and makes society stand and deliver, easing my lord bishop of a living, and his grace of a patent place, and my lady of a little snog post about the court, and gives them over to followers of his own. "The great prize has not come yet. The coach with the mitre and crozier in it, which he intends to have for his share, has been delayed on the way from St. James's; and he waits and waits until nightfall, when his runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different road, and escaped him. So he fires his pistols into the air with a curse, and rides away into his own country." A bold but strikingly significant figure of the clerical polemic—the restless, scornful heautontimoroumenos, whose youth was bitter, "as that of a great genius bound down by ignoble ties, and powerless in a mean dependence," and whose age was bitter, "like that of a great genius that had fought the battle and nearly won it, and lost it, and thought of it afterwards writhing in a lonely exile."
Mr. Thackeray holds that Swift's was a reverent and pious spirit—the spirit of a man who could love and pray. We incline to thinks with Mr. de Quincey,[1] that Swift was essentially irreligious, and that his rigid incapacity for dealing with the grandeurs of spiritual themes, is signally illustrated by his astonishment at Anne's refusing to confer a bishopric on one who had treated the deepest mysteries of Christianity, not with mere scepticism, or casual sneer, but with set pompous merriment and farcical buffoonery—who, in full canonicals, had made himself a regular mountebank—who seems to have thought that people differed, not by more and less religion, but by more and less dissimulation. But Mr. Thackeray does recognise in his clerical career a "life-long hypocrisy"—he does see that Swift, "having put that cassock on, it poisoned him: he was strangled in his bands. He goes through life, tearing, like a man possessed with a devil. Like Abudah in the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and knows that the night will come and the inevitable hag with it. What a night, my God, it was!—what a lonely rage and long agony!—what a vulture that tore the heart of that giant!" And it is good to read the comment on the fourth part of "Gulliver," and the denunciation of its "Yahoo language," its gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind,—tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene." Well may it be called a "dreadful allegory," of which the meaning is that man is utterly wicked, desperate, and imbecile, with passions so monstrous, and boasted powers so mean, that he is, and deserves to be, the slave of brutes, and ignorance is better than his vaunted reason. "A frightful self-consciousness it must have been, which looked on mankind so darkly through those keen eyes of Swift." And a bitter reaction on himself was the penalty of his misanthropic wrath—as was said to the Greek tyrant,
Ὀργῃ χαριν δους, ἡ σ᾽ἀει λυμαινεται.
The lecture on Congreve is Titmarsh all over. The dramatist's
- ↑ See his review of Schlosser's "Literary History of the Eighteenth Century." Tait 1847.
