That com thing which they seemed to detect in all men of unusual potency among the fellows, they used the word "demonic," not in its English sense, as signifying what appertains specially to the demons or powers of darkness, but in its Greek sense as equally implying the unseen agencies of light and good. The de-reer, that the gloom and melancholy which monic element in a man, therefore, may, in one case, be the demonic of the ethereal and the celestial; in another, the demonic of the Tartarean and infernal. There is a demonic of the supernatural-angels, and seraphs, and white-winged airy messengers swaying men's phantasies from above; and there is a demonic of the infra-natural-fiends, and shapes of horror tugging at men's thoughts from beneath. The demonic in Swift was of the latter kind. It is false, it would be an entire mistake as to his genius, to say that he regarded, or was inspired by, only the worldly and the secular; that men, women, and their relations on the little world of visible life, were all that his intellect cared to recognize. He, also, like our Miltons and our Shakspeares, and all our men who have been anything more than prudential and pleasant writers, had his being anchored in things and imaginations beyond the visible verge. But while it was given to them to hold rather by things and imaginations belonging to the region of the celestial-to hear angelic music, and the rustling of seraphic wings; it was his unhappier lot to be related rather to the darker and subterranean mysteries. One might say of Swift that he had far less of belief in a God, than belief in a Devil. He is like a man walking on the earth and among the busy haunts of his fellow-mortals, ob serving them and their ways, and taking his part in the bustle; all the while, however, conscious of the tuggings downward of secret chains reaching into the world of the demons. Hence his ferocity, his misanthropy, his sava indignatio, all of them true forms of energy, imparting unusual potency to a life; but forms of energy bred of communion with what outlies nature on the lower or infernal side. liam Temple received into his house, when his college had all but expelled him for contumacy, should ever be eminent in the world, it would be for fierce and controversial, and not for beautiful or harmonious activity. It is clear, however, on a survey of Swift's cacharacterized it, was not altogether congenital, but in part, at least, grew out of some special circumstance, or set of circumstances, having a precise date and locality among the facts of his life. In other words, there was some secret in Swift's life, some root of bitterness or remorse, diffusing a black poison throughout his whole existence. munion with the invisible almost exclusively on the infernal side-that consciousness of chains wound round his own moving frame at the one end, and, at the other, tugged at by demons in the depths of their populous pit, while no cords of love were felt sustaining him from the countervailing heaven--had its origin, in part at least, in some one recollection or cause of dread. It was some one demon down in that pit that tugged the chains; the others but assisted him. Thackeray's perception seems to us exact, when he says of Swift that "he goes through life, tearing, like a man possessed with a devil;" or again, changing the form of the figure, that," like Abudah in the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and knows that the night will come, and the inevitable hag with it." What was this Fury, this hag that duly came in the night, making the mornings horrible by the terrors of recollection, the evenings horrible by those of anticipation, and leaving but a calm hour at full mid day? There was a secret in Swift's life what was it? His biographers as yet have failed to agree on this dark topic. Thackeray's hypothesis, that the cause of Swift's despair was chiefly his consciousness of disbelief in the creed to which he had sworn his professional faith, does not seem to us sufficient. In Swift's days, and even with his frank nature, we think that difficulty could have been got Swift, doubtless, had this melancholic ten- over. There was nothing, at least, so unique dency in him, constitutionally, from the be- in the case, as to justify the supposition that ginning. From the first, we see him an this was what Archbishop King referred to unruly, rebellious, gloomy, revengeful, unfor- in that memorable saying to Dr. Delany, giving spirit, loyal to no authority, and "You have just met the most miserable man gnashing under every restraint. With no- on earth; but on the subject of his wretchthing small or weak in his nature, too proud edness you must never ask a question." Had to be dishonest, bold and fearless in his opin- Swift made a confession of scepticism to the ions, capable of strong attachments, and of Archbishop, we do not think the prelate hatreds as strong, it was to be predicted that, would have been taken so very much by surif the swarthy Irish youth, whom Sir Wil-prise. Nor can we think, with some, that Swift's vertigo (now pronounced to have been increasing congestion of the brain) and his life-long certainty that it would end in idiotcy or madness, are the true explanation of this interview and of the mystery which it shrouds. There was cause enough for melancholy here, but not exactly the cause that meets the case. Another hypothesis there is of a physical kind, which Scott and others hint at, and which finds great acceptance with the medical philosophers. Swift, it is said, was of "a cold temperament," &c., &c. But why a confession on the part of Swift to the Archbishop that he was not a marrying man, even had he added that he desired, above all things in the world, to be a person of this sort, should have so moved that dignitary, we cannot conceive. Besides, although this hypothesis might explain