a gentleman of

military appearance, who travels with pistols, as all the rest of the

world does, and has a rattling grey mare in the stables which will be

saddled and away with its owner half an hour before the “Fly” sets out on

its last day’s flight. And some five miles on the road, as the Exeter

“Fly” comes jingling and creaking onwards, it will suddenly be brought to

a halt by a gentleman on a grey mare, with a black vizard on his face, who

thrusts a long pistol into the coach window, and bids the company to hand

out their purses.... It must have been no small pleasure even to sit in

the great kitchen in those days, and see the tide of humankind pass by. We

arrive at places now, but we travel no more. Addison talks jocularly of a

difference of manner and costume being quite perceivable at Staines, where

there passed a young fellow “with a very tolerable periwig”, though, to be

sure, his hat was out of fashion, and had a Ramillies cock. I would have

liked to travel in those days (being of that class of travellers who are

proverbially pretty easy _coram latronibus_) and have seen my friend with

the grey mare and the black vizard. Alas! there always came a day in the

life of that warrior when it was the fashion to accompany him as he

passed—without his black mask, and with a nosegay in his hand, accompanied

by halberdiers and attended by the sheriff,—in a carriage without springs,

and a clergyman jolting beside him to a spot close by Cumberland Gate and

the Marble Arch, where a stone still records that here Tyburn turnpike

stood. What a change in a century; in a few years! Within a few yards of

that gate the fields began: the fields of his exploits, behind the hedges

of which he lurked and robbed. A great and wealthy city has grown over

those meadows. Were a man brought to die there now, the windows would be

closed and the inhabitants keep their houses in sickening horror. A

hundred years back, people crowded to see that last act of a highwayman’s

life, and make jokes on it. Swift laughed at him, grimly advising him to

provide a Holland shirt and white cap crowned with a crimson or black

ribbon for his exit, to mount the cart cheerfully—shake hands with the

hangman, and so—farewell. Gay wrote the most delightful ballads, and made

merry over the same hero. Contrast these with the writings of our present

humourists! Compare those morals and ours—those manners and ours!

We can’t tell—you would not bear to be told the whole truth regarding

those men and manners. You could no more suffer in a British drawing-room,

under the reign of Queen Victoria, a fine gentleman or fine lady of Queen

Anne’s time, or hear what they heard and said, than you would receive an

ancient Briton. It is as one reads about savages, that one contemplates

the wild ways, the barbarous feasts, the terrific pastimes, of the men of

pleasure of that age. We have our fine gentlemen, and our “fast men”;

permit me to give you an idea of one particularly fast nobleman of Queen

Anne’s days, whose biography has been preserved to us by the law

reporters.

In 1691, when Steele was a boy at school, my Lord Mohun was tried by his

peers for the murder of William Mountford, comedian. In Howell’s _State

Trials_, the reader will find not only an edifying account of this

exceedingly fast nobleman, but of the times and manners of those days. My

lord’s friend, a Captain Hill, smitten with the charms of the beautiful

Mrs. Bracegirdle, and anxious to marry her at all hazards, determined to

carry her off, and for this purpose hired a hackney-coach with six horses,

and a half-dozen of soldiers, to aid him in the storm. The coach with a

pair of horses (the four leaders being in waiting elsewhere) took its

station opposite my Lord Craven’s house in Drury Lane, by which door Mrs.

Bracegirdle was to pass on her way from the theatre. As she passed in

company of her mamma and a friend, Mr. Page, the Captain seized her by the

hand, the soldiers hustled Mr. Page and attacked him sword in hand, and

Captain Hill and his noble friend endeavoured to force Madam Bracegirdle

into the coach. Mr. Page called for help: the population of Drury Lane

rose: it was impossible to effect the capture; and bidding the soldiers go

about their business, and the coach to drive off, Hill let go of his prey

sulkily, and he waited for other opportunities of revenge. The man of whom

he was most jealous was Will Mountford, the comedian; Will removed, he

thought Mrs. Bracegirdle might be his: and accordingly the Captain and his

lordship lay that night in wait for Will, and as he was coming out of a

house in Norfolk Street, while Mohun engaged him in talk, Hill, in the

words of the Attorney-General, made a pass and run him clean through the

body.

Sixty-one of my lord’s peers finding him not guilty of murder, while but

fourteen found him guilty, this very fast nobleman was discharged: and

made his appearance seven years after in another trial for murder—when he,

my Lord Warwick, and three gentlemen of the military profession were

concerned in the fight which ended in the death of Captain Coote.

This jolly company were drinking together at Lockit’s in Charing Cross,

when angry words arose between Captain Coote and Captain French; whom my

Lord Mohun and my lord the Earl of Warwick(96) and Holland endeavoured to

pacify. My Lord Warwick was a dear friend of Captain Coote, lent him a

hundred pounds to buy his commission in the Guards; once when the captain

was arrested for 13_l_. by his tailor, my lord lent him five guineas,

often paid his reckoning for him, and showed him other offices of

friendship. On this evening the disputants, French and Coote, being

separated whilst they were upstairs, unluckily stopped to drink ale again

at the bar of Lockit’s. The row began afresh—Coote lunged at French over

the bar, and at last all six called for chairs, and went to Leicester

Fields, where they fell to. Their lordships engaged on the side of Captain

Coote. My Lord of Warwick was severely wounded in the hand, Mr. French

also was stabbed, but honest Captain Coote got a couple of wounds—one

especially, “a wound in the left side just under the short ribs, and

piercing through the diaphragma,” which did for Captain Coote. Hence the

trials of my Lords Warwick and Mohun: hence the assemblage of peers, the

report of the transaction, in which these defunct fast men still live for

the observation of the curious. My Lord of Warwick is brought to the bar

by the Deputy Governor of the Tower of London, having the axe carried

before him by the gentleman gaoler, who stood with it at the bar at the

right hand of the prisoner, turning the edge from him; the prisoner, at

his approach, making three bows, one to his grace the Lord High Steward,

the other to the peers on each hand; and his grace and the peers return

the salute. And besides these great personages, august in periwigs, and

nodding to the right and left, a host of the small come up out of the past

and pass before us—the jolly captains brawling in the tavern, and laughing

and cursing over their cups—the drawer that serves, the bar-girl that

waits, the bailiff on the prowl, the chairmen trudging through the black

lampless streets, and smoking their pipes by the railings, whilst swords

are clashing in the garden within. “Help there! a gentleman is hurt”: the

chairmen put up their pipes, and help the gentleman over the railings, and

carry him, ghastly and bleeding, to the bagnio in Long Acre, where they

knock up the surgeon—a pretty tall gentleman—but that wound under the

short ribs has done for him. Surgeon, lords, captains, bailiffs, chairmen,

and gentleman gaoler with your axe, where be you now? The gentleman

axeman’s head is off his own shoulders; the lords and judges can wag

theirs no longer; the bailiff’s writs have ceased to run; the honest

chairmen’s pipes are put out, and with their brawny calves they have

walked away into Hades—all as irrecoverably done for as Will Mountford or

Captain Coote. The subject of our night’s lecture saw all these

people—rode in Captain Coote’s company of the Guards very probably—wrote

and sighed for Bracegirdle, went home tipsy in many a chair, after many a

bottle, in many a tavern—fled from many a bailiff.

In 1709, when the publication of the _Tatler_ began, our

great-great-grandfathers must have seized upon that new and delightful

paper with much such eagerness as lovers of light literature in a later

day exhibited when the Waverley novels appeared, upon which the public

rushed, forsaking that feeble entertainment of which the Miss Porters, the

Anne of Swanseas, and worthy Mrs. Radcliffe herself, with her dreary

castles and exploded old ghosts, had had pretty much the monopoly. I have

looked over many of the comic books with which our ancestors amused

themselves, from the novels of Swift’s coadjutrix, Mrs. Manley, the

delectable author of the _New Atlantis_, to the facetious productions of

Tom Durfey, and Tom Brown, and Ned Ward, writer of the _London Spy_ and

several other volumes of ribaldry. The slang of the taverns and

ordinaries, the wit of the bagnios, form the strongest part of the farrago

of which these libels are composed. In the excellent newspaper collection

at the British Museum, you may see, besides the _Craftsman_ and _Post

Boy_, specimens, and queer specimens they are, of the higher literature of

Queen Anne’s time. Here is an abstract from a notable journal bearing

date, Wednesday, October 13th, 1708, and entitled _The British Apollo; or,

Curious Amusements for the Ingenious, by a Society of Gentlemen_. The

_British Apollo_ invited and professed to answer questions upon all

subjects of wit, morality, science, and even religion; and two out of its

four pages are filled with queries and replies much like some of the

oracular penny prints of the present time.

One of the first querists, referring to the passage that a bishop should

be the husband of one wife, argues that polygamy is justifiable in the

laity. The society of gentlemen conducting the _British Apollo_ are posed

by this casuist, and promise to give him an answer. Celinda then wishes to

know from “the gentlemen”, concerning the souls of the dead, whether they

shall have the satisfaction to know those whom they most valued in this

transitory life. The gentlemen of the _Apollo_ give but cold comfort to

poor Celinda. They are inclined to think not: for, say they, since every

inhabitant of those regions will be infinitely dearer than here are our

nearest relatives—what have we to do with a partial friendship in that

happy place? Poor Celinda! it may have been a child or a lover whom she

had lost, and was pining after, when the oracle of _British Apollo_ gave

her this dismal answer. She has solved the question for herself by this

time, and knows quite as well as the society of gentlemen.

From theology we come to physics, and Q. asks, “Why does hot water freeze

sooner than cold?” Apollo replies, “Hot water cannot be said to freeze

sooner than cold, but water once heated and cold, may be subject to freeze

by the evaporation of the spirituous parts of the water, which renders it

less able to withstand the power of frosty weather.”

The next query is rather a delicate one. “You, Mr. Apollo, who are said to

be the God of Wisdom, pray give us the reason why kissing is so much in

fashion: what benefit one receives by it, and who was the inventor, and

you will oblige Corinna.” To this queer demand the lips of Phoebus,

smiling, answer: “Pretty, innocent Corinna! Apollo owns that he was a

little surprised by your kissing question, particularly at that part of it

where you desire to know the benefit you receive by it. Ah! madam, had you

a lover, you would not come to Apollo for a solution; since there is no

dispute but the kisses of mutual lovers give infinite satisfaction. As to

its invention, ’tis certain nature was its author, and it began with the

first courtship.”

After a column more of questions, follow nearly two pages of poems, signed

by Philander, Armenia, and the like, and chiefly on the tender passion;

and the paper wound up with a letter from Leghorn, an account of the Duke

of Marlborough and Prince Eugene before Lille, and proposals for

publishing two sheets on the present state of Aethiopia, by Mr. Hill; all

of which is printed for the authors by J. Mayo, at the Printing Press

against Water Lane in Fleet Street. What a change it must have been—how

Apollo’s oracles must have been struck dumb, when the _Tatler_ appeared,

and scholars, gentlemen, men of the world, men of genius, began to speak!

Shortly before the Boyne was fought, and young Swift had begun to make

acquaintance with English Court manners and English servitude, in Sir

William Temple’s family, another Irish youth was brought to learn his

humanities at the old school of Charterhouse, near Smithfield; to which

foundation he had been appointed by James Duke of Ormond, a governor of

the House, and a patron of the lad’s family. The boy was an orphan, and

described, twenty years after, with a sweet pathos and simplicity, some of

the earliest recollections of a life which was destined to be chequered by

a strange variety of good and evil fortune.

