of his life. The air agreed with him. The | Yet in justice to Temple we must say, that soil was fruitful, and well suited to an experi- there is no reason to think that Swift was more mental farmer and gardener. The grounds unhappy at Moor Park than he would have been were laid out with the angular regularity in a similar situation under any roof in Engwhich Sir William had admired in the flower- land. We think also that the obligations which heds of Haarlem and the Hague. A beautiful the mind of Swift owed to that of Temple were rivulet, flowing from the hills of Surrey, bound- not inconsiderable. Every judicious reader ed the domain. But a straight canal which, must be struck by the peculiarities which disbordered by a terrace, intersected the garden, tinguish Swift's political tracts from all similar was probably more admired by the lovers of works produced by mere men of letters. Let the picturesque in that age. The house was any person compare, for example, the conduct small, but neat and well furnished;-the of the Allies, or the Letter to the October Club, neighbourhood very thinly peopled. Temple with Johnson's False Alarm, or Taxation no had no visiters, except a few friends who were Tyranny, and he will be at once struck by the willing to travel twenty or thirty miles in difference of which we speak. He may possi order to see him; and now and then a foreigner bly think Johnson a greater man than Swift. whom curiosity brought to have a look at the He may possibly prefer Johnson's style to author of the Triple Alliance. Swift's. But he will at once acknowledge that Johnson writes like a man who has never been out of his study. Swift writes like a man who has passed his whole life in the midst of public business, and to whom the most important affairs of state are as familiar as his weekly bills.

Here, in May, 1694, died Lady Temple. From the time of her marriage we know little of her, except that her letters were always greatly admired, and that she had the honour to correspond constantly with Queen Mary. Lady Giffard, who, as far as appears, had always been on the best terms with her sisterin-law, still continued to live with Sir William. But there were other inmates of Moor Park to whom a far higher interest belongs. An eccentric, uncouth, disagreeable, young Irishman, who had narrowly escaped plucking at Dublin, attended Sir William as an amanuensis, for twenty pounds a year and his board, dined at the second table, wrote bad verses in praise of his employer, and made love to a very pretty, dark-eyed young girl, who waited on Lady Giffard. Little did Temple imagine that the coarse exterior of his dependant concealed a genius equally suited to politics and to letters; a genius destined to shake great kingdoms, to stir the laughter and the rage of millions, and to leave to posterity memorials which can perish only with the English language. Little did he think that the flirtation in his servants' hall, which he perhaps scarcely deigned to make the subject of a jest, was the beginning of a long unprosperous love, which was to be as widely famed as the passion of Petrarch, or of Abelard. Sir William's secretary was Jonathan Swift-Lady Giffard's waiting-maid was poor Stella.

Swift retained no pleasing recollections of Moor Park. And we may easily suppose a situation like his to have been intolerably painful to a mind haughty, irascible, and conscious of pre-eminent ability. Long after, when he stood in the Court of Requests with a circle of gartered peers round him, or punned and rhymed with cabinet ministers over SecreLary St. John's Mount-Pulciano, he remembered, with deep and sore feeling, how miserable he used to be for days together when he suspected that Sir William had taken something ill. He could hardly believe that he, the same Swift who chid the Lord Treasurer, rallied the Captain General, and confronted the pride of the Duke of Buckinghamshire with pride still more inflexible, could be the same being who had passed nights of sleepless anxiety, in musing over a cross look or a testy word of a patron. "Faith," he wrote to Stella, with bitter Levity," Sir William spoiled a fine gentleman."

"Turn him to any cause of policy,

The Gordian knot of it he will unloose,
Familiar as his garter."

The difference, in short, between a political pamphlet by Johnson, and a political pamphlet by Swift, is as great as the difference between an account of a battle by Doctor Southey and the account of the same battle by Colonel Napier. It is impossible to doubt that the superiority of Swift is to be, in a great measure, attributed to his long and close connection with Temple.

Indeed, remote as the alleys and flower-pots of Moor Park were from the haunts of the busy and the ambitious, Swift had ample opportuni ties of becoming acquainted with the hidden causes of many great events. William was in the habit of consulting Temple, and occasionally visited him. Of what passed between them very little is known. It is certain, however, that when the Triennial Bill had been carried through the two Houses, his majesty, who was exceedingly unwilling to pass it, sent the Earl of Portland to learn Temple's opinion. Whether Temple thought the bill in itself a good one does not appear; but he clearly saw how imprudent it must be in a prince, situated as William was, to engage in an altercation with his Parliament; and directed Swift to draw up a paper on the subject, which, however, did not convince the king.

