‘And though reclaim’d by modern lights
               From an erroneous taste,
               I cannot but lament thy splendid wit
               Entangled in the cobwebs of the schools.’

Donne, who was considerably before Cowley, is without his fancy, but was
more recondite in his logic, and rigid in his descriptions. He is hence
led, particularly in his satires, to tell disagreeable truths in as
disagreeable a way as possible, or to convey a pleasing and affecting
thought (of which there are many to be found in his other writings) by
the harshest means, and with the most painful effort. His Muse suffers
continual pangs and throes. His thoughts are delivered by the Cæsarean
operation. The sentiments, profound and tender as they often are, are
stifled in the expression; and ‘heaved pantingly forth,’ are ‘buried
quick again’ under the ruins and rubbish of analytical distinctions. It
is like poetry waking from a trance: with an eye bent idly on the
outward world, and half-forgotten feelings crowding about the heart;
with vivid impressions, dim notions, and disjointed words. The following
may serve as instances of beautiful or impassioned reflections losing
themselves in obscure and difficult applications. He has some lines to a
Blossom, which begin thus:

           ‘Little think’st thou, poor flow’r,
           Whom I have watched six or seven days,
           And seen thy birth, and seen what every hour
           Gave to thy growth, thee to this height to raise,
           And now dost laugh and triumph on this bough.
                 Little think’st thou
           That it will freeze anon, and that I shall
           To-morrow find thee fall’n, or not at all.’

This simple and delicate description is only introduced as a foundation
for an elaborate metaphysical conceit as a parallel to it, in the next
stanza.

            ‘Little think’st thou (poor heart
            That labour’st yet to nestle thee,
            And think’st by hovering here to get a part
            In a forbidden or forbidding tree,
            And hop’st her stiffness by long siege to bow:)
                  Little think’st thou,
            That thou to-morrow, ere the sun doth wake,
            Must with this sun and me a journey take.’

This is but a lame and impotent conclusion from so delightful a
beginning.—He thus notices the circumstance of his wearing his late
wife’s hair about his arm, in a little poem which is called the Funeral:

              ‘Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm
                  Nor question much
              That subtle wreath of hair, about mine arm;
              The mystery, the sign you must not touch.’

The scholastic reason he gives quite dissolves the charm of tender and
touching grace in the sentiment itself—

            ‘For ’tis my outward soul,
        Viceroy to that, which unto heaven being gone,
            Will leave this to control,
        And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution.’

Again, the following lines, the title of which is Love’s Deity, are
highly characteristic of this author’s manner, in which the thoughts are
inlaid in a costly but imperfect mosaic-work.

             ‘_I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost,
             Who died before the God of Love was born_:
             I cannot think that he, who then lov’d most,
             Sunk so low, as to love one which did scorn.
             But since this God produc’d a destiny,
             And that vice-nature, custom, lets it be;
             I must love her that loves not me.’

The stanza in the Epithalamion on a Count Palatine of the Rhine, has
been often quoted against him, and is an almost irresistible
illustration of the extravagances to which this kind of writing, which
turns upon a pivot of words and possible allusions, is liable. Speaking
of the bride and bridegroom he says, by way of serious compliment—

               ‘Here lies a she-Sun, and a he-Moon there,
               She gives the best light to his sphere;
               Or each is both and all, and so
               They unto one another nothing owe.’

His love-verses and epistles to his friends give the most favourable
idea of Donne. His satires are too clerical. He shews, if I may so
speak, too much disgust, and, at the same time, too much contempt for
vice. His dogmatical invectives hardly redeem the nauseousness of his
descriptions, and compromise the imagination of his readers more than
they assist their reason. The satirist does not write with the same
authority as the divine, and should use his poetical privileges more
sparingly. ‘To the pure all things are pure,’ is a maxim which a man
like Dr. Donne may be justified in applying to himself; but he might
have recollected that it could not be construed to extend to the
generality of his readers, _without benefit of clergy_.

Bishop Hall’s Satires are coarse railing in verse, and hardly that. Pope
has, however, contrived to avail himself of them in some of his
imitations.

Sir John Davies is the author of a poem on the Soul, and of one on
Dancing. In both he shews great ingenuity, and sometimes terseness and
vigour. In the last of these two poems his fancy _pirouettes_ in a very
lively and agreeable manner, but something too much in the style of a
French opera-dancer, with sharp angular turns, and repeated deviations
from the faultless line of simplicity and nature.