I am afraid no good report could be given by his masters and ushers of

that thick-set, square-faced, black-eyed, soft-hearted little Irish boy.

He was very idle. He was whipped deservedly a great number of times.

Though he had very good parts of his own, he got other boys to do his

lessons for him, and only took just as much trouble as should enable him

to scuffle through his exercises, and by good fortune escape the flogging

block. One hundred and fifty years after, I have myself inspected, but

only as an amateur, that instrument of righteous torture still existing,

and in occasional use, in a secluded private apartment of the old

Charterhouse School; and have no doubt it is the very counterpart, if not

the ancient and interesting machine itself, at which poor Dick Steele

submitted himself to the tormentors.

Besides being very kind, lazy, and good-natured, this boy went invariably

into debt with the tart-woman; ran out of bounds, and entered into

pecuniary, or rather promissory, engagements with the neighbouring

lollipop-vendors and piemen—exhibited an early fondness and capacity for

drinking mum and sack, and borrowed from all his comrades who had money to

lend. I have no sort of authority for the statements here made of Steele’s

early life; but if the child is father of the man, the father of young

Steele of Merton, who left Oxford without taking a degree, and entered the

Life Guards—the father of Captain Steele of Lucas’s Fusiliers, who got his

company through the patronage of my Lord Cutts—the father of Mr. Steele

the Commissioner of Stamps, the editor of the _Gazette_, the _Tatler_, and

_Spectator_, the expelled Member of Parliament, and the author of the

_Tender Husband_ and the _Conscious Lovers_; if man and boy resembled each

other, Dick Steele the schoolboy must have been one of the most generous,

good-for-nothing, amiable little creatures that ever conjugated the verb

_tupto_, I beat, _tuptomai_, I am whipped, in any school in Great Britain.

Almost every gentleman who does me the honour to hear me will remember

that the very greatest character which he has seen in the course of his

life, and the person to whom he has looked up with the greatest wonder and

reverence, was the head boy at his school. The schoolmaster himself hardly

inspires such an awe. The head boy construes as well as the schoolmaster

himself. When he begins to speak the hall is hushed, and every little boy

listens. He writes off copies of Latin verses as melodiously as Virgil. He

is good-natured, and, his own masterpieces achieved, pours out other

copies of verses for other boys with an astonishing ease and fluency; the

idle ones only trembling lest they should be discovered on giving in their

exercises, and whipped because their poems were too good. I have seen

great men in my time, but never such a great one as that head boy of my

childhood: we all thought he must be Prime Minister, and I was

disappointed on meeting him in after-life to find he was no more than six

feet high.

Dick Steele, the Charterhouse gownboy, contracted such an admiration in

the years of his childhood, and retained it faithfully through his life.

Through the school and through the world, whithersoever his strange

fortune led this erring, wayward, affectionate creature, Joseph Addison

was always his head boy. Addison wrote his exercises. Addison did his best

themes. He ran on Addison’s messages: fagged for him and blacked his

shoes: to be in Joe’s company was Dick’s greatest pleasure; and he took a

sermon or a caning from his monitor with the most boundless reverence,

acquiescence, and affection.(97)

Steele found Addison a stately college Don at Oxford, and himself did not

make much figure at this place. He wrote a comedy, which, by the advice of

a friend, the humble fellow burned there; and some verses, which I dare

say are as sublime as other gentlemen’s composition at that age; but being

smitten with a sudden love for military glory, he threw up the cap and

gown for the saddle and bridle, and rode privately in the Horse Guards, in

the Duke of Ormond’s troop—the second—and, probably, with the rest of the

gentlemen of his troop, “all mounted on black horses with white feathers

in their hats, and scarlet coats richly laced,” marched by King William,

in Hyde Park, in November, 1699, and a great show of the nobility, besides

twenty thousand people, and above a thousand coaches. “The Guards had just

got their new clothes,” the _London Post_ said: “they are extraordinary

grand, and thought to be the finest body of horse in the world.” But

Steele could hardly have seen any actual service. He who wrote about

himself, his mother, his wife, his loves, his debts, his friends, and the

wine he drank, would have told us of his battles if he had seen any. His

old patron, Ormond, probably got him his cornetcy in the Guards, from

which he was promoted to be a captain in Lucas’s Fusiliers, getting his

company through the patronage of Lord Cutts, whose secretary he was, and

to whom he dedicated his work called the _Christian Hero_. As for Dick,

whilst writing this ardent devotional work, he was deep in debt, in drink,

and in all the follies of the town; it is related that all the officers of

Lucas’s, and the gentlemen of the Guards, laughed at Dick.(98) And in

truth a theologian in liquor is not a respectable object, and a hermit,

though he may be out at elbows, must not be in debt to the tailor. Steele

says of himself that he was always sinning and repenting. He beat his

breast and cried most piteously when he _did_ repent: but as soon as

crying had made him thirsty, he fell to sinning again. In that charming

paper in the _Tatler_, in which he records his father’s death, his

mother’s griefs, his own most solemn and tender emotions, he says he is

interrupted by the arrival of a hamper of wine, “the same as is to be sold

at Garraway’s, next week,” upon the receipt of which he sends for three

friends, and they fall to instantly, “drinking two bottles apiece, with

great benefit to themselves, and not separating till two o’clock in the

morning.”

His life was so. Jack the drawer was always interrupting it, bringing him

a bottle from the “Rose”, or inviting him over to a bout there with Sir

Plume and Mr. Diver; and Dick wiped his eyes, which were whimpering over

his papers, took down his laced hat, put on his sword and wig, kissed his

wife and children, told them a lie about pressing business, and went off

to the “Rose” to the jolly fellows.

While Mr. Addison was abroad, and after he came home in rather a dismal

way to wait upon Providence in his shabby lodging in the Haymarket, young

Captain Steele was cutting a much smarter figure than that of his

classical friend of Charterhouse Cloister and Maudlin Walk. Could not some

painter give an interview between the gallant captain of Lucas’s, with his

hat cocked, and his lace, and his face too, a trifle tarnished with drink,

and that poet, that philosopher, pale, proud, and poor, his friend and

monitor of schooldays, of all days? How Dick must have bragged about his

chances and his hopes, and the fine company he kept, and the charms of the

reigning toasts and popular actresses, and the number of bottles that he

and my lord and some other pretty fellows had cracked overnight at the

“Devil”, or the “Garter”! Cannot one fancy Joseph Addison’s calm smile and

cold grey eyes following Dick for an instant, as he struts down the Mall,

to dine with the Guard at St. James’s, before he turns, with his sober

pace and threadbare suit, to walk back to his lodgings up the two pair of

stairs? Steele’s name was down for promotion, Dick always said himself, in

the glorious, pious, and immortal William’s last table-book. Jonathan

Swift’s name had been written there by the same hand too.

Our worthy friend, the author of the _Christian Hero_, continued to make

no small figure about town by the use of his wits.(99) He was appointed

Gazetteer: he wrote, in 1703, _The Tender Husband_, his second play, in

which there is some delightful farcical writing, and of which he fondly

owned in after-life, and when Addison was no more, that there were “many

applauded strokes” from Addison’s beloved hand.(100) Is it not a pleasant

partnership to remember? Can’t one fancy Steele full of spirits and youth,

leaving his gay company to go to Addison’s lodging, where his friend sits

in the shabby sitting-room, quite serene, and cheerful, and poor? In 1704,

Steele came on the town with another comedy, and behold it was so moral

and religious, as poor Dick insisted, so dull the town thought, that the

_Lying Lover_ was damned.

Addison’s hour of success now came, and he was able to help our friend,

the _Christian Hero_, in such a way, that, if there had been any chance of

keeping that poor tipsy champion upon his legs, his fortune was safe, and

his competence assured. Steele procured the place of Commissioner of

Stamps: he wrote so richly, so gracefully often, so kindly always, with

such a pleasant wit and easy frankness, with such a gush of good spirits

and good humour, that his early papers may be compared to Addison’s own,

and are to be read, by a male reader at least, with quite an equal

pleasure.(101)

After the _Tatler_, in 1711, the famous _Spectator_ made its appearance,

and this was followed, at various intervals, by many periodicals under the

same editor—the _Guardian_—the _Englishman_—the _Lover_, whose love was

rather insipid—the _Reader_, of whom the public saw no more after his

second appearance—the _Theatre_, under the pseudonym of Sir John Edgar,

which Steele wrote, while Governor of the Royal Company of Comedians, to

which post, and to that of Surveyor of the Royal Stables at Hampton Court,

and to the Commission of the Peace for Middlesex, and to the honour of

knighthood, Steele had been preferred soon after the accession of George

I, whose cause honest Dick had nobly fought, through disgrace and danger,

against the most formidable enemies, against traitors and bullies, against

Bolingbroke and Swift in the last reign. With the arrival of the King,

that splendid conspiracy broke up; and a golden opportunity came to Dick

Steele, whose hand, alas, was too careless to grip it.

Steele married twice; and outlived his places, his schemes, his wife, his

income, his health, and almost everything but his kind heart. That ceased

to trouble him in 1729, when he died, worn out and almost forgotten by his

contemporaries, in Wales, where he had the remnant of a property.

Posterity has been kinder to this amiable creature; all women especially

are bound to be grateful to Steele, as he was the first of our writers who

really seemed to admire and respect them. Congreve the Great, who alludes

to the low estimation in which women were held in Elizabeth’s time, as a

reason why the women of Shakespeare make so small a figure in the poet’s

dialogues, though he can himself pay splendid compliments to women, yet

looks on them as mere instruments of gallantry, and destined, like the

most consummate fortifications, to fall, after a certain time, before the

arts and bravery of the besieger, man. There is a letter of Swift’s,

entitled “Advice to a very Young Married Lady”, which shows the Dean’s

opinion of the female society of his day, and that if he despised man he

utterly scorned women too. No lady of our time could be treated by any

man, were he ever so much a wit or Dean, in such a tone of insolent

patronage and vulgar protection. In this performance, Swift hardly takes

pains to hide his opinion that a woman is a fool: tells her to read books,

as if reading was a novel accomplishment; and informs her that “not one

gentleman’s daughter in a thousand has been brought to read or understand

her own natural tongue”. Addison laughs at women equally; but, with the

gentleness and politeness of his nature, smiles at them and watches them,

as if they were harmless, halfwitted, amusing, pretty creatures, only made

to be men’s playthings. It was Steele who first began to pay a manly

homage to their goodness and understanding, as well as to their tenderness

and beauty.(102) In his comedies, the heroes do not rant and rave about

the divine beauties of Gloriana or Statira, as the characters were made to

do in the chivalry romances and the high-flown dramas just going out of

vogue, but Steele admires women’s virtue, acknowledges their sense, and

adores their purity and beauty, with an ardour and strength which should

win the goodwill of all women to their hearty and respectful champion. It

is this ardour, this respect, this manliness, which makes his comedies so

pleasant and their heroes such fine gentlemen. He paid the finest

compliment to a woman that perhaps ever was offered. Of one woman, whom

Congreve had also admired and celebrated, Steele says, that “to have loved

her was a liberal education”. “How often,” he says, dedicating a volume to

his wife, “how often has your tenderness removed pain from my sick head,

how often anguish from my afflicted heart! If there are such beings as

guardian angels, they are thus employed. I cannot believe one of them to

be more good in inclination, or more charming in form than my wife.” His

breast seems to warm and his eyes to kindle when he meets with a good and

beautiful woman, and it is with his heart as well as with his hat that he

salutes her. About children, and all that relates to home, he is not less

tender, and more than once speaks in apology of what he calls his

softness. He would have been nothing without that delightful weakness. It

is that which gives his works their worth and his style its charm. It,

like his life, is full of faults and careless blunders; and redeemed, like

that, by his sweet and compassionate nature.

