"Non cuicunque datum est habere Nasam." I should be afraid of being thought a pedant for my quotation, did not I know that the gentleman I am writing to always carrys a Horace in his pocket.' The same taste which led Addison, as we have seen, to censure as fulsome the wild and gorgeous genius of Spenser, made him look with indifference, if not aversion, on the splendid scenery of the Alps: I am just arrived at Geneva,' he says, 'by a very troublesome journey over the Alps, where I have been for some days together shivering among the eternal snows. My head is still giddy with mountains and precipices, and you can't imagine how much I am pleased with the sight of a plain, that is as agreeable to me at present as a shore was about a year ago, after our tempest at Genoa.' The matured powers of Addison show little of this tame prosaic feeling. The higher of his essays, and his criticism on the Paradise Lost, betray no insensibility to the nobler beauties of creation, or the sublime effusions of genius. His conceptions were enlarged, and his mind expanded, by that literary study and reflection from which his political ambition never divorced him even in the busiest and most engrossing period of his life. [From the Letter from Italy.] For wheresoe'er I turn my ravish'd eyes, * The redd'ning orange, and the swelling grain: O liberty, thou goddess heavenly bright, In ten degrees of more indulgent skies; Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine, 'Tis liberty that crowns Britannia's isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. Ode. How are thy servants blest, O Lord! How sure is their defence! Eternal wisdom is their guide, Their help Omnipotence. In foreign realms, and lands remote, Supported by thy care, Through burning climes I pass'd unhurt, And breathed in tainted air. 1 Malone states that this was the first time the phrase classic ground, since so common, was ever used. It was ridiculed by some contemporaries as very quaint and affected. Thy mercy sweeten'd every soil, Think, O my soul! devoutly think, Confusion dwelt on every face, And fear in every heart, When waves on waves, and gulfs on gulfs, Yet then from all my griefs, O Lord! My soul took hold on thee. For though in dreadful whirls we hung I knew thou wert not slow to hear, The storm was laid, the winds retir'd, The sea that roar'd at thy command, In midst of dangers, fears, and death, My life, if thou preserv'st my life, Ode. The spacious firmament on high, Soon as the evening shades prevail, And spread the truth from pole to pole. What, though in solemn silence, all *The earliest composition that I recollect taking any pleasure in was the Vision of Mirza, and a hymn of Addison's, beginning," How are thy servants blest, O Lord!" I particularly remember one half-stanza, which was music to my boyish ear: "For though in dreadful whirls we hung Burns-Letter to Dr Moore. [The Battle of Blenheim.] But now the trumpet terrible from far, The fatal day its mighty course began, Behold, in awful march and dread array But O, my muse, what numbers wilt thou find [The concluding simile of the angel has been much celebrated, and was so admired by the lord treasurer, that on seeing it, without waiting for the completion of the poem, he rewarded the poet by appointing him, in the place of Mr Locke (who had been promoted), a commissioner of appeals.] [From the Tragedy of Cato.] Act iv.-Scene iv. Re-enter PORTIUS. Hah! what has he done? Portius. Scarce had I left my father, but I met him Portius. Nor did he fall before Yonder he lies. I saw the hoary traitor Grin in the pangs of death, and bite the ground. Portius, when I am dead, be sure thou place Portius. Cato. [meeting the corpse.] Welcome, my son! here lay him down, my friends, [Aside. Cato. Whate'er the Roman virtue has subdued, Portius. Misfortune on misfortune! grief on grief! Add, if you please, that I request it of him, The virtue of my friends may pass unpunish'd. a. If I forsake thee 1st I have life, may heaven abandon Juba! ato. Thy virtues, prince, if I foresee aright, ill one day make thee great; at Rome, hereafter, will be no crime to have been Cato's friend. ortius, draw near! My son, thou oft has seen sire engaged in a corrupted state, estling with vice and faction: now thou seest me spent, overpower'd, despairing of success: Let me advise thee to retreat betimes To thy paternal seat, the Sabine field, Where the great Censor toiled with his own hands, And all our frugal ancestors were blest In humble virtues and a rural life. There live retired; pray for the peace of Rome; When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, Portius. I hope my father does not recommend Cato. Farewell, my friends! if there be any of you In happier climes, and on a safer shore, [Pointing to his dead son. There the brave youth, with love of virtue fired, Who greatly in his country's cause expired, Shall know he conquer'd. The firm patriot there (Who made the welfare of mankind his care), Though still, by faction, vice, and fortune crost, Shall find the generous labour was not lost. Act V.-Scene I. [CATO alone, sitting in a thoughtful posture: in his hand PLATO's book on the Immortality of the Soul. A drawn sword on the table by him.] It must be so-Plato, thou reason'st well!- Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, I'm weary of conjectures. This must end them. The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds. Jon at: Swift. which he was early familiar, seem to have su.k deep in his haughty soul. Born a posthumous child,' says Sir Walter Scott, and bred up an object of charity, he early adopted the custom of observing his birth-day as a term, not of joy, but of sorrow, and of reading, when it annually recurred, the striking passage of Scripture in which Job laments and execrates the day upon which it was said in his father's house "that a man-child was born."" Swift was sent to Trinity college, Dublin, whicn he left in his twenty first year, and was received into the house of Sir William Temple, a distant relation of his mother. Here Swift met King William, and indulged hopes of preferment, which were never realised. In 1692 he repaired to Oxford, for the purpose of taking his degree of M.A., and shortly after obtaining this distinction he resolved to quit the establishment of Temple and take orders in the Irish church. He procured the prebend of Kilroot, in the diocese of Connor, but was soon disgusted with the life of an obscure country clergyman with an income of £100 a-year. He returned to Moorpark, the house of Sir William Temple, and threw up his living at Kilroot. Temple died in 1699, and the poet was glad to accompany Lord Berkeley to Ireland in the capacity of chaplain. From this nobleman he obtained the rectory of Aghar, and the vicarages of Laracor and Rathveggan; to which 35 was afterwards added the prebend of Dunlavin, making his income only about £200 per annum. At Moorpark, Swift had contracted an intimacy with Miss Hester Johnson, daughter of Sir William Temple's steward, and, on his settlement in Ireland, this lady, accompanied by another female of middle age, went to reside in his neighbourhood. Her future life was intimately connected with that of Swift, and he has immortalised her under the name of Stella. But books, and time, and state affairs, sidence of the unhappy Vanessa. 'As he entered She In school to hear the finest boy. In 1701, Swift became a political writer on the The tragedy continued to deepen as it approached side of the Whigs, and on his visits to England, he the close. Eight years had Vanessa nursed in soliassociated with Addison, Steele, and Arbuthnot. In tude the hopeless attachment. At length she wrote 1710, conceiving that he was neglected by the mito Stella, to ascertain the nature of the connexion nistry, he quarrelled with the Whigs, and united with between her and Swift; the latter obtained the fatal Harley and the Tory administration. He was re-letter, and rode instantly to Marley abbey, the received with open arms. I stand with the new people,' he writes to Stella, ten times better than ever I did with the old, and forty times more caressed.' He carried with him shining weapons for party warfare - irresistible and unscrupulous satire, steady hate, and a dauntless spirit. From his new allies, he received, in 1713, the deanery of St Patrick's. During his residence in England, he had engaged the affections of another young lady, Esther Vanhomrigh, who, under the name of Vanessa, rivalled Stella in poetical celebrity, and in personal misfortune. After the death of her father, this young lady and her sister retired to Ireland, where their father had left a small property near Dublin. Human nature has, perhaps, never before or since presented the spectacle of a man of such transcendent powers as Swift involved in such a pitiable labyrinth of the affections. His pride or ambition led him to postpone indefinitely his marriage with Stella, to whom he was early attached. Though, he said, he loved her better than his life a thousand millions of times,' he kept her hanging on in a state of hope deferred, injurions alike to her peace and her reputation. Did he fear the scorn and laughter of the world, if he should marry the obscure daughter of Sir William Temple's steward? He dared not afterwards, with manly sincerity, declare his situation to Vanessa, when this second victim avowed her passion. He was flattered that a girl of eighteen, of beauty and accomplishments, sighed for a gown of forty-four,' and he did not stop to weigh the consequences. The removal of Vanessa to Ireland, as Stella had gone before, to be near the presence of Swift her irrepressible passion, which no coldness or neglect could extinguish- her life of deep seclusion, only chequered by the occasional visits of Swift, each of which she commemorated by planting with her own hand a laurel in the garden where they met her agonizing remonstrances, when all her devotion and her offerings had failed, are touching beyond expression. The reason I write to you,' she says, is because I cannot tell it to you, should I see you. For when I begin to complain, then you are angry; and there is something in your looks so awful, that it strikes me dumb. O! that you may have but so much regard for me left, that this complaint may touch your soul with pity. I say as little as ever I can. Did you but know what I thought, I am sure it would move you to forgive me, and believe that I cannot help telling you this, and live.' To a being thus agitated and engrossed with the strongest passion, how poor, how cruel, must have seemed the return of Swift! Cadenus, common forms apart, In every scene had kept his heart; Had sighed and languished, vowed and writ, Even Stella, though ultimately united to Swift, dropped into the grave without any public recogni tion of the tie; they were married in secrecy in the garden of the deanery, when on her part all but life had faded away. The fair sufferers were deeply avenged. But let us adopt the only charitableperhaps the just-interpretation of Swift's conduct; the malady which at length overwhelmed his reason might then have been lurking in his frame; the heart might have felt its ravages before the intellect. A comparison of dates proves that it was some years before Vanessa's death that the scene occurred which has been related by Young, the author of the Night Thoughts.' Swift was walking with some friends in the neighbourhood of Dublin. Perceiving he did not follow us,' says Young, *1 * The talents of Vanessa may be seen from her letters to Swift. They are further evinced in the following Ode to Spring, in which she alludes to her unhappy attachment:— Hail, blushing goddess, beauteous Spring! Yet why should I thy presence hail? |