The frugal crone, whom praying priests attend, The courtier smooth, who forty years had shin'd Just brought out this, when scarce his tongue could stir : "I give and I devise" (old Euclio said, 20 And, Betty, give this cheek a little red. The "little red" is a poetical addition; but it really appears, from the "Life" above mentioned, that Mrs. Oldfield was handsomely dressed in her coffin, by her own direction. The charmer of the stage could not bear to fancy herself in mortal attire. SWIFT. BORN, 1667-DIED, 1745. For the qualities of sheer wit and humour, Swift had no superior, ancient or modern. He had not the poetry of Aristophanes, or the animal spirits of Rabelais; he was not so incessantly witty as Butler ; nor did he possess the delicacy of Addison, or the good nature of Steele or Fielding, or the pathos and depth of Sterne; but his wit was perfect, as such; a sheer meeting of the extremes of difference and likeness; and his knowledge of character was unbounded. He knew the humour of great and small, from the king down to the cook-maid. Unfortunately, he was not a healthy man; his entrance into the church put him into a false position ; mysterious circumstances in his personal history conspired with worldly disappointment to aggravate it; and that hypochondriacal insight into things, which might have taught him a doubt of his conclusions and the wisdom of patience, ended in making him the victim of a diseased blood and angry passions. Probably there was something morbid even in his excessive coarseness. Most of his contemporaries were coarse, but not so outrageously as he. When Swift, however, was at his best, who was so lively, so entertaining, so original? He has been said to be indebted to this and that classic, and this and that Frenchman;-to Lucian, to Rabelais, and to Cyrano de Bergerac; but though he was acquainted with all these writers, their thoughts had been evidently thought by himself; their quaint fancies of things had passed through his own mind; and they ended in results quite masterly, and his own. great fanciful wit like his wanted no helps to the discovery of Brobdignag and Laputa. The Big and Little Endians were close to him every day, at court and at church. A Swift took his principal measure from Butler, and he emulated his rhymes; yet his manner is his own. There is a mixture of care and precision in it, announcing at once power and fastidiousness, like Mr. Dean going with his verger before him, in flowing gown and five times washed face, with his nails pared to the quick. His long irregular prose verses with rhymes at the end, are an invention of his own; and a similar mixture is discernible even in those, not excepting a feeling of musical proportion. Swift had more music in him than he loved to let "fiddlers" suppose; and throughout all his writings there may be observed a jealous sense of power, modifying the most familiar of his impulses. After all, however, Swift's verse, compared with Pope's or with Butler's, is but a kind of smart prose. It wants their pregnancy of expression. His greatest works are Gulliver's Travels, and the Tale of a Tub. THE GRAND QUESTION DEBATED. WHETHER HAMILTON'S BAWN SHOULD BE TURNED INTO A Thus spoke to my lady the knight full of care : If I make it a barrack, the crown is my tenant; And rather than that, I would lose my estate." Thus ended the Knight: thus began his meek wife : * A cant word in Ireland for poor country clergymen. † Two of Sir Arthur's managers. |