We possess of poor Steele’s wild and chequered life some of the most

curious memoranda that ever were left of a man’s biography.(103) Most

men’s letters, from Cicero down to Walpole, or down to the great men of

our own time, if you will, are doctored compositions, and written with an

eye suspicious towards posterity. That dedication of Steele’s to his wife

is an artificial performance, possibly; at least, it is written with that

degree of artifice which an orator uses in arranging a statement for the

House, or a poet employs in preparing a sentiment in verse or for the

stage. But there are some 400 letters of Dick Steele’e to his wife, which

that thrifty woman preserved accurately, and which could have been written

but for her and her alone. They contain details of the business,

pleasures, quarrels, reconciliations of the pair; they have all the

genuineness of conversation; they are as artless as a child’s prattle, and

as confidential as a curtain-lecture. Some are written from the

printing-office, where he is waiting for the proofsheets of his _Gazette_,

or his _Tatler_; some are written from the tavern, whence he promises to

come to his wife “within a pint of wine”, and where he has given a

rendezvous to a friend, or a money-lender: some are composed in a high

state of vinous excitement, when his head is flustered with burgundy, and

his heart abounds with amorous warmth for his darling Prue: some are under

the influence of the dismal headache and repentance next morning: some,

alas, are from the lock-up house, where the lawyers have impounded him,

and where he is waiting for bail. You trace many years of the poor

fellow’s career in these letters. In September, 1707, from which day she

began to save the letters, he married the beautiful Mistress Scurlock. You

have his passionate protestations to the lady; his respectful proposals to

her mamma; his private prayer to Heaven when the union so ardently desired

was completed; his fond professions of contrition and promises of

amendment, when, immediately after his marriage, there began to be just

cause for the one and need for the other.

Captain Steele took a house for his lady upon their marriage, “the third

door from Germain Street, left hand of Berry Street,” and the next year he

presented his wife with a country house at Hampton. It appears she had a

chariot and pair, and sometimes four horses: he himself enjoyed a little

horse for his own riding. He paid, or promised to pay, his barber fifty

pounds a year, and always went abroad in a laced coat and a large

black-buckled periwig, that must have cost somebody fifty guineas. He was

rather a well-to-do gentleman, Captain Steele, with the proceeds of his

estates in Barbadoes (left to him by his first wife), his income as a

writer of the _Gazette_, and his office of gentleman waiter to his Royal

Highness Prince George. His second wife brought him a fortune too. But it

is melancholy to relate, that with these houses and chariots and horses

and income, the Captain was constantly in want of money, for which his

beloved bride was asking as constantly. In the course of a few pages we

begin to find the shoemaker calling for money, and some directions from

the Captain, who has not thirty pounds to spare. He sends his wife, “the

beautifullest object in the world,” as he calls her, and evidently in

reply to applications of her own, which have gone the way of all waste

paper, and lighted Dick’s pipes, which were smoked a hundred and forty

years ago—he sends his wife now a guinea, then a half-guinea, then a

couple of guineas, then half a pound of tea; and again no money and no tea

at all, but a promise that his darling Prue shall have some in a day or

two: or a request, perhaps, that she will send over his night-gown and

shaving-plate to the temporary lodging where the nomadic captain is lying,

hidden from the bailiffs. Oh that a Christian hero and late captain in

Lucas’s should be afraid of a dirty sheriff’s officer! That the pink and

pride of chivalry should turn pale before a writ! It stands to record in

poor Dick’s own handwriting; the queer collection is preserved at the

British Museum to this present day; that the rent of the nuptial house in

Jermyn Street, sacred to unutterable tenderness and Prue, and three doors

from Bury Street, was not paid until after the landlord had put in an

execution on Captain Steele’s furniture. Addison sold the house and

furniture at Hampton, and, after deducting the sum in which his

incorrigible friend was indebted to him, handed over the residue of the

proceeds of the sale to poor Dick, who wasn’t in the least angry at

Addison’s summary proceeding, and I dare say was very glad of any sale or

execution, the result of which was to give him a little ready money.

Having a small house in Jermyn Street for which he couldn’t pay, and a

country house at Hampton on which he had borrowed money, nothing must

content Captain Dick but the taking, in 1712, a much finer, larger, and

grander house, in Bloomsbury Square; where his unhappy landlord got no

better satisfaction than his friend in St. James’s, and where it is

recorded that Dick, giving a grand entertainment, had a half-dozen

queer-looking fellows in livery to wait upon his noble guests, and

confessed that his servants were bailiffs to a man. “I fared like a

distressed prince,” the kindly prodigal writes, generously complimenting

Addison for his assistance in the _Tatler_,—“I fared like a distressed

prince, who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid. I was undone by my

auxiliary; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without

dependence on him.” Poor, needy Prince of Bloomsbury! think of him in his

palace, with his allies from Chancery Lane ominously guarding him.

All sorts of stories are told indicative of his recklessness and his good

humour. One narrated by Dr. Hoadly is exceedingly characteristic; it shows

the life of the time: and our poor friend very weak, but very kind both in

and out of his cups.

“My father” (says Dr. John Hoadly, the bishop’s son)—“when Bishop of

Bangor, was, by invitation, present at one of the Whig meetings, held at

the ‘Trumpet’, in Shire Lane, when Sir Richard, in his zeal, rather

exposed himself, having the double duty of the day upon him, as well to

celebrate the immortal memory of King William, it being the 4th of

November, as to drink his friend Addison up to conversation pitch, whose

phlegmatic constitution was hardly warmed for society by that time. Steele

was not fit for it. Two remarkable circumstances happened. John Sly, the

hatter of facetious memory, was in the house; and John, pretty mellow,

took it into his head to come into the company on his knees, with a

tankard of ale in his hand to drink off to the _immortal memory_, and to

return in the same manner. Steele, sitting next my father, whispered

him—‘_Do laugh. It is humanity to laugh._’ Sir Richard, in the evening,

being too much in the same condition, was put into a chair, and sent home.

Nothing would serve him but being carried to the Bishop of Bangor’s, late

as it was. However, the chairmen carried him home, and got him upstairs,

when his great complaisance would wait on them downstairs, which he did,

and then was got quietly to bed.”(104)

There is another amusing story which, I believe, that renowned collector,

Mr. Joseph Miller, or his successors, have incorporated into their work.

Sir Richard Steele, at a time when he was much occupied with theatrical

affairs, built himself a pretty private theatre, and, before it was opened

to his friends and guests, was anxious to try whether the hall was well

adapted for hearing. Accordingly he placed himself in the most remote part

of the gallery, and begged the carpenter who had built the house to speak

up from the stage. The man at first said that he was unaccustomed to

public speaking, and did not know what to say to his honour; but the

good-natured knight called out to him to say whatever was uppermost; and,

after a moment, the carpenter began, in a voice perfectly audible: “Sir

Richard Steele!” he said, “for three months past me and my men has been

a-working in this theatre, and we’ve never seen the colour of your

honour’s money: we will be very much obliged if you’ll pay it directly,

for until you do we won’t drive in another nail.” Sir Richard said that

his friend’s elocution was perfect, but that he didn’t like his subject

much.

The great charm of Steele’s writing is its naturalness. He wrote so

quickly and carelessly, that he was forced to make the reader his

confidant, and had not the time to deceive him. He had a small share of

book-learning, but a vast acquaintance with the world. He had known men

and taverns. He had lived with gownsmen, with troopers, with gentleman

ushers of the Court, with men and women of fashion; with authors and wits,

with the inmates of the spunging-houses, and with the frequenters of all

the clubs and coffee-houses in the town. He was liked in all company

because he liked it; and you like to see his enjoyment as you like to see

the glee of a box full of children at the pantomime. He was not of those

lonely ones of the earth whose greatness obliged them to be solitary; on

the contrary, he admired, I think, more than any man who ever wrote; and

full of hearty applause and sympathy, wins upon you by calling you to

share his delight and good humour. His laugh rings through the whole

house. He must have been invaluable at a tragedy, and have cried as much

as the most tender young lady in the boxes. He has a relish for beauty and

goodness wherever he meets it. He admired Shakespeare affectionately, and

more than any man of his time; and, according to his generous expansive

nature, called upon all his company to like what he liked himself. He did

not damn with faint praise: he was in the world and of it; and his

enjoyment of life presents the strangest contrast to Swift’s savage

indignation and Addison’s lonely serenity.(105) Permit me to read to you a

passage from each writer, curiously indicative of his peculiar humour: the

subject is the same, and the mood the very gravest. We have said that upon

all the actions of man, the most trifling and the most solemn, the

humourist takes upon himself to comment. All readers of our old masters

know the terrible lines of Swift, in which he hints at his philosophy and

describes the end of mankind:—(106)

Amazed, confused, its fate unknown,

The world stood trembling at Jove’s throne;

While each pale sinner hung his head,

Jove, nodding, shook the heavens and said:

’Offending race of human kind,

By nature, reason, learning, blind;

You who through frailty stepped aside,

And you who never err’d through pride;

You who in different sects were shamm’d,

And come to see each other damn’d

(So some folk told you, but they knew

No more of Jove’s designs than you).

The world’s mad business now is o’er,

And I resent your freaks no more;

_I_ to such blockheads set my wit,

I damn such fools—go, go, you’re bit!’

Addison, speaking on the very same theme, but with how different a voice,

says, in his famous paper on Westminster Abbey (_Spectator_, No. 26):—“For

my own part, though I am always serious, I do not know what it is to be

melancholy, and can therefore take a view of nature in her deep and solemn

scenes with the same pleasure as in her most gay and delightful ones. When

I look upon the tombs of the great, every emotion of envy dies within me;

when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes

out; when I meet with the grief of parents on a tombstone, my heart melts

with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider

the vanity of grieving for those we must quickly follow.” (I have owned

that I do not think Addison’s heart melted very much, or that he indulged

very inordinately in the “vanity of grieving”.) “When,” he goes on, “when

I see kings lying by those who deposed them: when I consider rival wits

placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their

contests and disputes,—I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the

little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind. And, when I read

the several dates on the tombs of some that died yesterday and some 600

years ago, I consider that Great Day when we shall all of us be

contemporaries, and make our appearance together.”

Our third humourist comes to speak upon the same subject. You will have

observed in the previous extracts the characteristic humour of each

writer—the subject and the contrast—the fact of Death, and the play of

individual thought, by which each comments on it, and now hear the third

writer—death, sorrow, and the grave, being for the moment also his theme.

“The first sense of sorrow I ever knew,” Steele says in the _Tatler_, “was

upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years of

age: but was rather amazed at what all the house meant, than possessed of

a real understanding why nobody would play with us. I remember I went into

the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had

my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa;

for, I know not how, I had some idea that he was locked up there. My

mother caught me in her arms, and, transported beyond all patience of the

silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embraces,

and told me in a flood of tears, ‘Papa could not hear me, and would play

with me no more: for they were going to put him under ground, whence he

would never come to us again.’ She was a very beautiful woman, of a noble

spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of

her transport, which methought struck me with an instinct of sorrow that,

before I was sensible what it was to grieve, seized my very soul, and has

made pity the weakness of my heart ever since.”