much of the Stella and Vanessa imbroglio, it would not explain all; nor do we see on what foundation it could rest Scott's assertion that all through Swift's writings there is no evidence of his having felt the tender passion, is simply untrue. On the whole, the hypothesis which has been started, of a too near consanguinity between Swift and Stella, either known from the first to one or both, or discovered too late, would most nearly suit the conditions of the case. And yet, so far as we have seen, this hypothesis also rests on air, with no one fact to support it. Could we suppose that Swift, like another Eugene Aram, went through the world with a murder on his mind, it might be taken as a solution of the mystery; but, as we cannot do this, we must be content with supposing that either some one of the foregoing hypotheses, or some combination of them, is to be accepted; or that the matter is altogether inscrutable. This prince took a pleasure in conversing with me, enquiring into the nanners, religion, laws, government, and learning of Europe; wherein I gave him the best account I was able. His apprehension was so clear, and his judgment so exact, that he made very wise reflections and observations upon all I said. But I confess, that after I had been a little too copious in talking of my own beloved country, of our trade, and wars by sea and land, of our schisms in religion, and parties in the state, the prejudices of his educataking me up in his right hand, and stroking me tion prevailed so far that he could not forbear gently with the other, after an hearty fit of laughing, asking me, whether I was a Whig or a Tory. Then turning to his first minister, who waited behind him with a white staff nearly as tall as the mainmast of the Royal Sovereign, he observed how contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I; "And yet," says he, "I dare engage these creatures have their titles and distinctions of honor; they contrive little nests and burrows, that they call houses and cities; they make a figure in dress and equipage; they love, they fight, they 91 And thus he dispute, they cheat, they betray.' continued on, while my color came and went several times with indignation to hear our noble country, the mistress of arts and arms, the scourge of France, the arbitress of Europe, the seat of virtue, piety, honor, truth, the pride and envy of the world, so contemptuously treated. Swift's writings, accordingly, divide themselves in the main, into two classes,-pamphlets, tracts, lampoons, and the like, bearing directly on persons and topics of the day, and written with the ordinary purpose of a partisan; and satires of a more general aím, directed, in the spirit of a cynic philosopher, against humanity as a whole, or against particular human classes, arrangements, and modes of thinking. In some of his writings the politician and the general satirist are seen together. The "Drapier's Letters" and most of the poetical lampoons, exhibit Swift in his direct mood as a party writer; in the "Tale of a Tub," we have the ostensible purpose of a partisan masking a reserve of general scepticism; in the "Battle of the Books" we have a satire partly personal to individuals, partly with a refer Such by constitution as we have described him-with an intellect strong as iron, much acquired knowledge, an ambition all but insatiable, and a decided desire to be wealthy -Swift, almost as a matter of course, flung himself impetuously into the Whig and Tory controversy, which was the question paramount of his time. In that he labored as only a man of his powers could, bringing to the side of the controversy on which he chanced to be-and we believe, when he was on a side, it was honestly because he found a certain preponderance of right in it-a hard and ruthless vigor which served it immensely. But from the first, and, at all events, after the disappointments of a political career hadence to a prevailing tone of opinion; in the been experienced by him, his nature would not work alone in the narrow warfare of Whiggism and Toryism, but overflowed in general Voyage to Laputa," we have a satire on a great class of men; and in the " Voyages to Lilliput" and " Brobdingnag," and still more in the story of the "Houynhnms" and "Ya- | hoos," we have human nature itself analyzed and laid bare. Swift took no care of his writings, never acknowledged some of them, never collected them, and suffered them to find their way about the world as chance, demand, and the piracy of publishers directed. As all know, it is in his character as a Humorist, an inventor of the preposterous as a medium for the reflective, and above all, as a master of irony, that he takes his place as one of the chiefs of English literature. There can be no doubt that, as regards the literary form which he affected most, he took hints from Rabelais, as the greatest original in the realm of the absurd. Sometimes, as in his description of the Strulbrugs in the "Voyage to Laputa," he approaches the ghastly power of that writer; on the whole, however, there is more of stern English realism in him, and less of sheer riot and wildness. Some times, however, Swift throws off the guise of the humorist, and speaks seriously and in his own name. On such occasions we find ourselves simply in the presence of a man of strong, sagacious, and thoroughly English mind, content, as is the habit of Englishmen, with vigorous proximate sense, expressed in plain and rather coarse idiom. For the speculative he shows, in these cases, neither liking nor aptitude; he takes obvious reasons and arguments as they come to hand, and uses them in a robust, downright, Saxon manner. In one respect, he stands out conspicuously even among plain Saxon writers -his total freedom from cant. Johnson's advice to Boswell," above all things to clear his mind of cant," was perhaps never better illustrated