comic feast is described as flaring with lights, with the worst company in the world, without a pretence of morals—Mirabel or Belmour heading the table, dressed in the French fashion, and waited on by English imitators of Scapin and Mascarille. The young sparks are born to win youth and beauty, and to trip up old age—for what business have the old fools to hoard their money, or lock up blushing eighteen? "Money is for youth; love is for youth; away with the old people." Then comes the sigh we all know so well: "But ah! it's a weary feast, that banquet of wit where no love is. It palls very soon; sad indigestions follow it, and lonely blank headaches in the morning." The banquet is, to this observer, but a dance of death: every madly-glancing eye at that orgy is artificial—every tint of bloom is from the rouge-pot, and savours of corruption—
Every face, however full,
Padded round with flesh and fat,
Is but modell'd on a skull.[1]
With that graphic emphasis which makes him at his best so memorably impressive, the lecturer likens the feelings aroused by a perusal of Congreve's plays to those excited at Pompeii by an inspection of Sallust's house and the relics of a Roman "spread"—"a dried wine-jar or two, a charred supper-table, the breast of a dancing-girl pressed against the ashes, the laughing skull of a jester, a perfect stillness round about, as the Cicerone twangs his moral, and the blue sky shines calmly over the ruin. The Congreve muse is dead, and her song choked in Time's ashes. We gaze at the skeleton, and wonder at the life which once revelled in its mad veins. We take the skull up, and muse over the frolic and daring, the wit, scorn, passion, hope, desire, with which that empty bowl once fermented. We think of the glances that allured, the tears that melted, of the bright eyes that shone in those vacant sockets, and of lips whispering love, and cheeks dimpling with smiles, that once covered yon ghastly framework. They used to call those teeth pearls once. See! there's the cup she drank from, the gold chain she wore on her neck, the vase which held the rouge for her cheeks, her looking-glass, and the harp she used to dance to. Instead of a feast we find a gravestone, and in place of a mistress, a few bones!" How tellingly expressive, and how like the moralist, whose brightest sallies so often speak of saddest thought! Addison meets with warmer eulogy than might have been anticipated. He is invariably mentioned with loving deference. He is pictured as one of the finest gentlemen the world ever saw—at all moments of life serene and courteous, cheerful and calm—admirably wiser; wittier, calmer, and more instructed than almost every man he met with—one who could scarcely ever have had a degrading thought—and as for that "little weakness for wine"—why, without it, as we could scarcely have found a fault with him, so neither could we have liked him as we do. The criticism on his papers in the Spectator is delightfully genial and true; and the peroration of the lecture has a sweetness and natural solemnity of affecting reality, where
- ↑ Tennyson: "Vision of Sin."