The chief amusement of Temple's declining years was literature. After his final retreat from business, he wrote his very agreeable memoirs; corrected and transcribed many of his letters; and published several miscella neous treatises, the best of which, we think, is that on Gardening. The style of his essays is, on the whole, excellent,-almost always pleas ing, and now and then stately and splendid The matter is generally of much less value; as our readers will readily believe when we in form them that Mr. Courtenay-a biograpner,

that is to say, a literary vassal, bound by the immemorial law of his tenure to render homage, aids, reliefs, and all other customary

services to his lord,-avows that he cannot in tolerable order by his discretion, now, when give an opinion about the essay on "Heroic Virtue," because he cannot read it without skipping;-a circumstance which strikes us as peculiarly strange, when we consider how long Mr. Courtenay was at the India Board, and how many thousand paragraphs of the copious official eloquence of the East he must have perused.

he had long lived in seclusion, and had become accustomed to regard himself as by far the first man of his circle, rendered him blind to his own deficiencies. In an evil hour he published an “ Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning." The style of this treatise is very good-the matter ludicrous and contemptible to the last degree. There we read how Lycurgus travelled into India, and brought the Spartan laws from that country-how Orpheus and Musæus made voyages in search of knowledge, and how Orpheus attained to a depth of learn

One of Sir William's pieces, however, deserves notice, not, indeed, on account of its intrinsic merit, but on account of the light which it throws on some curious weaknesses of his character; and on account of the extra-ing which has made him renowned in all suc ordinary effect which it produced on the republic of letters.

A most idle and contemptible controversy had arisen in France touching the comparative merit of the ancient and modern writers. It was certainly not to be expected that, in that age, the question would be tried according to those large and philosophical principles of criticism which guided the judgments of Lessing and of Herder. But it might have been expected, that those who undertook to decide the point would at least take the trouble to read and understand the authors on whose merits they were to pronounce. Now, it is no exaggeration to say that, among the disputants who clamoured, some for the ancients, and some for the moderns, very few were decently acquainted with either ancient or modern literature, and not a single one was well acquainted with both. In Racine's amusing preface to the "Iphigénie," the reader may find noticed a most ridiculous mistake, into which | one of the champions of the moderns fell about a passage in the Alcestis of Euripides. Another writer blames Homer for mixing the four Greek dialects-Doric, Ionic, Æolic, and Attic -just, says he, as if a French poet were to put Gascon phrases and Picard phrases into the midst of his pure Parisian writing. On the other hand, it is no exaggeration to say that the defenders of the ancients were entirely unacquainted with the greatest productions of later times; nor, indeed, were the defenders of the moderns better informed. The parallels which were instituted in the course of this dispute are inexpressibly ridiculous. Balzac was selected as the rival of Cicero. Corneille was declared to unite the merits of Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. We should like to see a "Prometheus" after Corneille's fashion. The "Provincial Letters," masterpieces undoubtedly of reasoning, wit, and eloquence, were pronounced to be superior to all the writings of Plato, Cicero, and Lucian together, -particularly in the art of dialogue-an art in which, as it happens, Plato far excelled all men, and in which Pascal, great and admirable in other respects, is notoriously deficient.

ceeding ages-how Pythagoras passed twentytwo years in Egypt, and, after graduating there, spent twelve years more at Babylon, where the Magi admitted him ad eundem-how the ancient Brahmins lived two hundred years---how the earliest Greek philosophers foretold earth. quakes and plagues, and put down riots by magic-and how much Ninus surpassed in abilities any of his successors on the throne of Assyria. The moderns, he owns, have found cut the circulation of the blood; but, on the other hand, they have quite lost the art of magic; nor can any modern fiddler enchant fishes, fowls, and serpents by his performance. He tells us that "Thales, Pythagoras, Democritus, Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus made greater progresses in the several empires of science than any of their successors have since been able to reach;" which is as much as if he had said that the greatest names in British science are Merlin, Michael Scott, Dr. Sydenham, and Lord Bacon. Indeed, the man. ner in which he mixes the historical and the fabulous reminds us of those classical dictionaries, intended for the use of schools, in which Narcissus, the lover of himself, and Narcissus, the freedman of Claudius-Pollux, the son of Jupiter and Leda, and Pollux, the author of the Onomasticon-are ranged under the same heading, and treated as personages equally real. The effect of this arrangement resembles that which would be produced by a dictionary of modern names, consisting of such articles as the following:-"Jones, William, an eminent Orientalist, and one of the Judges of the Supreme Court of Judicature in Bengal-Davy, a fiend who destroys ships-Thomas, a found ling, brought up by Mr. Allworthy." It is from such sources as these that Temple seems to have learned all that he knew about the ancients. He puts the story of Orpheus between the Olympic games and the battle of Arbela; as if we had exactly as much reason for be lieving that Orpheus led beasts with his lyre, as we have for believing that there were races at Pisa, or that Alexander conquered Darius.

