PR I 3 63 L7a CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 189I BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Date Due N jt--m. M. TTHPr NOV ^R 2 2 )^d^ MAR 2 2 0EC14J944 MA^S^i^'.^ WAR;: 3#^ Cornell University Library PR 1363.L79 English essays, 3 1394 ni.T 336 569 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013336569 THE WARWICK LIBRARY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. In crown 8vo volumes, cloth, 3s. 6d. each. General Editor — Professor C. H. Herford, Litt.D. Each volume in the present series will deal with the development in English literature of some special literary form, which will be illustrated by a series of representative specimens, slightly anno- tated, and preceded by a critical analytical introduction. I English Pastorals. With an Introduction by Edmund K. Chambers, b.a. 2^ Literary Criticisni. With an Introduction by C. E. Vaughan, M.A., Professor of English Literature at University College, Cardiff. I English Essays. With an Introduction by J. H. Lobban, M.A., formerly Assistant Professor of English Literature in Aberdeen University. (T English riasques. With an Introduction by H. A. Evans, ^ M.A., Balliol College, Oxford. /-Letter- Writers. With an Introduction by W. Raleigh, m.a., '' Professor of English Literature at University College, Liver- pool. Tales In Verse. With an Introduction by C. H. Herford, Litt.D., Professor of English Literature at University College, Aberystwyth; General Editor of the Series. Other volumes from time to tinte. THE WARWICK SHAKESPEARE. The greater plays, edited in a literary spirit, and issued in single volumes at the price of ij-. or is. 6d. per volume. Richard the Second, is. 6d. Edited by C. H. Herfoed, LittD., Trinity College, Cambridge; Professor of English at University Collegej Aberystwyth. riacbeth. ts. Edited by Edmund K. Chambers, B.A., formerly scholar of Corpus Christ! College, Oxford; Chancellor's English Essayist, 1891. Julius Csesar. if. Editedby Arthur D. Innes, M.A., formerly scholar of Oriel College, Oxford, Hamlet. \s. 6d. Edited by Edmund K. Chambers, B.A., for- merly scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. As You Like It. is. 6d. Edited by J. C. Smith, M.A. (Edin.), B.A. (Oxon.), formerly eSchibitioner of Trinity College, Oxford, Lecturer in Owens College, Victoria University. Twelfth Night, is. 6d. Edited by Arthur D. Innes, M.A., Editor of Juliv^ Cezsar. Henry the Fifth, is. 6d. Edited by G. C. Moore Smith, M. A., St. John's College, Cambridge. Richard the Third. Edited by George Macdonald, M.A., Balliol College, Oxford; formerly classical examiner in the Uni- versity of Edinburgh. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Edited by E. K. Chambers. Cymbeline. Edited by A. J. Wyatt, M.A, Cantab, et Lond. The nerchant of Venice. Edited by H. L. Withers, B.A, Principal of the Borough Road Training College; formerly scho- lar of Balliol College, Oxford. The Tempest. Edited by F. S. Boas, M.A., formerly exhibi- tioner of Balliol College, Oxford; lecturer Oxford Society for the Extension of University Teaching. Edited by C. H. HERFORD, Lrtt.D. ENGLISH ESSAYS J. H. LOBBAN English Essays WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY J. H. LOBBAN LONDON: MDCCCXCVI BLACKIE & SON, LIMITED SO • OLD • BAILEY, • E.C. GLASGOW AND DUBLIN ' ? ^ ^■\\o\ %z "As we read in these delightful volumes of the Tatler and Spectator the past age returns, the England of our ancestors is revivified. The Maypole rises in the Strand again in London; the churches are thronged with daily worshippers; the beaux are gathering in the coffee-houses; the gentry are going to the draw- ing-room; the ladies are thronging to the toy-shops; the chairmen are Jostling in the streets; the footmen are running with links before the chariots, or fighting round the theatre doors." — Thackeray: English Humourists. CONTENTS. III. OfMprtf, Page Introduction, Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam— I. Of Seeming Wise, .... i II. Of Studies, - 2 Abraham Cowley — Daniel Defoe — IV. The Instability of Human Glory, - - . 11 V. A Quack Doctor, . 14 Sir Richard Steele — VI. A Scene of Domestic Felicity (Tatter, No. 95), oo.w' VII. A Death-bed Scene (7aif/«>-, No. 114), -' 26*' VIII. The Trumpet Club (Tatter, No. 132), - 3o«. IX. On the Death of Friends (Tatter, No. i8i), - 35- X. The Spectator Club (.S^erfato;-, No. 2), w*^ 39 XI. The Ugly Club (Spectator, No. 17), 46 XII. Sir Roger and the Widow (Spectator, No. 113), 51 Joseph Addison — XIII. fhe Character of Ned Softly (Tatter, No. 163),^ 56 — ~XIV. Nicolini and the Lions (Spectator, No. 13), 60 — «v. Fans (Spectator, No. 102), .^ - -, 64— XVI. Sir Roger at the Assizes (Spectator, No. 122), '^ 68— X VII. The Vision of Mirza {Spectator. No. 159), .»- 72 —XVIII. The Art of Grinning (i/iecto^**-, No. 173), 77 XIX. Sir Roger at the Abbey (Spectator, No. 329)--' 81 XX. Sir Roger at the Play (Spectator, No. 335),^ 86—-^ XXI. The Tory Fox-hunter (Freeholder, No. 22), *^ 90 Jonathan Swift — XXII. On Style (Tatler, No. 230), - 96 ' V XXIII. The Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff, 102 Henry Fielding — XXIV. The Commonwealth of Letters (Cov. Gar. Jour., No. 23), - 109 VUl CONTENTS. Page Alexander Eope — XXV. On Dedications (Guardian, No. 4), - - ■ I'S XXVI. On Epic Poetry (Guardian, No. 78), - 120 George Colman and Bonnel Thornton — XXVII. The Ocean of Inlc (Ca»«OMJe»?-, No. 3), - - 126 William Cowper — XXVIII. On Conversation (Connoisseur, No. 138), - - 131 Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield — XXIX.' On Passion (/%?-^, No. 196), - - 136 Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford — XXX. The Change of Style ( World, No. 10), - 142 Samuel Johnson — XXXI. 'The Advantages of Living in a Garrett (Rambler, No. 117), 147 XXXII. Literary Courage (Rambler, No. 137), 153 XXXIII. Dick Minim (Idler, No. 60), - 158 XXXIV. Dick Minim (Idler, No. 61), ■ 163 Oliver Goldsmith — XXXV. National Prejudice (Citizen of World, No. 4), - 166 XXXVI. The Man in Black (Citizen of World, No. 26), - 170 xxxvii. A Club of Authors (Citizen of World, No. 30), 173 XXXVIII. Beau Tibbs (Citizen of World, No. 70), i8o xxxix. A City Nigiit Piece (Citizen of World, No. 1 17), 185 Leigh Hunt — XL. A Few Thoughts on Sleep, - - - 188 XLi. Deaths of Little Children, ... 194 William Hazlitt — XLii. On Going a Journey, .... 198 xliil The Sick Chamber, - - - - - 211 j Charles Lamb— XLIV. All Fools' Day, - - - 219 ,' XLV. Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist, - - 224 XLVI. Dream-Children — A Reverie, - - 232 XLVii. The Convalescent, - - 237 ; XLViii. Detached Thc(ughts on Books and Reading, - 242 XLix. Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age, 25 1 INTRODUCTION. A LOOSE sally of the mind; an irregular, in- digested piece; not a regular and orderly com- position " — such is Johnson's definition of an essay. The first of these phrases admirably describes the typical eighteenth-century essay, but the term h£is so wide an application, embracing the maxims of Bacon, the philosophy of Locke, and the loose sallies of Steele and Addison, that the necessity is at once obvious of drawing some broad lines of demarcation among its various significances. The difficulty of making any such division is probably greater in the case of the essay than with any other generic name employed in literature, but three leading senses may be noted in which the term is used. It may be modestly applied to an elaborately finished treatise ; or, with more direct reference to its primary meaning, it may denote the brief, general treatment of any topic, an author's preliminary skirmish with his subject; while again, it may mean a short discursive article on any literary, philosophical, or social subject, viewed from a per- sonal or a historical standpoint. It is with essays of the last kind that this volume deals, and its scope is still farther limited by the exclusion of professedly critical papers. Literary criticism is a subject of so much importance and interest that X THE COMEDY OF MANNERS. it must be regarded as an independent develop- ment,' and the separation can be justified also on another ground. It is no violence to literary usage to think of the English Essayists as those who took for their special subject-matter the varying phases of contemporary manners and customs; and in tracing the course of this particular kind of writing, one meets with everything that is most character- istic in the periodical essay. The titles employed by the earlier essayists indicate pretty clearly the range of the subjects atteinpted. They hint, also, that the essayist must possess experience of and insight into character, a critical taste free from pedantry, and an easy literary style. The typical essayist must to some extent be at once a rambler, a spectator, a tatler, and a connoisseur. It is a suggestive fact that after the artificial comedy of manners the next great development in literature was the essay of contemporary manners. It began at a time when the stage was in a state of decline. Artificial comedy, the characteristic product of the Restoration age, was still reeling under the onset of Jeremy Collier. Dryden had made a dignified apology, Congreve had prevari- cated in vain, Farquhar, and more especially Steele, had in some degree purified the stage, but the theatre had no longer a paramount literary import- ance until Garrick appeared to act and Goldsmith to write. When the disorderly pulses of Restora- tion activity had finally resumed a normal beat, a vast change had taken place in the nature of social life, and there was need of some new form of litera- ture to gratify the cravings of Queen Anne society. BACON. XI It was the work of the essay to supply this demand, to judiciously season culture with the requisite spice of scandal, and to exhibit the ■ foibles of the time with a humour that should not be impure. In tracing the course of any literary development, one is apt to exaggerate the importance of the casual coincidences to be found in the literature of different periods. Passages might be singled out from Elizabethan prose bearing a certain resem- blance to the essay proper; but, as Professor Saints- bury has pointed out, importance is to be attached not to " the occasional flash here and flash there of 'modernism', but the general presence of a tendency distinctly different from that of the main body of forerunners". Bacon's essays form a collection of wonderfully ■ shrewd and pithy observations, and have been a veritable mine of suggestions for writers since; but in no real sense can they be said to be prototypes of the eighteenth -century essay. They are, in his own words, but "certain brief notes set down rather significantly than curi- ously ; not vulgar, but of a kind whereof men shall find much in experience and little in books ". Be- tween them and the Tatler there is nothing more than a nominal connection, and even to Dryden, Cowley, and Temple the Spectator owes but little obligation. To Dryden belongs the credit of hav- ing given modernism to English prose and of having founded literary criticism. His Prefaces are cer- tainly essays, not dissimilar in kind to the critical papers in the Spectator; but then it is not in these latter that the peculiar significance of Addison's work is to be found. It is often difficult to draw a XU FRENCH AND ITALIAN INFLUENCE. line between literary criticism and gossip about literature, but any essay in which the predominance of the former element is tolerably clear must be relegated to a different current of development from that of the periodical essay. Still, Dryden must be included among the remote pioneers of the latter, from the one fact that he made frequent use of a simple, colloquial style, intended to appeal not to a small circle of critics but to a wider and more popular audience. On the other hand it is sometimes claimed that the essay was the product of French and Italian influence, and Dr. Johnson, in his account of its origin, has singled out for mention the works of Casa, Castiglione, and La Bruy^re. It is only misleading, however, to con- nect the essay with such a book as Casa's Galateo, a somewhat rambling and casuistical treatise on polite behaviour which, nearly two centuries later, found a counterpart in Chesterfield's Letters to his Son. Nor is it less far-fetched to attach much importance to The Courtier of Castiglione. That this work enjoyed a great popularity is evident from the number of its editions and translations, but it would be absurd to say that its diffuse moralizings on the character of the ideal courtier of Urbino had any sensible influence on the English essay. The Characters of La Bruyere, avowedly modelled on those of Theophrastus, are in many respects so admirable as to justify their mention by Johnson. They were known to both Steele and Addison, to whom they very probably suggested many subjects for treatment; but they are too fragmentary, too much after the style of the seventeenth-century MONTAIGNE. XIU "character", to be seriously included among the antecedents of the Tatler, and their importance still further diminishes when it is remembered, that Montaigne, Bacon, Dryden, and Cowley had all written prior to them. The truth is that the only obligation the English essay owes to foreign sug- gestion is to the essays of Montaigne. To what extent he borrowed from Seneca and Plutarch is not worth considering, for it would be as hyper- critical to engineer a parentage for Montaigne's happy egotism as to ferret out the antecedents of Pepys' Diary. His essays at the time were unique, and Montaigne is the first philosopher in an easy chair. It can scarcely be determined at what point his influence first made itself felt in the progress of the English essay. Bacon owed him nothing, but it is interesting to find as a connecting-link between Montaigne and Dryden that the latter, after declar- ing that a preface should be " rambling '', admits that he learned this " from the practice of honest Montaigne". Cowley's essay. Of Myself , implicitly makes the same admission. Once for all the Frenchman had vindicated the essayist's right to be pleasantly discursive, and the spirit of his in- fluence breathes in the lucubrations of Bickerstaff not more than in the essays of Hazlitt, Hunt, and Lamb. Montaigne is, indeed, the prince of tatlers. There is no questioning his right to be called the inventor of the essay form in its most general sense, but it remained for his English successors to limit its scope by prescribing a certain unity of design, and some restraint in the essayist's use of irrele- vancy and egotism. XIV TEMPLE AND DRYDEN. The work of Temple and Dryden is more im- portant in connection with the development of English prose as a whole than with respect to the particular little bit of literary evolution here con- sidered. Lamb pointed out the affinity between Temple and Addison as writers of " genteel " English, and Addison in his statelier vein clearly shows that he had profited by Temple's courtly style. That the aim of Temple was not dissimilar to that of Steele and Addison may be inferred from his own statement that he " never wrote anything for the public without the intention of some public good". He did not, however, make any striking anticipation of the Tatler's method, and his posi- tion in literature is that, improving on Evelyn, he pointed out the way to Dryden, who made a yet bolder inroad on the stiffness of Elizabethan prose. When Dryden's masculine vigour had quite broken adrift from the influence of Euphuism, the result was that, for the first time in the seventeenth cen- tury, there was a terse, vigorous, and to some ex- tent homely prose. Dryden unquestionably affected the whole subsequent history of prose literature; but of him, as of Temple, it must be said that, leaving criticism out of the question, he did more to influence the style than the form of the eighteenth- century essay. He said himself that "he could write severely with more ease than he could write gently ", and this avowal shows how wide the gulf really is between him and his less vehement but sprightlier successors. "When we pass," says Mr. Craik, "from him to Steele and Addison, we find that the model he had formed has been adapted to EARLY NEWSPAPERS. XV new purposes for which by its nature it was ad- mirably fitted." On March 8, 1702, Anne ascended the throne, and three days later the Daily Courant, the first regular daily newspaper, appeared, "giving all the Material News as soon as every Post arrives ". It is not within the scope of this volume to treat of the growth of the newspaper press, but since at some points the essay and the news- paper come into touch, it must be observed that in one form or another papers were plentiful be- fore the appearance of the Tatler. So- far back as 1 62 1 Burton complains of the prevalence and popularity of "pamphlets of news", and in Nichols' Literary Anecdotes there is a list of more than two hundred pamphlets and sheets of intelligence which were prior to the Daily Courant. Of most of these the very names are generally forgotten, though a few are famous as indicating important stages in the development of the press, or are remembered, like the British Apollo ridiculed by Thackeray, for the degree of absurdity they succeeded in attaining. None of them, however, influenced the essay in anything like the same degree as Defoe's Review, which, in a manner characteristic both of the daring nature of its author and of the feverish state of the time, was begun, in 1704, within the walls of New- gate. The Review of the Affairs of France became, in the course of its second volume, a tri-weekly, appearing like the Tatler on every Tuesday, Thurs- day, and Saturday, and in this form it survived until 29th July, 17 12, when the Stamp Act imposed a duty of a penny per sheet. "Grub Street has xvi Defoe's review. but ten days to live", wrote Swift on 19th July, and the collapse of the Review was only one of an enormous number of cases which fuliilled the Spec- tator's punning prophecy of a general " fall of the leaf". While Defoe's Review, with its invention of the leading article, its splendid versatility, and its fearless criticism of topics of the day, must be granted an important place in the history of journalism; large reservation must be made when it is claimed that its author anticipated Steele. Few writers more than Defoe elude classification. He occupies a tantalizing position at the threshold of two great developments in prose literature, and it is as difficult to deny that the Review led the way to the Tatler as to maintain that Pamela was not influenced by Crusoe or Roxana. Although Defoe's object was primarily a political one, it had soon occurred to him that some attention to society scandal would further recommend his paper, and with this in view he added to it the "Mercure Scandale; or Advices from the Scandalous Club". The author of Roxana was clearly the very man to preside over such a club, but it is not surprising to find that he frequently allowed politics to invade the society corner of his journal, and that his gossip is characterized rather by realistic piquancy than by any endeavour to elevate his age. The Scandal Club may not un- fairly be supposed to have suggested to Steele the idea of using club life as a suitable framework for his essays. The project can, indeed, be traced farther back to the Athenian Gazette, but then, even in regard to the other novel features of the Review, Defoe humorously complains that he was (M249) DEFOES REVIEW. XVII charged with being " only a Mimic of Harry Carr, in his Weekly Packet of Advice from Rome". " All the Wit of Mankind," he adds, " seems now to be composed of but Imitations, and there 'is nothing new under the sun'." Defoe's theory of amuse- ment was better than his practice. He strikingly anticipates Steele when he declares " and thus we wheedle them in (if it may be allowed that expres- sion) to the knowledge of the world, who, rather than take more pains, would be content with their ignorance, and search into nothing"; but his laud- able design of wheedling the ignorant into know- ledge took the form generally of what he truly calls " impertinence and nonsense ", of frivolous answers to fictitious questions, and most frequently of scath- ing rejoinders to scurrilous attacks from Grub Street upon himself. It is a matter of some difficulty, especially at the present time, to say where literature begins and journalism ends. In Defoe's time the separation was tolerably broad, and he himself in his early efforts at essay-writing did not succeed in deviating into pure literature. With his wonted clear-sightedness he foresaw the possibilities in store for such a paper as the Tatler, but there were several obstacles in the way of his undertaking it. The buffetings of fortune left him no time to indulge in the learned ease of Addison, and he seems to have regarded literature only with the eye of a practical man of business. His extraordinary attention to realistic detail, and his plain, rugged style are only the natural literary expressions of the outstanding traits of his character. M. Taine has said of the Spectator that it " is only an honest man's manual, 'f (M249) B DEFOES REVIEW. and is often like the Complete Lawyer", and this misapplied phrase would not unfitly describe much of Defoe's literary work. He had not sufficient humour in his nature to enable him to laugh at the follies he was chiding, nor was he, in spite of his endless fertility of resource, possessed in large measure of the literary sense. That an essay ought to be something more than a hastily-written article on a subject of passing interest did not occur to him; he did not, like its greatest exponents, regard it as a thing to be lovingly touched and retouched until it emerged from its author's hands as an artistic whole. It is generally hazardous to appeal against any long-sustained verdict of public literary opinion, but it cannot be admitted that the oblivion into which the Review has fallen is a wholly merited one. A rich crop of mushroom periodicals sprang up after the disappearance of the Spectator, and their names and histories have frequently been recorded in literature. Most of them exhibit no ability comparable to that of the Review, so that some other cause must be sought for its failure than want of literary merit. Two reasons are readily found. There is no doubt that the main one is the Review's interference with politics, and the conjecture is supported by the subsequent fate of Addison's Freeholder. Again, the fact must be reckoned with that Defoe was never admitted into the inner circle of wits and gentlemen who presided at that time over the destinies of authors. His works, accordingly, never went forth to the public stamped with the imprima- tur of coffee-house applause. He was known in Defoe's later essays. xix the highest literary circles only as an old hosier and a seditious brawler. Pope chained him in the Dunciad along with some notorious scribblers, and Swift could allude to him only as an illiterate fellow who had stood in the pillory. However obvious his deficiencies as an essayist, it is impos- sible to withhold admiration for his single-handed achievement, begun, as he says, " in tenebris ", and carried out with indomitable courage. Yet, if the Review be called the prototype of the Tatler, it must be kept in mind that all it could have done was to suggest the possibility of holding up the follies of society in a periodical paper. Defoe's best essays must be looked for among the numerous articles discovered by Mr. Lee, which were sub- sequently contributed to Mist's and Applebee's Journals. It is not, however, by them but by his earlier work that the question of his priority to Steele must be judged, and it is certainly not of a kind to entitle him to be called the first English essayist. Of any attempt to give a literary finish to his style, or to laugh his age into virtue by means of coherent, neatly-rounded essays, there is no sign in the earlier essays of Defoe; and that he had himself no thought of having been the pioneer of Steele is evident from the fact that, long after the Tatler and the Spectator had begun to meet with the neglect generally paid to established classics, he appeared in the preface of the Universal Spectator as a professed imitator of the Addisonian essay. It remained for some one to follow up Defoe's suggestion by employing as a literary medium a prose style which should have both the XX CLUBS AND COFFEE-HOUSES. propriety of that of Temple and Dryden, and the ease and gaiety of ordinary conversation. The credit of making this combination, and of thereby inaugurating a new development in literature, be- longs entirely to Sir Richard Steele. In Hatton's New View of London, published six years after the accession of Queen Anne, it is seriously asked, with reference to the existence of coffee-houses, "who would have thought London would ever have had near 3000 such Nusances, and that Coffee should have been (as now) so much Drank by the best of Quality and Physicians.'" This question at once brings one face to face with the most characteristic feature of Queen Anne society, and it is not devoid of literary significance inasmuch as the periodical essay is closely con- nected with the history of clubs and coffee-houses. It was eminently natural for the early essayists, when they were on the outlook for a simple device by which to give some degree of unity to their loose sallies, to avail themselves of this predominating social feature. The atmosphere of the coffee-house pervaded the whole of the literature of the reign, and affected it in many obvious ways. Both Defoe and Swift conceived the idea of an English academy, and the coffee-house to a certain extent realized the conception. In the later days of Johnson this be- comes more apparent, but even in Queen Anne's time the literary taste of the town was almost en- tirely directed by the judgments of the chief coffee- house dictators. The first half of the eighteenth century witnessed a vast improvement in the man- ners and customs of society, a reformation in effect- CLUBS AND COFFEE-HOUSES. XXI ing which the essay was not the least powerful factor; but at the same time it is indubitable that the coffee-house and not the home was the centre of social life, and that the former was regarded as a sort of happy compromise between Restoration profligacy and Puritan domesticity. Most of Steele's letters to his wife are more or less ingenious apolo- gies for his "dining abroad", but the practice which Lady Steele resented was really a not unimportant element in her husband's education as an essayist. What was written of the earliest coffee-houses is equally descriptive of those in 1709: — " You may see there what fashions are, How periwigs are curled, And for a penny you may hear All novels in the world ". Nor does the doggerel enumerate all the aspects of coffee-house entertainment ; at Button's literature was eagerly canvassed, while again at Will's " The gentle beau, too, joins in wise debate, Adjusts his cravat, and reforms the state ". Surely in no other school could Steele so well have learned, like Will Honeycomb, " the history of every mode". In May, 1707, he had been appointed Gazetteer, and there can be little doubt that it was during the performance of this duty that the con- ception of the Tatler dawned upon him. His work in Lord Sunderland's office could not have been very congenial; Steele was more a beau than a politician, and it is easy to conjecture with what pleasure he determined to vary official drudgery by becoming the voluntary gazetteer of the coffee- XXll THE DESIGN OF THE TATLER. house. In the dedication of the first collected volume of the Tatler to Arthur Maynwaring, he throws some light on the history of his brilliant project. He resolved, he says, " to publish a paper which should observe upon the manners of the pleasurable, as well as the busy part of mankind ". From this it is not rash to infer that Steele claimed to have made a distinct advance on any former periodical, and to have been the first to make the essay an instrument for exhibiting contemporary manners. Had he had any previous paper in his mind, had he in any degree considered himself an imitator, one may be sure that he would have ad- mitted the fact, for he was always unjust to himself in his acknowledgment of debt to others. He also points out that " it seemed the most proper method to form it by way of a letter of intelligence " — and here it is Steele, the Gazetteer, who speaks, while his proposal to include "the ordinary occurrences of common journals of news " indicates his connection with preceding journalists. Indeed, the Tatler contains within itself many signs of the transition from journalism to essay-writing, and may fairly be regarded as standing midway between the Review and the Spectator. It is very noticeable that the journalistic element in the Tatler diminishes as the work proceeds. How much of the change was due to Addison cannot be determined, but probably he was the first to realize the full possibilities of Steele's design, and by the gradual exclusion of communica- tions dated from St. James's coffee-house to make the Tatler ultimately approximate to the form of the Spectator. Usually, in comparisons between them. PARTNKRSHIP OF ADDISON AND STEELE. xxiii great emphasis is laid on the superior unity of the Spectator. Such superiority was inevitable, and only points out, in an indirect way, that the Tatler was the beginning of a new development, and was therefore bound to betray some signs of its journal- istic origin. When two authors collaborate, there is an irresist- ible tendency for critics to set about apportioning their respective claims, and there is always consider- able danger of transferring interest from their actual works to rival theories concerning them. Only irrational optimism can hope that there will ever be a time when disputes will have ceased about Beaumont and Fletcher, or Addison and Steele; and even in the most honest attempts at forming a reconciliation, there is always the necessity of re- viewing the history of the antagonism, and the liability of thereby reopening the controversy. In the case of writers like Steele and Addison, where interest in the authors' personalities is a factor in any critical estimate too strong to be wholly elimin- ated, this danger is especially obvious, so that it is not surprising to find that many writers who depre- cate any antagonism are apt to proceed on the tacit assumption that Addison's was the more important share in the partnership. Such an assumption is, to say the least, highly questionable. Phrases such as "Addison's Spectator^' or "Addison's Sir Roger" are entirely question-begging phrases, and do a manifest injustice to the originality of Steele. If Addison be allowed to have been the more brilliant contributor, yet to Steele must be given all the credit of having been the projector and editor; and. XXIV UNJUST ESTIMATES OF STEELE. whatever his literary deficiencies, it is his name that must rank the higher, if regard be had merely to the development of the English essay. In Steele there was a strange blending of acute enterprise and boyish thoughtlessness, and it is the fate of all authors who have a special place in their readers' affections that the latter side of their character should be unduly emphasized. A claim to pity, even if it be a loving pity, is a dangerous attribute for an author to possess, and it has militated against Steele's purely literary reputation that he is thought of as being, like lug friend Gay, "in wit a man, simplicity a child". So enamoured of Addison's " elegance " were his earlier editors that they rather grudged Steele any share of his fame, and it is unfortunate that some of the absurdities of Hurd should have been endorsed by the eloquence of Macaulay. Nor are some of Steele's sincerest ad- mirers free from blame. Perhaps there is no more stimulating introduction to the literature of last century than Thackeray's lectures — or Esmond; but it is well in approaching Steele's writings to recognize that Thackeray's lovable Dick Steele is not altogether the same man as the founder of the English Essay. De Quincey pointed out several necessary qualifications in the exaggerated opinions current as to Addison's extensive learning. It may be admitted that he was better versed in classics than his friend, but it has to be set against this that Steele-fpossessed many qualities even more essential to an' essayist than extensive learning. His was an exceptionally strong emotional temperament; he could sympathize with every side of character, and Steele's qualifications. xxv temporarily identify himself with the feelings of another, and it was this that gave him so wide a knowledge of men and enabled him to sketch the outline of the Spectator Club. Steele rather than Addison was the true Spectator; he mixed freely in every kind of society, and it frequently happened that the general impressions he drew were after- wards improved and amplified by Addison. It is precisely what one would expect from the characters of the two men, that Steele should have taken the chief part in inventing the dramatis personae of the essays, and that Addison should appear to most advantage in handling mental abstractions of his own creation, and in critical and allegorical writing. The Tatler ran from I2th April-, 1709, to 2nd January, 17 11, and consisted in all of 271 numbers, of which Steele contributed four to his coadjutor's one. At first somewhat of a medley, it was not till it had run about a third of its course that it attained to anything like the unity of its successors, and for this change, as has been said, probably Addison was responsible. That it was thrown off in a hurry is a boast sometimes made by the author of a laboured composition, but of most of his work Steele could have said so with the utmost sincerity. Indeed, if capacity for taking pains be an indis- pensable part of the connotation of genius, Steele possessed but a slender stock. His talent lay not in elaboration, but in striking out disconnected happy thoughts, and for this purpose the earlier and looser form of the Tatler was best adapted. Of his sustained pieces of humour there is none better XXVI THE PATHOS OF STEELE. than the description of the Trumpet Club, whose president Sir Jeoffery Notch, with his story of the game-cock, Gantlett, is of the same family as Squire Hardcastle, Sir Roger, and Sir Peter Teazle. Of four papers which might justly be described as the best of his pathetic writing, three are in the Tailer. The scene of domestic felicity, with its sequel, is no less remarkable for its delicate word-painting than for the careful delineation which makes it rank as an anticipation of Pamela, while the description of his father's death is not only a masterpiece but is undoubtedly Steele's most characteristic effusion. Overcharged emotion can go no farther; the collapse is inevitable, and with unconscious imitation Steele has relieved the scene by the Shakespearian device of a knocking at the door. His pathos is singularly pure, and free from that maudlin self-consciousness which offends in Sterne, and is often repellent in the Man of Feeling. At such times, too, his writing reaches its highest water-mark; sincerity of feeling breaks through the affectations of fine writing and demands an equal simplicity of expression. Addi- son's contributions to the Tatler are completely overshadowed by his subsequent work, and it is on it that his reputation must be based. The paper in his most typical vein is the bantering sketch of Ned Softly, an admirably sustained bit of farcical writing. Steele would have probably compressed the subject into a paragraph, at any rate he had not the knack of drawing the humour out to such extreme tenuity. That he could do so without having recourse to commonplace interludes is one of Addison's most distinctive characteristics as a THE MERITS OF THE TATLER. xxvil humorist. Steele has described four of Addison's Tatlers as being the " greatest embellishments " of the whole work, but this is only the three-piled hyperbole of a biassed critic. It is remarkable that it is in the same place that he refers to himself as a distressed prince undone by his auxihary. This statement has often been unfairly quoted against him, and has been used with reference to his works as a whole. Steele meant it to apply only to the Tatler, and when it is remembered that he did four times the work of his brilliant auxiliary, one may be pardoned for refusing to accept literally his generous condemnation of him- self. It is impossible to believe that the Tatler came to an end because the editor was gravelled for lack of matter. Swift ill-naturedly expressed no surprise, charged Steele with laziness, and de- clared that the last Tatlers had been "cruel dull and dry ". There is little doubt that the real cause of the termination was that suggested by Gay, that Mr. Bickerstaff " had a mind to vary his shape, and appear again in some new light ". Steele had de- cided that it was impossible to graft a new project on the old design, and that the time had come for gratifying the public with a new series of characters. Its success justified the resolution, but the Tatler has merits apart from its historical interest. As a faithful picture of the time it excels the Spectator, and if it contains less literature, it contains more agreeable reading. It had completely realized its object; from the first it was hailed with unqualified approval by a public surfeited with third-rate plays and sombre divinity; it overthrew by ridicule XXVIU SIS SOGER DE COVERLEY. not a few of the follies of fashion, and it fought chivalrously and successfully for the dignity of woman. When the Spectator appeared after an interval of two months its success was assured. Its audience was ready to believe that the new paper would excel the old, and no writer had as yet appeared who could seriously rival the felicitous combination of Addison and Steele. Their contributions were of nearly equal extent; out of five hundred and ten papers Addison wrote thirty-eight more than Steele, while forty-five were done by occasional corre- spondents. The lead was taken by Addison with his description of the Spectator, and Steele followed with his six portraits of the members of the Spec- tator Club. Of these most interest attaches to Sir Roger de Coverley, for both authors bestowed special attention on the delineation of his character. They were not invariably successful in regarding the character from the same point of view, but after making due allowance for slight discrepancies, it must be admitted that they achieved a hitherto unequalled triumph in character-drawing. In the original sketch Steele described the knight as hav- ing formerly been a " fine gentleman ", a man about town, and none of his subsequent papers are incon- gruous with this outline. Addison, on the contrary, laid hold on the eccentric side of the character, and his Sir Roger is only an unusually simple country squire, who visits the play-house, the Abbey, and Vauxhall with the bewilderment of a rustic. But while Steele had an important share in the series of papers, there is no doubt about the literary ADDISON'S HUMOROUS ESSAYS. 