Can there be three more characteristic moods of minds and men? “Fools, do

you know anything of this mystery?” says Swift, stamping on a grave and

carrying his scorn for mankind actually beyond it. “Miserable, purblind

wretches, how dare you to pretend to comprehend the Inscrutable, and how

can your dim eyes pierce the unfathomable depths of yonder boundless

heaven?” Addison, in a much kinder language and gentler voice, utters much

the same sentiment: and speaks of the rivalry of wits, and the contests of

holy men, with the same sceptic placidity. “Look what a little vain dust

we are;” he says, smiling over the tombstones, and catching, as is his

wont, quite a divine effulgence as he looks heavenward, he speaks in words

of inspiration almost, of “the Great Day, when we shall all of us be

contemporaries, and make our appearance together”.

The third, whose theme is Death, too, and who will speak his word of moral

as Heaven teaches him, leads you up to his father’s coffin, and shows you

his beautiful mother weeping, and himself an unconscious little boy

wondering at her side. His own natural tears flow as he takes your hand

and confidingly asks your sympathy. “See how good and innocent and

beautiful women are,” he says, “how tender little children! Let us love

these and one another, brother—God knows we have need of love and pardon.”

So it is each man looks with his own eyes, speaks with his own voice, and

prays his own prayer.

When Steele asks your sympathy for the actors in that charming scene of

Love and Grief and Death, who can refuse it? One yields to it as to the

frank advance of a child, or to the appeal of a woman. A man is seldom

more manly than when he is what you call unmanned—the source of his

emotion is championship, pity, and courage; the instinctive desire to

cherish those who are innocent and unhappy, and defend those who are

tender and weak. If Steele is not our friend he is nothing. He is by no

means the most brilliant of wits nor the deepest of thinkers: but he is

our friend: we love him, as children love their love with an A, because he

is amiable. Who likes a man best because he is the cleverest or the wisest

of mankind; or a woman because she is the most virtuous, or talks French;

or plays the piano better than the rest of her sex? I own to liking Dick

Steele the man, and Dick Steele the author, much better than much better

men and much better authors.

The misfortune regarding Steele is, that most part of the company here

present must take his amiability upon hearsay, and certainly can’t make

his intimate acquaintance. Not that Steele was worse than his time; on the

contrary, a far better, truer, and higher-hearted man than most who lived

in it. But things were done in that society, and names were named, which

would make you shudder now. What would be the sensation of a polite youth

of the present day, if at a ball he saw the young object of his affections

taking a box out of her pocket and a pinch of snuff: or if at dinner, by

the charmer’s side, she deliberately put her knife into her mouth? If she

cut her mother’s throat with it, mamma would scarcely be more shocked. I

allude to these peculiarities of bygone times as an excuse for my

favourite, Steele, who was not worse, and often much more delicate than

his neighbours.

There exists a curious document descriptive of the manners of the last

age, which describes most minutely the amusements and occupations of

persons of fashion in London at the time of which we are speaking; the

time of Swift, and Addison, and Steele.

When Lord Sparkish, Tom Neverout, and Colonel Alwit, the immortal

personages of Swift’s polite conversation, came to breakfast with my Lady

Smart, at eleven o’clock in the morning, my Lord Smart was absent at the

Levée. His lordship was at home to dinner at three o’clock to receive his

guests; and we may sit down to this meal, like the Barmecide’s, and see

the fops of the last century before us. Seven of them sat down at dinner,

and were joined by a country baronet, who told them they kept Court hours.

These persons of fashion began their dinner with a sirloin of beef, fish,

a shoulder of veal, and a tongue. My Lady Smart carved the sirloin, my

Lady Answerwell helped the fish, and the gallant colonel cut the shoulder

of veal. All made a considerable inroad on the sirloin and the shoulder of

veal with the exception of Sir John, who had no appetite, having already

partaken of a beefsteak and two mugs of ale, besides a tankard of March

beer as soon as he got out of bed. They drank claret, which the master of

the house said should always be drunk after fish; and my Lord Smart

particularly recommended some excellent cider to my Lord Sparkish, which

occasioned some brilliant remarks from that nobleman. When the host called

for wine, he nodded to one or other of his guests, and said, “Tom

Neverout, my service to you.”

After the first course came almond pudding, fritters, which the colonel

took with his hands out of the dish, in order to help the brilliant Miss

Notable; chickens, black puddings, and soup; and Lady Smart, the elegant

mistress of the mansion, finding a skewer in a dish, placed it in her

plate with directions that it should be carried down to the cook and

dressed for the cook’s own dinner. Wine and small beer were drunk during

this second course; and when the colonel called for beer, he called the

butler, Friend, and asked whether the beer was good. Various jocular

remarks passed from the gentlefolks to the servants; at breakfast several

persons had a word and a joke for Mrs. Betty, my lady’s maid, who warmed

the cream and had charge of the canister (the tea cost thirty shillings a

pound in those days). When my Lady Sparkish sent her footman out to my

Lady Match to come at six o’clock and play at quadrille, her ladyship

warned the man to follow his nose, and if he fell by the way not to stay

to get up again. And when the gentlemen asked the hall-porter if his lady

was at home, that functionary replied, with manly waggishness, “She was at

home just now, but she’s not gone out yet.”

After the puddings, sweet and black, the fritters and soup, came the third

course, of which the chief dish was a hot venison pasty, which was put

before Lord Smart, and carved by that nobleman. Besides the pasty, there

was a hare, a rabbit, some pigeons, partridges, a goose, and a ham. Beer

and wine were freely imbibed during this course, the gentlemen always

pledging somebody with every glass which they drank; and by this time the

conversation between Tom Neverout and Miss Notable had grown so brisk and

lively, that the Derbyshire baronet began to think the young gentlewoman

was Tom’s sweetheart; on which Miss remarked, that she loved Tom “like

pie”. After the goose, some of the gentlemen took a dram of brandy, “which

was very good for the wholesomes,” Sir John said; and now having had a

tolerably substantial dinner, honest Lord Smart bade the butler bring up

the great tankard full of October to Sir John. The great tankard was

passed from hand to hand and mouth to mouth, but when pressed by the noble

host upon the gallant Tom Neverout, he said, “No faith, my lord, I like

your wine, and won’t put a churl upon a gentleman. Your honour’s claret is

good enough for me.” And so, the dinner over, the host said, “Hang saving,

bring us up a ha’porth of cheese.”

The cloth was now taken away, and a bottle of burgundy was set down, of

which the ladies were invited to partake before they went to their tea.

When they withdrew, the gentlemen promised to join them in an hour; fresh

bottles were brought, the “dead men”, meaning the empty bottles, removed;

and “D’you hear, John? bring clean glasses”, my Lord Smart said. On which

the gallant Colonel Alwit said, “I’ll keep my glass; for wine is the best

liquor to wash glasses in.”

After an hour the gentlemen joined the ladies, and then they all sat and

played quadrille until three o’clock in the morning, when the chairs and

the flambeaux came, and this noble company went to bed.

Such were manners six or seven score years ago. I draw no inference from

this queer picture—let all moralists here present deduce their own. Fancy

the moral condition of that society in which a lady of fashion joked with

a footman, and carved a great shoulder of veal, and provided besides a

sirloin, a goose, hare, rabbit, chickens, partridges, black-puddings, and

a ham for a dinner for eight Christians. What—what could have been the

condition of that polite world in which people openly ate goose after

almond pudding, and took their soup in the middle of dinner? Fancy a

colonel in the Guards putting his hand into a dish of _beignets

d’abricot_, and helping his neighbour, a young lady _du monde_! Fancy a

noble lord calling out to the servants, before the ladies at his table,

“Hang expense, bring us a ha’porth of cheese!” Such were the ladies of St.

James’s—such were the frequenters of White’s Chocolate-house, when Swift

used to visit it, and Steele described it as the centre of pleasure,

gallantry, and entertainment, a hundred and forty years ago!

Dennis, who ran amuck at the literary society of his day, falls foul of

poor Steele, and thus depicts him,—“Sir John Edgar, of the county of —— in

Ireland, is of a middle stature, broad shoulders, thick legs, a shape like

the picture of somebody over a farmer’s chimney—a short chin, a short

nose, a short forehead, a broad, flat face, and a dusky countenance. Yet

with such a face and such a shape, he discovered at sixty that he took

himself for a beauty, and appeared to be more mortified at being told that

he was ugly, than he was by any reflection made upon his honour or

understanding.

“He is a gentleman born, witness himself, of very honourable family;

certainly of a very ancient one, for his ancestors flourished in Tipperary

long before the English ever set foot in Ireland. He has testimony of this

more authentic than the Heralds’ Office, or any human testimony. For God

has marked him more abundantly than he did Cain, and stamped his native

country on his face, his understanding, his writings, his actions, his

passions, and, above all, his vanity. The Hibernian brogue is still upon

all these, though long habit and length of days have worn it off his

tongue.”(107)

Although this portrait is the work of a man who was neither the friend of

Steele nor of any other man alive, yet there is a dreadful resemblance to

the original in the savage and exaggerated traits of the caricature, and

everybody who knows him must recognize Dick Steele. Dick set about almost

all the undertakings of his life with inadequate means, and, as he took

and furnished a house with the most generous intentions towards his

friends, the most tender gallantry towards his wife, and with this only

drawback, that he had not wherewithal to pay the rent when quarter-day

came,—so, in his life he proposed to himself the most magnificent schemes

of virtue, forbearance, public and private good, and the advancement of

his own and the national religion; but when he had to pay for these

articles—so difficult to purchase and so costly to maintain—poor Dick’s

money was not forthcoming: and when Virtue called with her little bill,

Dick made a shuffling excuse that he could not see her that morning,

having a headache from being tipsy overnight; or when stern Duty rapped at

the door with his account, Dick was absent and not ready to pay. He was

shirking at the tavern; or had some particular business (of somebody’s

else) at the ordinary; or he was in hiding, or worse than in hiding, in

the lock-up house. What a situation for a man!—for a philanthropist—for a

lover of right and truth—for a magnificent designer and schemer! Not to

dare to look in the face the Religion which he adored and which he had

offended; to have to shirk down back lanes and alleys, so as to avoid the

friend whom he loved and who had trusted him—to have the house which he

had intended for his wife, whom he loved passionately, and for her

ladyship’s company which he wished to entertain splendidly, in the

possession of a bailiff’s man, with a crowd of little creditors,—grocers,

butchers, and small-coal men, lingering round the door with their bills

and jeering at him. Alas! for poor Dick Steele! For nobody else, of

course. There is no man or woman in _our_ time who makes fine projects and

gives them up from idleness or want of means. When Duty calls upon _us_,

we no doubt are always at home and ready to pay that grim tax-gatherer.

When _we_ are stricken with remorse and promise reform, we keep our

promise, and are never angry, or idle, or extravagant any more. There are

no chambers in _our_ hearts, destined for family friends and affections,

and now occupied by some Sin’s emissary and bailiff in possession. There

are no little sins, shabby peccadilloes, importunate remembrances, or

disappointed holders of our promises to reform, hovering at our steps, or

knocking at our door! Of course not. We are living in the nineteenth

century, and poor Dick Steele stumbled and got up again, and got into jail

and out again, and sinned and repented; and loved and suffered; and lived

and died scores of years ago. Peace be with him! Let us think gently of

one who was so gentle: let us speak kindly of one whose own breast

exuberated with human kindness.