He manages little better when he comes to the moderns. He gives us a catalogue of those This childish controversy spread to Eng- whom he regards as the greatest wits of later land; and some mischievous demon suggested times. It is sufficient to say that, in his list of to Temple the thought of undertaking the de- Italians, he has omitted Dante, Petrarch, Arifence of the ancients. As to his qualifications osto, and Tasso; in his list of Spaniards, Lope for the task, it is sufficient to say, that he knew and Calderon; in his list of French, Pascal, not a word of Greek. But his vanity, which, Bossuet, Molière, Corneille, Racine, and Boiwhen he was engaged in the conflicts of active leau; and in his list of English, Chaucer, wife, and surrounded by rivals, had been kept | Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton.

In the midst of all this vast mass of absurdity |ness had been increased by many years of seone paragraph stands out pre-eminent. The clusion and flattery,-was moved to the most doctrine of Temple-not a very comfortable violent resentment; complained, very unjustone-is, that the human race is constantly de- ly, of Bentley's foul-mouthed raillery, and degenerating; and that the oldest books in every clared that he had commenced an answer, but kind are the best. In confirmation of this doc-had laid it aside, "having no mind to enter the trine, he remarks that the Fables of Asop are lists with such a mean, dull, unmannerly pethe best fables, and the letters of Phalaris the dant." Whatever may be thought of the tembest letters in the world. On the merit of the per which Sir William showed on this occaletters of Phalaris he dwells with great warmth sion, we cannot too highly applaud his discreand with extraordinary felicity of language. tion in not finishing and publishing his answer, Indeed, we could hardly select a more favour- which would certainly have been a most exable specimen of the graceful and easy ma-traordinary performance. jesty to which his style sometimes rises than this unlucky passage. He knows, he says, that some learned men, or men who pass for learned, such as Politian, have doubted the genuineness of these letters. But of these doubts he speaks with the greatest contempt. Now it is perfectly certain, first, that the letters are very bad; secondly, that they are spurious; and thirdly, that, whether they be bad or good, spurious or genuine, Temple could know nothing of the matter; inasmuch as he was no more able to construe a line of them than to decipher an Egyptian obelisk.

This Essay, silly as it is, was exceedingly well received, both in England and on the Continent. And the reason is evident. The classical scholars, who saw its absurdity, were generally on the side of the ancients, and were inclined rather to veil than to expose the blunders of an ally; the champions of the moderns were generally as ignorant as Temple himself; and the multitude were charmed by his flowing and melodious diction. He was doomed, however, to smart, as he well deserved, for his vanity and folly.

He was not, however, without defenders. Like Hector, when struck down prostrate by Ajax, he was in an instant covered by a thick crowd of shields

66 ουτις εδυνήσατο ποιμένα λαών Οντασαι ουδε βαλειν πριν γαρ περίβησαν αριστοι, Πουλυδάμας τε, και Αινείας, και διος Αγήνωρ, Σαρπηδων τ' αρχος Λυκίων, και Γλαυκος αμυμων."

Christchurch was up in arms; and though that college seems then to have been almost destitute of severe and accurate learning, no academical society could show a greater array of orators, wits, politicians,-bustling adventurers, who united the superficial accomplishments of the scholar with the manners and arts of the man of the world, and this formidable body resolved to try how far smart repartees, well turned sentences, confidence, puffing, and intrigue could, on the question whether a Greek book were or were not genuine, supply the place of a little knowledge of Greek.