'W'^T blemishes which are apparent in his contribumnsT His sketches are replete with good-humour and with the results of an observant study of character, but they show scarcely anything of Addison's artistic skill in developing a picture. Sir Roger at the as- sizes, or at the play-house, may be taken as supreme instances of Addison's craftsmanship. The humour, tinged with irony, is never boisterous; indeed, it has nearly always a certain solemnity which makes it the more admirably in keeping with the character of the squire, and the archaic turn of expression, which often appears strained in Addison's essays, serves only to heighten the effect of Sir Roger's whimsical foibles. It is possible that Addison had a political motive for so treating the character, but it is unnecessary to read too much into his playful irony; and, judging the result merely as literature, one is forced to admit the delicacy of the portraiture and the artist's admirable lightness of touch. The essays on Nicolini, on Fans, and on Grinning are other tj'pical specimens of Addison's wit, and after all has been said in praise of his criticisms and allegories, the humorous papers in the Spectator are unquestionably the best. A comparison of any one of these three essays with the account of the Ugly Club reveals the striking difference between the humour of Addison and of Steele. The latter laughs joyously without the suspicion of a sneer, and so heartily appreciates the spectacle of his distorted heroes that he pokes fun at the short- comings of his own face. Addison's sympathy stopped short of this, and if it be true, as Thackeray maintains, that Dennis's description of Sir John XXX CHARACTERISTICS OF ADDISON'S STYLE. Edgar bears a dreadful resemblance to Steele, there is certainly an equally dreadful truth in Mande- ville's happy phrase. Steele performed his duties as Spectator by mingling freely in clubs and coffee- houses, while Addison, to use Hurd's expression, remained suaviter subridens, maintaining a dignified aloofness and viewing others with good-humoured contempt. He had the national dread of giving a loose rein to emotion, and never indulges his readers with the naive self-revelation of Goldsmith or of Steele. "When phlegm," however, as M. Taine has said, " is united to gentleness, as in Addison, it is as agreeable as it is piquant. We are not repelled by venomous bitterness, as in Swift, or by continuous buffoonery, as in Voltaire." As com- pared with Steele, he was a more careful and there- fore a better writer. His early practice in verse composition, and his study of Cowley and Tillotson, had trained his ear to appreciate the requirements of prose cadence. His vocabulary was not un- usually extensive any more than were his learning and critical acumen, his moralizings are not in advance of Pope's, and his style is purposely loose ; but with all this he possessed a quite exceptional power of graceful and euphonious expression, and a complete mastery of polite ridicule. The smooth- ness of his style often entailed a sacrifice of strength, and the prim propriety of his language stands out in striking contrast to the nervous, un- polished vigour of Defoe. Addison's true greatness lies in his use of a pure and tuneful diction, and in his power of humorous satire. Irony, in his hands, was like a fine rapier which can wound without at INFLUENCE OF THE SPECTATOR. XXXI once being felt, and no English writer has excelled him in the deft handling of the weapon. Besides being the standard model for succeeding essayists, the Spectator in its own day won an astonishing and unprecedented popularity. As regards the improvement of English prose, Steele and Addison occupy only a secondary position. Cowley, Temple, and Dryden among their prede- cessors, and Swift and Defoe among their contem- poraries, left a more veritable mark than they did on the progress of style. But Steele and Addison were the first to combine good style with attractive matter, and thus to convey a prose ideal to a much wider circle than had any before. And further, they diffused a taste for knowledge as none pre- vious had done, they fostered an interest in literary criticism, and exercised generally an incalculable educative influence. That the "lesser immoralities", against which they inveighed, were driven out of Ikshion is clear from many sources, and there is ^portant contemporary evidence which has been attributed to Gay. "It is impossible to conceive the effect his (Steele's) writings have had on the town ; how many thousand follies they have either quite banished or given a very great check to ; . . . how entirely they have convinced our fops and young fellows of the value and advantage of learning." Reformations of manners and customs are not, how- ever, easily effected by strokes of the pen. This panegyric must be accepted with some qualification, but that the Tatler and Spectator did excellent service in the way indicated is indisputable, though it need not be believed that the whole of Queen xxxii SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY 'CHARACTERS'. Anne society was at once reformed by the fiat of two laughing philosophers. And there was still another result which contemporary estimates could not include, although it is the essay's greatest secondary achievement. It led the way to the perfecting of the English novel. More than a century before the Spectator the writing of Char- acters was a fashionable kind of composition. In 1608, Bishop Hall wrote a collection of this kind, which gained him from Wotton the title of "our English Seneca", and met with high praise from Fuller for "the pureness, plainness, and fullness of his style". This was followed in- 1614 by Sir Thomas Overbury's Witty Descriptions of the Pro- perties of Sundry Persons, and in 1628 by Earle's Microcosmography. All of these were to some ex- tent the forerunners of La Bruy^re, they all display a profusion of epigrammatic and sometimes pedantic word-play, but they all painted with too broad a brush, ignoring the individual for the type. Their \ characters have no basis in reality, and are merely " attempts to body forth the universal by combining a number of individual traits. Of idiosyncrasies they take no account, and accordingly fail to create a personality capable of evoking the slightest sym- pathy or interest. Overbury, the most representa- tive of these character-writers, has been made' the subject of an interesting comparison by Professor Raleigh in his English Novel. By making a selec- tion of passages from the Coverley papers, he has framed a character of Sir Roger analogous to Overbury's character of a country squire, and the comparison of this selection with the fully elabo- THE ESSAY AND THE NOVEL. XXXlii rated conception in the Spectator reveals as nothing else could do the magnitude of Addison's advance. " The dreary ' Character ' of the seventeenth cen- tury ", says Professor Raleigh, " which would have rendered Sir Roger as 'An Old Country Knight', and Will Honeycomb as 'A Mere Town Gallant ', has received its death-blow in these sketches, drawn by men who loved the individual better than the type, and delighted in precisely those touches of character, eccentricities and surprises, that give life to a literary portrait." The essayists quickened the seventeenth- century lay-figure into life by endowing it with human emotions and passions, and by making it not merely an isolated object for contemplation but also a unit on the crowded stage of a larger drama. The Spectator opens with the rather ambitious aim of bringing philosophy out of closets and libraries to dwell in clubs and coffee-houses. Steele's more modest valedictory words in the Tatler give a truer estimate of the essay's work, and are signifi- cant as being such as Richardson might have fitly used. " I must confess it has been a most exquisite pleasure to me to frame characters of domestic life, and put those parts of it which are least observed into an agreeable view ... in a word, to trace human life through all its mazes and recesses." The claim to have framed characters of domestic life is just, and it strikes the key-note of the English novel. The inauguration of the latter by Richardson does not differ from that of other literary forms; the year 1740 marks not so much the birth-year of a new kind of literature as a critical period in the history of a development that had long been going (M249) C XXxiv POPE AND THE GUARDIAN. on. Richardson, like others, had his pioneers, some notable, many forgotten. That his work can be so far resolved into its prime factors is no detraction to any literary creator, no reason for any stinting of the praise due to his original contributions. Just as the Tatler shows signs of transition, so Pamela displays but partial emancipation from the essay form. It resembles the letters of the Tatler and Spectator, but with the difference that all are made to revolve round a fixed centre. Even in Fielding's fondness for essay interludes there is a trace of the novel's origin, but Fielding stands to Richardson as the Spectator to the Tatler — the one carries on the other to an inevitable culmination. None of the other periodicals conducted by Steele and Addison approach the Spectator in point of continuity of interest or brilliancy of execution. The Guardian, the most notable of them all, con- tains nothing by Steele that he had not already surpassed, and is interesting mainly for the contri- butions of Pope and for the celebrated critiques on pastoral poetry — critiques which are valuable, not only as illustrating the crafty intriguing of Pope, but as having furnished the foundation for the revival of Scottish poetry in the successful pastorals of Allan Ramsay. Pope's essays on Epic Poetry and on Dedications both smack most unmistakably of the Dunciad, and their author's own practice in the matter both of epic and of dedication hardly justifies the cheap irony and acrimonious wit His letters, which with their careful workmanship and obvious insincerity present so vivid a contrast to the pathos of the Journal to Stella or to the un- SWIFT. XXXV affected candour of Steele's letters, hold an im- portant place in the history of letter- writing; but his essays are only imitations, and not even strik- ingly brilliant as that. Keenly alive to the foibles of his time, and vi^ith powers of observation carefully trained by practice, Pope failed as an essayist for lack of sympathetic humour and of ability to con- ceal his art. The same reasons partially hold good for the comparative failure as an essayist of a greater contemporary. They hold good only par- tially, for while it is undeniable that Swift's humour is generally devoid of any touch of sympathy, there is no author of whom it can be more confidently said that he never obtrudes his art. What he in- vited the Tatler to become, he was in large measure himself, " the instrument of introducing into our style that simplicity which is the best and truest ornament of most things in life ". He has left the best definition of style, but the key to his own suc- cess, and the key to all good writing, is contained in his admirable injunction to make use on all occasions " of such words as naturally occur on the subject". It is needful to remember that simplicity like every other quality of style is subordinate to the greater law of relativity, that simplicity when affected or overdone defeats its own end, and that restraint, which is the sign of the true artist, may easily pass into weakness. Swift was happy in avoiding these extremes and in realizing his own ideal. He could easily sustain his style for any time at the same pitch, he could always closely accommodate his manner to his matter, and he could convey his ideas clearly and forcibly without XXXVl THE VINDICATION OF BICKERSTAFF. distracting the reader's attention to the excellence of their vehicle of expression. Yet, great as were his powers of shrewd penetration into character, Swift wanted the lighter graces necessary to the essayist. He loved to wage war on man rather than to instruct him, and used wit not to " enliven morality" but to increase the venom of his sting. The Laputans were attended by flappers who awaked them from their day-dreams by gently striking them with a bladder. As contrasted with Swift's method, the methods of Steele and Addison are equally gentle, and yet, as an instrument of social and literary reform the laugh of Steele or the raillery of Addison was far more potent than the loaded bludgeon of Swift. Of some of his papers it is often hard to say whether they are so much essays as lampoons. The Vindication of Bickerstaff is thus open to question, but there is little need for justifying the insertion of so thoroughly typical a specimen of Swift's skill. The grave irony with which Partridge is furnished with proofs of his own death, and the drollery with which he is rebuked for refusing to see that the question of his existence is only a matter of ordinary speculation, are excelled by nothing in literature. It is unnecessary to charge Swift in this case with uncharitableness. Partridge was a quack, and did not live in vain to have given occasion to such a brilliantyisw d'esprit. It is almost a commonplace of criticism to remark on the difficulty of imitating Swift, so free is he from those mannerisms which are always apt to be mistaken for originality of style. Indeed the truest way to imitate him is to aim constantly at a perfect ARBUTHNOT. THE FREEHOLDER. XXXvii naturalness of expression. There was one writer of the time who succeeded in this in a wonderful degree. Arbuthnot, who does not rank as an essayist, so faithfully copied the gravity of the irony and the ease of the style that it remains a difficult problem to disentangle his share from their joint productions. Though the most successful, he is not, however, the only understudy to be met with among the early essayists. Of the few who helped Steele and Addison, Budgell and Hughes deserve prominent mention, both for the quantity of their work and for the ability they showed in writing in conformity with the Spectator's design. In neither case is the illusion ever quite complete; the copy has certain characteristics of its own, and it has not all those of the original, but in the case of Budgell, at least, the resemblance is so good as to lend plau- sibility to the assertion made so often on Johnson's authority that the proofs were revised and amended by Addison himself. Little importance attaches to the minor periodicals of Steele and Addison which extend beyond the limits of Queen Anne's reign. Party passion ran so high that even the essayists with one accord rushed into the fray with political diatribes. The one interesting exception is Addison's Freeholder, and in it the one interesting character is the Tory Foxhunter, who furnishes an excellent comparison with Sir Roger de Coverley. The political motive here becomes plainly apparent, the same old skill in character delineation is equally marked ; but there is no longer any button on the foil, and humorous exaggeration has broadened into caricature. XXXVm CLOSE OF THE FIRST PERIOD. Ten years had elapsed since the appearance of the Tatler when Addison died and Defoe produced his immortal novel. This decade forms the first great period in the history of the essay, the period that comprises both its rise and its culmination. The essay form was now firmly established, thor- oughly attuned to the genius of the language ; and however great their diversity, all essays henceforth could trace their lineage back to the reign of Queen Anne. Defoe, whose meteoric incursions into the domain of letters during a period of forty years are so bewildering to the lover of an orderly historical outline, not only had helped to lay the foundation of the essay, but took the chief part after the close of this first great epoch in maintaining it during the interval that elapsed between the Spectator and the Rambler. In one of his last writings he refers ironically to the falling off in periodical essays. " Is there no wit or humour left, because they are gone.? Is the spirit of the Spectators all lost, and their mantle fallen upon nobody? Have they said all that can be said.? Has the world offered no variety, and presented no new scenes since they retired from us? Or did they leave off, because they were quite exhausted, and had no more to say? We think quite otherwise." Defoe did not allow sufficiently for the damping effect of the Spectator's excellence. A crowd of imitations follows in the wake of every striking literary suc- cess, but, if that success be a sufficiently prolonged one, imitation will gradually cease, and the literary energies of the time will revive some older form, or will strike out some new line of development, DEFOE'S ESSAYS. xxxix rather than continue in a course in which it seems impossible to excel, impossible to completely avoid the dulness that is inseparable from all mere imi- tations of a successful model. Defoe's essays have their faults, but they show no lack of originality. That on the Instability of Human Giory is a good example of his serious vein and illustrates some of his merits and shortcomings. It contains a good deal that is natural and eloquent, but as a whole it is formless, and is marred by ludicrous associations out of keeping with the sublimity of the subject. The flavour of journalism permeates all his essays. "In a word, the character of a good writer, wher- ever he is to be found, is this, viz. that he writes so as to please and serve at the same time." This is how Defoe has stated his literary ideal. It is patently a journalist's one, in which perfection of style holds only a secondary place ; but such as it is Defoe realized it, and with all their imperfections his contributions to Mist's and Applebe^s journals are not seriously rivalled by any similar publica- tions in the ten years after Addison's death. The last year of Defoe's life is one of some importance in the history of the periodical essay. It was in 173 1 that Edward Cave started the Gentleman's Magazine, which, though its immediate effect was small, was destined ultimately to put an end to the separate publication of essays. The plan of the Spectator, even when under able management, was fitted to weary readers by its unrelieved monotony, and after one more vigorous attempt to resuscitate the older design, the scheme of Sylvanus Urban was generally adopted, and the essay found its Xl FIELDING. proper place as only one element in a miscel- laneous magazine. On Defoe's death, it was left to Henry Fielding to maintain the continuity of the essay until Johnson was ready to accept the trust, and he did so with characteristic ability in the Champion, the Jacobites Journal, the True Patriot, and the Covent Garden Journal, from 1739 to 1752- The last especially contains many excellent essays on literature and morals, characterized by their author's robust common-sense, his vigorous, easy style, and his good-humoured, racy wit. Most of the topics he had already handled in his novels, for while it is inexpedient to dislocate them from their proper setting, the prefatory and incidental dis- courses in Tom Jones are Fielding's best essays. His desultory criticism is as sound as it is original, and whatever differences of opinion there may be as to the value of his fiction, there can be none as to the faithfulness with which he adheres in his novels to the theories which his essays propound. It was natural, after the Tatler and Spectator had fallen into oblivion, that some attempt should have been made to start a paper which might do for the Georgian era what they had done for the reign of Queen Anne. That the fame of the Spectators was now no longer a serious obstacle to original effort, as Defoe asserted, is tolerably plain from contem- porary evidence. In 1750 Richardson candidly states that he " never found time to read them all", and Sylvanus Urban in reply makes the same ad- mission. It was in this same year that the Ramblet made the first attempt at revival, and began the second epoch of the English essay. Johnson, who THE RAMBLER. xli was born in the year of the Tatter's appearance, decided at last, to use Boswell's phrase, " to come forth in the character for which he was eminently qualified, a majestic teacher of moral and religious wisdom". "The Tatler, Spectator, 2,nd Guardian", continues Boswell, " were the last of the kind pub- lished in England, which had stood the test of a long trial; and such an interval had now elapsed since their publication, as made him justly think that to many of his readers this form of instruction would in some degree have the advantage of novelty." It is scarcely accurate to say that Johnson's aim was identical with that of the earlier essayists. "As it has been my principal design", he wrote, "to inculcate wisdom or piety, I have allotted few papers to the idle sports of imagination; . . . but scarcely any man is so steadily serious as not to complain that the severity of dictatorial in- struction has been too seldom relieved." By the time that Johnson wrote this, he had found that, in spite of the encomiums of the best judges, the public was not prepared to welcome his instruction with anything like the avidity formerly shown for the lucubrations of Bickerstafif. Nor is there any cause for surprise in this. The wonder is that Johnson should have managed to continue it for two years, and that with its many obvious defects he should have been able to win for it at last a very substan- tial popularity. Too much stress is sometimes laid on the pomposity of his diction. For serious topics, which were avowedly his chief aim, his style is well suited, and his use of a balanced, periodic structure, if ludicrous when misapplied, is certainly impressive xlii JOHNSON'S DICTION. when it is made the vehicle of his morahzings. In the Rambler and Adventurer, the latter of which shows its editor, Hawkesworth, as faithful an imita- tor of Johnson as Arbuthnot was of Swift or Hughes of Addison, his serious papers are undoubtedly the best. The story is told of him that at one time he was driven to eke out his income by writing sermons, and most of his essays certainly resemble utterances from the pulpit rather than from the editorial easy-chair. The essays in the Rambler are not by any means his best, but they are the most Johnsonian — in the worst sense, in the sense with which tradition has rather unfairly invested the term. An illustration of this is found in the essay on Literary Courage, which closes with a passage that a manual of rhetoric might quote as typical. "By this descent from the pinnacles of art, no honour will be lost ; for the condescensions of learning are always overpaid by gratitude. An elevated genius employed in little things appears, to use the simile of Longinus, like the sun in his evening declination: he remits his splendour but retains his magnitude, and pleases more though he dazzles less." Johnson was far from being a pedant, but he wanted the agility to make a grace- ful descent from the pinnacles of art, and he had not the supreme requisite of being able to conceal the condescensions of learning. The central idea in the essay on Living in a Garret is sufficiently ludicrous, and the humour is able even to break through the heavy cloud of words that envelops it. " He that upon level ground stagnates in silence, or creeps in narrative, might, at the height of half a THE ESSAYS OF JOHNSON. xliii mile, ferment into merriment, sparkle with repartee, and froth with declamation." Johnson is seldom so successful as this in his acrobatic feats, and the Rambler as a whole, judged by this novel criterion of his own, compels one to think that it had been written for the most part upon the ground floor. An improvement observable in his contributions to the Adventurer becomes very apparent in the Idler — a collection of papers published weekly for two years in the Universal Chronicle. The increased sprightliness of manner and the simpler mode of expression were probably the result only of Johnson's having more accurately gauged the nature of the public demand. Of other causes the most likely is the influence of the Connoisseur, which preceded the Idler by four years. When Johnson describes Dick Minim he comes very near to the playful irony of Addison, and his two papers on this subject form a good comparison with the Taney's account of Ned Softly. It must always remain a puzzle to account for the two-sidedness of Johnson's literary character. As conversationalist, letter -writer and poet, he wielded a trenchant and incisive style, while in his essays he was seldom able to free himself from the trammels of a cumbrous mannerism. There was sound criticism in Goldsmith's jest that he would make little fishes talk like whales. With this one irreparable deficiency he had every qualification that can be imagined necessary for an essayist. Even more than Steele or Addison he was " a club- able man"; he knew London and loved London as no one else has done; his dictatorship was more powerful and .more unquestioned than ever Dryden's Xliv THE CONNOISSEUR AND THE WORLD. was ; and he had besides a passionate love of liter- ature for its own sake, a fund of genuine wit, and a faculty of acute and eminently sensible criticism. " No periodical writer", says Addison, "who always maintains his gravity, and does not sometimes sacrifice to the Graces, must expect to keep in vogue for any considerable time." This statement gives at once the key to the Spectatot^s success and to the Rambler's failure. Johnson's style was frozen in " the pinnacles . of art ", while Addison's easy, flexible English adapted itself to every loose sally of the mind. For ten years after the Rambler, the essay was revived with a vigour that almost rivalled that of the Queen Anne epoch; but, with only one great exception, all Johnson's contemporaries in essay- writing were eclipsed by the magnitude of his per- sonality. Yet it might well be argued that no periodical during this revival resembles the Taller as closely in many of its outstanding features as the Connoisseur of Colman and Thornton. These writers, who according to their own statement col- laborated in every essay, achieved no brilliant in- novation either in form or in matter, but their magazine is far and away superior to any of John- son's as a faithful and graphic picture of Georgian life, and deserves to be remembered for its literary value as well as for the fact that Cowper was one of its correspondents. Two other celebrated letter- writers. Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, were the most brilliant contributors to the World, but they suffered from the constraint of the essay- form, and were unable within its scope to display IMITATIONS OF JOHNSON. xlv the graceful negligence and cynical wit that charac- terize the letters of both. They avoided, however, what was the besetting sin of the Rambler's im- mediate successors. Johnson's style had a good effect as a corrective of loose and formless expres- sion, but its influence was baneful upon writers of less calibre than himself, who neglected the im- portant difference between sound and sense. The mannerism was so easy to acquire, and it possessed such sonorous dignity, that many besides Hawkes- worth used it successfully to screen their poverty of matter, and to fob their readers off" with platitudes arrayed in swelling Johnsonese. The one great writer whom Johnson could not eclipse was Oliver Goldsmith, who, amidst the general contamination, stood out as the exponent of a pure and almost faultless prose style. It is questionable whether Goldsmith's essays have generally received the at- tention they merit, for they are easily the best of their time. Boswell, who highly appreciated John- son's " labour of language ", and was irritated by the Idler's comparative simplicity, makes the solemn assurance that to him "and many others it appeared that he studiously copied the manner of Johnson, though indeed upon a smaller scale". There is fine, unintentional humour in his honest contempt for the small scale of Goldsmith's imitation, and in his manifest anxiety to allow no little fishes to dis- port themselves quite in the manner of the whale. And yet, strange as it appears, Boswell could have produced some evidence in support of his conten- tion. The first number of the Bee, Goldsmith's first effort at periodical writing, exhibits the ludicrous xlvi GOLDSMITH. spectacle of its author masquerading in Johnsonian buckram. " In this situation, however, a periodical- writer often finds himself upon his first attempt to address the public in form. All his power of pleas- ing is damped by solicitude, and his cheerfulness dashed with apprehension. Impressed with the terrors of the tribunal, his natural terror turns to pertness, and for real wit he is obliged to substitute vivacity." A reader coming bolt on such a passage as this might well rub his eyes, and ask if it could possibly be the work of that cunning hand which pictured " the idyllic grace of the Vicar's home ". It was, however, but a momentary yielding to a prevailing fashion, and very soon Goldsmith's ex- quisite literary taste provided him with a medium of expression more pure and limpid than any that had yet been evolved. His style, which charms by its inimitable grace and astonishes by its continuous excellence, was the product of careful workmanship and of a familiar acquaintance with the best work of his predecessors. He recognized what was ad- mirable in Dryden, Cowley, and Tillotson; he saw that vigour was as lacking in Addison as it was excessive in Johnson; and he acutely observed that Steele was at his best in the Tatler, when he wrote simply and naturally without making any futile attempt to imitate Addison's emotional restraint His early efforts met with so little encouragement that his fame " hardly travelled beyond the region of Bow-bell", but he found "great satisfaction in considering the delicacy and discernment " of such readers as he had. This, however, cannot have continued long, for when he came to collect his THE CITIZEN OF THE WORLD. xlvii fugitive essays, he found that some of them had been reprinted sixteen times and claimed by dif- ferent authors as their own. The absence of any national prejudice is a trait of Goldsmith's character in striking contrast to Johnson's insularity of view. His sturdy faith in Fleet Street is inseparable from our conception of Johnson, and no one would have it otherwise; yet it often hurried him into dogmatic assertions out of keeping with his truer judgment. On the other hand, Goldsmith's vagabondage was a notable part of his education; it broadened his sympathies, quickened his sense of humour, and made him, as he loved to think, a citizen of the world. It was under this title that he collected the series of papers by which he had made the fame of the Public Ledger, and upon which his reputation as an essayist is most firmly based. The idea of satirizing the failings of one's countrymen in the character of a foreigner was no new one. It began with the Turkish Spy, attributed to Marana, and it was put to brilliant use in the Persian Letters of Montesquieu, but neither of these was probably the actual source of Goldsmith's inspiration. Mr. Austin Dobson has shown beyond the possibility of doubt that the origin of the Chinese Letters is to be found in a pamphlet by Horace Walpole, consisting of "A Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher in London, to his friend Lien Chi, at Peking". In the character of the observant and witty oriental. Lien Chi Altangi, Goldsmith came nearer than any other essayist to the plan of the Spectator, and he fully equalled his model in the accuracy of his criticism of life and in the gentle xlviii THE CITIZEN OF THE WORLD. humour of his reproof. He possessed in a wonder- ful degree the art of miniature painting, and the Chinese Letters are full of that same skill in brief but pointed characterization which makes Retalia- tion unique in English poetry. Of the fourth Letter, with its droll exposure of the inconsistency and brusqueness of the national character, Mr. Dobson remarks that " it is Goldsmith, and Gold- smith only, who could have imagined the admirable humour of the dialogue on liberty between a pris- oner (through his grating), a porter pausing from his burden to denounce slavery and the French, and a soldier who, with a tremendous oath, advo- cates, above all, the importance of religion ". In this same essay Goldsmith observed that "the English confer their kindness with an appearance of indifference, and give away benefits with an air as if they despised them ", and it is this character- istic which he proceeded to illustrate more fully in his description of the Man in Black. It is one of the chief charms of Goldsmith's essays that he constantly draws on the fund of his own varied experience, and that in them, just as in the Deserted Village, the most amiable traits in his creations are borrowed from his loving recollections of his own Irish home. Writing of the Vicar of Wakefield, Mr. Gosse has said "that it is more like an extended episode in the Spectator manner than a story, and that Fielding would have discoursed in vain if the British novel, after its superb start, had gracefully trotted back again into its stable in this way". This is surely an exaggerated expression of a real truth; but for our present purpose it is more per- goldsmith's characterization. xlix tinent to point out that the statement holds good in the inverse, and that Goldsmith's essay-charac- ters are like single threads unravelled from the tangled skein of a complete novel. The Man in Black is Goldsmith's first portrait of this kind, and it is easy to see in it not only a careful delineation of his father, but also not a few traces of his own character. Both as men and as writers there are many strong points of resemblance between Gold- smith and Steele, and the hundred and eighty-first Tatler, with its confession that pity was the weak- ness of its author's heart, affords an interesting comparison with the twenty-sixth Chinese Letter, which describes Goldsmith as a " mere machine of pity". If not one of his most highly finished sketches, the Man in Black is thoroughly charac- teristic of the author, and no better description