character even of uncommon kindliness. The same fact has, I hope, been evidenced in the cases of the men with whom we have dealt up to the present time; and we shall meet with proofs of it, as we continue our progress from the age of Dryden to our own. LECTURE IV. SWIFT, POPE, CHURCHILL. JONATHAN SWIFT, the famous Dean of St. Patrick's, has left among his numerous volumes such a mass of Satire, and his whole attitude towards the world was so essentially that of a satirist, that he fairly comes within the province which I have selected to make an excursion in. He is such a huge figure in our literature, and his personal story is so strange, so interesting, and so awful, that generation after generation of men gather round his monument with wonder, and try to understand the meaning of it;— as they gather round a pyramid, and speculate on the moral phenomena which produced it. Compared with Swift's life, the lives of his contemporaries are commonplace, and their characters to be read off at first sight. A pious-minded, semi-conventional essayist, with a fine sheen of humour playing over him, here is his friend Addison; Pope is not such a very difficult man to understand; and Bolingbroke is still easier :-but Swift is a portentous figure. We just begin, I think, to comprehend and to judge of him fairly, when we admit that he is altogether the most unfortunate man of genius in the history of England. That history is not without several instances of men of genius who have suffered from misfortune. Mere poverty is only bitter in so far as it cramps a man's abilities, and prevents his achieving what Nature has fitted him to achieve. It is bad enough; and Swift for a while had his share of it. But he had to struggle all his life under far deeper obstructions. He had giant energies, and a wretched field for them; a soul for worship, in an age of unbelief; a heart for love, yet under the ban of a mysterious destiny; and he had to fight his fight under the closest of all restrictions, the restriction on the very energies of life within him, by disease; he moved from youth in a cloud of hypochondria. Hercules had the poisoned shirt on him all his life. Now I am quite aware that all the criticism in the world will not make Swift an every-day favourite; he is an exceptional man—entirely an out-ofthe-way person. A building, his fame is (as I have observed elsewhere1) more like a Tower of Pisa than an ordinary edifice,—far from straight to the eye, according to the established notion of what a tower should be. Well, let us admit the fact; but what then? The tower has another relation besides its 1 In Singleton Fontenoy. |