Out came the reply to Bentley, bearing the name of Boyle, but in truth written by Atterbury, with the assistance of Smalridge and Christchurch at Oxford was then widely and others. A most remarkable book it is, and justly celebrated as a place where the lighter often reminds us of Goldsmith's observation, parts of classical learning were cultivated that the French would be the best cooks in the with success. With the deeper mysteries of world if they had any butcher's meat, for that philology neither the instructors nor the pupils they can make ten dishes out of a nettle top. had the smallest acquaintance. They fancied It really deserves the praise, whatever that themselves Scaligers, as Bentley scornfully praise may be worth, of being the best book said, as soon as they could write a copy of ever written by any man on the wrong side of Latin verses with only two or three small a question of which he was profoundly igno faults. From this college proceeded a new rant. The learning of the confederacy is that edition of the Letters of Phalaris, which were of a schoolboy, and not of an extraordinary rare, and had been in request since the appear- schoolboy; but it is used with the skill and ance of Temple's Essay. The nominal editor address of most able, artful, and experienced was Charles Boyle, a young man of noble men; it is beaten out to the very thinnest leaf, family and promising parts; but some older and is disposed in such a way as to seem ten members of the society lent their assistance. times larger than it is. The dexterity with While this work was in preparation, an idle which they avoid grappling with those parts quarrel, occasioned, it should seem, by the of the subject with which they know themnegligence and misrepresentations of a book-selves to be incompetent to deal is quite wonseller, arose between Boyle and the king's librarian, Richard Bentley. Boyle, in the preface to his edition, inserted a bitter reflection on Bentley. Bentley revenged himself by proving that the Epistles of Phalaris were forgeries; and in his remarks on this subject treated Temple, not indecently, but with no great reverence.

Temple, who was quite unaccustomed to any but the most respectful usage, who, even while engaged in politics, had always shrunk from all rude collision, and had generally succeeded in avoiding it, and whose sensitive

derful. Now and then, indeed, they commit disgraceful blunders, for which old Busby, under whom they had studied, would have whipped them all round. But this circumstance only raises our opinion of the talents which made such a fight with such scanty means. Let our readers, who are not acquainted with the controversy, imagine a Frenchman who had acquired just English enough to read the Spectator with a dictionary, coming forward to defend the genuineness of "Rowley's Poems" against Percy and Farmer; and they will have some notion of the feat which Atterbury had!

the audacity to undertake, and which, for a time, it was really thought that he had performed.

This description is surely by no means ar. plicable to a statesman who had, through the whole course of his life, carefully avoided exposing himself in seasons of trouble; who had repeatedly refused, in the most critical con junctures. to be Secretary of State; and whe now, in the midst of revolutions, plots, foreign and domestic wars, was quietly writing_non sense about the visits of Lycurgus to the Brah mins, and the tunes which Arion played to the Dolphin.

We must not omit to mention that, while the controversy about Phalaris was raging, Swift, in order to show his zeal and attachment, wrote the "Battle of the Books ;"-the earliest piece in which his peculiar talents are discernible. We may observe, that the bitter dislike of Bentley, bequeathed by Temple to Swift, seems to have been communicated by Swift to Pope, to Arbuthnot, and to others who continued to tease the great critic, long after he had shaken hands very cordially both with Boyle and Atterbury.

The illusion was soon dispelled. Bentley's answer forever settled the question, and established his claim to the first place amongst classical scholars. Nor do those do him justice who represent the controversy as a battle between wit and learning. For, though there is a lamentable deficiency of learning on the side of Boyle, there is no want of wit on the side of Bentley. Other qualities too, as valuable as either wit or learning, appear conspicuously in Bentley's book;-a rare sagacity, an unrivalled power of combination, a perfect mastery of all the weapons of logic. He was greatly indebted to the furious outcry which the misrepresentations, sarcasms, and intrigues of his opponents had raised against him;-an outcry in which fashionable and political circles joined, and which was re-echoed by thousands who did not know whether Phalaris ruled in Sicily or in Siam. His spirit, daring even to rashness-self-confident, even to neg- Sir William Temple died at Moor Park in ligence and proud, even to insolent ferocity, January, 1699. He appeared to have suffered -was awed for the first and for the last time no intellectual decay. His heart was buried awed, not into meanness or cowardice, under a sun-dial which still stands in his fabut into wariness and sobriety. For once he vourite garden. His body was laid in Westran no risks; he left no crevice unguarded; minster Abbey by the side of his wife; and a he wantoned in no paradoxes; above all, he place hard by was set apart for Lady Giffard, returned no railing for the railing of his ene- who long survived him. Swift was his literary mies. In almost every thing that he has writ-executor, and superintended the publication of ten we can discover proofs of genius and learning. But it is only here that his genius and learning appear to have been constantly under the guidance of good sense and good temper. Here we find none of that besotted reliance on his own powers and on his own luck, which he showed when he undertook to edite Milton; none of that perverted ingenuity which deforms so many of his notes on Horace; none of that disdainful carelessness by which he laid himself open to the keen and dexterous thrusts of Middleton; none of that extravagant vaunting and savage scurrility by which he afterwards dishonoured his studies and his profession, and degraded himself al-fashion who made their entrance into society most to the level of De Paucs.