has ever been given of one who with his right hand shakes the fist of righteous indignation at an object of charity, and furtively bestows alms with the left. More graphic and much more humorous are the three papers in which Goldsmith drew the inimit- able picture of Beau Tibbs, the prince of all shabby- genteel gentlemen, who dwelt in what he facetiously styled the first floor down the chimney. Like Tony Lumpkin's pot-house friend, who danced his bear only to the genteelest of tunes, the beau could not bear anything low, he had a mythical acquaintance with Lord Mudler and Lady Grogram, and he de- signed his six-year-old daughter for my Lord Drumstick's eldest son. The beau is' at his best when he visits Vauxhall along with his wife, Lien Chi, the Man in Black, and the pawnbroker's (M249) I> 1 HUMOUR AND PATHOS OF GOLDSMITH. widow. Lady Teazle riding double, behind the butler, on a docked coach-horse, is not more ludic- rous than the picture of Mr. Tibbs being whirled to Vauxhall seated on his wife's lap, and the whole of the little comedy is in keeping with the opening scene. Equally successful are Goldsmith's attempts at club portraiture. Not Steele, nor Addison, nor Johnson, intimately as each knew the humours of club life, has left anything so vivid as the meeting of Grub Street hacks, where the poet tables one and sixpence to be allowed to read his doggerel, and where another member, evidently a very near kinsman of Goldsmith, tells how he was duped by a most splendid message from the Earl of Dooms- day into leaving his lodgings, only to alight at a sponging-house, where a bailiff with a devil's face came out to meet him. Passages of genuine humour such as these are scattered broadcast over the Citizen of the World, but, though predominant, they do not make up the whole total of its merits. Goldsmith's sway, as Johnson said, was equally powerful whether smiles were to be moved or tears, and the essay, " A City Night Piece ", is an admirable example of his exquisite tenderness. The simple solemnity of its opening, with its strik- ing anticipation of Macaulay's New Zealander, is followed up by reflections full of the same deli- cacy as shines through the humour of Lamb, and the conclusion is perhaps the most self-revealing passage in all Goldsmith's works. " Why was this heart of mine formed with such sensibility.'' or why was not my fortune adapted to its impulse?" This is the key to the greater part of his character; it DECLINE OF THE ESSAY. li accounts for the miseries of his life, for the crowded staircase at Brick Court, and for his unique hold on his readers' affections; and it points also to one of the elements which charm in his style. It was Steele's boast that he aimed at giving his essays the air of common speech by using incorrectness of style, but Goldsmith contrived to sacrifice to the graces without making any such unnecessary surrender. When Swift attempted a homely style he often became coarse, while Addison in the same endeavour frequently succumbed to weakness. Goldsmith easily avoided these pitfalls, and it is not hazardous to say that he is unexcelled by any English prose writer in the purity, simplicity, and melody of his diction. An undoubted archaism lurks in the Spectator, but Goldsmith is essentially mo- dern, and when he writes his very best he combines the grace of Addison and the artlessness of Steele. When Goldsmith died, the reign of Johnson was not yet over, and there was only Burke left to dispute the sovereignty. But Burke was wiser than to descend from the pinnacles of art, and did not attempt any lop-sided union between his fiery rhetoric and the essayist's familiar themes. Indeed, after the Citizen of the World, the history of the essay repeats itself, and just as half a century elapsed between the Tatler and the Rambler, it was not till after a similar period that the nine- teenth century effected another brilliant resuscita- tion of the form. The reasons for this decline are entirely similar to those which previously operated. The essays of Goldsmith and Johnson set up a standard beyond the reach of mediocre craftsmen. lii ESSAYS IN THE MAGAZINES. and rendered it inevitable that the centre of literary- interest should be shifted from the essay to other developments. The novel had once already, in the hands of Richardson and Fielding, usurped the essay's place, and now, after having enjoyed a second decade of success, the essay gave way once more to fiction as represented by the Vicar of Wakefield, Tristram Shandy, and the Castle of Otranto, and did not retrieve its position until the end of the half-century which witnessed the rapid development of historical and domestic novels. Selections have been made from the Gentleman's Magazine, and much might be gleaned from other miscellanies of the time, but it must be an anti- quarian rather than a literary interest that prompts the choice. Many readers would rejoice like Elia to find these old magazines in an inn, but when their contents are read "in a cool hour", most critics would regard them with the same leniency and reverence as are paid to the fardingale and the full-bottomed periwig. Most of these magazine writers were like Sir Fretful Plagiary " so unlucky as not to have the skill even to steal with taste", and, avoiding the graces of Goldsmith, plodded on industriously in the footsteps of Johnson. The futility of their attempt cannot be better expressed than in the trenchant language of Burke, no matter though it is an example of Satan reproving sin: — " No, no, it is not a good imitation of Johnson ; it has all his pomp without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak without its strength; it has all the contortions of the sibyl without the inspira- tion". Indeed, only one feeble flicker lights up THE "man of feeling". liii the gloom which enveloped the essay during the rest of the century. Long before its appearance, Allan Ramsay had carried pastoral poetry north of the Tweed, but he had shrewdly adapted it to its new environment, substituting Patie and Jenny for Phyllis and Corydon. When Henry Mackenzie attempted a similar feat with the English essay, he made no such requisite changes, and the Mirror, the Lounger, and the Observer are but echoes of the Tatler, Spectator, and Connoisseur. Addison and Sterne are supposed to have been his models, but the contortions of the sibyl are more apparent than the inspiration. The Man of Feeling had nothing of Sterne's subtle humour, which plays round his pathos like a lambent flame; he "re- solved ", like Steele, " to be sorrowful " ; but he nurses his grief so carefully, and toys with it so long, that true pathos is at last insulted by the mummery. Crambe repetita is not an appetizing dish, and Simon Softly, and Tom Sanguine, and Mary Muslin, and Mary Plain are names that strike cruelly on the jaded ear. His characters are, indeed, for the most part anachronisms, and are as " cruel dull and dry" as the piping swains in a third-rate pastoral By the beginning of this century the face of society had changed, and the essay could no longer afford to confine its scope to " the town ". As much as poetry the essay reflects the spirit of the age, and while the former was striking many new notes, the other, leaving aside antiquated scandal and pinchbeck sentimentalism, was being pressed into the service of political and philosophical liv LEIGH HUNT. exposition. When Leigh Hunt commenced to write essays, he was plainly under the spell of a past age, and the Connoisseur was admittedly his model. Nor did he ever wholly succeed in throwing off the faded garments of the eighteenth century, and there is always present in his style a touch of archaism which makes one rank him with the earlier essayists rather than with his own vigorous contemporaries. In 1812 he was known only as an unusually capable dramatic critic, and it was not till seven years later that he began in the Indicator to revive the essay on the lines of Addison and Goldsmith. He cannot, however, be placed in the first rank of English essayists. In all his work there is a lack of virility, and he had no special endowment of pathos or of humour. When it is said that he could write commonplace gracefully, his merits and defects are summarized. His essays bear nowhere the impress of a strong personality, they contain no fresh creations, and they scarcely ever deviate from one level of unemotional calm. Yet he had indubitable skill in writing on familiar subjects, and he wielded a simple style that on rare occasions became even eloquent. The essays On Sleep, and On the Deaths of Little Children are his finest pieces of word-painting. The former, if disfigured by some patches of cheap moralizing, concludes with two paragraphs of singular beauty, while the other, though not displaying Steele's pathos, nor Lamb's April blending of tears and smiles, is a masterpiece of tender imagery and artistic restraint. Leigh Hunt was a genuine man of letters, with no very strong feelings and with but HAZLITT. Iv little imagination, loving books and flowers, and able to treat any subject in a pleasant and cultured style. The indisputable decline of his reputation is to be accounted for by his want of any striking originality, and by his being overshadowed by his greater contemporaries. Prior to the appearance of the Indicator, Hazlitt had done some of his best critical work, while Lamb, having given the results of his loving study of the early dramatists, was on the point of coming forward in the character of Elia. The exclusion of critical papers necessarily gives a totally inadequate representation of Hazlitt, who wrote his best only when art or literature was his theme. In him, much more distinctly than in Hunt or Lamb, a modern spirit is apparent. Save for a certain exuberance of style, there is nothing in his essays to suggest even now the flavour of antiquity; he approached his subjects with perfect originality and freshness ; his style cannot be definitely linked to any prototype; and, as critics of his own day were quick to observe, " his taste was not the creature of schools and canons, it was begotten of Enthusiasm by Thought ". It is enthusiasm, indeed, that is the most obvious charac- teristic of the essays — and they are his best essays — which he contributed between 1820 and 1830 to the Examiner and other papers. The traditional limits of the periodical essay, however, were somewhat narrow for the full display of Hazlitt's genius. He craved for "more elbow-room and fewer encum- brances", and, as Professor Saintsbury has said, "what he could do, as hardly any other man has ever done in England, was a causerie of about the Ivi HAZLITT. same length as Sainte-Beuve's". None of his writings display those emotional qualities on which the reputation of the chief English essayists is based, and his success must be attributed to the virile excellence of his style, and to his passionate and unaffected love of letters. "My sun", he wrote, " arose with the first dawn of liberty. . . . The new impulse to ardour given to men's minds im- parted a congenial warmth and glow to mine; we were strong to run a race together." Burke was the one author whom he never wearied of commending, and it was at the torch of Burke's eloquence that the fire of his own style was kindled. Fortunately for literature, it was to it and not to politics that Hazlitt directed his enthusiasm, with the result that, in spite of some prejudices and exaggerations, his writings are unrivalled as a stimulating intro- duction to the study of literature. His knowledge of books was as extensive as his devotion was profound; they were to him "the first and last, the most home-felt, the most heart-felt of all our enjoyments ". Hazlitt's position among the essay- ists depends on the fact that he devoted himself less to the delineation of character than to the ex- position of literature. If not the first, he was the most influential of those who bent the essay to this purely literary purpose, and he may be regarded as standing midway between the old essayists and the new. It was a fashion in his own time, and one that has often since been followed, to insist too strongly on Hazlitt's limitations as a critic. Yet, after all has been said, his method was essentially the same as Sainte-Beuve's, and his essays cannot THE ESSAyS Of ELIA. . lyii even now be safely neglected by students of the literary developments with which they deal. It is impossible to read them without catching something of the ardour of his own enthusiasm, and it says much for the soundness of his taste and judgment that the great majority of his criticisms emerged undistorted from the glowing crucible of his thought. While there is a strong egotism in his essays, Hazlitt can scarcely be called a "personal essayist", for he had no Jonsonian " humour", and he rode no Shandean hobby-horse. With him, indeed, any survey of the essay's history might end, for it would be possible to trace some affinity between him or some of his predecessors, and any of those who have subsequently used the essay form. At least one exception must be made in favour of Charles Lamb, who occupies in so many ways a unique place in the development, and who more closely than any other went back to the practice of Montaigne in allowing his personality to colour everything he wrote. The Essays of Elia began in 1822, at a time when Sydney Smith had already a secure reputation as a wit, and Christopher North was beginning to make the fame of Blackwood's Magazine by his riotous humour. Unlike either of these, Lamb was an anachronism. Everywhere around him literature was striking out new channels, and exaggerated protests were being made against the alleged artificiality of the previous century. Except at the demands of private friendship Lamb took little interest in contemporary writing; he re- mained constant to his first love for the past, and drew his inspiration from the pure wells of Eliza- Iviii THE £SSAyS Of EL/A. bethan literature. He had mined deeply in Burton and in Fuller, in the old dramatists, and in the writers of artificial comedy; their idioms became his idioms, and he unconsciously brocaded his language with their quaint conceits and similitudes. " He evades the present ", in the words of Hazlitt, "he mocks the future. . . . He pitches his tent in the suburbs of existing manners . . . and occupies that nice point between egotism and disinterested humanity." In his own phrase, he venerated an honest obliquity of understanding, and due weight must always be attached to the influence of his idiosyncrasies upon his style. As the works of Goldsmith and Hood derive new meaning when interpreted in the light of the records of their lives, so the Essays of Elia must be viewed against the tragic background of their author's life, before due appreciation can be made of the delicacy of their humour and of the infinite tenderness of their unobtrusive pathos. It leads rather to a miscon- ception of Lamb to associate him only with so hackneyed an essay as the Dissertation on Roast Pig. Exquisite fooling, no doubt, it is, but it has not the recondite beauties, the quaint paradoxes, the felicitous characterization, the intermingling of humour and pathos, that are everywhere apparent in his best essays. The descriptions of Mrs. Battle and of the Convalescent are masterpieces which more readily than most of his essays can be directly com- pared with the work of Addison and Goldsmith; Dream-Children is typical of Lamb's whimsical pathos and of the extreme delicacy of his touch; Thoughts on Books is the most charming confession THE BSSAVS OF BLIA. lix extant of a literary creed; while All Fools' Day and the New Year's Coming of Age depict him in his most fantastic mood, toying with his subject, and wresting from it innumerable pleasantries. Lamb can scarcely be classed along with any other essayist; the archness and piquancy of his humour, if they sometimes remind one of Sterne, had for the most part an ancestry older than Addison and Steele, and it is only by going back to the writers of the seventeenth century that one fully detects the atavism of his style. "There is an inward unction, a marrowy vein both in the thought and feeling, an intuition deep and lively of his subject, that carries off any quaintness or awkwardness arising from an antiquated style and dress." In these happy words Hazlitt has pointed out the most indefinable feature in Lamb's essays — the rich marrowiness of their style. With their extra- ordinary nimbleness of fancy and grace of ex- pression the Essays of Elia are indeed " a paradise of dainty devices", redolent of the sweetness and old-world air of Cowley. His quaint paradoxes, too, seem to rise naturally from the subject and do not grate on the ear with the metallic ring of modern epigram. The obliquity of Lamb's genius precluded in his own day, as it still precludes, the possibility of successful imitation; he created no new school of essayists, and he left no abiding mark on the development of English prose; but he is within certain well-defined limits one of the most artistic exponents of the essay, and the power of fully appreciating the delicacy of his work is one of the surest indications of a literary epicure. Ix THE THREE PERIODS OF THE ESSAY. In the case of a continuous development, as that of the essay must necessarily be, it is inevitable that one of the boundaries of the field surveyed should be arbitrarily imposed. The latter half of this century has shown little regard for the older style of essays on abstract subjects; the essay has more and more become associated with literary criticism; and it might almost be said that fiction has again entered into combat with it, and in the form of the short story has ousted it from popular regard. Yet, in spite of powerful rivals, the essay is still a vital literary form. What the sonnet is to the poet, the same and more is the essay to the prose artist, requiring similar com- pression of thought, and affording similar scope for brilliancy of execution. It would be hazardous to suppose that criticism of the future will regard the present age as marking a revival in the history of the development; but it is tolerably certain that no future collection of the best British essayists will ignore the work of Robert Louis Stevenson. For the purpose, however, of the present volume it is scarcely necessary to extend the survey beyond Leigh Hunt and Lamb. By that time the essay had reached its full maturity, and had furnished examples of all its possible forms. The real history of the essay coincides with the period of a century and a half which elapsed between the appearance of the Tatler and the year of Leigh Hunt's death. During that time its progress was more than once arrested, and it is a gain to clearness with small sacrifice of accuracy to regard the three critical periods in the essay's history as being the begin- THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE ESSAY. Ixi ning, the middle, and the end of the eighteenth century — periods connected with the names of Steele and Addison, Johnson and Goldsmith, Haz- litt and Lamb. If not the greatest, the essay is certainly the most characteristic literary form of the eighteenth century. It owed its origin to the club-life of Queen Anne society, and true to its original purpose, it faithfully mirrored the manners of the day, when fiction presented nothing but ideals, and artiiicial comedy only caricature. It may be doubted, too, if any other literary develop- ment has been so prolific of results. No doubt the essay's greatest secondary achievement was the fillip it gave to the inauguration of the novel, but it founded, also, a requisite medium for literary criticism and created- the miscellaneous magazine. Not, however, that the fame of the essay requires to be propped up by that of its various descendants. It has been the favourite medium of many of the greatest masters of English prose, who have lavished on it the best of their artistic skill and all the re- sources of their wisdom and humour. There is no end to the variety of subjects which the English essayists have handled; no foible escaped their laughter, no abuse their scorn ; for their motto has been, as it must continue to be, that which Steele selected for the first English periodical — " Quicquid agunt homines nostri est farrago libelli "- ENGLISH ESSAYS. FRANCIS BACON, LORD VERULAM. (1561-1626.) I. OF SEEMING WISE. IT hath been an opinion, that the French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are; but howsoever it be between nations, certainly it is so between man and man. For, as the Apostle saith of god- liness, 'having a show of godUness, but denying the power thereof, so certainly there are, in points of wisdom and sufficiency^, that do nothing or little very solemnly; Magna conatu nugas.^ It is a ridiculous thing and fit for a satire to persons of judgment, to see what shifts these formalists^ have, and what prospectives to make superficies to seem body that hath depth and bulk. Some are so close and reserved, as they will not show their wares but by a dark light, and seem always to keep back somewhat : and when they know within themselves they speak of that they do not well know, would never- theless seem to others to know of that which they may not well speak. Some help themselves with countenance and gesture, and are wise by signs; as Cicero saith of Piso, that when he answered him he fetched one of his brows up to his forehead, and bent the other down to his chin; JRespondes, altera ad frantem sublato, altera ad mentum depresso supercilio, crudelitatem tihi nan placere. ^ability. 'Terence, Heaut. iv. 1. 8. ^i.e. the seeming wise. 2 ENGLISH ESSAYS. Some think to bear it by speaking a great word, and being peremptory; and go on, and take by admittance that which they cannot make good. Some, whatsoever is beyond their reach, will seem to despise or make light of it, as impertinent or curious \ and so would have their ignorance seem judgment. Some are never without a difference, and commonly by amusing men with a subtilty, blanch^ the matter; of whom A. Gellius saith; Hominem delirum, qui verborum minutiis rerum frangit pondera.^ Of which kind also Plato, in his Protagoras, bringeth in Prodicus in scorn and maketh him make a speech that consisteth of distinctions from the beginning to the end. Generally, such men in all deliberations find ease to be of the negative side, and affect a credit to object and foretell difficulties : for when propositions are denied there is an end of them; but if they be allowed, it requireth a new work: which false point of wisdom is the bane of business. To conclude, there is no decaying merchant or inward beggar* hath so many tricks to uphold the credit of their wealth as these empty persons have to maintain the credit of their sufficiency. Seeming wise men may make shift to get opinion: but let no man choose them for emplo)raient; for certainly you were better take for business a man somewhat absurd * than over formal *. II. OF STUDIES. STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in ' irrelevant or trifling. ^ evade. s The quotation is not from Gellius, but from Quintilian on Seneca, iv. I. (Whately). * one secretly a bankrupt (Whately). ° defective in judgment. ' too pretentious, FRANCIS BACON, LORD VERULAM. 3 the judgment and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those thaj: are learned. To spend too much time in, studies, is sloth ; 'to use them too much for ofnarhent, is affectation ; to make judgment wholly by tijeir rules is the humour of a scholar. They perfect ^riatiire and are perfected by experienoej for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study : and studies themselves do give forth directionsi/ too much at large, excepts they b^ bounded in by ex- perience. Crafty men con'^emn" studies; siinple men admire them; and wise men use them: for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to con- tradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and con- sider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously 1; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others : but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books : else distilled books are, like common distilled waters, flashy^ things. Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer Uttle, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth ' attentively. " Bacon uses the word in the sense of ' tasteless '. In his Nat. Hist. he remarks that the most offensive tastes are "bitter, sour, harsh, waterish, or flashy ". (112491 ^ 4 ENGLISH ESSAYS. not. Histc^s make men wise; poets witty; the nja^he- matics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric able toTcontend: Abeunt studia in mores. Nay, there^^is^rip stond^ or impediment in the wit, but may be wrovight out by fit studies: like as diseases of the body may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast; a gentle walking for the stomach; riding for the head; and the like. So, if a man's wits be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demon- strations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again : if his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the school-men; for they are Cymini sectores^. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate anothjer, let him study the lawyer's cases : so every defect of the mind may have a special receipt. ABRAHAM COWLEY. (1618-1667.) III. OF MYSELF. IT is a hard and nice subject for a man to write of himself;' it grates his own heart to say anything of disparagement and the reader's ears to hear anything of praise from him. There is no danger from me of offend- ing him in this kind; neither my mind, nor my body, nor my fortune allow me any materials for that vanity. It is ' obstacle. ° hair-splitters : lit. "dividers of cummin seed, which is one of the least seeds " (Bacon). s Cf. Spectator, No. 562, where Addison discourses on Egotism, and misquotes this sentence from Cowley. ABRAHAM COWLEY. 5 sufficient for my own contentment that they have pre- served me from being scandalous, or remarkable on the defective side. But besides that, I shall here speak of myself only in relation to the subject of these precedent discourses,^ and shall be likelier thereby to fall into the contempt than rise up to the estimation of most people. As far as my memory can return back into my past life, before I knew or was capable of guessing what the world, or glories, or business of it were, the natural affections of my soul gave me a secret bent of aversion from them, as some plants are said to turn away from others, by an antipathy imperceptible to themselves and inscrutable to man's understanding. Even when I was a very young boy at school,^ instead of running about on holidays and playing with my fellows, I was wont to steal from them and walk into the fields, either alone with a book, or with some one companion, if I could find any of the same temper. I was then, too, so much an enemy to all con- straint, that my masters could never prevail on me, by any persuasions or encouragements, to learn without book the common rules of grammar, in which they dis- pensed with me alone, because they found I made a shift to do the usual exercise out of my own reading and observation. That I was then of the same mind as I am now (which I confess I wonder at myself) may appear by the latter end of an ode' which I made when I was but thirteen years old, and which was then printed with many other verses. The beginning of it is boyish, but of this part which I here set down, if a very little were corrected, I should hardly now be much ashamed. '"Of Myself" is the last of eleven essays comprised under the title, "Several Discourses by way of Essays in Prose and Verse". 2 Cowley entered Westminster School when about ten years old. In 1636 he became a scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. 'The stanzas quoted form the conclusion of a poem entitled "A Vote ", which appeared in Sylva of 1636. ENGLISH ESSAYS. IX. This only grant me, that my means may lie Too low for envy, for contempt too high. Some honour I would have. Not from great deeds, but good alone. The unknown are better than ill known. Rumour can ope the grave ; Acquaintance I would have, but when 't depends Not on the number, but the choice of friends. Books should, not business, entertain the light. And sleep, as undisturbed as death, the night. My house a cottage, more Than palace, and should fitting be For all my use, no luxury. My garden painted o'er With Nature's hand, not Art's ; and pleasures yield, Horace might envy in his Sabine field. XI. Thus would I double my life's fading space. For he that runs it well, twice runs his race. And in this true delight, These unbought sports, this happy state, I would not fear, nor wish my fate, But boldly say each night. To-morrow let my sun his beams display, ^ Or in clouds hide them — I have lived to-day. You may see by it I was even then acquainted with the poets (for the conclusion is taken out of Horace i), and perhaps it was the immature and immoderate love of them which stamped first, or rather engraved, these characters in me. They were like letters cut into the bark of a young tree, which with the tree still grow pro- portionably. - But how this love came to be produced in me so early is a hard question. I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such ' Odes, III. xxix. 41. ABRAHAM COWLEY. 7 chimes of verse as have never since left ringing there. For I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's par- lour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser's works; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights, and giants, and monsters, and brave houses, which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all this) ; and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet as irremediably as a child is made an eunuch. With these affections of mind, and my heart wholly set upon letters, I went to the university, but was soon torn from thence by that violent public storm ^ which would suffer nothing to stand where it did, but rooted up every plant, even from the princely cedars to me, the hyssop. Yet I had as good fortune as could have befallen me in such a tempest; for I was cast by it into the family of one of the best persons, and into the court of one of the best princesses of the world. Now though I was here engaged in ways most contrary to the original design of my life, that is, into much company, and no small business, and into a daily sight of greatness, both militant and triumphant, for that was the state then of the English and French courts; yet all this was so far from altering my opinion, that it only added the confir- mation of reason to that which was before but natural inclination. I saw plainly all the paint of that kind of life, the nearer I came to it; and that beauty which I did not fall in love with when, for aught I knew, it was real, 1 In 1643 Cowley, as a Loyalist, had to leave Cambridge. A year after, he went to Paris as secretary to Lord Jermyn, the adviser of Queen Henrietta Maria. 8 ENGLISH ESSAYS. was not like to bewitch or entice me when I saw that it was adulterate. I met with several great persons, whom I liked very well, but could not perceive that any part of their greatness was to be liked or desired, no more than I would be glad or content to be in a storm, though I saw many ships which rid safely and bravely in it. A storm would not agree with my stomach, if it did with my courage. Though I was in a crowd of as good com- pany as could be found anywhere, though I was in busi- ness of great and honourable trust, though I ate at the best table, and enjoyed the best conveniences for present subsistence that ought to be desired by a man of my condition in banishment and public distresses, yet I could not abstain from renewing my old schoolboy's wish in a copy of verses to the same effect. Well then ; I now do plainly see, This busy woild and I shall ne'er agree, &c.* And I never then proposed to myself any other advan- tage from His Majesty's happy restoration, but the getting into some moderately convenient retreat in the country, which I thought in that case I might easily have com- passed, as well as some others, with no greater probabili- ties or pretences, have arrived to extraordinary fortunes. But I had before written a shrewd prophecy against myself, and I think Apollo inspired me in the truth, though not in the elegance of it. Thou, neither great at court nor in the war. Nor at th' exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar ; Content thyself with the small barren praise. Which neglected verse does raise, &c.^ However, by the failing of the forces which I had ^ The opening lines of ' ' The Wish ", one of the poems published in 1647 under the collective name of The Mistress. ' From "Destiny", the seventh of Cowley's fifteen Pindarique Odes published in 1656. ABRAHAM COWLEY. 9 expected, I did not quit the design which I had resolved on; I cast myself into it A corps perdu, without making capitulations or taking counsel of fortune. But God laughs at a man who says to his soul, "Take thy ease": I met presently not only with many little encumbrances and impediments, but with so much sickness (a new misfortune to me) as would have spoiled the happiness of an emperor as well as mine. Yet I do neither repent nor alter my course. Non ego perfidum dixi sacramentum. Nothing shall separate me from a mistress which I have loved so long, and have now at last married, though she neither has brought me a rich portion, nor lived yet so quietly with me as I hoped from her. Nee vos, dulcissima mundi Nomina, vos Musis, libertas, otia, libri, Hortique sylvceque anima remanenie relinquatn. Nor by me e'er shall you, You of all names the sweetest, and the best, You Muses, books, and liberty, and rest; You gardens, fields, and woods forsaken be, As long as life itself forsakes not me. But this is a very petty ejaculation. Because I have concluded all the other chapters with a copy of verses, I will maintain the humour to the last. Martial, Lib. id, Ep. 47. Vitam qutsfaciunt heatiorem, etc. Since, dearest friend, 'tis your desire to see A true- receipt of happiness from me ; These are the chief ingredients, if not all : Take an estate neither too great nor small. Which qtiantum sufficit the doctors call ; Let this estate from parents' care descend : The getting it too much of life does spend. Take such a ground, whose gratitude may be A fair encouragement for industry. ENGLISH ESSAYS. Let constant fires the winter's fury tame. And let thy kitchens be a vestal flame. Thee to the town let never suit at law, And rarely, very rarely, business draw. Thy active mind in equal temper keep. In undisturbed peace, yet not in sleep. Let exercise a vigorous health maintain. Without which all the composition 's vain. In the same weight prudence and innocence take. Ana ^ of each does the just mixture make. But a few friendships wear, and let them be By Nature and by Fortune fit for thee. Instead of art and luxury in food. Let mirth and freedom make thy table good. If any cares into thy daytime creep, At night, without wine's opium, let them sleep. Let rest, which Nature does to darkness wed, A_nd not lust, recommend to thee thy bed. Be satisfied, and pleased with what thou art ; Act cheerfully and well the allotted part. Enjoy the present hour, be thankfiil for the past. And neither fear, nor wish the approaches of the last. Martial, Lib. io, Ep. 96. Mb, who have lived so long among the great. You wonder to hear talk of a retreat : And a retreat so distant, as may show No thoughts of a return when once I go. Give me a country, how remote so e'er. Where happiness a moderate rate does bear. Where poverty itself in plenty flows And all the solid use of riches knows. • The ground about the house maintains it there, The house maintains the ground about it here. Here even hunger 's dear, and a fiiU board Devours the vital substance of the lord. The land itself does there the feast bestow. The land itself must here to market go. Three or four suits one winter here does waste, One suit does there three or four winters last. ' an equal quantity. DANIEL DEFOE. Here every frugal man must oft be cold, And little lukewarm fires are to you sold. There fire 's an element as cheap and free Almost as any of the other three. Stay you then here, and live among the great, Attend their sports, and at their tables eat. When all the bounties here of men you score : The Place's bounty there, shall give me more; DANIEL DEFOE. (1661-1731.) IV. THE INSTABILITY OF HUMAN GLORY.' SIR, I have employed myself of late pretty much in the study of history, and have been reading the stories of the great men of past ages, Alexander the Great, Julius Csesar, the great Augustus, and many more down, down, down, to the still greater Louis XIV., and even to the still greatest John, Duke of Marlborough^. In my way I met with Tamerlane^, the Scythian, Tomornbejus*, the Egyptian, Solyman^, the Magnificent, and others of the Mahometan or Ottoman race; and after all the great ^This essay appeared on July 21, 1722, in The Original Weekly Journal and Saturday's Post, started by Applebee on and Oct. 1714. From 1720 to 1726 Defoe contributed weekly articles in the form of "letters introductory". These letters — admittedly the prototypes of "leading articles" — were first introduced by Defoe in the sixty-eighth number of Mist's Journal, 1718. ^The Duke died five weeks before the date of Defoe's essay. ^Timour (1336-1405) made war on the whole world in support of what he regarded as the true Mahometan faith. He defeated the Otto- man Sultan, and died when preparing to invade China. 