IV PARNELL 137 symmetry. Parnell's remarkable odes, The Night Piece and The Hymn to Contentment, however, possess more real inspiration. They form a link between Milton on the one hand and Gray and Collins on the other, and their employment of the octosyllabic measure is wonderfully subtle and harmonious. The Hymn opens thus: "The silent heart, which grief assails, Treads soft and lonesome o'er the vales, And seeks, as I have vainly done, Amusing thought; but learns to know In trailing purple o'er the ground; To range the circuit of the sky, Converse with stars above, and know All nature in its forms below; The rest it seeks, in seeking dies, And doubts at last, for knowledge, rise." It would be easy to sustain the thesis that there is more of imagination, in the purely Wordsworthian sense, more of mystery and spirituality, in Parnell than in any other poet of the time. He was very diffident, and published nothing; but in 1722 Pope collected his posthumous pieces into a volume to which he prefixed a fine dedication, the only fault of which is that it contains too little about the dead Parnell and too much about the living Harley to whom, as the muse "shaded his evening walk with bays," the volume was inscribed. Among the wits and templars who surrounded Addison many wrote verses, but few wrote them particularly well. Three of his chief friends, however, stand out beyond the rest with some recognised claim to the title of poet. Ambrose Philips (1671-1749) is chiefly remembered on account of his dispute with Pope about the merit of their rival pastorals. Philips wrote, from Copenhagen, an Epistle to the Earl of Dorset, which was once admired; and, towards the close of his career, he composed a number of birthday odes to children of quality, in a sevensyllabled measure, which earned him the name of "NambyPamby," but which form, in their infantile, or servile, prettiness, his main claim to distinction. Thomas Tickell (1686-1740) is a man of one poem; he composed a really superb elegy, inspired by deep and genuine feeling, on the death of Addison : "Can I forget the dismal night, that gave And sleep in peace, next thy loved Montagu!" William Somerville (1677-1742) was more interesting as a man than either Tickell or Philips. He was a fox-hunting Warwickshire squire, who used to come up to town periodically to worship Mr. Addison, and who rather late in life ventured upon verse of his own. His chief poem, The Chase (1734), is a didactic epic, in four books of blank verse, on the art of hunting with the hounds. He delayed writing it so long that we find his old Addisonian style tempered by the new and freer manner of Thomson. Somerville, in fact, is one of the few transitional figures of the end of this period. Dr. Samuel Croxall (1680 ?-1752) published anonymously in 1720 The Fair Circassian, a paraphrase of the Canticles. He had previously issued two cantos in imitation of the Faery Queen. Croxall was blamed for the voluptuous warmth of his verses, which was indeed something extraordinary from the pen of an embryo canon residentiary. He translated Æsop in 1722. He described IV CROXALL 139 his poetical ambition rather too arrogantly, when he said that his aim was "to set off the dry and insipid stuff" of the age by publishing "a whole piece of rich glowing scarlet." Two stanzas from his utterly neglected poetry will show how little Croxall shared the manner of his contemporaries : "Unlock the tresses of your burnish'd hair, Loose let your ringlets o'er your shoulders spread; So Phoebus o'er the yielding ether streams, And streaks the silver clouds with brighter beams. What rosy odours your soft bosom yields, Heaving and falling gently as you breathe! Like hills that rise amidst fair fertile fields, 5 With round smooth tops and flowery vales beneath; While myrtles bud, and violets bloom below." The long life of Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), the Edinburgh wig-maker, projects beyond that of Pope at both ends. He gave up the outside of the head for the inside by becoming a bookseller and a publisher; from his shop at the sign of the Mercury he regarded the wits of distant London with almost superstitious reverence. He wrote a great deal of absolute rubbish, but his pastoral drama of The Gentle Shepherd (1725) is the best British specimen of its class, and contains some very beautiful passages both of dialogue and of description. Most of Ramsay's original songs were poor, but he preserved the habit of writing in the Doric dialect, and as an editor and collector of national poetry he did thoroughly efficient and valuable work. His two miscellanies, The Tea-Table and The Evergreen, were not without their direct usefulness in preparing the Scottish ear for Burns. CHAPTER V SWIFT AND THE DEISTS THREE years before the close of the seventeenth century two short works were ready for publication, which a mere accident postponed into the age of Anne. At the darkest moment of English literature, when every branch of original writing except comedy seemed dying or dead, a genius of the very first order was preparing for the press The Battle of the Books and A Tale of a Tub. It is desirable to remember that these works were complete in 1697, although not published until 1704, since the fact emphasises Swift's precedence of all the other wits of the reign of Anne. It cannot, indeed, be too strongly insisted upon that he was the leader of their chorus. In poetry, Pope, though stimulated and sustained by his sympathy, was quite independent of Swift; but the masters of prose, the great essayists, did not begin to flourish till his mighty spirit had breathed upon them. Swift is the dominant intellectual figure of the first half of the century, as Johnson of the second, and it is hard to deny that he is altogether greater than Johnson. He is original in the first degree. His personal character is such as to illuminate, or else obscure, every other individual that meets him. Swift's love or Swift's hatred colours our conception of every important literary figure of his age. If the saeva indignatio which he so adroitly indicated in his own draft of an epitaph has been over-insisted upon, no one can deny or evade the splendida bilis. The mag CHAP. V SWIFT 141 nificence of Swift's anger, scintillating with wit, glowing with passion, throws its cometary splendour right across the Augustan heavens. There was an almost superhuman greatness about his cruelty, a feline charm in his caresses, a childishness, like the merriment of a tiger-cub, in his humour; he was irresponsible and terrible; his ambition threw dice with his reckless waggishness, till all was lost and won. He was the most unhappy, the most disappointed man of his age, and yet the greatest and the most illustrious. He is altogether wonderful and inscrutable, a bundle of paradoxes, the object of universal curiosity, the repulsion of the many, the impassioned worship of the few. Jonathan Swift, "the great Irish patriot," had nothing Irish about him except the accident of being born in Dublin. His father was a Herefordshire man, and his mother was a Leicestershire woman. The elder Jonathan Swift was made steward to the Society of the King's Inns, Dublin, in 1666, and there died about a year afterwards. Some months later his widow bore him a posthumous son, on the 30th of November 1667, and this was the famous writer. His mother was reduced to great poverty, and had to be supported by the charity of her husband's brothers, Godwin and Dryden Swift. As an infant Swift was stolen by his nurse and carried to Whitehaven; his mother, enervated by distress, seems to have acquiesced in this exile for three years, during which time she lodged once more with her relatives in Leicestershire. From 1674 to 1682 Swift was being educated at Kilkenny, the most famous of Irish schools, where Congreve was one of his companions. He was only fourteen when he was removed from Kilkenny to be entered at Trinity College, Dublin, where he stayed until the Revolution of 1688. His college career was not distinguished. He tells us that "he was so discouraged and sunk in his spirits that he neglected his academic studies," and " was stopped of his degree for dulness and insufficiency." He was made a B.A. in 1686, by special grace, which he chose to consider a humiliating distinction in such a case as his. Circumstances seem to have made him reckless, and the remainder of his college |