Lecture The Fourth. Prior, Gay, And Pope

Matthew Prior was one of those famous and lucky wits of the auspicious

reign of Queen Anne, whose name it behoves us not to pass over. Mat was a

world-philosopher of no small genius, good nature, and acumen.(108) He

loved, he drank, he sang. He describes himself, in one of his lyrics, “in

a little Dutch chaise on a Saturday night; on his left hand his Horace,

and a friend on his right,” going out of town from the Hague to pass that

evening and the ensuing Sunday, boozing at a _Spielhaus_ with his

companions, perhaps bobbing for perch in a Dutch canal, and noting down,

in a strain and with a grace not unworthy of his Epicurean master, the

charms of his idleness, his retreat, and his Batavian Chloe. A vintner’s

son in Whitehall, and a distinguished pupil of Busby of the Rod, Prior

attracted some notice by writing verses at St. John’s College, Cambridge,

and, coming up to town, aided Montague(109) in an attack on the noble old

English lion John Dryden, in ridicule of whose work, _The Hind and the

Panther_, he brought out that remarkable and famous burlesque, _The Town

and Country Mouse_. Aren’t you all acquainted with it? Have you not all

got it by heart? What! have you never heard of it? See what fame is made

of! The wonderful part of the satire was, that, as a natural consequence

of _The Town and Country Mouse_, Matthew Prior was made Secretary of

Embassy at the Hague! I believe it is dancing, rather than singing, which

distinguishes the young English diplomatists of the present day; and have

seen them in various parts perform that part of their duty very finely. In

Prior’s time it appears a different accomplishment led to preferment.

Could you write a copy of Alcaics? that was the question. Could you turn

out a neat epigram or two? Could you compose _The Town and Country Mouse_?

It is manifest that, by the possession of this faculty, the most difficult

treaties, the laws of foreign nations, and the interests of our own, are

easily understood. Prior rose in the diplomatic service, and said good

things that proved his sense and his spirit. When the apartments at

Versailles were shown to him, with the victories of Louis XIV painted on

the walls, and Prior was asked whether the palace of the King of England

had any such decorations, “The monuments of my master’s actions,” Mat

said, of William, whom he cordially revered, “are to be seen everywhere

except in his own house.” Bravo, Mat! Prior rose to be full ambassador at

Paris,(110) where he somehow was cheated out of his ambassadorial plate;

and in a heroic poem, addressed by him to her late lamented Majesty Queen

Anne, Mat makes some magnificent allusions to these dishes and spoons, of

which Fate had deprived him. All that he wants, he says, is her Majesty’s

picture; without that he can’t be happy.

Thee, gracious Anne, thee present I adore:

Thee, Queen of Peace, if Time and Fate have power

Higher to raise the glories of thy reign,

In words sublimer and a nobler strain.

May future bards the mighty theme rehearse.

Here, Stator Jove, and Phoebus, king of verse,

The votive tablet I suspend.

With that word the poem stops abruptly. The votive tablet is suspended for

ever like Mahomet’s coffin. News came that the queen was dead. Stator

Jove, and Phoebus, king of verse, were left there, hovering to this day,

over the votive tablet. The picture was never got any more than the spoons

and dishes—the inspiration ceased—the verses were not wanted—the

ambassador wasn’t wanted. Poor Mat was recalled from his embassy, suffered

disgrace along with his patrons, lived under a sort of cloud ever after,

and disappeared in Essex. When deprived of all his pensions and

emoluments, the hearty and generous Oxford pensioned him. They played for

gallant stakes—the bold men of those days—and lived and gave splendidly.

Johnson quotes from Spence a legend, that Prior, after spending an evening

with Harley, St. John, Pope, and Swift, would go off and smoke a pipe with

a couple of friends of his, a soldier and his wife, in Long Acre. Those

who have not read his late excellency’s poems should be warned that they

smack not a little of the conversation of his Long Acre friends. Johnson

speaks slightingly of his lyrics; but with due deference to the great

Samuel, Prior’s seem to me amongst the easiest, the richest, the most

charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems.(111) Horace is always in his

mind, and his song, and his philosophy, his good sense, his happy easy

turns and melody, his loves, and his Epicureanism, bear a great

resemblance to that most delightful and accomplished master. In reading

his works, one is struck with their modern air, as well as by their happy

similarity to the songs of the charming owner of the Sabine farm. In his

verses addressed to Halifax, he says, writing of that endless theme to

poets, the vanity of human wishes—

So when in fevered dreams we sink,

And, waking, taste what we desire,

The real draught but feeds the fire,

The dream is better than the drink.

Our hopes like towering falcons aim

At objects in an airy height:

To stand aloof and view the flight,

Is all the pleasure of the game.

Would not you fancy that a poet of our own days was singing? and, in the

verses of Chloe weeping and reproaching him for his inconstancy, where he

says—

The God of us verse-men, you know, child, the Sun,

How after his journey, he sets up his rest.

If at morning o’er earth ’tis his fancy to run,

At night he declines on his Thetis’s breast.

So, when I am wearied with wandering all day,

To thee, my delight, in the evening I come:

No matter what beauties I saw in my way;

They were but my visits, but thou art my home!

Then finish, dear Chloe, this pastoral war,

And let us like Horace and Lydia agree;

For thou art a girl as much brighter than her,

As he was a poet sublimer than me.

If Prior read Horace, did not Thomas Moore study Prior? Love and pleasure

find singers in all days. Roses are always blowing and fading—to-day as in

that pretty time when Prior sang of them, and of Chloe lamenting their

decay—

She sighed, she smiled, and to the flowers

Pointing, the lovely moralist said;

See, friend, in some few leisure hours,

See yonder what a change is made!

Ah, me! the blooming pride of May,

And that of Beauty are but one:

At morn both flourisht, bright and gay,

Both fade at evening, pale and gone.

At dawn poor Stella danced and sung,

The amorous youth around her bowed,

At night her fatal knell was rung;

I saw, and kissed her in her shroud.

Such as she is who died to-day,

Such I, alas, may be to-morrow:

Go, Damon, bid the Muse display

The justice of thy Chloe’s sorrow.

Damon’s knell was rung in 1721. May his turf lie lightly on him! _Deus sit

propitius huic potatori_, as Walter de Mapes sang.(112) Perhaps Samuel

Johnson, who spoke slightingly of Prior’s verses, enjoyed them more than

he was willing to own. The old moralist had studied them as well as Mr.

Thomas Moore, and defended them, and showed that he remembered them very

well too on an occasion when their morality was called in question by that

noted puritan, James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck.(113)

In the great society of the wits, John Gay deserved to be a favourite, and

to have a good place.(114) In his set all were fond of him. His success

offended nobody. He missed a fortune once or twice. He was talked of for

Court favour, and hoped to win it; but the Court favour jilted him. Craggs

gave him some South-Sea Stock; and at one time Gay had very nearly made

his fortune. But Fortune shook her swift wings and jilted him too: and so

his friends, instead of being angry with him, and jealous of him, were

kind and fond of honest Gay. In the portraits of the literary worthies of

the early part of the last century, Gay’s face is the pleasantest perhaps

of all. It appears adorned with neither periwig nor nightcap (the full

dress and _negligée_ of learning, without which the painters of those days

scarcely ever portrayed wits), and he laughs at you over his shoulder with

an honest boyish glee—an artless sweet humour. He was so kind, so gentle,

so jocular, so delightfully brisk at times, so dismally woebegone at

others, such a natural good creature that the Giants loved him. The great

Swift was gentle and sportive with him,(115) as the enormous Brobdingnag

maids of honour were with little Gulliver. He could frisk and fondle round

Pope,(116) and sport, and bark, and caper without offending the most

thin-skinned of poets and men; and when he was jilted in that little Court

affair of which we have spoken, his warm-hearted patrons the Duke and

Duchess of Queensberry(117) (the “Kitty, beautiful and young”, of Prior)

pleaded his cause with indignation, and quitted the Court in a huff,

carrying off with them into their retirement their kind gentle protégé.

With these kind lordly folks, a real Duke and Duchess, as delightful as

those who harboured Don Quixote, and loved that dear old Sancho, Gay

lived, and was lapped in cotton, and had his plate of chicken, and his

saucer of cream, and frisked, and barked, and wheezed, and grew fat, and

so ended.(118) He became very melancholy and lazy, sadly plethoric, and

only occasionally diverting in his latter days. But everybody loved him,

and the remembrance of his pretty little tricks; and the raging old Dean

of St. Patrick’s, chafing in his banishment, was afraid to open the letter

which Pope wrote him, announcing the sad news of the death of Gay.(119)

Swift’s letters to him are beautiful; and having no purpose but kindness

in writing to him, no party aim to advocate, or slight or anger to wreak,

every word the Dean says to his favourite is natural, trustworthy, and

kindly. His admiration for Gay’s parts and honesty, and his laughter at

his weaknesses, were alike just and genuine. He paints his character in

wonderful pleasant traits of jocular satire. “I writ lately to Mr. Pope,”

Swift says, writing to Gay; “I wish you had a little villakin in his

neighbourhood; but you are yet too volatile, and any lady with a coach and

six horses would carry you to Japan.” “If your ramble,” says Swift, in

another letter, “was on horseback, I am glad of it, on account of your

health; but I know your arts of patching up a journey between

stage-coaches and friends” coaches—for you are as arrant a Cockney as any

hosier in Cheapside. I have often had it in my head to put it into yours,

that you ought to have some great work in scheme, which may take up seven

years to finish, besides two or three under-ones that may add another

thousand pounds to your stock, and then I shall be in less pain about you.

I know you can find dinners, but you love twelvepenny coaches too well,

without considering that the interest of a whole thousand pounds brings

you but half a crown a day:’ and then Swift goes off from Gay to pay some

grand compliments to her Grace the Duchess of Queensberry, in whose

sunshine Mr. Gay was basking, and in whose radiance the Dean would have

liked to warm himself too.

But we have Gay here before us, in these letters—lazy, kindly, uncommonly

idle; rather slovenly, I’m afraid; for ever eating and saying good things;

a little, round, French abbé of a man, sleek, soft-handed, and

soft-hearted.

Our object in these lectures is rather to describe the men than their

works; or to deal with the latter only in as far as they seem to

illustrate the character of their writers. Mr. Gay’s _Fables_, which were

written to benefit that amiable prince, the Duke of Cumberland, the

warrior of Dettingen and Culloden, I have not, I own, been able to peruse

since a period of very early youth; and it must be confessed that they did

not effect much benefit upon the illustrious young prince, whose manners

they were intended to mollify, and whose natural ferocity our

gentle-hearted Satirist perhaps proposed to restrain. But the six

pastorals called the _Shepherd’s Week_, and the burlesque poem of _Trivia_

any man fond of lazy literature will find delightful, at the present day,

and must read from beginning to end with pleasure. They are to poetry what

charming little Dresden china figures are to sculpture: graceful, minikin,

fantastic; with a certain beauty always accompanying them. The pretty

little personages of the pastoral, with gold clocks to their stockings,

and fresh satin ribbons to their crooks and waistcoats and bodices, dance

their loves to a minuet-tune played on a bird-organ, approach the charmer,

or rush from the false one daintily on their red-heeled tiptoes, and die

of despair or rapture, with the most pathetic little grins and ogles; or

repose, simpering at each other, under an arbour of pea-green crockery; or

piping to pretty flocks that have just been washed with the best Naples in

a stream of Bergamot. Gay’s gay plan seems to me far pleasanter than that

of Philips—his rival and Pope’s—a serious and dreary idyllic Cockney; not

that Gay’s “Bumkinets and Hobnelias” are a whit more natural than the

would-be serious characters of the other posture-master; but the quality

of this true humourist was to laugh and make laugh, though always with a

secret kindness and tenderness, to perform the drollest little antics and

capers, but always with a certain grace, and to sweet music—as you may

have seen a Savoyard boy abroad, with a hurdy-gurdy and a monkey, turning

over head and heels, or clattering and piroueting in a pair of wooden

shoes, yet always with a look of love and appeal in his bright eyes, and a

smile that asks and wins affection and protection. Happy they who have

that sweet gift of nature! It was this which made the great folks and

Court ladies free and friendly with John Gay—which made Pope and Arbuthnot

love him—which melted the savage heart of Swift when he thought of him—and

drove away, for a moment or two, the dark frenzies which obscured the

lonely tyrant’s brain, as he heard Gay’s voice with its simple melody and

artless ringing laughter.