'Tumanbeg or Turaanbai, the last Mameluke Sultan, was defeated and put to death by Selim in 1517. 'Suleiman, the Magnificent, the Lawgiver (1490-1566), was the great- est constructor of the Ottoman power. The capture of Rhodes, the invasion of Hungary, and the siege of Vienna were his most famous exploits. 12 ENGLISH ESSAYS. things they have done I find it said of them all, one after another, AND THEN HE DIED, all dead, dead, dead! hie jacet is the finishing part of their history. Some lie in the bed of honour, and some in honour's truckle bed; some were bravely slain in battle on the field of honour, some in the storm of a counterscarp and died in the ditch of honour; some here, some there; — the bones of the bold and the brave, the cowardly and the base, the hero and the scoundrel, are heaped up together; — there they lie in oblivion, and under the ruins of the earth, undistinguished from one another, nay, even from the common earth. " Huddled in dirt the blust'ring engine lies, That was so great, and thought himself so wise." How many hundreds of thousands of the bravest fellows then in the world lie on heaps in the ground, whose bones are to this day ploughed up by the rustics, or dug up by the labourer, and the earth their more noble vital parts are converted to has been perhaps applied to the meanest uses ! How have we screened the ashes of heroes to make our mortar, and mingled the remains of a Roman general to make_a hog sty ! Where are the ashes of a Caesar, and the remains' of a Pompey, a Scipio, or a Hannibal? All are vanished, they and their very monuments are mouldered into earth, their dust is lost, and their place knows them no more. They live only in the immortal writings of their historians and poets, the renowned flatterers ol' the age they lived in, and who have made us think of the persons, not as they really were, but as they were pleased to represent them. As the greatest men, so even the longest lived. The Methusalems of the antediluvian world — the accounts of them all end with the same: Methusalem lived nine hundreti sixty and nine years and begat sons and daughters —and what then? AND THEN HE DIED. DANIEL DEFOE. 1 3 /■ ' " Death like an overflowing stream Sweeps us away; our life 's a dream." We are now solemnizing the obsequies of the great Marlborough J all his victories, all his glories, his great projected schemes of war, his uninterrupted series of conquests, which are called his, as if he alone had fought and conquered by his arm, what so many men obtained for him with their blood — all is ended, where other men, and, indeed, where all men ended: HE IS DEAD. Not all his immense wealth, the spoils and trophies of his enemies, the bounty of his grateful Mistress, and the treasure amassed in war and peace, not all that mighty bulk of gold — which some suggest is such, and so great, as I care not to mention — could either give him life, or continue it one moment, but he is dead; and some say the great treasure he was possessed of here had one strange particular quality attending it, which might have been very dissatisf)dng to him if he had considered much on it, namely, that he could not carry much of it with him. We have now nothing left us of this great man that we can converse with but his monument and his history. He is now numbered among things passed. The funeral as well as the battles of the Duke of Marlborough are like to adorn our houses in sculpture as things equally gay and to be looked on with pleasure. Such is the end of human glory, and so little is the world able to do for the greatest men that come into it, and for the greatest merit those men can arrive to. What then is the work of life? What the business of great men, that pass the stage of the world in seeming triumph as these men, we call heroes, have done? Is it to grow great in the mouth of fame and take up many pages in history? Alas! that is no more than making a tale for the reading of posterity till it turns into fable and_ romance. Is it to furnish subject to the poets, and live 14 ENGLISH ESSAYS. in their immortal rhymes, as they call them? That is, in short, no more than to be hereafter turned into ballad and song and be sung by old women to quiet children, or at the corner of a street to gather crowds in aid of the pick- pocket and the poor. Or is their business rather to add virtue and piety to their glory, which alone will pass them into eternity and make them truly immortal? What is glory without virtue? A great man without religion is no more than a great beast without a soul. What is honour without merit? And what can be called true merit but that which makes a person be a good man as well as a great man? If we believe in a future state of life, a place for the rewards of good men and for the punishment of the haters of virtue, how few of heroes and famous men crowd in among the last! How few crowned heads wear the crowns of immortal felicity ! Let no man envy the great and glorious men, as we call them ! Could we see them now, how many of them would move our pity rather than call for our congratula- tions! These few thoughts. Sir, I send to prepare your readers' minds when they go to see the magnificent funeral of the late Duke of Marlborough. v. DESCRIPTION OF A QUACK DOCTOR.^ MMIST, Passing occasionally the other day through . a little village, at some distance from town, I was entertained with the view of a very handsome equipage moving towards me. The gravity of the gentleman who sat in it, and the eagerness wherewith the coachman drove ' This essay appeared on Dec. s, 1719, in Natlianiel Mist's Weekly Journal or Saturdays Post, started on isth Dec. 1716. On March 29, 1718, Defoe contributed the first leading article. The paper ran until 1728, when it passed into the hands of Fog. Mist was a Jacobite, and a "vender of Scandal and Sedition", and in January, 1728, "took the opportunity of slinking away in a mist ". DANIEL DEFOE. 1 5 along, engaged my whole attention; and I immediately concluded that it could be nothing less than some minister of state, who was posting this way upon some very im- portant affair. They were now got about the middle of the place, when making a full stand, the footman, deserting his station behind and making up abreast of his master, gave us a very fine blast with a trumpet. I was surprised to see a skip'^ transformed so speedily into a trumpeter, and began to wonder what should be the meaning of such an unusual phenomenon ; when the coachman, jumping from his box, laying by his whip, and slipping off his great coat, in an instant rose up a complete merry-andrew. My surprise was now heightened, and though honest pickle^ with a world of grimace and gesticulation en- deavoured to move my gaiety, I began to be very fearful where the metamorphosis might end. I looked very earnestly first at the horse and then at the wheels, and expected every minute to have seen them take their turn in the farce, and laying aside their present appearances assume other shapes. By this time the gentleman, who had hitherto appeared wonderfully sedate and composed, began to throw off his disguise; and having pocketed all his former modesty and demureness, and flushed his forehead with all the impudence of a thorough-paced quack, I immediately discovered him to be a very eminent and learned mountebank. This discovery raised my curiosity as much as it abated my surprise, so that being very desirous to hear what new proposal the doctor had to make, or what new arcanum in physic he had found out, I quitted my former station and joined myself to the crowd that encompassed him. After a short preamble, he began to open the design of ^ lackey. ' A harlequin in O. G. comedy. The fuller form of the word is pickle- herring. 1 6 ENGLISH ESSAYS. his embassy, setting forth at large the great affection which he bore in particular to the people of that place; ampli- fying on his own merits and qualifications, specifying great numbers of cures which he had wrought on incurable distempers, expatiating on the extreme danger of being without his physic, and offering health and immortality to sale for the price of a tester. You'd have burst your sides, Mr. Mist, had you but heard the foolish allusions, quaint expressions, and in- consistent metaphors, which fell from the mouth of this eloquent declaimer. For my part I should have wondered where he could have raked up nonsense enough to furnish out such a wordy harangue, but that I am told he has studied the Flying Post'^ with a great deal of appli- cation, and that most of the silly things in his speech are borrowed from that excellent author. Sometimes he'd creep in the most vulgar phrases imaginable, by and by he'd soar out of sight and traverse the spacious realms of fustian and bombast. He was, indeed, very sparing of his Latin and Greek, as (God knows) having a very slender stock of those commodities; but then, for hard words and terms, which neither he, nor you, nor I, nor anybody else understand, he poured them out in such abundance that you'd have sworn he had been rehearsing some of the occult philosophy of Agrippa^ or Rosicrusius, or reading a lecture out of Cabala. After the doctor had given such ample indications of the greatest humanity, skill, and erudition, who d'ye think would be so incredulous as not to believe him, or so ' This is obviously a thrust at Defoe's enemy, George Ridpath, the writer of the Flying Post. Defoe contributed to another paper of the same name, hence Ridpath's scornful allusion to a " Sham Flying Post". " To dulness Ridpath is as dear as Mist ". {Dunciad, I. 208.) 'Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486, Cologne) was a famous alchemist, author oi De Occulta Philosophia, &c. DANIEL DEFOE. 1 7 uncourteous as to refuse to purchase one of his packets? Lest any of us, however, should be too tenacious of our money to part with it on these considerations, he had one other motive which did not fail to do the business; this was by persuading us that there were the seeds of some malignant distemper lurking in every one of our bodies, and that there was nothing in nature could save us but some one or other of his medicines. He threatened us with death in case of refusal, and assured us with a prophetic air that without his physic every mother's son of us would be in our graves by that day twelve-month. The poor people were infinitely terrified with the imminent danger they found themselves under, but were as much pleased to find how easy it was to be evaded; so that, without more ado, every man bought his packet, and turned the doctor adrift to pursue further adventures. The scene being now removed, I was at leisure to reflect on what had passed, and could really have either cry'd or laugh'd very heartily at what I had seen. The arrogance of the doctor and the silliness of his patients were each of them ridiculous enough to have set a person of more gravity than myself a-laughing; but then to consider the tragical issue to which these things tended, and the fatal effect so many murthering medicines might have on several of his majesty's good subjects, would have made the merriest buffoon alive serious. I have not often observed a more hale, robust crowd of people than that which encircled this doughty doctor, methinks one might have read health in their very faces, and there was not a countenance among them which did not give the lie to the doctor's suggestions. Could but one see a little into futurity, and observe the condition they will be in a few months hence, what an alteration would one find ! How many of those brawny youths are already puking in chimney corners? And how many rosy complexioned 1 8 ENGLISH ESSAYS. girls are by this time reduced to the paleness of a cockney? I propose in a little time to make a second journey to this place in order to see how the doctor's physic has operated. By searching the parish register and comparing the number of funerals made weekly before the doctor's visit with those which have followed, it will be easy to form an estimate of the havoc which this itinerant man-slayer made in the space of two hours. I shall then , proceed to compute the number of quacks^ in the three kingdoms, from which it will be no hard matter to determine the number of people carried oE per annum by the whole fraternity. Lastly, I shall calculate the loss which the government sustains by the death of every subject; from all of which the immense damages accruing to his majesty will evidently appear, and the public will be fully convinced of the truth of what I have heretofore asserted, viz. that the quacks contribute more towards keeping us poor than all our national debts, and that to suppress the former would be an infallible means of redeeming the latter. The whole scheme shall be drawn up in due form and presented to the parliament in the ensuing session, and that august assembly, I don't doubt, will pay all regard thereto, which the importance of the subject and the weight of my argument shall require. Methinks the course of justice, which has hitherto obtained among us, is chargeable with great absurdities. Petty villains are hanged or transported, while great ones are suffered to pass impune. A man cannot take a purse upon the highway, or cut a single throat, but he must presently oe called to answer for it at the Old Bailey, and perhaps to suffer for it at Tyburn; and yet, here are ' Cf. Tathr, 240, and Spectator, 572. The latter by Zachary Pearce is largely similar to Defoe's essay. Defoe had reason to know about the subject, as his Review was filled with quack advertisements. DANIEL DEFOE. 1 9 t wretches suffered to commit murthers by wholesale, and to plunder, not only private persons and pockets, but I even the king and the Exchequer, without having any ; questions asked! Pray, Mr. Mist, what were gibbets, \ gallows, and whipping posts made for? But to return to Doctor Thornhill. I have had the curiosity to examine several of his medicines in a re- verberatory, reducing compounds into their simples by a chemical analysis, and have constantly found a consider- able proportion of some poisonous plant or mineral in every one of them. Arsenic, wolf s-bane, mercury, and hemlock are sine guibus non, and he could no more make up a medicament without some of these than remove a mountain. Accordingly as they are variously mixed and disposed among other drugs, he gives them various names, calling them pills, boluses, electuaries, etc. His pills I would prescribe as a succedaneum to a halter, so that such persons as are weary of this troublesome world and would willingly quit it for a better, but are too squeamish to take up with that queer old-fashioned recipe called hanging, may have their business done as securely and more decently by some of these excellent pills. His bolus, too, is very good in its kind; I have made experiments with it on several animals, and find that it poisons to a miracle. A moderate dose of it has perfectly silenced a bawling dog that used to disturb my morning slumbers, and a like quantity of it has quieted several other snarling curs in my neighbourhood. And then, if you be troubled with rats, Mr. Mist, there 's the doctor's electuary is an infallible remedy, as I myself have experienced. I have effectually cleared my house of those troublesome animals by dis- posing little packets of it in the places they frequent, and do recommend it to you and your readers as the most powerful ratsbane in the world. It would be needless to enumerate all the virtues of the doctor's several inedicines, (H249) T 20 ENGLISH ESSAYS. but I dare affirm that what the ancients fabulously reported of Pandora's box is strictly true of the doctor's packet, and that it contains in it the seeds and principles of all diseases. I must ask your pardon, Mr. Mist, for being so grave on so ludicrous a subject and spending so many words on an empty quack. Mr. Mist, Your humble servant, Philygeia. SIR RICHARD STEELE. (1671-1729.) VI. A SCENE OF DOMESTIC FELICITY. Inierea dulces pendent circum oscula nati. Casta pudicitiam servat domus. — Virg. Georg. ii. 523- His cares are eas'd with intervals of bliss ; His little children, climbing for a kiss, Welcome their father's late return at night , His faithful bed is crown'd with chaste delight. — Dryden. THERE are several persons who have many pleasures and entertainments in their possession, which they do not enjoy. It is, therefore, a kind and good office to acquaint them with their own happiness, and turn their attention to such instances of their good fortune as they are apt to overlook. Persons in the married state often want such a monitor; and pine away their days, by looking upon the same condition in anguish and murmur, which carries with it in the opinion of others a complication of all the pleasures of life, and a retreat from its inquietudes. I am led^ into this thought by a visit I made an old friend, who was formerly my school-fellow. He came to town last week with his family for the winter, and yester- day morning sent me word his wife expected me to dinner. SIR RICHARD STEELE. 21 I am, as it were, at home at that house, and every member of it knows me for their well-wisher. I cannot, indeed, express the pleasure it is, to be met by the children with so much joy as I am when I go thither. The boys and girls strive who shall come first, when they think it is I that am knocking at the door; and that child which loses the race to me runs back again to tell the father it is Mr. Bickerstaff ^. This day I was led in by a pretty girl, that we all thought must have forgot me, for the family has been out of town these two years. Her knowing me again was a mighty subject with us, and took up our discourse at the first entrance. After which, they began to rally me upon a thousand little stories they heard in the country, about my marriage to one of my neighbour's daughters. Upon which the gentleman, my friend, said, " Nay, if Mr. Bickerstaff marries a child of any of his old companions, I hope mine shall have the preference; there is Mrs. Mary is now sixteen, and would make him as fine a widow as the best of them. But I know him too well : he is so enamoured with the very memory of those who flourished in our youth, that he will not so much as look upon the modern beauties. I remember, old gentle- man, how often you went home in a day to refresh your countenance and dress when Teraminta reigned in your heart. As we came up in the coach, I repeated to my wife some of your verses on her." With such reflections on little passages which happened long ago, we passed our time, during a cheerful and elegant meal. After dinner, his lady left the room, as did also the children. As soon as we were alone, he took me by the hand; "Well, my good friend," says he, "I am heartily glad to see thee; I was afraid you would never have seen all the company ^ Swift borrowed the name from a locksmith's sign, and Steele adopted it because, from Swift's use of it, it was sure to gain " an audience of all who had any taste of wit ". 22 ENGLISH ESSAYS. that dined with you to-day again. Do not you think the good woman of the house a little altered, since you followed her from the playhouse, to find out who she was, for me?" I perceived a tear fall down his cheek as he spoke, which moved me not a little. But, to turn the discourse, I said, " She is not indeed quite that creature she was, when she returned me the letter I carried from you; and told me, 'she hoped, as I was a gentleman, I would be employed no more to trouble her, who had never offended me; but would be so much the gentle- man's friend, as to dissuade him from a pursuit, which he could never succeed in '. You may remember, I thought her in earnest; and you were forced to employ your cousin Will, who made his sister get acquainted with her, for you. You cannot expect her to be for ever fifteen." "Fifteen!" replied my good friend: "Ah! you little under- stand, you that have a lived a bachelor, how great, how exquisite a pleasure there is, in being really beloved ! It is impossible, that the most beauteous face in nature should raise in me such pleasing ideas, as when I look upon that excellent woman. That fading in her counten- ance is chiefly caused by her watching with me in my fever. This was followed by a fit of sickness, which had like to have carried her off last winter. I tell you sin- cerely, I have so many obligations to her, that I cannot, with any sort of moderation, think of her present state of health. But as to what you say of fifteen, she gives me every day pleasures beyond what I ever knew in the possession of her beauty, when I was in the vigour of youth. Every moment of her life brings me fresh in- stances of her complacency to my inclinations, and her prudence in regard to my fortune. Her face is to me much more beautiful than when I first saw it; there is no decay in any feature, which I cannot trace, from the very instant it was occasioned by some anxious concern for SIR RICHARD STEELE. 23 my welfare and interests. Thus, at the same time, me- thinks, the love I conceived towards her for what she was, is heightened by my gratitude for what she is. The love of a wife is as much above the idle passion commonly called by that name, as the loud laughter of buffoons is inferior to the elegant mirth of gentlemen. Oh, she is an inestimable jewel ! In her examination of her household affairs, she shows a certain fearfulness to find a fault, which makes her servants obey her like children; and the meanest we have has an ingenuous shame for -an offence, not always to be seen in children in other families. I speak freely to you, my old friend; ever since her sick- ness, things that gave me the quickest joy before, turn now to a certain anxiety. As the children play in the next room, I know the poor things by their steps, and am considering what they must do, should they lose their mother in their tender years. The pleasure I used to take in telling my boy stories of battles, and asking my girl questions about the disposal of her baby, and the gossiping of it, is turned into inward reflection and melancholy." He would have gone on in this tender way, when the good lady entered, and with an inexpressible sweetness in her countenance told us, " she had been searching her closet for something very good, to treat such an old friend as^I was " Her husband's eye sparkled with pleasure at the cheerfulness of her countenance; and I saw all his fears vanish in an instant. The lady observing some- thing in our looks which showed we had been more sferious than ordinary, and seeing her husband receive her with great concern under a forced cheerfulness, im- mediately guessed at what we had been talking of; and applying herself to me, said, with a smile, "Mr. Bickerstaff, do not believe a word of what he tells you; I shall still live to have you for my second, as I have often promised 24 ENGLISH ESSAYS. you, unless he takes more care of himself than he has done since his coming to town. You must know, he tells me he finds London is a much more healthy place than the country; for he sees several of his old acquaint- ances and schoolfellows are here young fellows with fair full-bottomed periwigs'^. I could scarce keep him this morning from going out open-breasted'". My friend, who is always extremely delighted with her agreeable humour, made her sit down with us. She did it with that easiness which is peculiar to women of sense; and to keep up the good humour she had brought in with her, turned her raillery upon me. " Mr. Bickerstaff, you remember you followed me one night from the play-house : suppose you should carry me thither to-morrow night, and lead me into the front box." This put us into a long field of dis- course about the beauties, who were mothers to the present, and shined in the boxes twenty years ago. I told her, " I was glad she had transferred so many of her charms, and I did not question but her eldest daughter was within half a year of being a toast ^." We were pleasing ourselves with this fantastical prefer- ment of the young lady, when on a sudden we were alarmed with the noise of a drum, and immediately entered my little godson to give me a point of war. His mother, between laughing and chiding, would have put him out of the room; but I would not part with him so. I found, upon conversation with him, though he was a little noisy in his mirth, that the child had excellent parts, and was a great master of all the learning on the '■ A privilege allowed only to young beaux. In Tatler, No. 246, Steele reproves " a fat fellow for wearing his breast open in the midst of winter out of an aifectation of youth ". " An institution that first came into vogue in Anne's reign. At the age of seventeen every young lady of quality expected to become a toast at some club, more especially at the Kit-Cat. The locus classicus on the subject is in the 24th Tatler. SIR RICHARD STEELE. 25 Other side eight years old. I perceived him a very great historian in ^sop's Fables : but he frankly declared to me his mind, " that he did not delight in that learning, because he did not beUeve they were true;" for which reason I found he had very much turned his studies, for about a twelvemonth past, into the lives and adventures of Don Bellianis of Greece, Guy of Warwick, the Seven Champions, and other historians of that age. I could not but observe the satisfaction the father took in the for- wardness of his son; and that these diversions might turn to some profit, I found the boy had made remarks which might be of service to him during the course of his whole life. He would tell you the mismanagements of John Hickathrift, find fault with the passionate temper in Bevis of Southampton, and loved Saint George for being the champion of England; and by this means had his thoughts insensibly moulded into the notions of dis- cretion, virtue, and honour. I was extolling his accom- plishments, when his mother told me that the little girl who led me in this morning was in her way a better scholar than he. "Betty", said she, "deals chiefly in fairies and sprites, and sometimes in a winter night will terrify the maids with her accounts, until they are afraid to go up to bed." I sat with them until it was very late, sometimes in merry, sometimes in serious discourse, with this particular pleasure,) which gives the only true relish to all conversa- tion, a sense that every one of us liked each other.) I went home considering the different conditions of a married life and that of a bachelor; and I must confess it struck me with a secret concern, to reflect, that whenever I go off I shall leave no traces behind me. In this pensive mood I return to my family: that is to say, to my maid, my dog, and my cat, who only can be the better or worse for what happens to me. 26 ENGLISH ESSAYS. VII.— A DEATH-BED SCENE. Ut in vita, sic in studiis, pulcherrimum. et kumanissimum existimo severitaiem. comiiatemque miscere, ne ilia in trisHtiatn, haec in petulan- tiam procedat. — Pliny. As in a man's life, so in his studies, I think it the most beautiful and humane thing in the world, so to mingle gravity with pleasantry, that the one may not sink into melancholy, nor the other rise up into wantonness, I WAS walking about my chamber this morning in a very gay humour, when I saw a coach stop at my door, and a youth about fifteen alighting out of it, whom I per- ceived to be the eldest son of my bosom friend that I gave some account of in my paper of the seventeenth of the last month. I felt a sensible pleasure rising in me at the sight of him, my acquaintance having begun with his father when he was just such a stripling, and about that very age. When he came up to me he took me by the hand, and burst out in tears. I was extremely moved, and immediately said, " Child, how does your father do?" He began to reply, " My mother — " but could not go on for weeping. I went down with him into the coach, and gathered out of him, "that his mother was then dying; and that, while the holy man was domg the last offices to her, he had taken that time to come and call me to his father, who, he said, would certainly break his heart, if I did not go and comfort him ". The child's discretion in coming to me of his own head, and the tenderness he showed for his parents, would have quite overpowered me, had I not resolved to fortify myself for the seasonable performances of those duties which I owed to my friend. As we were going, I could not but reflect upon the character of that excellent woman, and the greatness of his grief for the loss of one who has ever been the support to him under all other afflictions. How, thought I, will he be able to bear the hour of her death, that could not. SIR RICHARD STEELE. 2 7 when I was lately with him, speak of a sickness, which was then past, without sorrow? We were now got pretty far into Westminster, and arrived at my friend's house. At the door of it I met Favonius, not without a secret satisfaction to find he had been there. I had formerly conversed with him at this house; and as he abounds with that sort of virtue and knowledge which makes religion beautiful, and never leads the conversation into the violence and rage of party-disputeS, I listened to him with great pleasure. Our discourse chanced to be upon the subject of death, which he treated with such a strength of reason, and greatness of soul, that, instead of being terrible, it appeared to a mind rightly cultivated, altogether to be contemned, or rather to be desired. As I met him at the door, I saw in his face a certain glowing of grief and humanity, heightened with an air of fortitude and resolution, which, as I afterwards found, had such an irresistible force, as to suspend the pains of the dying, and the lamentation of the nearest friends who attended her. I went up directly to the room where she lay, and was met at the entrance by my friend, who, notwithstanding his thoughts had been composed a little before, at the sight of me turned away his face and wept. The little family of children renewed the expressions of their sorrow according to their several ages and degrees of under- standing. The eldest daughter was in tears, busied in attendance upon her mother; others were kneeling about the bedside; and what troubled me most, was, to see a little boy, who was too young to know the reason, weeping only because his sisters did. The only one in the room who seemed resigned and comforted was the dying person. At my approach to the bed side she told me, with a low broken voice, "This is kindly done — take care of your friend — do not go. from him ". She had before taken leave of her husband and children, in a manner proper 28 ENGLISH ESSAYS. for SO solemn a parting, and with a gracefulness peculiar to a woman of her character. My heart was torn in pieces, to see the husband on one side suppressing and keeping down the swellings of his grief, for fear of dis- turbing her in her last moments; and the wife, even at that time, concealing the pains she endured, for fear of increasing his aflfliction. She kept her eyes upon him for some moments after she grew speechless, and soon after closed them for ever. In the moment of her departure, my friend, who had thus far commanded himself, gave a deep groan, and fell into a swoon by her bed side.i The distraction of the children, who thought they saw both their parents expiring together, and now lying dead before them, would have melted the hardest heart; but they soon perceived their father recover, whom I helped to remove into another room, with a resolution to accompany him until the first pangs of his affliction were abated. I knew consolation would now be imperti- nent, and therefore contented myself to sit by him, and condole with him in silence. For I shall here use the method of an ancient author^, who, in one of his epistles, relating the virtues and death of Macrinus's wife, expresses himself thus : " I shall suspend my advice to this best of friends until he is made capable of receiving it by those three great remedies, the necessity of submission, length of time, and satiety of grief". In the mean time, I cannot but consider, with much commiseration, the melancholy state of one who has had ^ With this sentence Steele's share in the paper stops. The rest has always been assigned to Addison, and it is instructive to compare his conclusion with Steele's in Tatler, 281. Steele's emotion kept pace with his imagination, while Addison constantly checked his from an over- regard for ' ' elegant " expression. Thus, while Addison ends this essay incongruously with a fragment of criticism, Steele is quite overcome, and "commended the hamper of wine until two of the clock this morning "- ' Seneca. SIR RICHARD STEELE. 29 such a part of himself torn from him, and which he misses in every circumstance of Ufe. His condition is like that of one who has lately lost his right arm, and is every moment offering to help himself with it. He does not appear to himself the same person in his house, at his table, in company, or in retirement ; and loses the relish of all the pleasures and diversipns that were before entertaining to him by her participation ofThemr— -The most agreeable objects recall the sorrow for her with whom he used to enjoy them. This additional satisfaction, from the taste of pleasures in the society of one we love, is admirably described by Milton, who represents Eve, though in Paradise itself, no further pleased with the beautiful objects around her, than as she sees them in company with Adam, in that passage so inexpressibly charming: "With thee conversing, I forget all time; All seasons, and their change ; all please alike. Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun, When first on this delightful land he spreads His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower, Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertile earth After soft showers ; and sweet the coming on Of gratefiil evening mild; the silent night, With this her solemn bird, and this fair moon, And these the gems of heaven, her starry train. But neither breath of morn when she ascends With charm of earliest birds ; nor rising sun On this delightfvil land ; nor herb, fruit, flower, Glistering with dew; nor fragrance after showers; Nor grateful evening mild ; nor silent night. With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon. Or glittering star-light, without thee is sweet." The variety of images in this passage is infinitely pleasing, and the recapitulation of each particular image, with a little varying of the expression, makes one of the finest turns of words that I have ever seen; which I rather 30 ENGLISH ESSAYS. mention because Mr. Dryden ^ has said, in his preface to Juvenal, that he could meet with no turn of words in Milton. It may be further observed, that though the sweetness of these verses has something in it of a pastoral, yet it excels the ordinary kind, as much as the scene of it is above an ordinary field or meadow. I might here, since I am accidentally led into this subject, show several passages in Milton that have as excellent turns of this nature as any of our English poets whatsoever; but shall only mention that which follows, in which he describes the fallen angels engaged in the intricate disputes of pre- destination, free-will, and fore-knowledge; and, to humour the perplexity, makes a kind of labyrinth in the very words that describe it. " Others apart sat on a hill retir'd, In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate, Fix'd fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. " VIII. THE TRUMPET CLUB. 2 Habeo senectuti magnam gratiam, quae mihi sermonis aviditatem auxit, potionis et cibi sustulit. — Cicero, de Sen. I am much beholden to old age, which has increased my eagerness for conversation, in proportion as it has lessened my appetites of hunger and thirst. AFTER having applied my mind with more than ordin- ary attention to my studies, it is my usual custom to relax and unbend it in the conversation of such as are 1 Near the end of his Discourse on Satire, Dryden says that he searched the older poets in quest of ' ' beautiful turns of thoughts and words ", but that he found none in Cowley or in Milton. ^ As clubs are of some interest to students of the English Essay, reference may be made to Timbs' History of Clubs and Club Life, and to Ashton's Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne. To the latter excellent book the oresent writer has to express special obligations. SIR RICHARD STEELE. 