than in the case of Dean Swift. Indeed, it might be given as a summary definition of Swift's character, that he had cleared his mind of cant, without having succeeded in filling the void with song. It was Swift's intense hatred of cant-cant in religion, cant in morality, cant in literature-that occasioned many of those peculiarities which shock people in his writings. His principle being to view things as they are, irrespective of all the accumulated cant of orators and poets, he naturally prosecuted his investigations into those classes of circumstances which orators and poets have omitted as unsuitable for their purposes. If they had viewed men as Angels, he would view them as Yahoos. If they had placed the springs of action among the fine phrases and the sublimities, he would trace them down into their secret connection with the bestial and the obscene. Hence-as much as for any of those physiological reasons which some of his biographers assign for it his undisguised delight in filth. And hence, also, probably-seeing that among the forms of cant he included the traditional manner of speaking of women in their relations to men-his studious contempt, whether in writing for men or women, of all the accustomed decencies. It was not only the more obvious forms of cant, however, that Swift had in aversion. Even to that minor form of cant, which consists in the trite, he gave no quarter. Whatever was habitually said by the majority of people, seemed to him, for that very reason, not worthy of being said at all, much less put into print. A considerable portion of his writings-as, for example, his "Tritical Essay on the Faculties of the Mind," and his " Art of Polite Conversation,"-in the one of which he strings together a series of the most thread-bare maxims and quotations to be found in books, offering the compilation as an original disquisition of his own; and, in the other, mimics the insipidity of ordinary table-talk in society -may be regarded as showing a systematic determination on his part to turn the trite into ridicule. Hence, in his own writings, though he abstains from the profound, he never falls into the commonplace. Apart from all Swift's other merits, there are to be found scattered through his writings not a few distinct propositions of an innovative and original character respecting our social arrangements. We have seen his doctrine as to the education of woman; and we may mention as an instance of the same kind, his denunciation of the institution of standing armies as incompatible with freedom. Curiously enough, also, it was Swift's belief that, Yahoos as we are, the world is always in the right. SAD and sweeping, of late, have been the | ravages of Time among our men of letters. Now by the hand of death, now of decay (which is nigh unto death, for that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away), and now of changes and chances in this uncertain life. A long list, and as mournful as long, might be drawn up, of setting suns and falling stars, missed, with more or less of regret, from this visible diurnal sphere, in whose greater light to rule our day we rejoiced, or in their lesser, to govern our night. (Happily, this figure is faulty; for the light of such luminaries remain, and often brightens more and more continually, after their earthly orbit has fulfilled its course.) Brief is the space within which we have had to sorrow for the decease of a Wordsworth, though full of years and honors,-of a Moore (and already how "lightly they speak of the spirit that's gone, and o'er his cold ashes upbraid him"),-and, not to name others that might be named, of a Talfourd, the judge upon the judgment-seat, cited before another tribunal, so strangely, solemnly, suddenly, 'ev 'aroμw, 'εv 'piπn 'optaλuou! And, again, the breaking up of old literary alliances, the evanishing of familiar systems, the scattering of time-honored but time-dissolving galaxies, is mournfully instanced in the case of two of Scott's " ""wild young men," young bloods," who are now compassed with infirmities that require seclusion, as well as stricken with years that yearn for it,—John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart. To each may the influences of retirement be healing and restorative-to each may there come a soothing experience of what is a sacred promise, "At evening-time it shall be light" light with a mellow radiance, fit precursor of the gloaming, and not unfit conclusion of the noonday heat and sunny splendors of their fervid prime.* It is of the latter we have now, and in our desultory way to make mention ;-of the sonin-law of Sir Walter, the ready writer of " Pe *Alas, since this was penned, the poet of the "Isle of Palms" hath "fallen on sleep." ter's Letters," the reckless, dashing attaché to Old Ebony's gay staff, the classical author of "Valerius," the morbid anatomist of "Adam Blair," the manly biographer of Scotland's two chiefest names in song and story, the animated translator of "Spanish Ballads," and the long-reigning editor of the Quarterly Review. The present generation is little versed in the pages of Mr. Lockhart's first work of note, "Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk,❞—of which he has, in his riper experience, said, that nobody but a very young and a very thoughtless person could have dreamt of putting forth such a book,-while he protests against denouncing these epistles of the imaginary Welsh Doctor, Peter Morris, "with his spectacles-his Welsh accent-his Toryism-his inordinate thirst for draught porter and his everlasting shandry-dan,—as a mere string of libels on the big-wigs therein portrayed. Among these were Scott, happy and happy-making at Abbotsford,-Jeffrey, the "wee reekit deil o' criticism" and laird of Craigcrook,-Playfair, always considered fair game by good haters of the Edinburgh,— James Hogg, the "inspired