retirement so frequently and emphatically expressed in his works. This is a remarkable instance of the malicious ingenuity of courts : and this refusal, there can be but little doubt, tended to deepen the gloom which pervades all Young's poetry, and particularly his later works.

Young married a lady of rank, daughter of the Earl of Lichfield, and widow of Colonel Lee, to whose two children the poet was tenderly attached. The death of this lady, which was followed, though at considerable intervals, by that of the two children, produced a powerful impression on Young's mind, and had, it is probable, a great influence in suggesting the tone and subject of his last and greatest work, the Night Thoughts.' It is this poem upon which his reputation, in England as elsewhere, is principally founded; and we shall endeavour, in giving a short account of its nature and merits, to show the causes of its great popularity. It is a series of reflections on the most awful and important subjects which can engage the attention of the man or of the Christian—on Life, Death, and Immortality-and is in many passages executed in a manner worthy of the tremendous character of the subject. The poem is divided into nine books, or Nights, each of which pursues some train of thought in harmony with the supposed feelings of the poet at the time of composition. These feelings are modified by the deep grief arising from the recent loss of many beloved objects, and from the contemplation of the total ruin of a surviving person, young Lorenzo," by some supposed to be the portrait of the poet's own son, but who is probably nothing more than an embodiment of imaginary atheism and unavailing remorse and despair. There can be no doubt that the gloom of these unhappy events was intentionally aggravated and exaggerated by the poet, in order to give greater weight and impressiveness to the reflections which he pursues. Whether this want of good faith be real, or only existing in the reader's imagination, it is singularly injurious to the effect of the poem; for we are of course apt to look upon the deep gloom which Young has thrown over his picture rather as a trick of art than as the terrific thunder-cloud-the "earthquake and eclipse" of nature : and the diminution of sublimity in our minds produced by this want of sincerity is in exact proportion to the impression that would have been made had this eloquent grief been altogether real.

"the

The style, too, of Young in the Night Thoughts' is of a kind little capable of keeping alive those awful feelings of wonder and sublimity which his genius is so powerful in evoking. In him the intellect had an undue predominance over the imagination and the sensibility; and hardly does he raise up before us some grand image of death, of power, or of immortality, than he turns aside to seek after remote and fantastic allusions, which instantly destroy the potent charm. Few writers are so unequal as Young, or rather, few writers

of such powerful and acknowledged genius were ever so deficient in comparative or critical taste. To him every idea seemed good, provided only it was strong, original, and ingenious; and as his subject was precisely the one least suited to this species of intellectual sword-play, the conceits, unexpected analogies, and epigrammatic turns of which he was so fond, are as offensive and incongruous as would be the placing of the frippery fountains and clipped yews and trim parterres of Versailles among the glaciers and precipices of Alpine scenery. This false taste for ingenious and far-fetched allusions Young may have in some measure acquired from the study of Crowley, Donne, and other writers of what was incorrectly called the "metaphysical" school of English poetry; but it is easy to observe that what in amatory or encomiastic compositions is nothing but false ornament and perverted ingenuity, becomes, when introduced into a work of a sublime and religious character, a great and unpardonable offence against good taste and propriety. It is impossible to open any page of Young without finding something grand, true, and striking: he is full of

"thoughts that wander through eternity."

He "speaks as one having authority;" and his accents are weighty, solemn and awakening, when he exhibits to us the vanity and nothingness of this life, and the nobility of the human soul-its aspirations, its destinies, and its hopes. But the mind of Young was ever on the watch for an opportunity for anything striking and new; his genius has "lidless dragon eyes," a restless, unappeasable vigilance; and no sooner does he perceive the slightest opening for an unexpected and epigrammatic turn, than he turns aside to pursue these butterflies of wit, these "Dalilahs of the imagination." Consequently there are few poets whose works present a greater number of detached glittering apophthegms-none who is so little adapted to give continuous pleasure to a reader of cultivated taste. Like the painter, he is sometimes equal to Raphael, sometimes inferior to himself.

It would be unjust were we to refuse our tribute of acknowledgment and admiration to the vast richness and fertility of imagination displayed by this powerful writer: it is the fertility of a tropical climate; or, rather, it is the abundant vegetation of a volcanic region; flowers and weeds, the hemlock and the vine, the gaudy and noxious poppy, and the innocent and life-supporting wheatall is brought forth with a boundless and indiscriminate profusion. Hence, in spite of the gloomy nature of Young's subject—a gloom yet further augmented by the half-affected tone of his language his writings are often studied with rapture by the youthful, and by those whose taste is yet unformed; and there are not many works whose perusal is fraught at the same time with more danger and

more advantage. His happinesses of diction are innumerable. What can be finer either in images or in sound than his phantoms of past glory and power?

"What visions rise!

What triumphs, toils imperial, arts divine,
In wither'd laurels glide before my sight!
What lengths of far-famed ages, billow'd high
With human agitation, roll along

In unsubstantial images of air!

The melancholy ghosts of dead renown,
Whispering faint echoes of the world's applause;
With penitential aspect, as they pass,

All point at earth, and hiss at human pride❞—

or that noble and yet familiar image, so justly praised by Campbell— "Where final Ruin fiercely drives

Her ploughshare o'er creation"

or the bold impersonation of Death, who is introduced

"To tread out empires and to quench the stars."

On the other hand, what can be in worse taste than the comparison of the celestial orbs with diamonds set in a ring to adorn the finger of Omnipotence, which ring, by a supererogation of absurdity, is afterwards called a seal-ring?