What used to be said about Rubini, _qu’il avait des larmes dans la voix_,

may be said of Gay,(120) and of one other humourist of whom we shall have

to speak. In almost every ballad of his, however slight,(121) in the

_Beggar’s __ Opera_(122) and in its wearisome continuation (where the

verses are to the full as pretty as in the first piece, however), there is

a peculiar, hinted, pathetic sweetness and melody. It charms and melts

you. It’s indefinable, but it exists; and is the property of John Gay’s

and Oliver Goldsmith’s best verse, as fragrance is of a violet, or

freshness of a rose.

Let me read a piece from one of his letters, which is so famous that most

people here are no doubt familiar with it, but so delightful that it is

always pleasant to hear:—

“I have just passed part of this summer at an old romantic seat of

my Lord Harcourt’s, which he lent me. It overlooks a common

hayfield, where, under the shade of a haycock, sat two lovers—as

constant as ever were found in romance—beneath a spreading bush.

The name of the one (let it sound as it will) was John Hewet; of

the other Sarah Drew. John was a well-set man, about

five-and-twenty; Sarah, a brave woman of eighteen. John had for

several months borne the labour of the day in the same field with

Sarah; when she milked, it was his morning and evening charge to

bring the cows to her pails. Their love was the talk, but not the

scandal, of the whole neighbourhood, for all they aimed at was the

blameless possession of each other in marriage. It was but this

very morning that he had obtained her parents’ consent, and it was

but till the next week that they were to wait to be happy. Perhaps

this very day, in the intervals of their work, they were talking

of their wedding clothes; and John was now matching several kinds

of poppies and field-flowers, to make her a present of knots for

the day. While they were thus employed (it was on the last of

July), a terrible storm of thunder and lightning arose, that drove

the labourers to what shelter the trees or hedges afforded. Sarah,

frightened and out of breath, sunk on a hay-cock; and John (who

never separated from her) sat by her side, having raked two or

three heaps together, to secure her. Immediately, there was heard

so loud a crash, as if heaven had burst asunder. The labourers,

all solicitous for each other’s safety, called to one another:

those that were nearest our lovers, hearing no answer, stepped to

the place where they lay: they first saw a little smoke, and

after, this faithful pair—John, with one arm about his Sarah’s

neck, and the other held over her face, as if to screen her from

the lightning. They were struck dead, and already grown stiff and

cold in this tender posture. There was no mark or discolouring on

their bodies—only that Sarah’s eyebrow was a little singed, and a

small spot between her breasts. They were buried the next day in

one grave!”

And the proof that this description is delightful and beautiful is, that

the great Mr. Pope admired it so much that he thought proper to steal it

and to send it off to a certain lady and wit, with whom he pretended to be

in love in those days—my Lord Duke of Kingston’s daughter, and married to

Mr. Wortley Montagu, then his Majesty’s Ambassador at Constantinople.

We are now come to the greatest name on our list—the highest among the

poets, the highest among the English wits and humourists with whom we have

to rank him. If the author of the _Dunciad_ be not a humourist, if the

poet of the _Rape of the Lock_ be not a wit, who deserves to be called so?

Besides that brilliant genius and immense fame, for both of which we

should respect him, men of letters should admire him as being the greatest

literary _artist_ that England has seen. He polished, he refined, he

thought; he took thoughts from other works to adorn and complete his own;

borrowing an idea or a cadence from another poet as he would a figure or a

simile from a flower, river, stream, or any object which struck him in his

walk, or contemplation of Nature. He began to imitate at an early

age;(123) and taught himself to write by copying printed books. Then he

passed into the hands of the priests, and from his first clerical master,

who came to him when he was eight years old, he went to a school at

Twyford, and another school at Hyde Park, at which places he unlearned all

that he had got from his first instructor. At twelve years old, he went

with his father into Windsor Forest, and there learned for a few months

under a fourth priest. “And this was all the teaching I ever had,” he

said, “and God knows it extended a very little way.”

When he had done with his priests he took to reading by himself, for which

he had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry. He

learned versification from Dryden, he said. In his youthful poem of

_Alcander_, he imitated every poet, Cowley, Milton, Spenser, Statius,

Homer, Virgil. In a few years he had dipped into a great number of the

English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets. “This I did,” he says,

“without any design, except to amuse myself; and got the languages by

hunting after the stories in the several poets I read, rather than read

the books to get the languages. I followed everywhere as my fancy led me,

and was like a boy gathering flowers in the fields and woods, just as they

fell in his way. These five or six years I looked upon as the happiest in

my life.” Is not here a beautiful holiday picture? The forest and the

fairy story-book—the boy spelling Ariosto or Virgil under the trees,

battling with the Cid for the love of Chimène, or dreaming of Armida’s

garden—peace and sunshine round about—the kindest love and tenderness

waiting for him at his quiet home yonder—and Genius throbbing in his young

heart, and whispering to him, “You shall be great; you shall be famous;

you, too, shall love and sing; you will sing her so nobly that some kind

heart shall forget you are weak and ill-formed. Every poet had a love.

Fate must give one to you too,”—and day by day he walks the forest, very

likely looking out for that charmer. “They were the happiest days of his

life,” he says, when he was only dreaming of his fame: when he had gained

that mistress she was no consoler.

That charmer made her appearance, it would seem, about the year 1705, when

Pope was seventeen. Letters of his are extant, addressed to a certain Lady

M——, whom the youth courted, and to whom he expressed his ardour in

language, to say no worse of it, that is entirely pert, odious, and

affected. He imitated love compositions as he had been imitating love

poems just before—it was a sham mistress he courted, and a sham passion,

expressed as became it. These unlucky letters found their way into print

years afterwards, and were sold to the congenial Mr. Curll. If any of my

hearers, as I hope they may, should take a fancy to look at Pope’s

correspondence, let them pass over that first part of it; over, perhaps,

almost all Pope’s letters to women; in which there is a tone of not

pleasant gallantry, and, amidst a profusion of compliments and

politenesses, a something which makes one distrust the little pert,

prurient bard. There is very little indeed to say about his loves, and

that little not edifying. He wrote flames and raptures and elaborate verse

and prose for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; but that passion probably came to

a climax in an impertinence and was extinguished by a box on the ear, or

some such rebuff, and he began on a sudden to hate her with a fervour much

more genuine than that of his love had been. It was a feeble, puny grimace

of love, and paltering with passion. After Mr. Pope had sent off one of

his fine compositions to Lady Mary, he made a second draft from the rough

copy, and favoured some other friend with it. He was so charmed with the

letter of Gay’s, that I have just quoted, that he had copied that and

amended it, and sent it to Lady Mary as his own. A gentleman who writes

letters _à deux fins_, and after having poured out his heart to the

beloved, serves up the same dish _rechauffé_ to a friend, is not very much

in earnest about his loves, however much he may be in his piques and

vanities when his impertinence gets its due.

But, save that unlucky part of the Pope Correspondence, I do not know, in

the range of our literature, volumes more delightful.(124) You live in

them in the finest company in the world. A little stately, perhaps; a

little _apprêté_ and conscious that they are speaking to whole generations

who are listening; but in the tone of their voices—pitched, as no doubt

they are, beyond the mere conversation key—in the expression of their

thoughts, their various views and natures, there is something generous,

and cheering, and ennobling. You are in the society of men who have filled

the greatest parts in the world’s story—you are with St. John the

statesman; Peterborough the conqueror; Swift, the greatest wit of all

times; Gay, the kindliest laugher—it is a privilege to sit in that

company. Delightful and generous banquet! with a little faith and a little

fancy any one of us here may enjoy it, and conjure up those great figures

out of the past, and listen to their wit and wisdom. Mind that there is

always a certain _cachet_ about great men—they may be as mean on many

points as you or I, but they carry their great air—they speak of common

life more largely and generously than common men do—they regard the world

with a manlier countenance, and see its real features more fairly than the

timid shufflers who only dare to look up at life through blinkers, or to

have an opinion when there is a crowd to back it. He who reads these noble

records of a past age, salutes and reverences the great spirits who adorn

it. You may go home now and talk with St. John; you may take a volume from

your library and listen to Swift and Pope.

Might I give counsel to any young hearer, I would say to him, Try to

frequent the company of your betters. In books and life that is the most

wholesome society; learn to admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is

that. Note what the great men admired; they admired great things: narrow

spirits admire basely, and worship meanly. I know nothing in any story

more gallant and cheering, than the love and friendship which this company

of famous men bore towards one another. There never has been a society of

men more friendly, as there never was one more illustrious. Who dares

quarrel with Mr. Pope, great and famous himself, for liking the society of

men great and famous? and for liking them for the qualities which made

them so? A mere pretty fellow from White’s could not have written the

_Patriot King_, and would very likely have despised little Mr. Pope, the

decrepit Papist, whom the great St. John held to be one of the best and

greatest of men: a mere nobleman of the Court could no more have won

Barcelona, than he could have written Peterborough’s letters to Pope,(125)

which are as witty as Congreve: a mere Irish Dean could not have written

_Gulliver_; and all these men loved Pope, and Pope loved all these men. To

name his friends is to name the best men of his time. Addison had a

senate; Pope reverenced his equals. He spoke of Swift with respect and

admiration always. His admiration for Bolingbroke was so great, that when

some one said of his friend, “There is something in that great man which

looks as if he was placed here by mistake,” “Yes,” Pope answered, “and

when the comet appeared to us a month or two ago, I had sometimes an

imagination that it might possibly be come to carry him home, as a coach

comes to one’s door for visitors.” So these great spirits spoke of one

another. Show me six of the dullest middle-aged gentlemen that ever

dawdled round a club-table, so faithful and so friendly.

We have said before that the chief wits of this time, with the exception

of Congreve, were what we should now call men’s men. They spent many hours

of the four-and-twenty, a fourth part of each day nearly, in clubs and

coffee-houses, where they dined, drank, and smoked. Wit and news went by

word of mouth; a journal of 1710 contained the very smallest portion of

one or the other. The chiefs spoke, the faithful _habitués_ sat round;

strangers came to wonder and listen. Old Dryden had his head quarters at

Will’s, in Russell Street, at the corner of Bow Street, at which place

Pope saw him when he was twelve years old. The company used to assemble on

the first floor—what was called the dining-room floor in those days—and

sat at various tables smoking their pipes. It is recorded that the beaux

of the day thought it a great honour to be allowed to take a pinch out of

Dryden’s snuff-box. When Addison began to reign, he with a certain crafty

propriety—a policy let us call it—which belonged to his nature, set up his

court, and appointed the officers of his royal house. His palace was

Button’s, opposite Will’s.(126) A quiet opposition, a silent assertion of

empire, distinguished this great man. Addison’s ministers were Budgell,

Tickell, Philips, Carey; his master of the horse, honest Dick Steele, who

was what Duroc was to Napoleon, or Hardy to Nelson; the man who performed

his master’s bidding, and would have cheerfully died in his quarrel.