his Letters and Memoirs, not without some acrimonious contests with the family.

Of Temple's character little more remains to be said. Burnet accuses him of holding ir. religious opinions, and corrupting everybody who came near him. But the vague assertion of so rash and partial a writer as Burnet, about a man with whom, as far as we know, he never exchanged a word, is of very little weight. It is, indeed, by no means improbable that Temple may have been a free-thinker. The Osbornes thought him so when he was a very young man. And it is certain that a large proportion of the gentlemen of rank and

while the Puritan party was at the height of power, and while the memory of the reign of that party was still recent, conceived a strong disgust for all religion. The imputation was common between Temple and all the most distinguished courtiers of the age. Rochester and Buckingham were open scoffers, and Mul

Temple did not live to witness the utter and irreparable defeat of his champions. He died, indeed, at a fortunate moment, just after the appearance of Boyle's book, and while all England was laughing at the way in which the Christchurch men had handled the pedant. In Boyle's book, Temple was praised in the high-grave very little better. Shaftesbury, though est terms, and compared to Memmius-not a very happy comparison; for the only particular information which we have about Memmius is, that in agitated times he thought it his duty to attend exclusively to politics; and that his friends could not venture, except when the republic was quiet and prosperous, to intrude on him with their philosophical and poetical productions. It is on this account, that Lucretius puts up the exquisitely beautiful prayer for peace with which his poem

opens:

"Nam neque nos agere hoc patria tempore iniquo Possumus æque animo, nec Menimii clara propago Talibus in rebus communi deesse saluti."

more guarded, was supposed to agree with them in opinion. All the three noblemen who were Temple's colleagues during the short time of his continuance in the cabinet, were of very indifferent repute as to orthodoxy. Halifax, indeed, was generally considered as an atheist; but he solemnly denied the charge; and, indeed, the truth seems to be, that he was more religiously disposed than most of the statesmen of that age; though two impulses which were unusually strong in him,—à passion for ludicrous images, and a passion for subtle speculations,—sometimes prompted him to talk on serious subjects in a manner which gave great and just offence. It is not even

unlikely that Temple, who seldom went below the surface of any question, may have been infected with the prevailing skepticism. All that we can say on the subject is, that there is no trace of impiety in his works; and that the ease with which he carried his election for a university, where the majority of the voters were clergymen, though it proves nothing as w his opinions, must, we think, be considered as proving that he was not, as Burnet seems to insinuate, in the habit of talking atheism to all who came near him.

Temple, however, will scarcely carry with him any great accession of authority to the side either of religion or of infidelity. He was no profound thinker. He was merely a man of lively parts and quick observation, a man of the world amongst men of let ters, a man of letters amongst men of the world. Mere scholars were dazzled by the ambassador and cabinet councillor; mere politicians by the essayist and historian. But neither as a writer nor as a statesman can we allot to him any very high place. As a man,

he seems to us to have been excessively self ish, but very sober, wary, and far-sighted in his selfishness;-to have known better than most people know what he really wanted in life; and to have pursued what he wanted with much more than ordinary steadiness and sagacity;-never suffering himself to be drawn aside either by bad or by good feelings. It was his constitution to dread failure more than he desired success,--to prefer security, comfort, repose, leisure, to the turmoil and anxiety which are inseparable from greatness ;--and this natural languor of mind, when contrasted with the malignant energy of the keen and restless spirits among whom his lot was cast, sometimes appears to resemble the moderation of virtue. But we must own, that he seems to us to sink into littleness and meanness when we compare him--we do not say with any high ideal standard of morality,-but with many of those frail men who, aiming at noble ends, but often drawn from the right path by strong pas sions and strong temptations, have left to posterity a doubtful and checkered fame.

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