31 rather easy than shining companions. This I find par- ticularly necessary for me before I retire to rest, in order to draw my slumbers upon me by degrees, and fall asleep insensibly. This is the particular use I make of a set of heavy honest men, with whom I have passed many hours with much indolence, though not with great pleasure. Their conversation is a kind of preparative for sleep; it takes the mind down from its abstractions, leads it into the familiar traces of thought, and lulls it into that state of tranquillity, which is the condition of a thinking man, when he is but half awake. After this, my reader will not be surprised to hear the account which I am about to give of a club of my own contemporaries, among whom I pass two or three hours every evening. This I look upon as taking my first nap before I go to bed. The truth of it is, I should think myself unjust to posterity, as well as to the society at the Trumpet'^, of which I am a mem- ber, did not I in some part of my writings give an account of the persons among whom I have passed almost a sixth part of my time for these last forty years. Our club con- sisted originally of fifteen; but, partly by the severity of the law in arbitrary times, and partly by the natural effects of old age, we are at present reduced to a third part of that number; in which, however, we have this consolation, that the best company is said to consist of five persons. I must confess, besides the aforementioned benefit which I meet with in the conversation of this select society, I am not the less pleased with the company, in that I find myself the greatest wit among them, and am heard as their oracle in all points of learning and difficulty. Sir Jeoffery Notch, who is the oldest of the club, has been in possession of the right-hand chair time out of mind, and is the only man among us that has the liberty 1 A tavern in Shire Lane, near the new Courts of Justice. The Kit- Cat Club also originated here about 1700. 32 ENGLISH ESSAYS. of Stirring the fire. This our foreman is a gentleman of an ancient family, that came to a great estate some years before he had discretion, and run it out in hounds, horses, and cock-fighting; for which reason he looks upon him- self as an honest, worthy gentleman, who has had mis- fortunes in the world, and calls every thriving man a pitiful upstart. Major Matchlock is the next senior, who served in the last civil wars, and has all the battles by heart. He does not think any action in Europe worth talking of since the fight of Marston Moor; and every night tells us of having been knocked off his horse at the rising ^ of the London apprentices; for which he is in great esteem among us. Honest old Dick Reptile is the third of our society. He is a good-natured indolent man, who speaks little himself, but laughs at our jokes; and brings his young nephew along with him, a youth of eighteen years old, to show him good company, and give him a taste of the world. This young fellow sits generally silent; but when- ever he opens his mouth, or laughs at anything that passes, he is constantly told by his uncle, after a jocular manner, "Ay, ay. Jack, you young men think us fools; but we old men know you are ". The greatest wit of our company, next to myself, is a bencher of the neighbouring inn, who in his youth fre- quented the ordinaries ^ about Charing-cross, and pretends to have been intimate with Jack Ogle. He has about ten distichs of Hudibras without book, and never leaves the club until he has applied them all. If any modern wit be mentioned, or any town-frolic spoken of, he shakes his head at the dulness of the present age, and tells us a story of Jack Ogle. ^ July 14, 1647. " Locket's Ordinary at Charing Cross was one of the fashionable restaurants of the time. Cf. Tale of a Tub, Sec. 2. SIR RICHARD STEELE. 33 For my own part, I am esteemed among them, because they see I am something respected by others; though at the same time I understand by their behaviour, that I am considered by them as a man of a great deal of learn- ing, but no knowledge of the world; insomuch, that the major sometimes, in the height of his military pride, calls me the Philosopher : and Sir Jeoffery, no longer ago than last night, upon a dispute what day of the month it was then in Holland, pulled his pipe out of his mouth, and cried, "What does the scholar say to it?" Our club meets precisely at six o'clock in the evening; but I did not come last night until half an hour after seven, by which means I escaped the battle of Naseby, which the major usually begins at about three quarters after six: I found also, that my good friend the bencher had already spent three of his distichs; and only waited an opportunity to hear a sermon spoken of, that he might • introduce the couplet where " a stick " rhymes to " ecclesi- astic "- At my entrance into the room, they were naming a red petticoat and a cloak, by which I found that the bencher had been diverting them with a story of Jack Ogle. I had no sooner taken my seat, but Sir Jeoffery, to show his goodwill towards me, gave me a pipe of his own tobacco, and stirred up the fire. I look upon it as a point of morality, to be obliged by those who endeavour to oblige me; and therefore, in requital for his kindness, and to set the conversation a-going, I took the best occasion I could to put him upon telling us the story of old Gantlett^, which he always does with very particular concern. He traced up his descent on both sides for several generations, describing his diet and manner of life, with his several battles, and particularly that in which * Cock-fighting was then a fjavourite pastime. As much as 500 guineas was staked on an inter-county match. 34 ENGLISH ESSAYS. he fell. This Gantlett was a game cock, upon whose head the knight, in his youth, had won five hundred pounds, and lost two thousand. This naturally set the major upon the account of Edge-hill fight, and ended in a duel of Jack Ogle's. Old Reptile was extremely attentive to all that was said, though it was the same he had heard every night for these twenty years, and, upon all occasions, winked upon his nephew to mind what passed. This may suffice to give the world a taste of our inno- cent conversation, which we spun out until about ten of the clock, when my maid came with a lantern to light me home. I could not but reflect with myself, as I was going out, upon the talkative humour of old men, and the little figure which that part of life makes in one who cannot employ his natural propensity in discourses which would make him venerable.' I must own, it makes me very melancholy in company, when I hear a young man begin a story; and have often observed, that one of a quarter of an hour long in a man of five-and-twenty, gathers circumstances every time he tells it, until it grows into a long Canterbury tale of two hours by that time he is threescore. The only way of avoiding such a trifling and frivolous old age, is to lay up in our way to it such stores of knowledge and observation, as may make us useful and agreeable in our declining years. The mind of man in a long life will become a magazine of wisdom or folly, and will consequently discharge itself in something impertinent or improving. For which reason, as there is nothing more ridiculous than an old trifling story-teller, so there is nothing more venerable than one who has turned his experience to the entertainment and advantage of mankind. In short, we, who are in the last stage of life, and are SIR RICHARD STEELE. 35 apt to indulge ourselves in talk, ought to consider if what we speak be worth being heard, and endeavour to make our discourse like that of Nestor, which Homer compares to the flowing of honey for its sweetness. I am afraid I shall be thought guilty of this excess I am speaking of, when I cannot conclude without observing that Milton certainly thought of this passage in Homer, when, in his description of an eloquent spirit, he says : — " His tongue dropped manna "- IX. ON THE DEATH OF FRIENDS. Dies, nifallor, adest, quern semper acerhum. Semper honoratum, sic dii voluistis, habeio. — Virg. Aen. v. 49. And now the rising day renews the year, A day for ever sad, for ever dear. — Dryden. THERE are those among mankind, who can enjoy no relish of their being, except the world is made acquainted with all that relates to them, and think everything lost that passes unobserved; but others find a solid delight in stealing by the crowd, and modelling their life after such a manner as is as much above the approbation as the practice of the vulgar. Life being too short to give instances great enough of true friendship or goodwill, some sages have thought it pious to preserve a certain reverence for the Manes of their deceased friends; and have withdrawn themselves from the restl of the world at certain seasons, to commemorate in their ' own thoughts such of their acquaintance who have gone before them out of this life. And indeed, when we are advanced in years, there is not a more pleasing entertain- ment, than to recollect in a gloomy moment the many we have parted with that have been dear and agreeable to us, and to cast a melancholy thought or two after those with whom, perhaps, we have indulged ourselves in (M249) G 36 ENGLISH ESSAYS. whole nights of mirth and jollity. With such inclinations in my heart I went to my closet yesterday in the evening, and resolved to be sorrowful; upon which occasion I could not but look with disdain upon myself, that though all the reasons which I had to lament the loss of many of my friends are now as forcible as at the moment of their departure, yet did not my heart swell with the same sorrow which I felt at that time; but I could, without tears, reflect upon many pleasing adventures I have had with some, who have long been blended with common earth. Though it is by the benefit of nature that length of time thus blots out the violence of afflictions; yet, with tempers too much given to pleasure, it is almost necessary to revive the old places of grief in our memory; and ponder step by step on past life, to lead the mind into that sobriety of thought which poises the heart, and makes it beat with due time, without being quickened by desire, or retarded with despair, from its proper and equal motion. When we wind up a clock that is out of order, to make it go well for the future, we do not im- mediately set the hand to the present instant, but we make it strike the round of all its hours, before it can recover the regularity of its time. Such, thought I, shall be my method this evening; and since it is that day of the year which I dedicate to the memory of such in another life as I much delighted in when living, an hour or two shall be sacred to sorrow and their memory, while I run over all the melancholy circumstances of this kind which have occurred to me in my whole life. The first sense of sorrow I ever knew was upon the death of my father \ at which time I was not quite five years of age; but was rather amazed at what all the house ^ Steele's father was a lawyer, and was once secretary to the Duke of Ormond, who procured the essayist a foundation at the Charterhouse, where his friendship with Addison began. SIR RICHARD STEELE. 37 meant than possessed with a real understanding why nobody was willing to play with me. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a -beating the coffin, and calling papa; for, I know not how, I had some slight idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her arms, and, transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embraces ; and told me in a flood of tears, "Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again". She was a very beautiful woman, of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport which, methought, struck me with an instinct of sorrow, that, before I was sensible of what it was to grieve, seized my very soul, and has made pity the weakness of my heart ever since. The mind in infancy is, methinks, like the body in embryo; and receives impressions so forcible, that they are as hard to be removed by reason as any mark with which a child is born is to be taken away by any future application. Hence it is that good-nature in me is no merit; but having been so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before I knew the cause of any affliction, or could draw defences from my own judgment, I imbibed commiser- ation, remorse, and an unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since insnared me into ten thousand calamities; from whence I can reap no advantage, except it be that, in such a humour as I am now in, I can the better indulge myself in the softness of humanity, and enjoy that sweet anxiety which arises from the memory of past afflictions. We, that are very old, are better able to remember things which befell us in our distant youth than the passages of later days. For this reason it is that the 38 ENGLISH ESSAYS. companions of my strong and vigorous years present themselves more immediately to me in this office of sorrow. Untimely and unhappy deaths are what we are most apt to lament; so little are we able to make it indifferent when a thing happens, though we know it must happen. Thus we groan under life, and bewail those who are relieved from it. Every object that returns to our im- agination raises different passions, according to the circumstance of their departure. Who can have lived in an army, and in a serious hour reflect upon the many gay and agreeable men that might long have flourished in the arts of peace, and not join with the imprecations of the fatherless and widow on the tyrant to whose am- bition they fell sacrifices? But gallant men, who are cut off by the sword, move rather our veneration than our pity; and we gather relief enough from their own contempt of death, to make that no evil, which was approached with so much cheerfulness, and attended with so much honour. But when we turn our thoughts from the great parts of life on such occasions, and instead of lamenting those who stood ready to give death to those from whom they had the fortune to receive it; I say, when we let our thoughts wander from such noble objects, and consider the havoc which is made among the tender and the innocent, pity enters with an unmixed softness, and possesses all our souls at once. . Here (were there words to express such sentiments with proper tenderness) I should record the beauty, innocence, and untimely death of the first object my eyes ever beheld with love. The beauteous virgin ! how ignorantly did she charm, how carelessly excel ! Oh Death ! thou hast right to the bold, to the ambitious, to the high, and to the haughty; but why this cruelty to the humble, to the meek, to the undiscerning, to the thoughtless? Nor age, nor business, nor distress can erase the dear image from my SIR RICHARD STEELE. 39 imagination. In the same week, I saw her dressed for a ball, and in a shroud. How ill did the habit of death become the pretty trifler! I still behold the smiling earth A large train of disasters were coming on to my memory, when my servant knocked at my closet-door, and interrupted me with a letter, attended with a hamper of wine, of the same sort with that which is to be put to sale on Thursday next at Garraway's coffee-house ^. Upon the receipt of it I sent for three of my friends. We are so intimate that we can be company in whatever state of mind we meet, and can entertain each- other without expecting always to rejoice. The wine we found to be generous and warming, but with such a heat as moved us rather to be cheerful than frolicsome. It revived the spirits, without firing the blood. We commended it until two of the clock this morning; and having to-day met a little before dinner, we found that, though we drank two bottles a man, we had much more reason to recollect than forget what had passed the night before. X. THE SPECTATOR CLUB. Asi alii sex Et plures una conclamant ore. — Juv. Sat. vii. 166. Six more at least join their consenting voice. THE first of our society is a gentleman of Worcester- shire, of an ancient descent, a baronet, his name Sir Roger de Coverley^. His great-grandfather was in- ventor of that famous country-dance which is called after him. All who know that shire are very well acquainted with the parts and merits of Sir Roger. He is a gentleman 'A noted coffee-house in Change Alley, Cornhill. It was opened about 1660 by Thomas Garway, who was the first to sell tea. ^ The tune and dance are said to have been named after a Yorkshire knight, Roger Calverley, who lived in the reign of Richard I. (Chappell's Music of the Olden Time). 40 ENGLISH ESSAYS. that is very singular in his behaviour, but his singularities proceed from his good sense, and are contradictions to the manners of the world, only as he thinks the world is in the wrong. However, this humour creates him no enemies, for he does nothing with sourness or obstinacy ; and his being unconfined to modes and forms makes him but the readier and more capable to please and oblige aU who know him. When he is in town he lives in Soho Square. It is said he keeps himself a bachelor by reason he was crossed in love by a perverse beautiful widow of the next county to him. Before this disappointment. Sir Roger was what you call a fine gentleman \ had often supped with my Lord Rochester^ and Sir George Etherege \ fought a duel upon his first coming to town, and kicked bully Dawson* in a public coffee-house for calling him youngster. But being ill-used by the above- mentioned widow, he was very serious for a year and a half; and though, his temper being naturally jovial, he at last got over it, he grew careless of himself and never dressed afterwards. He continues to wear a coat and doublet of the same cut that were in fashion at the time ' This describes those whom Steele calls "ambitious young men, every night employed in roasting Porters, smoaking Coblers, knocking down Watchmen, overturning Constables, etc." {Tatler, 77). 'JohnWilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), a poet of some ability. Rochester and Sedley anticipated the Mohocks of Queen Anne's reign, and were notorious even in the Restoration age. ' This dramatist {1634-1694) closely resembled the two writers men- tioned above. His plays are of little value, but one of them, TAe Comical Smenge (1664), has the distinction of having founded the English Comedy of Manners. * \ tavern swashbuckler, who is represented in Brown's Letters from the Living to the Dead as thus challenging a rival bully : — "If ever you intend to be my Rival in Glory, you must fight a Bailiff once a Day, Stand Kick and Culf once a Week, Challenge some Coward or Other once a Month, Bilk your Lodgings once a Quarter, and Cheat a Taylor once a Year. Never till then will the fame of W-n (Wharton?) ring like Dawson's in every coffee-house, and be the merry subject of every Tavern Tittle Tattle." SIR RICHARD STEELE. 4 1 of his repulse, which, in his merry humours, he tells us, has been in and out twelve times since he first wore it. It is said Sir Roger grew humble in his desires after he had forgot his cruel beauty, in so much that it is reported he has frequently offended with beggars and gypsies; but this is looked upon, by his friends, rather as matter of raillery than truth. He is now in his fifty-sixth year, cheerful, gay, and hearty; keeps a good house both in town and country; a great lover of mankind; but there is such a mirthful cast in his behaviour, that he is rather beloved than esteemed ^. His tenants grow rich, his servants look satisfied, all the young women profess love to him, and the young men are glad of his company. When he comes into a house, he calls the servants by their names, and talks all the way upstairs to a visit. I must not omit that Sir Roger is a justice of the quorum; that he fills the chair at a quarter-session with great abilities, and three months ago gained universal applause, by explaining a passage in the Game Act. The gentleman next in esteem and authority among us 'The Coverley papers properly amount to thirty-one in number, of which Addison wrote sixteen, Steele seven, Budgell three, and Tickell one. (No. 410, signed T, has been ascribed to Steele, but internal evidence favours its assignment to Tickell.) The natural outcome of this joint-authorship is the presence of some incongruities in the sketch. To mention but one example, the simple knight who makes guileless comments on the Tombs (Add. Sped. 329) could never have been such a beau in his youth as to have supped with Etherege and Rochester (Steele, Sfect. 2,). It can hardly be doubted that Addison indulged in some irony at tlie knight's expense, thereby aiming a left-handed blow at Tory squiredom. It is only hero-worship that could make a critic see in Addison's picture nothing but ' ' a sweet image of simplicity and good- ness" (Arnold's Sfectator.) Nor is it quite just to say, as Mr. Gosse does, that Sir Roger is "the pecuhar property of Addison". This is merely to re-echo what Mr. Forster truly called "the braying of Hurd". Some of the finest touches in the picture are entirely due to Steele, and a very competent critic, after a subtle analysis of the character, arrived at the conclusion that "all that is amiable in the conception belongs to Steele" (Minto's Manual of Eng. Prose Lit., p. 457.) 42 ENGLISH ESSAYS. is another bachelor, who is a member of the Inner Temple, a man of great probity, wit, and understanding ; but he has chosen his place of residence rather to obey the direc- tion of an old humorsome father than in pursuit of his own inclinations. He was placed there to study the laws of the land, and is the most learned of any of the house in those of the stage. Aristotle and Longinus are much better understood by him than Littleton or Coke. The father sends up every post questions relating to marriage- articles, leases, and tenures, in the neighbourhood; all which questions he agrees with an attorney to answer and take care of in the lump. He is studying the passions themselves, when he should be enquiring into the debates among men which arise from them. He knows the argument of each of the orations of Demosthenes and TuUy, but not one case in the reports of our own courts. No one ever took him for a fool; but none, except his intimate friends, know he has a great deal of wit. This turn makes him at once both disinterested and agreeable. As few of his thoughts are drawn from business, they are most of them fit for conversation. His taste for books is a little too just for the age he lives in ; he has read all but approves of very few. His familiarity with the customs, manners, actions, and writings of the ancients, makes him a very delicate observer of what occurs to him in the present world. He is an excellent critic, and the time of the play is his hour of business; exactly at five he passes through New-Inn, crosses through Russell-court, and takes a turn at Will's till the play begins; he has his shoes rubbed and his periwig powdered at the barber's as you go into the Rose. It is for the good of the audi- ence when he is at the play, for the actors have an am- bition to please him. The person of next consideration is Sir Andrew Free- port, a merchant of great eminence in the city of London; SIR RICHARD STEELE. 43 a person of indefatigable industry, strong reason, and great experience. His notions of trade are noble and generous, and (as every rich man has usually some sly way of jesting, which would make no great figure were he not a rich man) he calls the sea the British Common. He is acquainted with commerce in all its parts, and will tell you that it is a stupid and barbarous way to extend dominion by arms; for true power is to be got by arts and industry. He will often argue that, if this part of our trade were well cultivated, we should gain from one nation; and if another, from another. I have heard him prove that diligence makes more lasting acquisitions than valour, and that sloth has ruined more nations than the sword. He abounds in several frugal maxims, amongst which the greatest favourite is, " A penny saved is a penny got". A general trader of good sense is pleasanter company than a general scholar ; and Sir Andrew having a natural unaffected eloquence, the perspicuity of his discourse gives the same pleasure that wit would in another man. He has made his fortune himself; and says that England may be richer than other kingdoms by as plain methods as he himself is richer than other men; though at the same time I can say this of him, that there is not a point in the compass but blows home a ship in which he is an owner. Next to Sir Andrew in the club-room sits Captain Sentry, a gentleman of great courage, good understanding, but invincible modesty. He is one of those that deserve very well, but are very awkward at putting their talents within the observation of such as should take notice of them. He was some years a captain, and behaved him- self with great gallantry in several engagements and at several sieges; but having a small estate of his own, and being next heir to Sir Roger, he has quitted a way of life in which no man can rise suitably to his merit, who is 44 ENGLISH ESSAYS. not something of a courtier as well as a soldier. I have heard him often lament that, in a profession where merit is placed in so conspicuous a view, impudence should get the better of modesty. When he has talked to this purpose, I never heard him make a sour expression, but frankly confess that he left the world, because he was not fit for it. A strict honesty and an even regular behaviour are in themselves obstacles to him that must press through crowds, who endeavour at the same end with himself, the favour of a commander. He will, however, in his way of talk excuse generals for not disposing according to men's desert, or enquiring into it; for, says he, that great man who has a mind to help me has as many to break through to come to me as I have to come at him : therefore he will conclude that the man who would make a figure, especially in a military way, must get over all false modesty, and assist his patron against the impor- tunity of other pretenders, by a proper assurance in his own vindication. He says it is a civil cowardice to be backward in asserting what you ought to expect, as it is a military fear to be slow in attacking when it is your duty. With this candour does the gentleman speak of himself and others. The same frankness runs through all his conversation. The military part of his life has furnished him with many adventures, in the relation of which he is very agreeable to the company; for he is never overbearing, though accustomed to command men in the utmost degree below him; nor ever too obsequious, from an habit of obe3dng men highly above him. But that our society may not appear a set of humourists, unacquainted with the gallantries and pleasures of the age, we have amongst us the gallant Will Honeycomb, a gentleman who, according to his years, should be in the decline of his life; but having ever been very careful of his person, and always had a very easy fortune, time has SIR RICHARD STEELE. 45 made but a very little impression, either by wrinkles on his forehead, or traces on his brain. His person is well turned, and of a good height. He is very ready at that sort of discourse with which men usually entertain women. He has all his life dressed very well, and remembers habits as others do men. He can smile when one speaks to him, and laughs easily. He knows the history of every mode, and can inform you from which of the French king's wenches our wives and daughters had this manner of curling their hair, that way of placing their hoods; whose frailty was covered by such a sort of petticoat, and whose vanity to show her foot made that part of the dress so short in such a year. In a word, all his conversation and knowledge have been in the female world. As other men of his age will take notice to you what such a minister said upon such and such an occasion, he will tell you when the Duke of Monmouth danced at court, such a woman was then smitten, another was taken with him at the head of his troop in the park. In all these important relations, he has ever about the same time received a kind glance, or a blow of a fan from some celebrated beauty, mother of the present Lord Such-a-one. If you speak of a young commoner that said a lively thing in the House, he starts up, "He has good blood in his veins; Tom Mirable begot him; the rogue cheated me in that affair; that young fellow's mother used me more like a dog than any woman I ever made advances to". This way of talk- ing of his very much enlivens the conversation among us of a more sedate turn, and I find there is not one of the company, but myself, who rarely speak at all, but speaks of him as of that sort of man who is usually called a well-bred fine gentleman. To conclude his character, where women are not concerned, he is an honest worthy man. I cannot tell whether I am to account him, whom I am 46 ENGLISH ESSAYS. next to speak of, as one of our company; for he visits us but seldom, but when he does, it adds to every man else a new enjoyment of himself. He is a clergyman, a very philosophic man, of general learning, great sanctity of life, and the most exact good breeding. He has the misfortune to be of a very weak constitution, and conse- quently cannot accept of such cares and business as preferments in his function would oblige him to; he is therefore among divines what a chamber - counsellor is among lawyers. The probity of his mind, and the in- tegrity of his life, create him followers, as being eloquent or loud advances others. He seldom introduces the subject he speaks upon; but we are so far gone in years that he observes, when he is among us, an earnestness to have him fall on some divine topic, which he always treats with much authority, as one who has no interest in this world, as one who is hastening to the object of all his wishes, and conceives hope from his decays and in- firmities. These are my ordinary companions. XL THE UGLY CLUB. Tetrum ante omnia vultum.—]\iv., Sat. x. igi. A visage rough, Deform'd, unfeatur'd. — Dryden. SINCE our persons are not of our own making, when they are such as appear defective or uncomely, it is, methinks, an honest and laudable fortitude to dare to be ugly; at least to keep ourselves from being abashed with a consciousness of imperfections which we cannot help, and in which there is no guilt. I would not defend a haggard beau for passing away much time at a glass, and giving softness and languishing graces to deformity : all I intend is, that we ought to be contented with our countenance and shape, so far as never to give ourselves an uneasy SIR RICHARD STEELE. 47 reflection on that subject. It is to the ordinary people, who are not accustomed to make very proper remarks on any occasion, matter of great jest if a man enters with a prominent pair of shoulders into an assembly, or is distin- guished by an expansion of mouth, or obliquity of aspect. It Is happy for a man that has any of these oddnesses about him, if he can be as merry upon himself as others are apt to be upon that occasion. When he can possess himself with such a cheerfulness, women and children, who are at first frightened at him, will afterwards be as much pleased with him. As it is barbarous in others to rally him for natural defects, it is extremely agreeable when he can jest upon himself for them. Madame Maintenon's first husband^ was an hero in this kind, and has drawn many pleasantries from the irregularity of his shape, which he describes as very much resembling the letter Z. He diverts himself likewise by representing to his reader the make of an engine and pulley, with which he used to take off his hat. When there happens to be anything ridiculous in a visage, and the owner of it thinks it an aspect of dignity, he must be of very great quality to be exempt from raillery. The best expedient, therefore, is to be pleasant upon himself. Prince Harry and FalstafF, in Shakespeare, have carried the ridicule upon fat and lean as far as it will go. Falstaff is humorously called woolsack, bedpresser, and hill of flesh; Harry, a starveling, an elfskin, a sheath, a bow- case, and a tuck. There is, in several incidents of the conversation between them, the jest still kept up upon the person. Great tenderness and sensibility in this point is one of the greatest weaknesses of self-love. For my own part, I am a little unhappy in the mould of my face, which is not quite so long as it is broad. Whether this might not partly arise from my opening my mouth much 1 Scarron. 48 ENGLISH ESSAYS. seldomer than other people, and by consequence not so much lengthening the fibres of my visage, I am not at leisure to determine. However it be, I have been often put out of countenance by the shortness of my face, ' and was formerly at great pains in concealing it by wearing a periwig with a high fore-top, and letting my beard grow. But now I have thoroughly got over this delicacy, and could be contented with a much shorter, provided it might qualify me for a member of the merry club, which the following letter gives me an account of. I have received it from Oxford, and as it abounds with the spirit of mirth and good humour, which is natural to that place, I shall set it down word for word as it came to me. " Most Profound Sir, " Having been very well entertained, in the last of your speculations that I have yet seen, by your specimen upon clubs, which I therefore hope you will continue, I shall take the liberty to furnish you with a brief account of such a one as, perhaps, you have not seen in all your travels, unless it was your fortune to touch upon some of the woody parts of the African continent, in your voyage to or from Grand Cairo. There have arose in this univer- sity (long since you left us without saying anything) several of these inferior hebdomadal societies, as the Punning Club, the Witty Club, and, amongst the rest, the Handsome Club; as a burlesque upon which, a certain merry species that seem to have come into the world in masquerade, for some years last past have associated themselves together, and assumed the name of the Ugly Club. This ill-favoured fraternity consists of a president and twelve fellows; the choice of which is not confined by 1 This was made use of by the savage John Dennis in his attack on Steele, who had, he said, " a shape like the picture of somebody over a farmer's chimney" Steele vanquished his surly critic with the suavest good humour. SIR RICHARD STEELE. 49 patent to any particular foundation (as St. John's men would have the world believe, and have therefore erected a separate society within themselves), but liberty is left to elect from any school in Great Britain, provided the candi- dates be within the rules of the club, as set forth in a table entitled, ' The Act of Deformity', a clause or two of which I shall transmit to you. " ' I. That no person whatsoever shall be admitted without a visible queerity in his aspect, or peculiar cast of countenance; of which the president and ofificers for the time being are to determine, and the president to have the casting voice. " ' II. That a singular regard be had upon examination to the gibbosity of the gentlemen that offer themselves as founder's kinsmen; or to the obliquity of their figure, in what sort soever. " ' III. That if the quantity of any man's nose be emi- nently miscalculated, whether as to length or breadth, he shall have a just pretence to be elected. " ' Lastly, That if there shall be two or more competi- tors for the same vacancy, cceteris paribus, he that has the thickest skin to have the preference.' " Every fresh member, upon his first night, is to enter- tain the company with a dish of cod-fish, and a speech in praise of .^Esop, whose portraiture they have in full pro- portion, or rather disproportion, over the chimney; and their design is, as soon as their funds are sufficient, to purchase the heads of Thersites, Duns Scotus^, Scarron, Hudibras^, and the old gentleman in Oldham,^ with all ' The disciples of Aquinas maligned the personal appearance as well as the doctrines of Duns Scotus. ^ Admitted to the club for the sake of his beard, which was a mixture of whey, orange, and grey. ' Ignatius Loyola as described in the third of the Satires upon the Jesuits by John Oldham, 1679. 