sheep's-head," Chalmers, with his sublimely-developed mathematical frontispiece, &c. Allan Cunningham calls the work all life and character, and admires its freshness and variety, treating as it does of courts of law and Glasgow punch, of craniology and criticism,-telling us how to woo a bride or cut up a haggis,and giving us "the pictures, mental and bodily, of some of the leading men of Scotland, with great truth and effect." Scott himself was much interested in this last-mentioned feature of the book. "What an acquisition," he says, "it would have been to our general information to have had such a work written, I do not say fifty, but even five-and-twenty years ago;* and how much of grave and gay might then have been preserved, as it were, in amber, which have [sic] now mouldered away. When I think that an age, not much * Sir Walter wrote this (in a letter to his son-inlaw presumptive) in July, 1819. on at our neighbors' firesides. But ought we to be so pleased ?"* Aye, gentlemen tourists, pencillers by the way, domestic police reporters, household inventory takers, and breakfast-table shorthand-writers, all the sort of you-aye, there's the rub. Good Mrs. Grant would perhaps have changed her mild interrogative into a very decisive affirmative, or rather a very indignant negative, had she lived to see what we see, and hear what we hear, in these times of gossiping fireside inquisitors. younger than yours I knew Black, Ferguson, Robertson, Erskine, Adam Smith, John Home, &c., &c., and at least saw Burns, I can appreciate better than any one, the value of a work which, like this, would have handed them down to posterity in their living colors." And Sir Walter goes on to say that Dr. Morris ought, like Nourjahad, to revive every half century, to record the fleeting manners of the age, and the interesting features of those who will be known only to posterity by their works.* Could Sir Walter have foreseen the host of third-rate and thirtieth-rate Dr. Morrises, who, between then and now, have infested the face of the earth, on the plea of being chiels amang us takin' notes, and faith! wull prent 'em-notes of our res domi (never mind how angusta,) of our dressing-gowns and slippers, of our obiter allusions and by-the-way interjections, of how we clear our throats, and whether we wear straps, and so forth, he would probably have put in a qualifying clause, to modify his panegyric of the Morrisian tactics. And this reminds us of a passage to the purpose in one of the lively letters of the author's country woman, Mrs. Grant, of Laggan. "You ask me," she writes, "what I think of Peter's Letters?torian guard-room, and a prison for doomed I answer in a very low whisper-not much. The broad personality is coarse, even where it is laudatory; no one very deserving of praise cares to be held up to the public eye like a picture on sale by an auctioneer.f it is not the style of our country, and it is a bad style in itself. So much for its tendency. Then, if you speak of it as a composition, it has no keeping, no chastity of style, and is in a high degree florid and verbose. . Some depth of thought and acuteness appears now and then, like the weights at the tail of a paper kite, but not enough to balance the levity of the whole. With all this, the genius which the writers possess, in no common degree, is obvious through the whole book: but it is genius misapplied, and running riot beyond all the bounds of good taste and sober thinking. We are all amused, and so we should be, if we lived in a street where those slaves of the lamp had the power of rendering the walls co transparent that we could see everything going • Lockhart's Life of Scott. Chap. xiv. Even Scott, it may be observed, considered the general turn of the book too favorable, both to the state of public society, and of individual character, in Scotland-quoting Goldsmith's couplet, "His fools have their follies so lost in a crowd of virtues and feelings, that folly grows proud." From "Peter's Letters" to "Valerius" is. an abrupt transition. In this classical novel we are made spectators of a series of tableaux, illustrative of the manners and events of Rome under Trajan. Thus the narrator takes us to patrician reception-rooms; to the Forumwith its grand associations and familiar traditions-the ancient rostrum from which Tully had declaimed, and the old mysterious fig tree of Romulus, and the rich tesselated pavement, memorial of the abyss that had once yawned before the steady eye of Curtius; to senatorial gardens, with their garniture of fountains and exotics and perfumed terraces and sculptured nymphs and fauns; to a supper party in the Suburra; to a præ Christians; to the Flavian amphitheatre, to hear the gladiator's moriturus vos saluto, and the confessor's dying credo; to the temple of Apollo, shrine of the reliquary Sybilline prophecies, and museum of the busts of earth's immortals: to a Veronese painter's studio; to a Neapolitan witch's midnight enchantments; to a village barber's shop, full of custom and fuss and small talk; to a secret congress of the faithful in the catacombs ; to Trajan's presence-chamber, and the Mammertine dungeons. The characters engaged in the action present a fair diversity of types of society in the capital, but for the most part lacking individuality and life. Valerius himself is too much of the faultless walking gentleman, though his betrothed, the high-hearted and deep-hearted Athanasia, is some removes beyond the standard walking lady. Sabinus, the jovial, kindly, bustling centurion-with his strong muscular fabric and hearty masculine laugh,—who, under Agricola and his real triumphs, and Domitian and his sham one, has undergone various freaks of fortune, and preserved his equanimity and rubicundity unaltered in them all; Xerophrastes, the professed Stoic, and * Memoirs and Correspondence of Mrs. Grant, of Laggan. |