"A constellation of ten thousand gems,

Set in one signet, flames on the right hand
Of Majesty Divine; the blazing seal,
That deeply stamps, on all created mind,
Indelible, his sovereign attributes."

But perhaps the most easily perceived defect in this extraordinary work is the want of a plan and interest pervading the whole, and producing a natural connection or dependence between the various parts of the poem. Of course it would be too much to expect that a meditative or contemplative composition should contain a fable or narrative of progressive interest; but, at the same time, we have a right in every work consisting of many parts to look for a certain degree of dependence and mutual coherency. This condition is assuredly not fulfilled by the 'Night Thoughts,' the parts of which have no necessary connection, and may be displaced in their order without any injury to the effect of the whole. This blemish, perhaps to a certain degree inevitable, is but too much aggravated by the fragmentary and paroxysmal character of Young's style, producing its effect upon the reader, as Campbell justly and acutely remarks, rather by short abrupt ictuses of surprise than by sustained splendour of thought or steady progression of imagery.

CHAPTER XIII.

SWIFT AND THE ESSAYISTS.

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Coarseness of Manners in the 17th and 18th centuries Jonathan Swift Battle of the Books-Tale of a Tub - Pamphlets - Stella and Venessa Drapier's Letters-Voyages of Gulliver- Minor Works-Poems-Steele and Addison-Cato - Tatler-Spectator-Samuel Johnson -- Prose Style Satires of London' and 'The Vanity of Human Wishes' - Rasselas -Journey to the Hebrides-Lives of the Poets-Edition of Shakspeare — Dictionary-Rambler and Idler.

IT can hardly, we think, be denied, that the Revolution of 1688 either produced or was accompanied by certain social effects at least temporarily injurious to society in England, and lowering the tone of sentiment, not only in political matters, but also, which is of much more importance to our subject, in the literary character of the times. Something of the old courtesy, something of the romantic and ideal in social intercourse between man and man, and still more preceptibly between man and woman, the Revolution appears to have annihilated; a more selfish, calculating, and material spirit begins to be perceptible in society, and consequently to be reflected in books. Language becomes a little ruder, more disputative, and more combative the intellect now plays a more prominent part than either the fancy or the sensibility—the head has overbalanced the heart.

Of the general prevalence of such a tone of society there can be no more conclusive proof than the personal and literary character of Jonathan Swift; a man of robust and mighty intellect, of great and ready acquirements, of an indomitable will, activity, and perseverance, but equally deficient in heart as a man and in disinterestedness as a patriot. The Dean of St. Patrick's was indeed a rarely-gifted, prompt, and vigorous intellect: in his particular line of satire he is unequalled in literature; he did more and more readily what few beside him could have attempted; he played during his life a prominent and important part in the political drama of his country, and established himself by his writings among the prose classics of the world: but he was, as a man, heartless, selfish, unloving, and unsympathising; as a writer, he degraded and lowered our reverence for the divinity of our nature; and as a statesman, he appears to have felt no nobler spur to the exertion of his gigantic powers than the sting of personal pique and the pang of discontented ambition.

He was born in Dublin in the year 1667; a posthumous child, left dependent upon the uncertain charity of relations for support, and the not less precarious favour of the great for protection. This

unfortunate entrance into life appears to have tinged with a darker shade of misanthropic gloom a temperament naturally saturnine, and to have inspired something of that morbid melancholy which ultimately deepened into hypochondria, and terminated so terribly in madness and idiotcy. Swift at the beginning of his career received the aid and protection of Sir William Temple, who enabled him to complete his education at Oxford, and in whose house he made that acquaintance with Mrs. Johnson (the daughter of Temple's steward) which became the source, to Swift, of a signal instance of retributive justice, and to the unfortunate lady of such a sad celebrity under the name of Stella. Swift did not begin to write until he had reached the tolerably mature age of thirty-four; and this circumstance will not only account for the extraordinary force and mastery which his style from the first exhibited, but it will prove the absence in Swift's mind of any of that purely literary ambition which incites the student

"To scorn delights, and live laborious days."

Throughout the whole of his literary career Swift never appears to have cared to obtain the reputation of a mere writer: his works (the greater number of which were political pamphlets, referring to temporary events, and composed for the purpose of attaining temporary objects) seem never to have been considered by him otherwise than as means, instruments, or engines for the securing of their particular object. The ruling passion of his mind was an intense and arrogant desire for political power and notoriety; or, as he says himself, "All my endeavours, from a boy, to distinguish myself, were only for want of a great title and fortune, that I might be used like a lord by those who have an opinion of my parts-whether right or wrong, it is no great matter." This was indeed but a low and creeping ambition; and the fruit—at least as far as any augmentation of human happiness is concerned is worthy of the tree.

The protégé of Temple, Swift was naturally, at the beginning of his public life, a Whig; and his first achievements in the warfare of party were made under the Whig banner. He also exhibited his

attachment to his patron by taking part in the famous controversy respecting the comparative superiority of the ancients or the moderns; a controversy of which Temple was the most distinguished champion. Swift wrote the 'Battle of the Books,' a short satirical pamphlet, full of that coarse invective and savage personality which afterwards rendered him so famous and so formidable. Some of the incidents of the battle are worthy of the hand which painted the Yahoos or the Projectors' College of Laputa. The principal object of attack in this fierce and brutal piece of drollery was Bentley.

In 1704 appeared Swift's extraordinary satiric allegory, entitled 'The Tale of a Tub,' in which the author pretends to give an account