50 ENGLISH ESSAYS. the celebrated ill faces of antiquity, as furniture for the club-room. " As they have always been professed admirers of the other sex, so they unanimously declare that they will give all possible encouragement to such as will take the benefit of the statute, though none yet have appeared to do it. "The worthy president, who is their most devoted champion, has lately shown me two copies of verses, composed by a gentleman of his society; the first, a congratulatory ode, inscribed to Mrs. Touchwood, upon the loss of her two fore-teeth; the other, a panegyric upon Mrs. Andiron's left shoulder. Mrs. Vizard, he says, since the small-pox, has grown tolerably ugly, and a top toast in the club; but I never heard him so lavish of his fine things as upon old Nell Trot, who constantly officiates at their table; her he even adores and extols as the very counterpart of Mother Shipton; in short, Nell, says he, is one of the extraordinary works of nature; but as for complexion, shape, and features, so valued by others, they are all mere outside and sym- metry, which is his aversion. Give me leave to add that the president is a facetious, pleasant gentleman, and never more so than when he has got (as he calls them) his dear mummers about him; and he often protests it does him good to meet a fellow with a right genuine grimace in his air (which is so agreeable in the generality of the French nation); and, as an instance of his sincerity in this particular, he gave me a sight of a list in his pocket-book of all this class, who for these five years have fallen under his observation, with himself at the head of them, and in the rear (as one of a promising and improving aspect), Sir, " Your obliged and humble servant, "ALEXANDER CARBUNCLE. "Oxford, March 12, 1710." SIR RICHARD STEELE. 5 1 XII. SIR ROGER AND THE WIDOW. H(Erent infixi pectore vultus. — Virg. ^n. iv. 4. Her looks were deep imprinted in his heart. IN my first description of the company in which I pass most of my time, it may be remembered that I men- tioned a great affliction which my friend Sir Roger had met with in his youth, which was no less than a disap- pointment in love. It happened this evening that we fell into a very pleasing walk at a distance from his house. As soon as we came into it, " It is," quoth the good old man, looking round him with a smile, "very hard that any part of my land should be settled upon one who has used me so ill as the perverse widow^ did; and yet I am sure I could not see a sprig of any bough of this whole walk of trees, but I should reflect upon her and her severity. She has certainly the finest hand of any woman in the world. You are to know this was the place wherein I used to muse upon her; and by that custom I can never come into it, but the same tender sentiments revive in my mind as if I had actually walked with that beautiful creature under these shades. I have been fool enough to carve her name on the bark of several of these trees; so unhappy is the condition of men in love to attempt the removing of their passion by the methods which serve only to imprint it deeper. She has certainly the finest hand of any woman in the world." Here followed a profound silence; and I was not dis- pleased to observe my friend falling so naturally into a discourse, which I had ever before taken notice he in- dustriously avoided. After a very long pause, he entered ^ It has been conjectured that the widow — and also, with less proba- bility, the sweetheart alluded to in Tatkr 181 — was Mrs. Catherine Bovey, to whom Steele dedicated the second volume of his Lady's Library. (M249) H 52 ENGLISH ESSAYS. upon an account of this great circumstance in his life, with an air which I thought raised my idea of him above what I had ever had before; and gave me the picture of that cheerful mind of his before it received that stroke which has ever since affected his words and actions. But he went on as follows : " I came to my estate in my twenty-second year, and resolved to follow the steps of the most worthy of my ancestors who have inhabited this spot of earth before me, in all the methods of hospitality and good neigh- bourhood, for the sake of my fame; and in country sports and recreations, for the sake of my health. In my twenty-third year, I was obliged to serve as Sheriff of my county; and in my servants, ofi&cers, and whole equipage, indulged the pleasure of a young man (who did not think ill of his own person) in taking that public occasion of showing my figure and behaviour to advantage. You may easily imagine to yourself what appearance I made, who am pretty tall, rode well, and was very well dressed, at the head of a whole county, with music before me, a feather in my hat, and my horse well bitted. I can assure you I was not a little pleased with the kind looks and glances I had from all the balconies and windows as I rode to the hall where the assizes were held. But when I came there, a beautiful creature, in a widow's habit, sat in court to hear the event of a cause concerning her dower. This commanding creature (who was born for the destruction of all who beheld her) put on such a resignation in her countenance, and bore the whispers of all around the court with such a pretty un- easiness, I warrant you, and then recovered herself from one eye to another, until she was perfectly confused by meeting something so wistful in all she encountered, that at last, with a murrain to her, she cast her bewitching eye upon me. I no sooner met it but I bowed, like a SIR RICHARD STEELE. 53 great surprised booby; and knowing her cause to be the first which came on, I cried, hke a captivated calf as I was, 'Make way for the defendant's witnesses'. This sudden partiality made all the county see the sheriff also was become a slave to the fine widow. During the time her cause was upon trial, she behaved herself, I warrant you, with such a deep attention to her business, took opportunities to have little billets handed to her coun- sel, then would be in such a pretty confusion, occasioned, you must know, by acting before so much company, that not only I, but the whole court, was prejudiced in her favour; and all that the next heir to her husband had to urge was thought so groundless and frivolous that when it came to her counsel to reply, there was not half so much said as every one besides in the court thought he could have urged to her advantage. You must under- stand, sir, this perverse woman is one of those unaccount- able creatures that secretly rejoice in the admiration of men, but indulge themselves in no further consequences. Hence it is that she has ever had a train of admirers, and she removes from her slaves in town to those in the country according to the seasons of the year. She is a reading lady, and far gone in the pleasures of friendship. She is always accompanied -by a confidant who is witness to her daily protestations against our sex, and conse- quently a bar to her first steps towards love, upon the strength of her own maxims and declarations. "However, I must needs say, this accompUshed mistress of mine has distinguished me above the rest, and has been known to declare Sir Roger de Coverley was the tamest and most humane of all the brutes in the country. I was told she said so by one who thought he rallied me; but upon the strength of this slender encouragement of being thought least detestable, I made new liveries, new- paired my coach-horses, sent them all to town to be 54 ENGLISH ESSAYS. bitted, and taught to throw their legs well, and move all together, before I pretended to cross the country and wait upon her. As soon as I thought my retinue suitable to the character of my fortune and youth, I set out from hence to make my addresses. The particular skill of this lady has ever been to inflame your wishes, and yet command respect. To make her mistress of this art, she has a greater share of knowledge, wit, and good sense than is usual even among men of merit. Then she is beautiful beyond the race of women. If you will not let her go on with a certain artifice with her eyes, and the skill of beauty, she will arm herself with her real charms, and strike you with admiration instead of desire. It is certain that if you were to behold the whole woman, there is that dignity in her aspect, that composure in her motion, that complacency in her manner, that if her form makes you hope, her merit makes you fear. But then again she is such a desperate scholar that no country gentleman can approach her without being a jest. As I was going to tell you, when I came to her house, I was admitted to her presence with great civility; at the same time she placed herself to be first seen by me in such an attitude as I think you call the posture of a picture, that she discovered new charms, and I at last came towards her with such an awe as made me speechless. This she no sooner observed but she made her advantage of it, and began a discourse to me concerning love and honour, as they both are followed by pretenders, and the real votaries to them. When she discussed these points in a discourse, which I verily believe was as learned as the best philo- sopher in Europe could possibly make, she asked me whether she was so happy as to fall in with my sentiments on these important particulars. Her confidant sat by her, and upon my being in the last confusion and silence, this malicious aid of hers, turning to her, says, ' I am very glad SIR RICHARD STEELE. 55 to observe Sir Roger pauses upon this subject, and seems resolved to deliver all his sentiments upon the matter when he pleases to speak '. They both kept their countenances, and after I had sat half an hour meditating how to behave before such profound casuists, I rose up and took my leave. Chance has since that time thrown me very often in her way, and she as often has directed a discourse to me which I do not understand. This barbarity has kept me ever at a distance from the most beautiful object my eyes ever beheld. It is thus also she deals with all mankind, and you must make love to her, as you would conquer the sphinx, by posing her. But were she like other women, and that there were any talking to her, how constant must the pleasure of that man be who would converse with a creature — But, after all, you may be sure her heart is fixed on some one or other; and yet I have been credibly informed — but who can believe half that is said? — after she had done speaking to me she put her hand to her bosom and adjusted her tucker. Then she cast her eyes a little down upon my beholding her too earnestly. They say she sings excellently: her voice in her ordinary speech has something in it inexpressibly sweet. You must know I dined with her at a public table the day after I first saw her, and she helped me to some tansy in the eye of all the gentlemen in the country. She has certainly the finest hand of any woman in the world. I can assure you, sir, were you to behold her you would be in the same condition; for as her speech is music, her form is angelic. But I find I grow irregular while I am talking of her; but indeed it would be stupidity to be unconcerned at such perfection. Oh, the excellent creature ! she is as inimitable to all women as she is inaccessible to all men — '' I found my friend begin to rave, and insensibly led him towards the house that we might be joined by some 56 ENGLISH ESSAYS. Other company; and am convinced that the widow is the secret cause of all that inconsistency which appears in some parts of my friend's discourse; though he has so much command of himself as not directly to mention her, yet, according to that of Martial, which one knows not how to render into English, Dum facet, hanc loquitur; I shall end this paper with that whole epigram, which repre- sents with much humour my honest friend's condition: — Quicquid agit Rufus, nihil est nisi Navia Rufo, Sigauaet, siflet, si facet, hanc loquitur: Casnat, propinat, poscit, negat, innuit, una est Ncmia: si non sit Ncevia, mutus erit. Scriberet hestemd patri cum luce salutem, Navia Itix, inquit, Navia! lumen, ave. — Epig. i. 69. " Let Rufiis weep, rejoice, stand, sit, or walk, Still he can nothing but of Nsevia talk ; Let him eat, drink, ask questions or dispute. Still he must speak of Nsvia, or be mute. He writ to his father, ending with this line, I am, my lovely Nsevia, ever thine." JOSEPH ADDISON. (1672-1719.) XIII. THE CHARACTER OF NED SOFTLY. Idem inficeto est inficetior rure, Simul poemata attigit ; neque idem unquam Aeque est beatus, ac poema cum scribit: Tam gaudet in se, tamque se ipse miraiur. Nimirum idem omnes fallimur; neque est quisquam Quern non in aliqua re videre Suffenum Possis. -^Catul. de Suffeno, xx. 14. Suffenus has no more wit than a mere clown when he attempts to write verses; and yet he is never happier than when he is scribbling: so much does he admire himself and his compositions. And, indeed, this is the foible of every one of us ; for there is no man living who is not a Suffenus in one thing or other. 1 YESTERDAY came hither about two hours before the company generally make their appearance, with a design to read over all the newspapers; but, upon JOSEPH ADDISON. 57 my sitting down, I was accosted by Ned Softly, who saw me from a corner in the other end of the room, where I found he had been writing something. " Mr. Bickerstaff," says he, " I observe by a late paper of yours, that you and I are just of a humour; for you must know, of all impertinences, there is nothing which I so much hate as news. I never read a gazette in my life; and never trouble my head about our armies, whether they win or lose, or in what part of the world they lie encamped." Without giving me time to reply, he drew a paper of verses out of his pocket, telling me, " that he had some- thing which would entertain me more agreeably; and that he would desire my judgment upon every line, for that we had time enough before us until the company came in.'' Ned Softly is a very pretty poet, and a great admirer of easy lines. Waller is his favourite : and as that admir- able writer has the best and worst verses of any among our great English poets, Ned Softly has got all the bad ones without book: which he repeats upon occasion, to show his reading, and garnish his conversation. Ned is indeed a true English reader, incapable of relishing the great and masterly strokes of this art; but wonderfully pleased with the little Gothic ornaments of epigrammatical conceits, turns, points, and quibbles, which are so frequent in the most admired of our English poets, and practised by those who want genius and strength to represent, after the manner of the ancients, simplicity in its natural beauty and perfection. Finding myself unavoidably engaged in such a conver- sation, I was resolved to turn my pain into a pleasure, and to divert myself as well as I could with so tery odd a fellow. " You must understand," says Ned, " that the sonnet I am going to read to you was written upon a lady, who showed me some verses of her own making, and is, perhaps, the best. poet of our age. But you shall hear it." 58 ENGLISH ESSAYS. Upon which he began to read as follows : TO MIRA, ON HER INCOMPARABLE POEMS. I. When dress'd in laurel wreaths you shine, And tune your soft melodious notes. You seem a sister of the Nine, Or Phcebus' self in petticoats. II. I fancy, when your song you sing, (Your song you sing with so much art) Your pen was pluck'd from Cupid's wing; For, ah ! it wounds me like his dart. " Why," says I, " this is a little nosegay of conceits, a very lump of salt : every verse has something in it that piques; and then the dart in the last line is certainly as pretty a sting in the tail of an epigram, for so I think you critics call it, as ever entered into the thought of a poet." " Dear Mr. Bickerstaff," says he, shaking me by the hand, "everybody knows you to be a judge of these things; and to tell you truly, I read over Roscommon's transla- tion of Horace's Art of Poetry three several times before I sat down to write the sonnet which I have shown you. But you shall hear it again, and pray observe every line of it; for not one of them shall pass without your approbation. When dress'd in laurel wreaths you shine, "That is," says he, "when you have your garland on; when you are writing verses." To which I replied, " I know your meaning; a metaphor!" "The same,'' said he, and went on. And tune your soft melodious notes, " Pray observe the gliding of that verse; there is scarce a consonant in it; I took care to make it run upon liquids. Give me your opinion of it." " Truly," said I, JOSEPH ADDISON. 59 " I think it as good as the former.'' " I am very glad to hear you say so," says he, " but mind the next." You seem a sister of the Nine, "That is," says he, "you seem a sister of the Muses; for, if you look into ancient authors, you will find it was their opinion that there were nine of them." " I remem- ber it very well," said I; "but pray proceed." Or Phoebus' self in petticoats. " Phoebus ", says he, " was the god of poetry. These little instances, Mr. BickerstafF, show a gentleman's read- ing. Then, to take off from the air of learning, which Phoebus and the Muses had given to this first stanza, you may observe, how it falls all of a sudden into the familiar, 'in petticoats!' " Let us now," says I, "enter upon the second stanza; I find the first line is still a continuation of the metaphor." I fancy, when your song you sing, " It is very right," says he; " but pray observe the turn of words in those two lines. I was a whole hour in ad- justing of them, and have still a doubt upon me whether in the second line it should be, 'Your song you sing;' or, 'You sing your song.' You shall hear them both"- I fancy, when your song you sing (Your song you sing with so much art) ; or, I fancy, when your song you sing, (You sing your song with so much art). "Truly,"' said I, "the turn is so natural either way, that you have made me almost giddy with it." " Dear sir,'' said he, grasping me by the hand, "you have a great deal of patience; but pray what do you think of the next verse?" Your pen was pluck'd from Cupid's wing : 6o ENGLISH ESSAYS. "Think!" says I, "I think you have made Cupid look like a little goose." "That was my meaning," says he, "I think the ridicule is well enough hit off. But we come now to the last, which sums up the whole matter." For, ah ! it wounds me like his dart. " Pray how do you like that Ah ! doth it not make a pretty figure in that place ? Ah ! — it looks as if I felt the dart, and cried out as being pricked with it. For, ah ! it wounds me like his dart. "My friend, Dick Easy," continued he, "assured me he would rather have written that Ah t than to have been the author of the ^neid. He indeed objected, that I made Mira's pen like a quill in one of the lines, and like a dart in the other. But as to that — " . " Oh ! as to that," says I, "it is but supposing Cupid to be like a porcupine, and his quills and darts will be the same thing." He was going to embrace me for the hint; but half a dozen critics coming into the room, whose faces he did not like, he conveyed the sonnet into his pocket, and whispered me in the ear, " he would show it me again as soon as his man had written it over fair". XIV. NICOLINI AND THE LIONS. Die mihi, sifueris tu leo, qualis erisf — Mart. Were you a lion, how would you behave? THERE is nothing that of late years has afforded matter of greater amuseinent to the town than Signor Nicolini's ^ combat with a lion in the Haymarket, ^ The Cavaliere Nicolino Grimaldi, a Neapolitan, came to London in 1708. He performed first in Pyrrhus and Demetrius in 1710, the last of the mongrel Anglo-Italian operas. In 1712 he left England, after gaining the name of being " the greatest performer in dramatick music that is now living, or that perhaps ever appeared on a stage" (Spect. 405). He is alluded to by Addison in Spect, 5, as acting in the opera Rinaldo by ' Mynheer Handel '. JOSEPH ADDISON. 6 1 which has been very often exhibited to the general satisfaction of most of the nobility and gentry in the kingdom of Great Britain. Upon the first rumour of his intended combat, it was confiidently affirmed, and is still believed, by many in both galleries, that there would be a tame lion sent from the Tower every opera night in order to be killed by Hydaspes.i This report, though al- together groundless, so universally prevailed in the upper regions of the playhouse that some of the most refined poli- ticians in those parts of the audience gave it out in whisper that the lion was a cousin-german of the tiger who made his appearance in King William's days, and that the stage would be supplied with lions at the public expense during the whole session. Many likewise were the conjectures of the treatment which this lion was to meet with from ■ the hands of Signor Nicolini; some supposed that he was to subdue him in recitativo, as Orpheus used to serve the wild beasts in his time, and afterwards to knock him on the head; some fancied that the lion would not pretend to lay his paws upon the hero, by reason of the received opinion, that a lion will not hurt a virgin. Several, who pretended to have seen the opera in Italy, had informed their friends that the lion was to act a part in high Dutch, and roar twice or thrice to a thorough bass before he fell at the feet of Hydaspes. To clear up a matter that was so variously reported, I have made it my business to examine whether this pretended lion is really the savage he appears to be, or only- a counterfeit. But before I communicate my discoveries, I must acquaint the reader, that upon my walking behind the scenes last winter, as I was thinking on something else, I accidentally jostled against a monstrous animal that extremely startled me, and, upon my nearer survey of it, appeared to be a lion rampant. The lion seeing me very 1 An opera by Francesco Mancini, produced at the Haymarket, 1710. 62 ENGLISH ESSAYS. much surprised told me, in a gentle voice, that I might come by him if I pleased; "For", says he, "I do not intend to hurt anybody". I thanked him very kindly, and passed by him : and in a little time after saw him leap upon the stage, and act his part with very great applause. It has been observed by several that the lion has changed his manner of acting twice or thrice since his first appear- ance; which will not seem strange when I acquaint my reader that the lion has been changed upon the audience three several times. The first lion was a candle-snuffer, who, being a fellow of a testy choleric temper, overdid his part, and would not suffer himself to be killed as easily as he ought to have done; besides, it was observed of him, that he grew more surly every time that he came out of the lion; and having dropt some words in ordinary conversation, as if he had not fought his best, and that he suffered himself to be thrown upon his back in the scuflBe, and that he would wrestle with Mr. Nicolini for what he pleased, out of his lion's skin, it was thought proper to discard him: and it is verily believed to this day, that had he been brought upon the stage another time, he would certainly have done mischief. Besides, it was objected against the first lion, that he reared him- self so high upon his hinder paws, and walked in so erect a posture, that he looked more like an old man than a lion. The second lion was a tailor by trade, who belonged to the playhouse, and had the character of a mild and peaceable man in his profession. If the former was too furious, this was too sheepish for his part; insomuch, that after a short modest walk upon the stage, he would fall at the first touch of Hydaspes, without grappling with him, and giving him an opportunity of showing his variety of Italian trips. It is said, indeed, that he once gave him a rip in his flesh-coloured doublet: but JOSEPH ADDISON. 63 this was only to make work for himself, in his private character of a tailor. I must not omit that it was this second lion who treated me with so much humanity behind the scenes. The acting lion at present is, as I am informed, a country ge ntleman , who does it for his diversion, but desires Eis name may be concealed. He says very handsomely in his own excuse, that he does not act for gain, that he indulges an innocent pleasure in it; and that it is better to pass away an evening in this manner than in gaming and drinking: but at the same time says, with a very agreeable raillery upon himself, that if his name should be known, the ill-natured world might call hirti, "The ass in the lion's skin". This gentleman's temper is made out of such a happy mixture of the mild and the choleric that he outdoes both his predecessors, and has drawn togethe r greater audiences than have been known in the memory of man. I must not conclude my narrative without first taking notice of a groundless report that has been raised to a gentleman's disadvantage of whom I must declare myself an admirer; namely, that Signor Nicolini and the lion have been seen sitting peaceably by one another, and smoking a pipe together behind the scenes; by which their com- mon enemies would insinuate that it is but a sham combat which they represent upon the stage: but upon inquiry I find, that if any such correspondence has passed between them, it was not till the combat was over, when the lion was to be looked upon as dead, according to the received rules of the drama. Besides, this is what is practised every day in Westminster Hall, where nothing is more usual than to see a couple of lawyers, who have been tearing each other to pieces in the court, embracing one another as soon as they are out of it. 64 ENGLISH ESSAYS. I would not be thought in any part of this relation to reflect upon Signor Nicolini, who in acting this part only complies with the wretched taste of his audience; he knows very well that the lion has many more admirers than himself; as they say of the famous equestrian statue on the Pont-Neuf at Paris, that more people go to see the horse than the king who sits upon it. On the contrary, it gives me a just indignation to see a person whose action gives new majesty to kings, resolution to heroes, and softness to lovers, thus sinking from the greatness of his behaviour, and degraded into the character of the London 'prentice. I have often wished that our tra- gedians would copy after this great master of action. Could they make the same use of their arms and legs, and inform their faces with as significant looks and passions, how glorious would an English tragedy appear with that action, which is capable of giving dignity to the forced thoughts, cold conceits, and unnatural expressions of an Italian opera! In the meantime, I have related this combat of the lion, to show what are at present the reigning entertainments of the politer part of Great Britain. Audiences have often been reproached by writers for the coarseness of their tastes, but our present grievance does not seem to be the want of a good taste, but of common sense. XV. FANS. Lusus animo debent aliquando dari. Ad cogitandum Ttielior ut redeat sibi. — Phaedr. Fai. xiv. j. The mind ought sometimes to be diverted, that it may return the better to tbinliing. 1D0 not know whether to call the following letter a satire upon coquettes, or a representation of their several fantastical accomplishments, or what other title to JOSEPH ADDISON. 65 give it; but, as it is, I shall communicate it to the public. It will sufficiently explain its own intentions, so that I shall give it my reader at length, without either preface or postscript. "Mr. Spectator, " Women are armed with fans as men with swords, and sometimes do more execution with them. To the end therefore that ladies may be entire mistresses of the weapons which they bear, I have erected an academy for the training up of young women in the exercise of the fan, according to the most fashionable airs and motions that are now practised at court. The ladies who carry fans under me are drawn up twice a day in my great hall, where they are instructed in the use of their arms, and exercised by the following words of command : — Handle your fans, Unfurl your fans. Discharge your fans. Ground your fans. Recover your fans. Flutter your fans. By the right observation of these few plain words of command, a woman of a tolerable genius, who will apply herself diligently to her exercise for the space of but one half- year, shall be able to give her fan all the graces that can possibly enter into that little modish machine. " But to the end that my readers may form to them- selves a right notion of this exercise, I beg leave to explain it to them in all its parts. When my female regiment is drawn up in array, with every one her weapon in her hand, upon my giving the word to Handle their fans, each of them shakes her fan at me with a smile, then gives her right-hand woman a tap upon the shoulder, then presses her lips with the extremity of her fan, then lets her arms fall in an easy motion, and stands in readi- ness to receive the next word of command. All this is done with a close fan, and is generally learned in the first week. " The next motion is that of unfurling the fan, in which 66 ENGLISH ESSAYS. are comprehended several little flirts and vibrations, as also gradual and deliberate openings, with many voluntary fallings asunder in the fan itself, that are seldom learned under a month's practice. This part of the exercise pleases the spectators more than any other, as it discovers on a sudden an infinite number of cupids, garlands, altars, birds, beasts, rainbows, and the like agreeable figures, that display themselves to view, whilst every one in the regiment holds a picture in her hand. " Upon my giving the word to Discharge their fans, they give one general crack that may be heard at a considerable distance when the wind sits fair. This is one of the most difficult parts of the exercise, but I have several ladies with me, who at their first entrance could not give a pop loud enough to be heard at the farther end of a room, who can now discharge a fan in such a manner, that it shall make a report like a pocket-pistol. I have likewise taken care (in order to hinder young women from letting off their fans in wrong places or on unsuitable occasions) to show upon what subject the crack of a fan may come in properly : I have likewise invented a fan, with which a girl of sixteen, by the help of a Uttle wind which is inclosed about one of the largest sticks, can make as loud a crack as a woman of fifty with an ordinary fan. "When the fans are thus discharged, the word of command in course is to Ground their fans. This teaches a lady to quit her fan gracefully when she throws it aside in order to take up a pack of cards, adjust a curl of hair, replace a fafiing pin, or apply herself to any other matter of importance. This part of the exercise, as it only consists in tpssing a fan with an air upon a long table (which stands by for that purpose), may be learned in two days' time as well as in a twelvemonth. " When my female regiment is thus disarmed, I gene- JOSEPH ADDISON. 67 rally let them walk about the room for some time; when on a sudden (like ladies that look upon their watches after a long visit) they all of them hasten to their arms, catch them up in a hurry, and place themselves in their proper stations upon my calling out. Recover your fans. This part of the exercise is not difficult, provided a woman applies her thoughts to it. " The fluttering of the fan is the last, and indeed the masterpiece of the whole exercise ; but if a lady does not misspend her time, she may make herself mistress of it in three months. I generally lay aside the dog-days and the hot time of the summer for the teaching of this part of the exercise; for as soon as ever I pronounce Flutter your fans, the place is filled with so many zephyrs and gentle breezes as are very refreshing in that season of the year, though they might be dangerous to ladies of a tender constitution in any other. "There is an infinite variety of motions to be made use of in the flutter of a fan. There is the angry flutter, the modest flutter, the timorous flutter, the confused flutter, the merry flutter, and the amorous flutter. Not to be tedious, there is scarce any emotion in the mind which does not produce a suitable agitation in the fan; insomuch, that if I c nly see the fan of a disciplined lady, I know very well whether she laughs, frowns, or blushes. I have seen a fan so very angry, that it would have been dangerous for the absent lover who provoked it to have come within the wind of it; and at other times so very languishing, that I have been glad for the lady's sake the lover was at sufficient distance from it. I need not add, that a fan is either a prude or coquette, according to the nature of the person who bears it. STo conclude my -letter, I must acquaint you that I have from my own observations compiled a little treatise for the use of my scholars, entitled, The Passions of the Fan; which I will (M249) I 68 ENGLISH ESSAYS. communicate to you, if you think it may be of use to the pubhc. I shall have a general review on Thursday next; to which you shall be very welcome if you will honour it with your presence. " I am, &c. "P.S. I teach young gentlemen the whole art of gallanting a fan. N.B. I have several little plain fans made for this use, to avoid expense.'' XVI. SIR ROGER AT THE ASSIZES. Comes jucundus in via pro vehiculo est. — Publ. Syr. Frag. An agreeable companion upon the road is as good as a coach, A MAN'S first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart; his next, to escape the censures of the world. If the last interferes with the former, it ought to be entirely neglected; but otherwise there can- not be a greater satisfaction to an honest mind than to see those approbations which it gives itself seconded by the applauses of the public. A man is more sure of his conduct when the verdict which he passes upon his own behaviour is thus warranted and confirmed by the opinion of all that know him. My worthy friend Sir Roger is one of those who is not only at peace within himself, but beloved and esteemed by all about him. He receives a suitable tribute for his universal benevolence to mankind in the returns of affec- tion and good-will which are paid him by everyone that lives within his neighbourhood. I lately met with two or three odd instances of that general respect which is shown to the good old knight. He would needs carry Will Wimble and myself with him to the country assizes. As we were upon the road, Will Wimble joined a couple JOSEPH ADDISON. bg of plain men who rid before us, and conversed with them for some time, during which my friend Sir Roger acquainted me with their characters. "The first of them," says he, "that has a spaniel by his side, is a yeoman of about a hundred pounds a year, an honest man. He is just within the Game Act, and qualified to kill a hare or a pheasant. He knocks down his dinner with his gun twice or thrice a week; and by that means lives much cheaper than those who have not so good an estate as himself. He would be a good neighbour if he did not destroy so many partridges. In short, he is a very sensible man, shoots flying, and has been several times foreman of the petty jury. " The other that rides along with him is Tom Touchy, a fellow famous for 'taking the law' of everybody. There is not one in the town where he lives that he has not sued at a quarter sessions. The rogue had once the impudence to go to law with the widow. His head is full of costs, damages, and ejectments. He plagued a couple of honest gentlemen so long for a trespass in breaking one of his hedges, till he was forced to sell the ground it enclosed to defray the charges of the prosecu- tion. His father left him fourscore pounds a year; but he has cast and been cast so often that he is not now worth thirty. I suppose he is going upon the old business of the willow-tree." As Sir Roger was giving me this account of Tom Touchy, Will Wimble and his two companions stopped short till we came up to them. After having paid their respects to Sir Roger, Will told him that Mr. Touchy and he must appeal to him upon a dispute that arose between them. Will, it seems, had been giving his fellow-traveller an account of his angling one day in such a hole, when Tom Touchy, instead of hearing out his story, told him that Mr. Such-a-one, if he pleased, might " take the law of 70 ENGLISH ESSAYS. him" for fishing in that part of the river. My friend Sir Roger heard them both upon a round trot; and after having paused some time, told them, with the air of a man who would not give his judgment rashly, that "much might be said on both sides". They were neither of them dis- satisfied with the knight's determination, because neither of them found himself in the wrong by it. Upon which we made the best of our way to the assizes. The court was sat before Sir Roger came; but notwith- standing all the justices had taken their places upon the bench, they made room for the old knight at the head of them ; who, for his reputation in the country, took occasion to whisper in the judge's ear, " that he was glad his lord- ship had met with so much good weather in his circuit". I was listening to the proceeding of the court with much attention, and infinitely pleased with that great appear- ance of solemnity which so properly accompanies such a public administration of our laws; when, after about an hour's sitting, I observed, to my great surprise, in the midst of a trial, that my friend Sir Roger was getting up to speak. I was in some pain for him, until I found he had acquitted himself of two or three sentences, with a look of much business and great intrepidity. Upon his first rising the court was hushed, and a general whisper ran among the country people that Sir Roger "was up''. The speech he made was so little to the purpose that I shall not trouble my readers with an account of it; and I believe was not so much designed by the knight himself to inform the court, as to give him a figure in my eye, and keep up his credit in the country. I was highly delighted, when the court rose, to see the gentlemen of the country gathering about my old friend, and striving who should compliment him most; at the same time that the ordinary people gazed upon him- at a JOSEPH ADDISON. 