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and professed to write, merely for the people; and, when he pleased others, he contented himself. Pope was not content to satisfy: he desired to excel; and, therefore, always endeavoured to do his best. He did not court the candor, but dared the judgement, of his reader; and, expecting no indulgence from others, he showed none to himself. For this reason, he kept his pieces long in his hands, while he considered and reconsidered them. It will seldom be found that he altered, without adding clearness, elegance, and vigour. Pope had, perhaps, the judgement of Dryden; but Dryden, certainly, wanted the diligence of Pope.

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• In acquired knowledge, the superiority must be allowed to Dryden, whose education was more scholastic. His mind had a larger range, and he collects his images and illustrations from a more extensive circumference of science. Dryden knew more of man in his general nature, and Pope in his local manners. The notions of Dryden were formed by a comprehensive speculation, and those of Pope by minute attention. There is more dignity in the knowledge of Dryden, and more certainty in that of Pope.

Poetry was not the sole praise of either, for both excelled, likewise, in prose: but Pope did not borrow his prose from his predecessors. The stile of Dryden is capricious and varied; that of Pope is cautious and uniform. Dryden observes the motions of his own mind; Pope constrains his mind to his own rules of composition. Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid; Pope is always smooth, uniform, and gentle. Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of

abundant vegetation; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe and levelled by the roller.

'Of genius, that power which constitutes a poet, that quality without which judgement is cold and knowledge is inert, that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates, the superiority must with some hesitation be allowed to Dryden. It is not to be inferred, that of this poetical vigour Pope had only a little, because Dryden had more for every other writer, since Milton, must give place to Pope; and even of Dryden it must be said, that if he has brighter paragraphs, he has not better poems.' Dryden's performances were always hasty; either excited by some external occasion, or extorted by some domestic necessity: he composed without consideration, and published without correction. What his mind could supply at call, or gather in one excursion, was all that he sought, and all that he gave. The dilatory caution of Pope enabled him to condense his sentiments, to multiply his images, and to accumulate all that study might produce, or that chance might supply. If the flights of Dryden therefore are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing. If of Dryden's fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope's the heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses expectation, and Pope never falls below it. Dryden is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight.

465

DR. JONATHAN SWIFT,

DEAN OF ST. PATRICK'S, DUBLIN.*

[1667-1745:]

OF eight pens, which have been contemporaneously or successively employed upon the life, writings, and character of this illustrious man, only those of Lord Orrery, Mr. T. Sheridan, Dr. Hawkesworth, and Dr. Johnson rise to the dignity of biography. Dr. Delany, Mr. Deane Swift, and Mr. Berkeley must be regarded as mere apologists; and Mrs. Pilkington, as a retailer simply of interesting anecdotes.

Jonathan Swift, the posthumous son of Mr. Jonathan Swift an attorney, was born at Dublin, No

* AUTHORITIES. Lord Orrery, Mr. T. Sheridan, Dr. Hawkesworth, Dr. Johnson, Dr. Delany, and Mrs. Pilkington.

+ Though his family was an ancient one in Yorkshire, and even boasted a Viscount (Carlingford, created by Charles I. in 1627) among it's ancestry, he himself has been the herald, as Lord Orrery observes, to blazon the dignity of their coat. To a similar purport Gibbon has remarked, that "the Fairy Queen' is the richest jewel in the coronet of the Spencers." His paternal grandfather, Vicar of Goodrich in Herefordshire, mar"ried the aunt of Dryden, and by her had ten sons and three or four daughters. Of those sons six survived him, Godwin, Thomas, Dryden, William, Jonathan, and Adam. They seem to have courted poetical affinity. Thomas, who took orders, married the daughter of Davenant: Godwin married VOL. V.

2 H

vember 30, 1667. His mother, of the Leicestershire family of Heyrick, was left in distressed circumstances, having for her whole support only an annuity of 201. Grief, and a bad state of health, prevented her from suckling him; and when he was about a year old, the nurse to whose care he had been committed being obliged to visit a sick relation at Whitehaven, and feeling herself unwilling to part with him, conveyed him on shipboard without the knowledge of his mother or relations, and kept him with her during the three years which she spent at that place.

*

From this circumstance many of his friends imagined him to be a native of England; while others regarded him as the natural son of Sir William Temple. Neither of these suggestions, however, can be true; for although in his angry moods, when he was provoked at the ingratitude of the Irish, he was frequently heard to exclaim, "I am not of this vile country; I am an Englishman:" in his cooler hours, he never denied his extraction. On the contrary, he frequently pointed out the house where he was born. The notion concerning his illegitimacy is equally false. Sir William Temple was employed as a minister abroad from 1665 to 1670; so that Swift's mother, who never crossed the sea except from England to Ireland, could not possibly have had any

more profitably; one of his four wives was a relation to the old Marchioness of Ormond, upon which account the Duke made him his Attorney General in the county of Tipperary. The other four were attorneys.

* The same affection led her to teach him so carefully, that before he was five years old, he could read any chapter in the Bible.

personal intercourse with him, till some years after her son's birth.

The care of his education was undertaken by his uncle Mr. Godwin Swift, an eminent barrister, who (though he had children of his own) received his mother,* likewise, and his infant sister under his protection, and thus became a guardian to the whole family. This gentleman, when his nephew was six years of age, sent him to school at Kilkenny; and eight years afterward, entered him, with a small allowance however, at Trinity College, Dublin, under the tuition of Mr. St. Ashe, a scholar of considerable science. There Swift lived in perfect regularity, and in an entire obedience to the statutes! but the moroseness of his temper, exasperated by the penuriousness of his eldest uncle, and the total neg lect of the rest, rendered him generally unacceptable to his companions; so that he was little re garded, and less beloved. Neither were the academical exercises agreeable to his genius. Logic and Metaphysics he held in the utmost contempt; and, if he paid some slight attention to Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, it was chiefly for the purpose of turning them into ridicule.

His favourite studies were History and Poetry, in which he made a great progress. To other branches of science he had so little applied, that when he appeared at the usual period as a candidate for the degree of B. A., he was set aside on account of insufficiency; and at last obtained his admission speciali gratiâ, a phrase which in the University of

† She subsequently quitted his family, and retired to Leicester, where she found support from her own.

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