Addison lived with these people for seven or eight hours every day. The

male society passed over their punch-bowls and tobacco-pipes about as much

time as ladies of that age spent over Spadille and Manille.

For a brief space, upon coming up to town, Pope formed part of King

Joseph’s court, and was his rather too eager and obsequious humble

servant.(127) Dick Steele, the editor of the _Tatler_, Mr. Addison’s man,

and his own man too—a person of no little figure in the world of letters,

patronized the young poet, and set him a task or two. Young Mr. Pope did

the tasks very quickly and smartly (he had been at the feet quite as a boy

of Wycherley’s decrepit reputation, and propped up for a year that doting

old wit): he was anxious to be well with the men of letters, to get a

footing and a recognition. He thought it an honour to be admitted into

their company; to have the confidence of Mr. Addison’s friend, Captain

Steele. His eminent parts obtained for him the honour of heralding

Addison’s triumph of _Cato_ with his admirable prologue, and heading the

victorious procession as it were. Not content with this act of homage and

admiration, he wanted to distinguish himself by assaulting Addison’s

enemies, and attacked John Dennis with a prose lampoon, which highly

offended his lofty patron. Mr. Steele was instructed to write to Mr.

Dennis and inform him that Mr. Pope’s pamphlet against him was written

quite without Mr. Addison’s approval.(128) Indeed, _The Narrative of Dr.

Robert Norris on the Phrenzy of J. D._ is a vulgar and mean satire, and

such a blow as the magnificent Addison could never desire to see any

partisan of his strike in any literary quarrel. Pope was closely allied

with Swift when he wrote this pamphlet. It is so dirty that it has been

printed in Swift’s works, too. It bears the foul marks of the master hand.

Swift admired and enjoyed with all his heart the prodigious genius of the

young Papist lad out of Windsor Forest, who had never seen a university in

his life, and came and conquered the Dons and the doctors with his wit. He

applauded, and loved him, too, and protected him, and taught him mischief.

I wish Addison could have loved him better. The best satire that ever has

been penned would never have been written then; and one of the best

characters the world ever knew would have been without a flaw. But he who

had so few equals could not bear one, and Pope was more than that. When

Pope, trying for himself, and soaring on his immortal young wings, found

that his, too, was a genius, which no opinion of that age could follow, he

rose and left Addison’s company, settling on his own eminence, and singing

his own song.

It was not possible that Pope should remain a retainer of Mr. Addison; nor

likely that after escaping from his vassalage and assuming an independent

crown, the sovereign whose allegiance he quitted should view him

amicably.(129) They did not do wrong to mislike each other. They but

followed the impulse of nature, and the consequence of position. When

Bernadotte became heir to a throne, the Prince Royal of Sweden was

naturally Napoleon’s enemy. “There are many passions and tempers of

mankind,” says Mr. Addison in the _Spectator_, speaking a couple of years

before their little differences between him and Mr. Pope took place,

“which naturally dispose us to depress and vilify the merit of one rising

in the esteem of mankind. All those who made their entrance into the world

with the same advantages, and were once looked on as his equals, are apt

to think the fame of his merits a reflection on their own deserts. Those

who were once his equals envy and defame him, because they now see him the

superior; and those who were once his superiors, because they look upon

him as their equal.” Did Mr. Addison, justly perhaps thinking that, as

young Mr. Pope had not had the benefit of a university education, he

couldn’t know Greek, therefore he couldn’t translate Homer, encourage his

young friend Mr. Tickell, of Queen’s, to translate that poet, and aid him

with his own known scholarship and skill?(130) It was natural that Mr.

Addison should doubt of the learning of an amateur Grecian, should have a

high opinion of Mr. Tickell, of Queen’s, and should help that ingenious

young man. It was natural, on the other hand, that Mr. Pope and Mr. Pope’s

friends should believe that this counter-translation, suddenly advertised

and so long written, though Tickell’s college friends had never heard of

it—though, when Pope first wrote to Addison regarding his scheme, Mr.

Addison knew nothing of the similar project of Tickell, of Queen’s—it was

natural that Mr. Pope and his friends, having interests, passions, and

prejudices of their own, should believe that Tickell’s translation was but

an act of opposition against Pope, and that they should call Mr. Tickell’s

emulation Mr. Addison’s envy—if envy it were.

And were there one whose fires

True genius kindles and fair fame inspires,

Blest with each talent and each art to please,

And born to write, converse, and live with ease;

Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,

Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne;

View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes,

And hate, for arts that caused himself to rise;

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,

And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;

Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,

Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;

Alike reserved to blame as to commend,

A timorous foe and a suspicious friend;

Dreading even fools, by flatterers besieged,

And so obliging that he ne’er obliged;

Like Cato give his little senate laws,

And sit attentive to his own applause;

While wits and templars every sentence raise,

And wonder with a foolish face of praise;

Who but must laugh if such a man there be,

Who would not weep if Atticus were he?

“I sent the verses to Mr. Addison,” said Pope, “and he used me very

civilly ever after.” No wonder he did. It was shame very likely more than

fear that silenced him. Johnson recounts an interview between Pope and

Addison after their quarrel, in which Pope was angry, and Addison tried to

be contemptuous and calm. Such a weapon as Pope’s must have pierced any

scorn. It flashes for ever, and quivers in Addison’s memory. His great

figure looks out on us from the past—stainless but for that—pale, calm,

and beautiful; it bleeds from that black wound. He should be drawn, like

St. Sebastian, with that arrow in his side. As he sent to Gay and asked

his pardon, as he bade his stepson come and see his death, be sure he had

forgiven Pope, when he made ready to show how a Christian could die.

Pope then formed part of the Addisonian court for a short time, and

describes himself in his letters as sitting with that coterie until two

o’clock in the morning over punch and burgundy amidst the fumes of

tobacco. To use an expression of the present day, the “pace” of those

_viveurs_ of the former age was awful. Peterborough lived into the very

jaws of death; Godolphin laboured all day and gambled at night;

Bolingbroke,(131) writing to Swift, from Dawley, in his retirement, dating

his letter at six o’clock in the morning, and rising, as he says,

refreshed, serene, and calm, calls to mind the time of his London life;

when about that hour he used to be going to bed, surfeited with pleasure,

and jaded with business; his head often full of schemes, and his heart as

often full of anxiety. It was too hard, too coarse a life for the

sensitive, sickly Pope. He was the only wit of the day, a friend writes to

me, who wasn’t fat.(132) Swift was fat; Addison was fat; Steele was fat;

Gay and Thomson were preposterously fat—all that fuddling and

punch-drinking, that club and coffee-house boozing, shortened the lives

and enlarged the waistcoats of the men of that age. Pope withdrew in a

great measure from this boisterous London company, and being put into an

independence by the gallant exertions of Swift(133) and his private

friends, and by the enthusiastic national admiration which justly rewarded

his great achievement of the _Iliad_, purchased that famous villa of

Twickenham which his song and life celebrated; duteously bringing his old

parents to live and die there, entertaining his friends there, and making

occasional visits to London in his little chariot, in which Atterbury

compared him to “Homer in a nutshell”.

“Mr. Dryden was not a genteel man,” Pope quaintly said to Spence, speaking

of the manner and habits of the famous old patriarch of Will’s. With

regard to Pope’s own manners, we have the best contemporary authority that

they were singularly refined and polished. With his extraordinary

sensibility, with his known tastes, with his delicate frame, with his

power and dread of ridicule, Pope could have been no other than what we

call a highly-bred person. His closest friends, with the exception of

Swift, were among the delights and ornaments of the polished society of

their age. Garth,(134) the accomplished and benevolent, whom Steele has

described so charmingly, of whom Codrington said that his character was

“all beauty”, and whom Pope himself called the best of Christians without

knowing it; Arbuthnot,(135) one of the wisest, wittiest, most

accomplished, gentlest of mankind; Bolingbroke, the Alcibiades of his age;

the generous Oxford; the magnificent, the witty, the famous, and

chivalrous Peterborough: these were the fast and faithful friends of Pope,

the most brilliant company of friends, let us repeat, that the world has

ever seen. The favourite recreation of his leisure hours was the society

of painters, whose art he practised. In his correspondence are letters

between him and Jervas, whose pupil he loved to be—Richardson, a

celebrated artist of his time, and who painted for him a portrait of his

old mother, and for whose picture he asked and thanked Richardson in one

of the most delightful letters that ever was penned,(136)—and the

wonderful Kneller, who bragged more, spelt worse, and painted better than

any artist of his day.(137)

It is affecting to note, through Pope’s correspondence, the marked way in

which his friends, the greatest, the most famous, and wittiest men of the

time—generals and statesmen, philosophers and divines—all have a kind

word, and a kind thought for the good simple old mother, whom Pope tended

so affectionately. Those men would have scarcely valued her, but that they

knew how much he loved her, and that they pleased him by thinking of her.

If his early letters to women are affected and insincere, whenever he

speaks about this one, it is with a childish tenderness and an almost

sacred simplicity. In 1713, when young Mr. Pope had, by a series of the

most astonishing victories and dazzling achievements, seized the crown of

poetry; and the town was in an uproar of admiration, or hostility, for the

young chief; when Pope was issuing his famous decrees for the translation

of the _Iliad_; when Dennis and the lower critics were hooting and

assailing him; when Addison and the gentlemen of his court were sneering

with sickening hearts at the prodigious triumphs of the young conqueror;

when Pope, in a fever of victory, and genius, and hope, and anger, was

struggling through the crowd of shouting friends and furious detractors to

his temple of Fame, his old mother writes from the country, “My deare,”

says she, “my deare, there’s Mr. Blount, of Mapel Durom, dead the same day

that Mr. Inglefield died. Your sister is well; but your brother is sick.

My service to Mrs. Blount, and all that ask of me. I hope to hear from

you, and that you are well, which is my daily prayer; and this with my

blessing.” The triumph marches by, and the car of the young conqueror, the

hero of a hundred brilliant victories—the fond mother sits in the quiet

cottage at home, and says, “I send you my daily prayers, and I bless you,

my deare”.

In our estimate of Pope’s character, let us always take into account that

constant tenderness and fidelity of affection which pervaded and

sanctified his life, and never forget that maternal benediction.(138) It

accompanied him always: his life seems purified by those artless and

heartfelt prayers. And he seems to have received and deserved the fond

attachment of the other members of his family. It is not a little touching

to read in Spence of the enthusiastic admiration with which his

half-sister regarded him, and the simple anecdote by which she illustrates

her love. “I think no man was ever so little fond of money.” Mrs. Rackett

says about her brother, “I think my brother when he was young read more

books than any man in the world”; and she falls to telling stories of his

schooldays, and the manner in which his master at Twyford ill-used him. “I

don’t think my brother knew what fear was,” she continues; and the

accounts of Pope’s friends bear out this character for courage. When he

had exasperated the dunces, and threats of violence and personal assault

were brought to him, the dauntless little champion never for one instant

allowed fear to disturb him, or condescended to take any guard in his

daily walks, except occasionally his faithful dog to bear him company. “I

had rather die at once,” said the gallant little cripple, “than live in

fear of those rascals.”