71 distance, not a little admiring his courage that was not afraid to speak to the judge. In our return home we met with a very odd accident, which I cannot forbear relating, because it shows how desirous all who know Sir Roger are of giving him marks of their esteem. When we were arrived upon the verge of his estate, we stopped at a little inn to rest ourselves and our horses. The man of the house had, it seems, been formerly a servant in the knight's family; and to do honour to his old master, had some time since, unknown to Sir Roger, put him up in a sign-post before the door; so that the knight's head had hung out upon the road about a week before he himself knew anything of the matter. As soon as Sir Roger was acquainted with it, finding that his servant's indiscretion proceeded wholly from affection and goodwill, he only told him that he had made him too high a compliment; and when the fellow seemed to think that could hardly be, added with a more decisive look, that it was too great an honour for any man under a duke; but told him at the same time that it might be altered with a very few touches, and that he himself would be at the charge of it. Accordingly they got a painter by the knight's directions to add a pair of whiskers to the face, and by a little aggravation of the features to change it into the Saracen's Head. I should not have known this story had not the innkeeper, upon Sir Roger's alighting, told him in my hearing that his honour's head was brought back last night with the alterations that he had ordered to be made in it. Upon this, my friend, with his usual cheerfulness, related the particulars above-mentioned, and ordered the head to be brought into the room. I could not forbear discovering greater expressions of mirth than ordinary upon the appearance of this monstrous face, under which, notwith- standing it was made to frown and stare in a most extra- 72 ENGLISH ESSAYS. ordinary manner, I could still discover a distant resem- blance to my old friend. Sir Roger, upon seeing me laugh, desired me to tell him truly if I thought it possible for people to know him in that disguise. I at first kept my usual silence; but upon the knight's conjuring me to tell him whether it was not still more like himself than a Saracen, I composed my countenance in the best manner I could, and replied that " much might be said on both sides". . These several adventures, with the knight's behaviour in them, gave me as pleasant a day as ever I met with in any of my travels. XVII. THE VISION OF MIRZA. Omnem, quae nunc obducta tuenti Mortales hehetat visus tibi, et humida circum Caligat, nubem eripiam, — ^Virg. ^«. ii. 604. The cloud, which, intercepting the clear light, Hangs o'er thy eyes, and blunts thy mortal sight, 1 will remove. WHEN I was at Grand Cairo, I picked up several oriental manuscripts, which I have still by me. Among others I met with one entitled. The Visions of Mirza, which I have read over with great pleasure. I intend to give it to the public when I have no other entertainment for them, and shall begin with the first vision, which I have translated word for word as follows : — " On the fifth day of the moon, which according to the custom of my forefathers I always keep holy, after having washed myself and offered up my morning devo- tions, I ascended the high hills of Bagdad, in order to pass the rest of the day in meditation and prayer. As I was here airing myself on the tops of the mountains, I fell into a profound co ntemplation on the vanity of human life, and pasiliig from one thought to another, 'Surely,' JOSEPH ADDISON. 73 said I, ' man is but a shadow, and life a dream '. Whilst I was thus musing, I cast my eyes towards the summit of a rock that was not far from me, where I discovered one in the habit of a shepherd, with a little musical instru- ment in his hand. As T looked upon him he applied it to his lips, and began to play upon it. The sound of it was exceeding sweet, and wrought into a variety of tunes that were inexpressibly melodious and altogether different from anything I had ever heard. They put me in mind of those heavenly airs that are played to the departed souls of good men upon their first arrival in Paradise, to wear out the impressions of the last agonies, and qualify them for the pleasures of that happy place. My heart mdted_aisayjn_s^retja2tures. "I hadbeen often told that the rock before me was the Jiaunt_ofa;_genius ; and that several had been entertained with music wEoTiad passed by it, but never heard that the musician had before made himself visible. When he had raised my thoughts by those transporting airs which he played, to taste the pleasures of his conversation, as I looked upon him like one astonished, he beckoned to me, and by the waving of his hand directed me to approach the place where he sat. I drew near with that reverence which is due to a superior nature; and as my heart was entirely subdued by the captivating strains I had heard, I fell down at his feet and wept. The genius smiled upon me with a look of compassion and affability that familiarized him to my imagination, and at once dispelled all the fears and apprehensions with which I approached him. He hfted me from the ground, and taking me by the hand, ' Mirza,' said he, ' I have heard thee in thy soliloquies; follow me'. " He then led me to the highest pinnacle of the rock, and placing me on the top of it, 'Cast thy eyes east- ward,' said he, 'and tell me what thou seest'. 'I see,' 74 ENGLISH ESSAYS. said I, 'a huge valley and a prodigious tide of water rolling through it.' ' The valley that thou seest,' said he, 'is the Vale of Misery, and the tide of water that thou seest is parToT the great tid e of eternit y.' 'What is the reason,' said I, ' that the tide I see rises out of a thick mist at one end, and again loses itself in a thick mist at the other?' 'What thou seest,' said he, 'is that portion of eternity which is called ti,me, measured out by the sun, and reaching from the beginnmg of the world to its con- summation. Examine now,' said he, ' this sea that is thus bounded with darkness at both ends, and tell me what thou discoverest in it.' ' I see a bridge,' said I, 'standing in the midst of the tide.' 'The bridge thou seest,' said he, 'is human^life; consider it attentively.' Upon a more leisurely survey of it I found that it con- sisted of more than three-score ajnd„tgni_entire arches, with several broken arches which, added to those that were entire, made up the number to about a hundred. As I was counting the arches, the genius told me that this bridge consisted at first of a thousand arches; but that a great flood swept away the rest, and left the bridge in the ruinous condition I now beheld it. ' But tell me further,' said he, 'what thou discoverest on it.' 'I see multitudesjjf peeplejjassing over it,' said I, ' and a black cloud hanging ^ each end of it.' As I looked more attenfiviry, I saw several of the passengers dropping through the bridge into the great tide that flowed under- neath it; and upon further examination, perceived there were innumerable trap-doors that lay concealed in the bridge, which the passengers no sooner trod upon, but they fell through them into the tide and immediately dis- appeared. These hidden pit-falls were set_v ery thick at the entrance _ofLthe bridge, so that throngs of people no sooner broke through the cloud, but many of them fell into them. They grew thinner towards the middle, but JOSEPH ADDISON. 75 multiplied and lay^^ closer, together towards the end of the arches that were entire. "There were indeed some persons, but their number was very small, that continued a kind of hobbling march on the broker! arches, but fell through one after another, being quite tired and spent with so long a walk. "I passed some time in the contemplation of this wonderful structure, and the great variety of objects which it presented. My heart was filled with a deep melancholy to see several dropping unexpectedly in the midst of mirth and jollity, and catching at everything that stood by them to save themselves. Some were looking up towards the heavens in a thoughtful posture, and in the midst of a speculation stumbled and fell out of sight. Multitudes were very busy in the pursuit of bubbles that glittered in their eyes and danced before them, but often when they thought themselves within the reach of them their footing failed and down they sunk. In this con- fusion of objects, I observed some with scimitars in their hands, and others with urinals, who ran to and fro upon the bridge, thrusting several persons on trap-doors which did not seem to lie in their way, and which they might have escaped had they not been thus forced upon them. " The genius, seeing me indulge myself on this melan- choly prospect, told me I had dwelt long enough upon it. 'Take thine eyes off the bridge,' said he, 'and tell me if thou yet seest anything thou dost not comprehend.' Upon looking up, 'What mean,' said I, 'those great flights of birds that are perpetually hovering about the l3ndge7and settling upon it from time to time? I see vultures, harpies, ravens, cormorants, and among many other feathered creatures several little^wjnged-feeys. that perch in great numbers upon the midme arches.' 'These,' said the genius, ' are Em%-Avarice, Superstition, Despair, Love, with the likecares and passions that infest human life.' 76 ENGLISH ESSAYS "I here fetched a deep sigh. 'Alas,' said I, 'man was made in vain: how is he given away to misery and mortality, tortured in life, and swallowed up in death!' The genius being moved with compassion towards me, bid me quit so uncomfortable a prospect. 'Look no more,' said he, 'on man in the first stage of his existence, in his setting out for eternity; but cast thine eye on that thick mist into which the tide bears the several genera- tions of mortals that fall into it. I directed my sight as I was ordered, and (whether or no the good genius strengthened it with any supernatural force, or dissipated part of the mist that was before too thick for eye to penetrate) I saw the valley opening at the farther end, and spreading forth into an immense ocean that had a huge rock of adamant ruiming through the midst of it, and dividing it into two eqjial parts. The clouds still rested on one half of it, insomuch that I could discover nothing in it; but the other appeared to me a vast ocean planted with innumerable islands, that were covered with fruits and flowers, and interwoven with a thousand little shining seas that ran among them. I could see persons dressed in glorious habits with garlands upon their heads, passing among the trees, lying down by the sides of foun- tains, or resting on beds of flowers; and could hear a confused harmony of singing birds, falling waters, human voices, and musical instruments. Gladness grew in me upon the discovery of so delightful a scene. I wished for the wings of an eagle that I might fly away to those happy seats; but the genius told me there was no passage to them except through the gates of death that I saw opening every moment upon the bridge. 'The islands,' said he, 'that lie so fresh and green before thee, and with which the whole face of the ocean appears spotted as far as thou canst see, are more in number than the sands on the sea- shore; there are myriads of islands behind those which JOSEPH ADDISON. 77 thou here discoverest, reaching farther than thine eye, or even thine imagination can extend itself. These are the mansions of good men after death, who, according to the degree and kinds of virtue in which they excelled, are distributed among these several islands, which abound with pleasures of different kinds and degrees suitable to the relishes and perfections of those who are settled in them; every islandjs_a,-paradise accommodated to its respective inhabit ants. Are not these, O Mirza, habita- tions worth contending for? Does life appear miserable that gives thee opportunities of earning such a reward? Is death to be feared that will convey thee to so happy an existence? Think not man was made in vain who has such an eternity reserved for him.' I gazed with inex- pressible pleasure on these happy islands. At length, said I, ' Show me now, I beseech thee, the secrets that lie hid under those dark clouds which cover the ocean on the other side of the rock of adamant '. The genius making me no answer, I turned me about to address myself to him a second time, but I found that he had left me; I then turned again to the vision which I had been so long contemplating; but, instead of the rolling tide, the arched bridge, and the happy islands, I saw nothing but the long valley of Bagdad, with oxen, sheep, and camels grazing upon the sides of it." The end of the first Vision of Mirza.ggk XVIII. THE ART OF GRINNING. Remove fera vionstra, tuaeque Saxificos v-ultus, guaecunque ea, idle Medusae. — Ovid, Met. v. 216. Hence with those monstrous features, and, O I spare That Gorgon's look, and petrifying stare. — P. IN a late paper I mentioned the project of an ingenious author for the erecting of several handicraft prizes to be contended for by our British artisans, and the influence 78 ENGLISH ESSAYS. they might have towards the improvement of our several manufactures. I have since that been very much sur- prised by the following advertisement, which I find in the Post-Boy ^ of the nth instant, and again repeated in the Post-Boy of the isth: — "On the 9th of October next will be run for upon Coleshill-heath in Warwickshire, a plate of six guineas value, three heats, by any horse, mare, or gelding, that hath not won above the value of 5/., the winning horse to be sold for 10/. To carry 10 stone weight, if 14 hands high; if above or under to carry or be allowed weight for inches, and to be entered Friday the 1 5 th at the Swan in Coleshill, before six in the evening. Also a plate of less value to be run for by asses. The same day a gold ring to be grinned for by men." The first of these diversions that is to be exhibited by the 10/. race-horses, may probably have its use; but the two last, in which the asses and men are concerned, seem to me altogether extraordinary and unaccountable. Why they should keep running asses at Coleshill, or how mak- ing mouths turns to account in Warwickshire, more than in any other parts of England, I cannot comprehend. I have looked over all the Olympic games, and do not find anything in them like an ass-race, or a match at grinning. However it be, I am informed that several asses are now kept in body-clothes, and sweated every morning upon the heath; and that all the country-fellows within ten miles of the Swan grin an hour or two in their glasses every morning, in order to qualify themselves for the 9th of October. The prize which is proposed to be grinned for has raised such an ambition among the common people of out-gritining one another, that many very dis- cerning persons are afraid it should spoil most of the faces in the county; and that a Warwickshire man will ' A tri-weekly which began in May, 1695. JOSEPH ADDISON. 79 be known by his grin, as Roman Catholics imagine a Kentish man is by his tail. The gold ring, which is made the prize of deformity, is just the reverse of the golden apple that was formerly made the prize of beauty, and should carry for its poesy the old motto inverted: ' Detur tetriori '. Or, to accommodate it to the capacity of the combatants, The frightfuU'st grinner Be the winner. In the meanwhile I would advise a Dutch painter to be present at this great controversy of faces, in order to make a collection of the most remarkable grins that shall be there exhibited. I must not here omit an account which I lately received of one of these grinning-matches from a gentleman, who, upon reading the above-mentioned advertisement, enter- tained a coffee-house with the following narrative : — Upon the taking of Namur^, amidst other public rejoicings made on that occasion, there was a gold ring given by a whig justice of peace to be grinned for. The first competitor that entered the lists was a black swarthy Frenchman, who accidentally passed that way, and being a man naturally of a withered look, and hard features, promised himself good success. He was placed upon a table in the great point of view, and looking upon the company like Milton's death, ' Grinn'd horribly a ghastly smile '. His muscles were so drawn together on each side of his face, that he showed twenty teeth at a grin, and put the country in some pain, lest a foreigner should carry away the honour of the day; but upon a farther trial they found he was master only of the merry grin. ' Captured by William in 1695. 8o ENGLISH ESSAYS. The next that mounted the table was a malcontent in those days, and a great master in the whole art of grinning, but particularly excelled in the angry grin. He did his part so well that he is said to have made half a dozen women miscarry; but the justice being apprised by one who stood near him that the fellow who grinned in his face was a Jacobite, and being unwilling that a disaffected person should win the gold ring, and be looked upon as the best grinner in the country, he ordered the oaths to be tendered unto him upon his quitting the table, which the grinner refusing, he was set aside as an unqualified person. There were several other grotesque figures that presented themselves, which it would be too tedious to describe. I must not however omit a ploughman, who lived in the farther part of the country, and being very lucky in a pair of long lantern-jaws ^, wrung his face into such a hideous grimace, that every feature of it appeared under a different distortion. The whole company stood astonished at such a complicated grin, and were ready to assign the prize to him, had it not been proved by one of his antagonists that he had practised with verjuice for some days before, and had a crab found upon him at the very time of grinning; upon which the best judges of grinning declared it as their opinion that he was not to be looked upon as a fair grinner, and therefore ordered him to be set aside as a cheat. The prize it seems at length fell upon a cobbler, Giles Gorgon by name, who produced several new grins of his own invention, having been used to cut faces for many years together over his last. At the very first grin he cast every human feature out of his countenance, at the second he became the face of a spout, at the third a baboon, at the fourth a head of a bass-viol, and at the ' " A term used of a thin visage, such as if a candle were burning in the mouth might transmit the hght " (Johnson). JOSEPH ADDISON. 8 1 fifth a pair of nut-crackers. The whole assembly won- dered at his accomplishments, and bestowed the ring upon him unanimously; but, what he esteemed more than all the rest, a country wench, whom he had wooed in vain for above five years before, was so charmed with his grins, and the applauses which he received on all sides, that she married him the week following, and to this day wears the prize upon her finger, the cobbler having made use of it as his wedding-ring. This paper might perhaps seem very impertinent, if it grew serious in the conclusion. I would nevertheless leave to the consideration of those who are the patrons of this monstrous trial of skill, whether or no they are not guilty, in some measure, of an affront to their species, in treating after this manner the " human face divine ", and turning that part of us, which has so great an image im- pressed upon it, into the image of a monkey; whether the raising such silly competitions among the ignorant, proposing prizes for such useless accomplishments, filling the common people's heads with such senseless ambitions, and inspiring them with such absurd ideas of superiority and pre-eminence, has not in it something immoral as well as ridiculous. XIX. SIR ROGER AT THE ABBEY. Ire tamen restai Nutna qub devenit et Ancus. — Hor. Ep. i. 6, 27. With Ancus, and with Numa, kings of Rome, We must descend into the silent tomb. My friend Sir Roger de Coverley told me t' other night, that he had been reading my paper^ upon West- minster Abbey, in which, says he, there are a great many ingenious fancies. He told me at the same time that he observed I had promised another paper upon the tombs, ^ Spectator y 26. 82 ENGLISH ESSAYS. and that he should be glad to go and see them with me, not having visited them since he had read history. I could not imagine how this came into the knight's head, till I recollected that he had been very busy all last summer upon Baker's Chronicle, which he has~' quoted several times in his disputes with Sir Andrew Freeport since his last coming to town. Accordingly, I promised to call upon him the next morning, that we might go together to the abbey. I found the knight under his butler's hands, who always shaves him. He was no sooner dressed than he called for a glass of the Widow Trueby's water, which he told me he always drank before he went abroad. He recommended to me a dram of it at the same time, with so much heartiness, that I could not forbear drinking it. As soon as I had got it down, I found it very unpalatable ; upon which the knight, observing that I had made several wry faces, told me that he knew I should not like it at first, but that it was the best thing in the world agaigst the stone or gravel. I could have wished indeed that he had acquainted me with the virtues of it sooner; but it was too late to complain, and I knew what he had done was out of good will. Sir Roger told me further, that he looked upon it to be very good for a man whilst he staid in town, to keep off infection, and that he got together a quantity of it upon the first news of the sickness being at Dantzic: when, of a sudden, turning short to one of his servants, who stood behind him, he bid him call a hackney-coach and take care it was an elderly man that drove it. He then resumed his discourse upon Mrs. Trueby's water, telling me that the Widow Trueby was one who did more good than all the doctors and apothecaries in the county; that she distilled every poppy that grew within five miles of her; that she distributed her water gratis JOSEPH ADDISON. 83 among all sorts of people: to which the knight added that she had a very great jointure, and that the whole country would fain have it a match between him and her; "and truly," says Sir Roger, "if I had not been engaged, perhaps I could not have done better ". His discourse was broken off by his man's telling him he had called a coach. Upon our going to it, after having cast his eye upon the wheels, he asked the coach- man if his axle-tree was good: upon the fellow's telling him he would warrant it, the knight turned to me, told me he looked like an honest man, and went in without further ceremony. We had not gone far, when Sir Roger, popping out his head, called the coachman down from his box, and upon presenting himself at the window, asked him if he smoked. As I was considering what this would end in, he bid him stop by the way at any good tobacconist's, and take in a roll of their best Virginia. Nothing material happened in the remaining part of our journey, till we were set down at the west end of the abbey. As we went up the body of the church, the knight pointed at the trophies upon one of the new monuments, and cried out, " A brave man, I warrant him ! " Passing afterwards by Sir Cloudsley Shovel, ^ he flung his hand that way, and cried " Sir Cloudsley Shovel ! a very gallant man". As we stood before Busby's^ tomb, the knight uttered himself again after the same manner: "Dr. Busby! a great rnan: he whipped my grandfather; a very great man ! I should have gone to him myself, if I had not been a blockhead — a very great man!" We were immediately conducted into the little chapel on the right hand. Sir Roger, planting himself at our historian's elbow, was very attentive to everything he ^ Drowned off the Scilly Isles, Oct. 22, 1707. ^ Headmaster of Westminster {b. 1606, d. 1695). (M249) S. 84 ENGLISH ESSAYS. said, particularly to the account he gave us of the lord who had cut off the king of Morocco's head. Among several other figures, he was very well pleased to see the statesman Cecil upon his knees; and concluding them all to be great men, wa^xonducted to the figure which represents that martyr to good housewifery^ who died by the prick of a needle. Upon our interpreter's telling us that she was a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth, the knight was very inquisitive into her name and family; and, after having regarded her finger for some time, " I wonder," says he, "that Sir Richard Baker has said nothing of her in his Chronicle ". We were then conveyed to the two coronation chairs^, where my old friend, after having heard that the stone underneath the most ancient of them, which was brought from Scotland, was called Jacob's pillow, sat himself down in the chair, and, looking like the figure of an old Gothic king, asked our interpreter, what authority they had to say that Jacob had ever been in Scotland? The fellow, instead of returning him an answer, told him, that he hoped his honour would pay his forfeit. I could observe Sir Roger a little ruffled upon being thus tre- panned, but our guide not insisting upon his demand, the knight soon recovered his good humour, and whis- pered in my ear, that if Will Wimble were with us, and saw those two chairs, it would go hard but he would get a tobacco stopper out of one or t' other of them. Sir Roger, in the next place, laid his hand upon Edward the Third's sword, and, leaning upon the pommel ' Lady Eliz. Russel, one of whose sisters married Lord Burleigh, and another was the mother of Francis Bacon. The story here alluded to is an absurd legend. 2 In the chapel of Edward the Confessor. One of the chairs was made for the coronation of Queen Mary. The other is Edward's chair, the seat of which was carried off from Scone in 1296, and was said by tra- dition to have been Jacob's pillow. JOSEPH ADDISON. 85 of it, gave us the whole history of the Black Prince; con- cluding, that, in Sir Richard Baker's opinion, Edward the Third was one of the greatest princes that ever sat upon the English throne. We were then shown Edward the Confessor's tomb; upon which Sir Roger acquainted us, that he was the first who touched for the evil : and afterwards Henry the Fourth's; upon which he shook his head, and told us there was fine reading in the casualties of that reign. Our conductor then pointed to that monument where there is the figure of one of our English kings without a head;^ and upon giving us to know that the head, which was of beaten silver, had been stolen away several years since, "Some Whig, I'll warrant you," says Sir Roger; "you ought to lock up your kings better; they will carry off the body too, if you don't take care ". The glorious names of Henry the Fifth and Queen Elizabeth gave the knight great opportunities of shining, and of doing justice to Sir Richard Baker, who, as our knight observed with some surprise, had a great many kings in him, whose monuments he had not seen in the abbey. For my own part, I could not but be pleased to see the knight show such an honest passion for the glory of his country, and such a respectful gratitude to the memory of its princes. I must not omit that the benevolence of my good old friend, which flows out towards every one he converses with, made him very kind to our interpreter, whom he looked upon as an extraordinary man : for which reason he shook him by the hand at parting, telling him that he should be very glad to see him at his lodgings in Norfolk Buildings, and talk over these matters with him more at leisure. ^ The head of Henry V., cast in silver, was stolen at the time of the Reformation. 86 ENGLISH ESSAYS. XX. SIR ROGER- AT THE PLAY. Respicere exemplar vitae morumque julelo Doctum imitatorem, et veras hinc ducere voces. — Hor. Ars Poet, 317. Keep Nature's great original in view, And thence the living images pursue. — Francis. MY friend Sir Roger de Coverley, when we last met together at the club, told me that he had a great mind to see the new tragedy ^ with me, assuring me at the same time that he had not been at a play these twenty years. "The last I saw," said Sir Roger, "was The Committee ^, which I should not have gone to neither, had not I been told beforehand that it was a good Church of England comedy." He then proceeded to inquire of me who this distrest mother was; and upon hearing that she was Hector's widow, he told me that her husband was a brave man, and that when he was a schoolboy he had read his life at the end of the dictionary. My friend asked me, in the next place, if there would not be some danger in coming home late, in case the Mohocks' should be abroad. "I assure you,'' says he, "I thought I had fallen into their hands last night; for I observed two or * The Distrest Mother, by Ambrose Philips, 1712, founded on Racine's Andromaque. 2 A play (1665) by Sir Robert Howard, who collaborated with Dryden in The Indian Queen. 3 " Who has not trembled at the Mohock's name? Was there a watchman took his hourly rounds, Safe from their blows or new invented wounds?" (Gay's Trivia, Bk. III.) The Mohocks corresponded to the Restoration Scowrers. See note on Essay x. There was a special scare at the time of this Essay. On March 9, 1712, Svrift wrote to Stella that "it is not safe being in the streets at night for them" So great was the alarm that on March 17 a royal proclamation offered ;^ioo reward for their detection. JOSEPH ADDISON. 87 three lusty black men that followed me half way up Fleet Street, and mended their pace behind me in proportion as I put on to get away from them. You must know," continued the knight with a smile, " I fancied they had a mind to hunt me; for I remember an honest gentleman in my neighbourhood, who was sferved such a trick in King Charles the Second's time, for which reason he has not ventured himself in town ever since. I might have shown them very good sport, had this been their design; for, as I am an old fox-hunter, I should have turned and dodged and have played them a thousand tricks they had never seen in their lives before." Sir Roger added, that "if these gentlemen had any such intention, they did not succeed very well in it; for I threw them out", says he, " at the end of Norfolk Street, where I doubled the corner, and got shelter in my lodgings before they could imagine what was become of me. However," says the knight, " if Captain Sentry will make one with us to- morrow night, and you will both of you call upon me about four o'clock, that we may be at the house before it is full, I will have my own coach in readiness to attend you, for John tells me he has got the fore-wheels mended." The captain, who did not fail to meet me there at the appointed hour, bid Sir Roger fear nothing, for that he had put on the same sword which he made use of at the battle of Steenkirk^. Sir Roger's servants, and among the rest my old friend the butler, had, I found, provided themselves with good oaken plants, to attend their master upon this occasion. When we had placed him in his coach, with myself at his left hand, the captain before ^ King William was forced to retreat at Steerikirk on July 24, 1692, before the Duke of Luxemburg. The French generals, it is said, were so eager for the fray that they did not take time to adjust their neck- cloths. Hence the fashion in Queen Anne's reign of wearing a scarf with studied negligence. 88 ENGLISH ESSAYS. him, and his butler at the head of his footmen in the rear, we convoyed him in safety to the playhouse, where, after having marched up the entry in good order, the captain and I went in with him, and seated him betwixt us in the pit. As soon as the house was full, and the candles lighted, my old friend stood up, and looked about him with that pleasure which a mind seasoned with humanity naturally feels in itself, at the sight of a multi- tude of people who seem pleased with one another, and partake of the same common entertainment. I could not but fancy to myself, as the old man stood up in the middle of the pit, that he made a very proper centre to a tragic audience. Upon the entering of Pyrrhus, the knight told me that he did not believe the king of France himself had a better strut. I was indeed very attentive to my old friend's remarks, because I looked upon them as a piece of natural criticism, and was well pleased to hear him, at the conclusion of almost every scene, telling me that he could not imagine how the play would end.' One while he appeared much concerned for Andromache; and a little while after as much for Hermione; and was extremely puzzled to think what would become of Pyrrhus. When Sir Roger saw Andromache's obstinate refusal to her lover's importunities, he whispered me in the ear, that he was sure she would never have himj to which he added, with a more than ordinary vehemence, "You can't imagine, sir, what it is to have to do with a widow". Upon Pyrrhus's threatening afterwards to leave her, the knight shook his head, and muttered to himself, " Ay, do if you can". This part dwelt so much upon my friend's imagination, that at the close of the third act, as I was thinking of something else, he whispered me in my ear, " These widows, sir, are the most perverse creatures in the world. But pray," says he, " you that are a critic, is the play according to your dramatic rules, as you call them? JOSEPH ADDISON. 89 Should your people in tragedy always talk to be under- stood? Why, there is not a single sentence in this play that I do not know the meaning of." The fourth act very luckily began before I had time to give the old gentleman an answer. "Well," says the knight, sitting down with great satisfaction, " I suppose we are now to see Hector's ghost." He then renewed his attention, and, from time to time, fell a-praising the widow. He made, indeed, a little mistake as to one of her pages, whom at his first entering he took for Astyanax; but quickly set himself right in that particular, though, at the same time, he owned he should have been very glad to have seen the little boy, who, says he, must needs be a very fine child by the account that is given of him. Upon Hermione's going off with a menace to Pyrrhus, the audience gave a loud clap, -to which Sir Roger added, "On my word, a notable young baggage!" As there was a very remarkable silence and stillness in the audience during the whole action, it was natural for them to take the opportunity of these intervals between the acts to express their opinion of the players and of their respective parts. Sir Roger, hearing a cluster of them praise Orestes, struck in with them, and told them that he thought his friend Pylades was a very sensible man. As they were afterwards applauding Pyrrhus, Sir Roger put in a second time, "And let me tell you," says he, "though he speaks but little, I like the old fellow in whiskers as well as any of them". Captain Sentry, seeing two or three wags who sat near us lean with an attentive ear towards Sir Roger, and fearing lest they should smoke the knight, plucked him by the elbow, and whispered something in his ear, that lasted till the opening of the fifth act. The knight was wonderfully attentive to the account which Orestes gives of Pyrrhus's death, and at the conclusion of it, told me it was such a 9° ENGLISH ESSAYS. bloody piece of work that he was glad it was not done upon the stage. Seeing afterwards- Orestes in his raving fit, he grew more than ordinarily serious, and took occasion to moralize (in his way) upon an evil conscience, adding, that Orestes, in his madness, looked as if he saw some- thing. As we were the first that came into the house, so we were the last that went out of it; being resolved to have a clear passage for our old friend, whom we did not care to venture among the jostling of the crowd. Sir Roger went out fully satisfied with his entertainment, and we guarded him to his lodging in the same manner that we brought him to the playhouse; being highly pleased for my own part, not only with the performance of the excel- lent piece which had been presented, but with the satisfaction which it had given to the good old man. XXI. THE TORY FOX-HUNTER.I Studiis rudis, sermone barharus, impetu sirenuus, manu promptus, cogitatione celer. — Veil. Paterc. FOR the honour of his Majesty, and the safety of his government, we cannot but observe that those who have appeared the greatest enemies to both are of that rank of men who are commonly distinguished by the title of Fox-hunters. As several of these have had no part of their education in cities, camps, or courts, iit is doubtful whether they are of greater ornament or use to the nation in which they live. It would be an everlasting reproach to politics should such men be able to overturn an establishment which has been formed by the wisest laws, 1 From The Freeholder. This paper was written entirely by Addison, and consisted of fifty-five numbers, from 23rd Dec. 1715, to 29th June, 1716. Its object was purely political, and its main topics were "the enormity of rebellion and the prejudices of ignorance and faction". The Tory Fox-hunter is painted manifestly by a Whig brush. JOSEPH ADDISON. 9 1 and is supported by the ablest heads. The wrong notions and prejudices which cleave to many of these country gentlemen, who have always lived out of the way of being better informed, are not easy to be conceived by a person who has never conversed with them. That I may give my readers an image of these rural statesmen, I shall, without farther preface, set down an account of a discourse I chanced to have with one of them some time ago. I was travelling towards one of the remote parts of England, when about three o'clock in the afternoon, seeing a country gentleman trotting before me with a spaniel by his horse's side, I made up to him. Our conversation opened, as usual, upon the weather, in which we were very unanimous, having both agreed that it was too dry for the season of the year. My fellow-traveller, upon this, observed to me that there had been no good weather since the Revolution. I was a little startled at so extraordinary a remark, but would not interrupt him till he proceeded to tell me of the fine weather they used to have in King Charles the Second's reign. I only answered that I did not see how the bad- ness of the weather could be the king's fault; and, with- out waiting for his reply, asked him whose house it was we saw upon a rising ground at a little distance from us. He told me it belonged to an old fanatical cur, Mr. Such-a-one. "You must have heard of him," says he, " he 's one of the Rump." I knew the gentleman's charac- ter upon hearing his name, but assured him that to my knowledge he was a good churchman. "Ay," says he, with a kind of surprise, "we were told in the country that he spoke twice, in the Queen's time, against taking off the duties upon French claret." This naturally led us in the proceedings of late parliaments, upon which occasion he affirmed roundly that there had not been one good law passed since King William's accession to 92 ENGLISH ESSAYS. the throne, except the act for preserving the game. I had a mind to see him out, and therefore did not care for contradicting him. "Is it not hard," says he, "that honest gentlemen should be taken into custody of messengers to prevent them from acting according to their consciences? But,'' says he, "what can we expect when a parcel of factious sons of — " He was going on in great passion, but chanced to miss his dog, who was amusing himself about a bush that grew at some distance behind us. We stood still till he had whistled him up, when he fell into a long panegyric upon his spaniel, who seemed, indeed, excellent in his kind; but I found the most remarkable adventure of his life was that he had once like to have worried a dissenting teacher 1. The master could hardly sit on his horse for laughing all the while he was giving me the particulars of this story, which I found had mightily endeared his dog to him, and as he himself told me, had made him a great favourite among all the honest gentlemen of the country. We were at length diverted from this piece of mirth by a post-boy, who winding his horn at us, my companion gave him two or three curses, and left the way clear for him. " I fancy," said I, " that post brings news from Scotland. I shall long to see the next Gazette." " Sir," says he, " I make it a rule never to believe any of your printed news. We never see, sir, how things go, except now and then in Dyer's Letter^, and I read that more for the style than the news. The man has a clever pen, it must be owned. But is it not strange that we should be 1 Fielding probably profited by Addison's sketch, when twenty-six years later he described in Joseph Andrews the squire who set his dogs on Parson Adams. ' Dyer's News Letter began about ifiga Steele in Tatler i8 states that it was specially esteemed by fox-hunters for the marvels in which it dealt. Cf. Addison's Drummer, act ii. sc. i. " I believe he is still living, be- cause the news of his death was first published in Dyer's Letter ". JOSEPH ADDISON. 93 making war upon Church of England men, with Dutch and Swiss soldiers, men of antimonarchical principles? These foreigners will never be loved in England, sir; they have not that wit and good-breeding that we have." I must confess I did not expect to hear my new acquaintance value himself upon these qualifications, but finding him such a critic upon foreigners, I asked him if he had ever travelled. He told me he did not know what travelling was good for, but to teach a man to ride the great horse, to jabber French, and to talk against passive obedience; to which he added that he scarce ever knew a traveller in his life who had notfbrSook his principles and lost his hunting-seat. " Fofmy part," says he, " I and my father before me have always been for passive obedience, and shall be always for opposing a prince who makes use of ministers that are of another opinion. But where do you intend to inn to-night? (for we were now come in sight of the next town). I can help you to a very good landlord if you will go along with me. He is a lusty jolly fellow, that lives well, at least three yards in the girt, and the best Church of England man upon the road." I had a curiosity to see this High-church inn-keeper, as well as to enjoy more of the conversation of my fellow-traveller, and therefore readily consented to set our horses together for that night. As we rode side by side through the town, I was let into the characters of all the principal inhabitants whom we met in our way. One was a dog, another a whelp, another a cur, and another the son of a bitch, under which several denominations were compre- hended all that voted on the Whig side in the last elec- tion of burgesses. As for those of his own party, he distinguished them by a nod of his head, and asking them how they did by their Christian names. Upon our arrival at the inn my companion fetched out the jolly landlord, who knew him by his whistle. Many endearments and 94 ENGLISH ESSAYS. private whispers passed between them, though it was easy to see, by the landlord's scratching his head, that things did not go to their wishes. The landlord had swelled his body to a prodigious size, and worked up his com- plexion to a standing crimson by his zeal for the prosperity of the Church, which he expressed every hour of the day, as his customers dropt in, by repeated bumpers. He had not time to go to church himself, but, as my friend told me in my ear, had headed a mob at the pulling down of two or three meeting-houses. While supper was prepar- ing, he enlarged upon the happiness of the neighbouring shire; "For," says he, "there is scarce a Presbyterian in the whole county, except the bishop". In short, I found by his discourse that he had learned a great deal of politics, but not one word of religion, from the parson of his parish; and, indeed, that he had scarce any other notion of religion but that it consisted in hating Presbyterians. I had a remarkable instance of his notions in this par- ticular. Upon seeing a poor decrepit old woman pass under the window where we sat, he desired me to take notice of her; and afterwards informed me that she was generally reputed a witch by the country people, but that, for his part, he was apt to believe she was a Presby- terian. Supper was no sooner served in than he took occasion, from a shoulder of mutton that lay before us, to cry up the plenty of England, which would be the happiest country in the world, provided we would live within our- selves. Upon which he expatiated on the inconveniences of trade, that carried from us the commodities of our country, and made a parcel of upstarts as rich as men of the most ancient famihes of England. He then declared frankly that he had always been against all treaties and alliances with foreigners. " Our wooden walls,'' says he, " are our security, and we may bid defiance to the whole JOSEPH ADDISON. 95 world, especially if they should attack us when the militia is out.'' I ventured to reply that I had as great an opinion of the English fleet as he had; but I could not see how they could be paid, and manned, and fitted out, unless we encouraged trade and navigation. He replied, with some vehemence, that he would undertake to prove trade would be the ruin of the English nation. I would fain have put him upon it; but he contented himself with affirming it more eagerly, to which he added two or three curses upon the London merchants, not forgetting the directors of the bank. After supper he asked me if I was an admirer of punch, and immediately called for a sneaker. I took this occasion to insinuate the advantages of trade by observing to him that water was the only native of England tliat could be made use of on this occasion, but that the lemons, the brandy, the sugar, and the nutmeg were all foreigners. This put him into confusion; but the landlord, who overheard me, brought him off, by affirming, that for constant use, there was no liquor like a cup of English water, provided it had malt enough in it. My squire laughed heartily at the conceit, and made the landlord sit down with us. We sat pretty late over our punch; and, amidst a great deal of improving discourse, drank the healths of several persons in the country, whom I had never heard of, that, they both assured me, were the ablest statesmen in the nation : and of some Londoners, whom they extolled to the skies for their wit, and who, I knew, passed in town for silly fellows. It being now midnight, and my friend perceiving by his almanac that the moon was up, he called for his horses, and took a sudden resolution to go to his house, which was at three miles distance from the town, after having bethought him- self that he never slept well out of his own bed. He shook me very heartily by the hand at parting, and dis- covered a great air of satisfaction in his looks, that he had '9^ ENGLISH ESSAYS. met with an opportunity of showing his parts, and left me a much wiser man than he found me. JONATHAN SWIFT. (1667-1745). XXII. ON STYLE. THE following letter has laid before me many great and manifest evils in the world of letters, which I had overlooked; but they open to me a very busy scene, and it will require no small care and application to amend errors which are become so universal. The affection of politeness is exposed in this epistle with a great deal of wit and discernment; so that whatever discourses I may fall into hereafter upon the subjects the writer treats of, I shall at present lay the matter before the world, without the least alteration from the words of my correspondent. " To Isaac Bicker staff, Esquire. " Sir, "There are some abuses among us of great conse- quence, the reformation of which is properly your province; though, as far as I have been conversant in your papers, you have not yet considered them. These are the deplorable ignorance that for some years hath reigned among our English writers, the great depravity of our taste, and the continual corruption of our style. I say nothing here of those who handle particular sciences, divinity, law, physic, and the like; I mean the traders in history, politics, and the lielks lettres, together with those by whom books are not translated, but, as the common expressions are, done out of French, Latin, or other language, and made English. I cannot but observe to JONATHAN SWIFT. 97 you that until of late years a Grub-street book was always bound in sheep-skin, with suitable print and paper, the price never above a shilling, and taken off wholly by common tradesmen or country pedlars; but now they appear in all sizes and shapes, and in all places. They are handed about from lapfuls in every coffee-house to persons of quality; are shown in Westminster-hall and the Court of Requests. You may see them gilt, and in royal paper of five or six hundred pages, and rated accordingly. I would engage to furnish you with a catalogue of English books, published within the compass of seven years past, which at the first hand would cost you a hundred pounds, wherein you shall not be able to find ten lines together of common grammar or common sense. "These two evils, ignorance and want of taste, have produced a third; I mean the continual corruption of our English tongue, which, without some timely remedy, will suffer more by the false refinements of twenty years past than it hath been improved in the foregoing hundred. And this is what I design chiefly to enlarge upon, leaving the former evils to your animadversion. " But instead of giving you a list of the late refinements crept into our language, I here send you the copy of a letter I received, some time ago, from a most accomplished person in this way of writing; upon which I shall make some remarks. It is in these terms : "'Sir, " ' I cou^d n't get the things you sent for all about town — I thot to ha come down myself, and then I'd K brot 'um; but I ha'nt don V, and I believe I can't do '/, that 's pozz — Tom begins to gi 'msel/ahs, because he 's going with the pknipo's — ^'T is said the French king will bamboozl us agen, which causes many speculations. Th& Jacks and others of that kidney are very uppish and alert upon V, as you may 98 ENGLISH ESSAYS. see by their phizs^s — Will Hazard has got the hipps, having lost to the tune of five hundred pound, thd he understands play very well, no body better. He • has promi^t me upon rep, to leave off play; but you know 't is a weakness he 's too apt to give in to, thcf he has as much wit as any man, no body more. He has lain incog ever since — The mob 's very quiet with us now — I believe you thot I banter' d you in my last, like a country put — I shan't leave town this month, &c.' " This letter is in every point an admirable pattern of the present polite way of writing; nor is it of less authority for being an epistle. You may gather every flower in it, with a thousand more of equal sweetness, from the books, pamphlets, and single papers offered us every day in the coffee-houses: and these are the beauties introduced to supply the want of wit, sense, humour, and learning, which formerly were looked upon as qualifications for a writer. If a man of wit, who died forty years ago, were to rise from the grave on purpose, how would he be able to read this letter? and after he had got through that difficulty, how would he be able to understand it? The first thing that strikes your eye, is the breaks at the end of almost every sentence; of which I know not the use, only that it is a refinement, and very frequently practised. Then you will observe the abbreviations and elisions, by which consonants of most obdurate sound are joined together, without one softening vowel to intervene; and all this only to make one syllable of two, directly con- trary to the example of the Greek and Romans, altogether of the Gothic strain, and a natural tendency towards relapsing into barbarity, which delights in monosyllables, and uniting of mute consonants, as it is observable in all the northern languages. And this is still more visible in the next refinement, which consists in pronouncing the first syllable in a word that has many, and dismissing the JONATHAN SWIFT. 99 rest, such as phizz, hipps, mob, pozz, rep, and many more, when we are already overloaded with monosyllables, which are the disgrace of our language. Thus we cram one syllable, and cut off the rest, as the owl fattened her mice after she had bit off their legs to prevent them from running away ; and if ours be the same reason for maiming our words, it will certainly answer the end ; for I am sure no other nation will desire to borrow them. Some words are hitherto but fairly split, and therefore only in their way to perfection, as incog and plenipo : but in a short time it is to be hoped they will be further docked to inc and plen. This reflection has made me of late years very impatient for a peace, which I believe would save the lives of many brave words, as well as men. The war has introduced abundance of polysyllables^, which will never be able to live many more campaigns: speculations, operations, preliminaries, ambassadors, pallisadoes, com- munication, circumvallation, battalions: as numerous as they are, if they attack us too frequently in our coffee- houses, we shall certainly put them to flight, and cut off the rear. " The third refinement observable in the letter I send you consists in the choice of certain words ^, invented by some pretty fellows, such as banter, bamboozle, country put, and kidney, as it is there applied; some of which are now struggling for the vogue, and others are in possession of it. I have done my utmost for some years past to stop the progress of mob and banter, but have been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to assist me. " In the last place, you are to take notice of certain 1 Several of those cited by Swift are used by Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. '^Banter, bamboozle, and -fmi are of uncertain origin. Kidney is used in the same sense by Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor, act iii. sc. 5. ( M 249 ) % lOO ENGLISH ESSAYS. choice phrases scattered through the letter, some of them tolerable enough, until they were worn to rags by servile imitators. You might easily find them though they were not in a different print, and therefore I need not disturb them. " These are the false refinements in our style which you ought to correct: first, by argument and fair means; but if these fail, I think you are to make use of your authority as Censor, and by an annual Index Expurgatorius expunge all words and phrases that are offensive to good sense, and condemn those barbarous mutilations of vowels and syllables. In this last point the usual pretence is, that they spell as they speak. A noble standard for language ! to depend upon the caprice of every coxcomb who, because words are the clothing of our thoughts, cuts them out and shapes them as he pleases, and changes them oftener than his dress. I believe all reasonable people would be content that such refiners were more sparing in their words, and liberal in their syllables : and upon this head I should be glad you would bestow some advice upon several young readers in our churches, who, coming up from the university full fraught with admiration of our town politeness, will needs correct the style of their prayer- books. In reading the Absolution, they are very care- ful to say pardons and absolves: and in the prayer for the royal family, it must be endue'um, enrich'um, prosper'um, and bring' tint. Then in their sermons they use all the modern terms of art, sham, banter, mob, bubble'^, bully, cutting, shuffling, 2ind. palming; all which, and many more of the like stamp, as I have heard them often in the pulpit from such young sophisters, so I have read them in some of ' those sermons that have made most noise of late'. The design, it seems, is to avoid the dreadful imputation of pedantry; to show us that they know the > Any one de&auded. So used after the time of the South Sea Bubble. JONATHAN SWIFT. lOI town, understand men and manners, and have not been poring upon old unfashionable books in the university. " I should be glad to see you the instrument of intro- ducing into our style that simplicity which is the best and truest ornament of most things in life, which the politer age always aimed at in their building and dress, simplex tnunditiis, as well as in their productions of wit. It is manifest that all new affected modes of speech, whether borrowed from the court, the town, or the theatre, are the first perishing parts in any language; and, as I could prove by many hundred instances, have been so in ours. The writings of Hooker i, who was a country clergyman, and of Parsons ^ the Jesuit, both in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, are in a style that, with very few allowances, would not offend any present reader, and are much more clear and intelligible than those of Sir Harry Wotton ^ Sir Robert Naunton*, Osborn^ Daniel^ the historian, and several others who writ later; but being men of the court, and affecting the phrases then in fashion, they are often either not to be understood, or appear perfectly ridiculous. " What remedies are to be applied to these evils I have not room to consider, having, I fear, already taken up ' i5S3-i6oo- For some years rector of Boscombe, Salisbury. Cf. Hallam's verdict: — "So little is there of vulgarity in his racy idiom, of pedantry in his learned phrase, that I know not whether any later writer has more admirably displayed the capacities of our language "- ''Robert Parsons (1546-1610), a famous Jesuit agitator in the reign of Elizabeth. ' Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639). The Reliquiae Wottonianae were edited by Izaak Walton, 1651. *Sir R. Naunton (1563-1635) was author of Fragmenta Regalia, an account of certain Elizabethan celebrities. " Francis Osbom (1589-1658) was author of Advice to a Son, concern- ing which Johnson said, that " were a man to write so now, the boys would throw stones at him ". ' Sam. Daniel (1562-1619), a poet and historian. Swift's criticism is unjust, for Daniel's style has always been praised for its perspicuity. 102 ENGLISH ESSAYS. most of your paper. Besides, I think it is our office only to represent abuses, and yours to redress them. I am, with great respect, Sir, "Yours, &c." XXIII. THE VINDICATION OF ISAAC BICKER- STAFF. MR. PARTRIDGE' has been lately pleased to treat me after a very rough manner, in that which is called his Almanac for the present year: such usage is very in- decent from one gentleman to another, and does not at all contribute to the discovery of truth, which ought to be the great end in all disputes of the learned. To call a man a fool and villain, an impudent fellow, only for differing from him in a point merely speculative, is, in my humble opinion, a very improper style for a person of his educa- tion. I appeal to the learned world, whether, in last year's predictions, I gave him the least provocation for such unworthy treatment. Philosophers have differed in all ages; but the discreetest among them have always differed as became philosophers. Scurrility and passion, in a controversy among scholars, is just so much of nothing to the purpose, and at best a tacit confession * The history of the famous joke is briefly this. In 1708, Swift, In ridicule of the pretensions of almanac makers, published under the name of Bickerstaff his sham "Predictions for the year 1708", one of the predictions being the death of John Partridge on March 29th, 1708. Partridge was a well-known prophet of the time, whose book was called "Merlinus Liberatus, by John Partridge, Student in Physick and Astrology, at the Blue Bell in Salisbury Street, in the Strand, London". In April Swift published an account of Partridge's death, and many wits followed this up with numerous epitaphs. Later appeared " Bickerstaff Detected, by J. Partridge", an attempt to turn the joke against Swift, which has been variously attributed to Congreve, Rowe, and Dr. Yalden. Then, in 1709, Swift vindicated himself in this ironical paper. Part- ridge really lived till 1715, and there is an epitaph to him in Mortlake Churchyard, but he issued no almanac after 1709, for his fame did not survive his metaphorical death at the hands of Swift. JONATHAN SWIFT. I03 of a weak cause : my concern is not so much for my own reputation, as that of the republic of letters, which Mr. Partridge has endeavoured to wound through my sides. If men of public spirit must be superciliously treated for their ingenious attempts, how will true useful knowledge be ever advanced? I wish Mr. Partridge knew the thoughts which foreign universities have conceived of his ungenerous proceedings with me; but I am too tender of his reputation to publish them to the world. That spirit of envy and pride, which blasts so many rising geniuses in our nation, is yet unknown among professors abroad : the necessity of justifying myself will excuse my vanity, when I tell the reader, that I have near a hundred honorary letters from several parts of Europe (some as far as Muscovy) in praise of my performance, beside several others which, as I have been credibly informed, were opened in the post-ofBce, and never sent me. It is true, the Inquisition^ in Portugal was pleased to burn my predictions, and condemn the author and the readers of them: but I hope, at the same time, it will be con- sidered in how deplorable a state learning lies at present in that kingdom: and with the profoundest veneration for crowned heads, I will presume to add, that it a little concerned his majesty of Portugal to interpose his authority in behalf of a scholar and a gentleman, the subject of a nation with which he is now in so strict an alliance. But the other kingdoms and states of Europe have treated me with more candour and gener- osity. If I had leave to print the Latin letters transmitted to me from foreign parts, they would fill a volume, and be a full defence against all that Mr. Partridge, or his accomplices of the Portugal inquisition, will be ever able to object; who, by the way, are the only enemies my 1 Swift had predicted that the pope would die on the nth of Sept., and it was reported by an ambassador that his book was actually burnt. 104 ENGLISH ESSAYS. predictions have ever met with at home or abroad. But I hope I know better what is due to the honour of a learned correspondence in so tender a point. Yet some of those illustrious persons will perhaps excuse me for transcribing a passage or two^ in my vindication. The most learned Monsieur Leibnitz thus addresses to me his third letter: " Illustrissimo Bickerstaffio astrologim in- stauratori", &c. Monsieur Le Clerc, quoting my pre- dictions in a treatise he published last year, is pleased to say, " Ita nuperimme Bickerstaffius magnum illud Anglia sidus ". Another great professor writing of me has these words: "Bickerstaffius nobilis Anglus, astrologorum hujusce scBCuli facile princeps ". Signior Magliabecchi, the great duke's famous library keeper, spends almost his whole letter in compliments and praises. It is true, the re- nowned professor of astronomy at Utrecht seems to differ from me in one article; but it is after the modest manner that becomes a philosopher; as, pace tanti viri dixerim: and page 55, he seems to lay the error upon the printer (as indeed it ought), and says, velforsan error typographi, cum alioquin Bickerstaffius vir doctissimus, &c. If Mr. Partridge had followed these examples in the controversy between us, he might have spared me the trouble of justifying myself in so public a manner. I believe no man is readier to own his errors than I, or more thankful to those who will please to inform him of them. \ But it seems, this gentleman, instead of encouraging the progress of his own art, is pleased to look upon all attempts of that kind as an invasion of his province. He has been indeed so wise as to make no objection against the truth of my predictions, except in one single point relating to himself: and to demonstrate how much men are blinded by their own partiality, I do ^ These ludicrous quotations are a burlesque of the style of Swift's old antagonist, Bentley (Nichols). JONATHAN SWIFT. 105 solemnly assure the reader, that he is the only person, from whom I ever heard that objection offered; which consideration alone, I think, will take off all its weight_l With my utmost endeavours I have not been able to trace above two objections ever made against the truth of my last year's prophecies : the first was of a (Frenchman who was pleased to publish to the world "that the Cardinal de Noailles was still alive, notwith- standing the pretended prophecy of Monsieur Biquer- staffe", but how far a Frenchman, a papist, and an enemy is to believed in his own cause, against an English Protestant who is true to the government, I shall leave to the candid and impartial reader.! The other objection is the unhappy occasion of this discourse, and relates to an article in my Predictions, which foretold the death of Mr. Partridge to happen on March 29, 1708. This he is pleased to contradict absolutely in the almanac he has published for the present year, and in that ungentlemanly manner (pardon the expression) as I have above related. In that work he very roundly asserts that he " is not only now alive, but was likewise alive upon that very 29th of March, when I had foretold he should die ". This is the subject of the present controversy between us; which I design to handle with all brevity, perspicuity, and calmness. In this dispute, I am sensible the eyes not only of Eng- land but of all Europe will be upon us : and the learned in every country will, I doubt not, take part on that side where they find most appearance of reason and truth. (Without entering into criticisms of chronology about the hour of his death, I shall only prove that Mr. Part- ridge is not alive. '| And my first argument is this : about a thousand gentlemen having bought his almanacs for this year merely to find what he said against me, at every line they read, they would lift up their eyes. Io6 ENGLISH ESSAYS. and cry out, betwixt rage and laughter, " they were sure no man alive ever writ such damned stuff as this". Neither did I ever hear that opinion disputed, so that Mr. Partridge lies under a dilemma, either of disowning his almanac, or allowing himself to be no man alive. Secondly, Death is defined by all philosophers, a separ- ation of the soul and body. Now it is certain, that the poor woman who has best reason to know, has gone about for some time into every alley in the neighbour- hood, and sworn to the gossips that her husband had neither life nor soul in him. Therefore, if an uninformed carcase walks still about, and is pleased to call itself Partridge, Mr. Bickerstaff does not think himself any way answerable for that. Neither had the said carcase any right to beat the poor boy who happened to pass by it in the street, crying, "a full and true account of Dr. Partridge's death ", &c. Thirdly, Mr. Partridge pretends to tell fortunes, and recover stolen goods; which all the parish says he must do by conversing with the devil and other evil spirits; and no wise man will ever allow he could converse personally with either till after he was dead. Fourthly, I will plainly prove him to be dead, out of his own almanac for this year and from the very passage which he produces to make us think him alive. He there says, " he is not only now ahve, but was also alive upon that very 29th of March which I foretold he should die on": by this he declares his opinion that a man may be alive now who was not alive a twelve- month ago. And, indeed, there lies the sophistry of his argument. He dares not assert he was alive ever since that 29th of March, but that he_"is now alive, and was so on that day''. I grant the latter; for he did not die till night, as appears by the printed account of his death in a Letter to a Lord; and whether he be since revived JONATHAN SWIFT. I07 I leave the world to judge. This indeed is perfect cavilling, and I am ashamed to dwell any longer upon it. Fifthly, I will appeal to Mr. Partridge himself whether it be probable I could have been so indiscreet to begin my predictions with the only falsehood that ever was pretended to be in them? and this in an affair at home where I had so many opportunities to be exact; and must have given such advantages against me to a person of Mr. Partridge's wit and learning, who, if he could possibly have raised one single objection more against the truth of my prophecies, would hardly have spared me. And here I must take occasion to reprove the above- mentioned writer of the relation of Mr. Partridge's death in a Letter to a Lord, who was pleased to tax me with a mistake of four whole hours in my calculation of that event. I must confess, this censure, pronounced with an air of certainty, in a matter that so nearly concerned me, and by a grave judicious author, moved liie not a little. But though I was at that time out of town,-yet several of my friends, whose curiosity had led them to be exactly informed, (for as to my own part, having no doubt at all in the matter, I never once thought of it) assured me I computed to something under half an hour, which (I speak my private opinion) is an error of no very great magnitude that men should raise a clamour about it. I shall only say, it would not be amiss if that author would henceforth be more tender of other men's reputa- tions as well as his own. It is well there were no more mistakes of that kind; if there had, I presume he would have told me of them with as little ceremony. There is one objection against Mr. Partridge's death which I have sometimes met with, though indeed very slightly offered, that he still continues to write almanacs. Io8 ENGLISH ESSAYS. But this is no more than what is common to all of that pro- fession: Gadbury\ Poor Robin, Dove, Wing, and several others do yearly publish their almanacs though several of them have been dead since before the Revolution. Now the natural reason of this I take to be, that whereas it is the privilege of authors to live after their death, almanac-makers are alone excluded, because their dis- sertations, treating only upon the minutes as they pass, become useless as those go off. In consideration of which, time, whose registers they are, gives them a lease in reversion, to continue their works after death. I should not have given the public or myself the trouble of this vindication if my name had not been made use of by several persons to whom I never lent it; one of which, a few days ago, was pleased to father on me a new set of predictions. But I think these are things too serious to be trifled with, jit grieved me to the heart, when I saw my labours, which had cost me so much thought and watching, bawled about by the common hawkers of Grub-street, which I only intended for the weighty consideration of the gravest personsji This prejudiced the world so much at first, that several of my friends had the assurance to ask me whether I were in jest? to which I only answered coldly, "that the event would show ". But it is the talent of our age and nation to turn things of the greatest importance into ridicule. When the end of the year had verified all my predictions, out comes Mr. Partridge's almanac, disputing the point of his death; so that I am employed, like the general who was forced to kill his enemies twice over, whom a necromancer had raised to life. If Mr. Partridge have practised the same experiment upon himself, and be ' A contemporary almanac-maker, whose life was written by Partridge. Poor Robin's Almanac lasted from 1662 to 1828. The others are adver- tised in the Daily Courant in 1705. HENRY FIELDING. log again alive, long may he continue so; that does not the least contradict my veracity : but I think I have clearly proved, by invincible demonstration, that he died, at farthest, within half an hour of the time I foretold, and not four hours sooner, as the above-mentioned author, in his Letter to a Lord, has maliciously suggested, with design to blast my credit, by charging me with so gross a mistake. HENRY FIELDING. (1707-1754.) XXIV. THE COMMONWEALTH OF LETTERS. 06k iyaBhv iroKvKoipavlij, efs Kolpams (aru, Efs BatrtXei);, ^ ^SojKe "Kpdvov Trais &yKv\vfJ,'^eu XK7jirTp6v T^'fid^ 64fiuTTas, tva a