As for his death, it was what the noble Arbuthnot asked and enjoyed for

himself—a euthanasia—a beautiful end. A perfect benevolence, affection,

serenity, hallowed the departure of that high soul. Even in the very

hallucinations of his brain, and weaknesses of his delirium, there was

something almost sacred. Spence describes him in his last days, looking

up, and with a rapt gaze as if something had suddenly passed before him.

He said to me, “What’s that?” pointing into the air with a very steady

regard, and then looked down and said, with a smile of the greatest

softness, “’twas a vision!” He laughed scarcely ever, but his companions

describe his countenance as often illuminated by a peculiar sweet smile.

“When,” said Spence,(139) the kind anecdotist whom Johnson despised, “when

I was telling Lord Bolingbroke that Mr. Pope, on every catching and

recovery of his mind, was always saying something kindly of his present or

absent friends; and that this was so surprising, as it seemed to me as if

humanity had outlasted understanding, Lord Bolingbroke said, ‘It has so,’

and then added, ‘I never in my life knew a man who had so tender a heart

for his particular friends, or a more general friendship for mankind. I

have known him these thirty years, and value myself more for that man’s

love than——’ Here,” Spence says, “St. John sunk his head, and lost his

voice in tears.” The sob which finishes the epitaph is finer than words.

It is the cloak thrown over the father’s face in the famous Greek picture

which hides the grief and heightens it.

In Johnson’s _Life of Pope_, you will find described with rather a

malicious minuteness some of the personal habits and infirmities of the

great little Pope. His body was crooked, he was so short that it was

necessary to raise his chair in order to place him on a level with other

people at table.(140) He was sewed up in a buckram suit every morning and

required a nurse like a child. His contemporaries reviled these

misfortunes with a strange acrimony, and made his poor deformed person the

butt for many a bolt of heavy wit. The facetious Mr. Dennis, in speaking

of him, says, “If you take the first letter of Mr. Alexander Pope’s

Christian name, and the first and last letters of his surname, you have A.

P. E.” Pope catalogues, at the end of the _Dunciad_, with a rueful

precision, other pretty names, besides Ape, which Dennis called him. That

great critic pronounced Mr. Pope was a little ass, a fool, a coward, a

Papist, and therefore a hater of Scripture, and so forth. It must be

remembered that the pillory was a flourishing and popular institution in

those days. Authors stood in it in the body sometimes: and dragged their

enemies thither morally, hooted them with foul abuse, and assailed them

with garbage of the gutter. Poor Pope’s figure was an easy one for those

clumsy caricaturists to draw. Any stupid hand could draw a hunchback, and

write Pope underneath. They did. A libel was published against Pope, with

such a frontispiece. This kind of rude jesting was an evidence not only of

an ill nature, but a dull one. When a child makes a pun, or a lout breaks

out into a laugh, it is some very obvious combination of words, or

discrepancy of objects, which provokes the infantine satirist, or tickles

the boorish wag; and many of Pope’s revilers laughed, not so much because

they were wicked, as because they knew no better.

Without the utmost sensibility, Pope could not have been the poet he was;

and through his life, however much he protested that he disregarded their

abuse, the coarse ridicule of his opponents stung and tore him. One of

Cibber’s pamphlets coming into Pope’s hands, whilst Richardson the painter

was with him, Pope turned round and said, “These things are my

diversions;” and Richardson, sitting by whilst Pope perused the libel,

said he saw his features “writhing with anguish”. How little human nature

changes! Can’t one see that little figure? Can’t one fancy one is reading

Horace? Can’t one fancy one is speaking of to-day?

The tastes and sensibilities of Pope, which led him to cultivate the

society of persons of fine manners, or wit, or taste, or beauty, caused

him to shrink equally from that shabby and boisterous crew which formed

the rank and file of literature in his time: and he was as unjust to these

men as they to him. The delicate little creature sickened at habits and

company which were quite tolerable to robuster men: and in the famous feud

between Pope and the Dunces, and without attributing any peculiar wrong to

either, one can quite understand how the two parties should so hate each

other. As I fancy, it was a sort of necessity that when Pope’s triumph

passed, Mr. Addison and his men should look rather contemptuously down on

it from their balcony; so it was natural for Dennis and Tibbald, and

Welsted, and Cibber, and the worn and hungry pressmen in the crowd below,

to howl at him and assail him. And Pope was more savage to Grub Street

than Grub Street was to Pope. The thong with which he lashed them was

dreadful; he fired upon that howling crew such shafts of flame and poison,

he slew and wounded so fiercely, that in reading the _Dunciad_ and the

prose lampoons of Pope, one feels disposed to side against the ruthless

little tyrant, at least to pity those wretched folks upon whom he was so

unmerciful. It was Pope, and Swift to aid him, who established among us

the Grub Street tradition. He revels in base descriptions of poor men’s

want; he gloats over poor Dennis’s garret, and flannel nightcap, and red

stockings; he gives instructions how to find Curll’s authors, the

historian at the tallow-chandler’s under the blind arch in Petty France,

the two translators in bed together, the poet in the cock-loft in Budge

Row, whose landlady keeps the ladder. It was Pope, I fear, who

contributed, more than any man who ever lived, to depreciate the literary

calling. It was not an unprosperous one before that time, as we have seen;

at least there were great prizes in the profession which had made Addison

a minister, and Prior an ambassador, and Steele a commissioner, and Swift

all but a bishop. The profession of letters was ruined by that libel of

the _Dunciad_. If authors were wretched and poor before, if some of them

lived in haylofts, of which their landladies kept the ladders, at least

nobody came to disturb them in their straw; if three of them had but one

coat between them, the two remained invisible in the garret, the third, at

any rate, appeared decently at the coffee-house, and paid his twopence

like a gentleman. It was Pope that dragged into light all this poverty and

meanness, and held up those wretched shifts and rags to public ridicule.

It was Pope that has made generations of the reading world (delighted with

the mischief, as who would not be that reads it?) believe that author and

wretch, author and rags, author and dirt, author and drink, gin, cowheel,

tripe, poverty, duns, bailiffs, squalling children and clamorous

landladies, were always associated together. The condition of authorship

began to fall from the days of the _Dunciad_: and I believe in my heart

that much of that obloquy which has since pursued our calling was

occasioned by Pope’s libels and wicked wit. Everybody read those.

Everybody was familiarized with the idea of the poor devil, the author.

The manner is so captivating that young authors practise it, and begin

their career with satire. It is so easy to write, and so pleasant to read!

to fire a shot that makes a giant wince, perhaps; and fancy one’s self his

conqueror. It is easy to shoot—but not as Pope did—the shafts of his

satire rise sublimely: no poet’s verse ever mounted higher than that

wonderful flight with which the _Dunciad_ concludes(141):—

She comes, she comes! the sable throne behold!

Of Night primaeval and of Chaos old;

Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,

And all its varying rainbows die away;

Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,

The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.

As, one by one, at dread Medea’s strain

The sick’ning stars fade off the ethereal plain;

As Argus’ eyes, by Hermes’ wand oppress’d,

Closed one by one to everlasting rest;—

Thus, at her fell approach and secret might,

Art after Art goes out, and all is night.

See skulking Faith to her old cavern fled,

Mountains of casuistry heaped o’er her head;

Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,

Shrinks to her second cause and is no more.

Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires,

And, unawares, Morality expires.

Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine,

Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine.

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos, is restored,

Light dies before thy uncreating word;

Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall,

And universal darkness buries all.(142)

In these astonishing lines Pope reaches, I think, to the very greatest

height which his sublime art has attained, and shows himself the equal of

all poets of all times. It is the brightest ardour, the loftiest assertion

of truth, the most generous wisdom, illustrated by the noblest poetic

figure, and spoken in words the aptest, grandest, and most harmonious. It

is heroic courage speaking: a splendid declaration of righteous wrath and

war. It is the gage flung down, and the silver trumpet ringing defiance to

falsehood and tyranny, deceit, dullness, superstition. It is Truth, the

champion, shining and intrepid, and fronting the great world-tyrant with

armies of slaves at his back. It is a wonderful and victorious single

combat, in that great battle, which has always been waging since society

began.

In speaking of a work of consummate art one does not try to show what it

actually is, for that were vain; but what it is like, and what are the

sensations produced in the mind of him who views it. And in considering

Pope’s admirable career, I am forced into similitudes drawn from other

courage and greatness, and into comparing him with those who achieved

triumphs in actual war. I think of the works of young Pope as I do of the

actions of young Bonaparte or young Nelson. In their common life you will

find frailties and meannesses, as great as the vices and follies of the

meanest men. But in the presence of the great occasion, the great soul

flashes out, and conquers transcendent. In thinking of the splendour of

Pope’s young victories, of his merit, unequalled as his renown, I hail and

salute the achieving genius, and do homage to the pen of a hero.

Lecture The Fifth. Hogarth, Smollett, And Fielding

I suppose as long as novels last and authors aim at interesting their

public, there must always be in the story a virtuous and gallant hero, a

wicked monster his opposite, and a pretty girl who finds a champion;

bravery and virtue conquer beauty: and vice, after seeming to triumph

through a certain number of pages, is sure to be discomfited in the last

volume, when justice overtakes him and honest folks come by their own.

There never was perhaps a greatly popular story but this simple plot was

carried through it: mere satiric wit is addressed to a class of readers

and thinkers quite different to those simple souls who laugh and weep over

the novel. I fancy very few ladies indeed, for instance, could be brought

to like _Gulliver_ heartily, and (putting the coarseness and difference of

manners out of the question) to relish the wonderful satire of _Jonathan

Wild_. In that strange apologue, the author takes for a hero the greatest

rascal, coward, traitor, tyrant, hypocrite, that his wit and experience,

both large in this matter, could enable him to devise or depict; he

accompanies this villain through all the actions of his life, with a

grinning deference and a wonderful mock respect: and doesn’t leave him,

till he is dangling at the gallows, when the satirist makes him a low bow

and wishes the scoundrel good day.

It was not by satire of this sort, or by scorn and contempt, that Hogarth

achieved his vast popularity and acquired his reputation.(143) His art is

quite simple,(144) he speaks popular parables to interest simple hearts

and to inspire them with pleasure or pity or warning and terror. Not one

of his tales but is as easy as _Goody Two Shoes_; it is the moral of Tommy

was a naughty boy and the master flogged him, and Jacky was a good boy and

had plum cake, which pervades the whole works of the homely and famous

English moralist. And if the moral is written in rather too large letters

after the fable, we must remember how simple the scholars and schoolmaster

both were, and like neither the less because they are so artless and

honest. “It was a maxim of Dr. Harrison’s,” Fielding says in _Amelia_,

speaking of the benevolent divine and philosopher who represents the good

principle in that novel—“that no man can descend below himself, in doing

any act which may contribute to protect an innocent person, _or to bring a

rogue to the gallows_.” The moralists of that age had no compunction you

see; they had not begun to be sceptical about the theory of punishment,

and thought that the hanging of a thief was a spectacle for edification.

Masters sent their apprentices, fathers took their children, to see Jack

Sheppard or Jonathan Wild hanged, and it was as undoubting subscribers to

this moral law, that Fielding wrote and Hogarth painted. Except in one

instance, where in the mad-house scene in the _Rake’s Progress_, the girl

whom he has ruined is represented as still tending and weeping over him in

his insanity, a glimpse of pity for his rogues never seems to enter honest

Hogarth’s mind. There’s not the slightest doubt in the breast of the jolly

Draco.