Crashaw was a writer of the same ambitious stamp, whose imagination was
rendered still more inflammable by the fervors of fanaticism, and who
having been converted from Protestantism to Popery (a weakness to which
the ‘seething brains’ of the poets of this period were prone) by some
visionary appearance of the Virgin Mary, poured out his devout raptures
and zealous enthusiasm in a torrent of poetical hyperboles. The
celebrated Latin Epigram on the miracle of our Saviour, ‘The water
blushed into wine,’ is in his usual _hectic_ manner. His translation of
the contest between the Musician and the Nightingale is the best
specimen of his powers.

Davenant’s Gondibert is a tissue of stanzas, all aiming to be wise and
witty, each containing something in itself, and the whole together
amounting to nothing. The thoughts separately require so much attention
to understand them, and arise so little out of the narrative, that they
with difficulty sink into the mind, and have no common feeling of
interest to recal or link them together afterwards. The general style
may be judged of by these two memorable lines in the description of the
skeleton-chamber.

            ‘Yet on that wall hangs he too, who so thought,
            And she dried by him whom that he obeyed.’

Mr. Hobbes, in a prefatory discourse, has thrown away a good deal of
powerful logic and criticism in recommendation of the plan of his
friend’s poem. Davenant, who was poet-laureate to Charles II. wrote
several masques and plays which were well received in his time, but have
not come down with equal applause to us.

Marvel (on whom I have already bestowed such praise as I could, for
elegance and tenderness in his descriptive poems) in his satires and
witty pieces was addicted to the affected and involved style here
reprobated, as in his Flecknoe (the origin of Dryden’s Macflecknoe) and
in his satire on the Dutch. As an instance of this forced, far-fetched
method of treating his subject, he says, in ridicule of the Hollanders,
that when their dykes overflowed, the fish used to come to table with
them,

                ‘And sat not as a meat, but as a guest.’

There is a poem of Marvel’s on the death of King Charles I. which I have
not seen, but which I have heard praised by one whose praise is never
high but of the highest things, for the beauty and pathos, as well as
generous frankness of the sentiments, coming, as they did, from a
determined and incorruptible political foe.

Shadwell was a successful and voluminous dramatic writer of much the
same period. His Libertine (taken from the celebrated Spanish story) is
full of spirit; but it is the spirit of licentiousness and impiety. At
no time do there appear to have been such extreme speculations afloat on
the subject of religion and morality, as there were shortly after the
Reformation, and afterwards under the Stuarts, the differences being
widened by political irritation; and the Puritans often over-acting one
extreme out of grimace and hypocrisy, as the king’s party did the other
out of _bravado_.

Carew is excluded from his pretensions to the laureateship in Suckling’s
Sessions of the Poets, on account of his slowness. His verses are
delicate and pleasing, with a certain feebleness, but with very little
tincture of the affectation of this period. His masque (called _Cœlum
Britannicum_) in celebration of a marriage at court, has not much wit
nor fancy, but the accompanying prose directions and commentary on the
mythological story, are written with wonderful facility and elegance, in
a style of familiar dramatic dialogue approaching nearer the writers of
Queen Anne’s reign than those of Queen Elizabeth’s.

Milton’s name is included by Dr. Johnson in the list of metaphysical
poets on no better authority than his lines on Hobson the Cambridge
Carrier, which he acknowledges were the only ones Milton wrote on this
model. Indeed, he is the great contrast to that style of poetry, being
remarkable for breadth and massiness, or what Dr. Johnson calls
‘aggregation of ideas,’ beyond almost any other poet. He has in this
respect been compared to Michael Angelo, but not with much reason: his
verses are

                         ——‘inimitable on earth
                 By model, or by shading pencil drawn.’

Suckling is also ranked, without sufficient warrant, among the
metaphysical poets. Sir John was of ‘the court, courtly;’ and his style
almost entirely free from the charge of pedantry and affectation. There
are a few blemishes of this kind in his works, but they are but few. His
compositions are almost all of them short and lively effusions of wit
and gallantry, written in a familiar but spirited style, without much
design or effort. His shrewd and taunting address to a desponding lover
will sufficiently vouch for the truth of this account of the general
cast of his best pieces.

               ‘Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
                     Pr’ythee why so pale?
               Will, when looking well can’t move her,
                     Looking ill prevail?
                     Pr’ythee why so pale?

               Why so dull and mute, young sinner?
                     Pr’ythee why so mute?
               Will, when speaking well, can’t win her,
                     Saying nothing do ‘t?
                     Pr’ythee why so mute?

               Quit, quit for shame, this will not move,
                     This cannot take her;
               If of herself she will not love,
                     Nothing can make her;
                     The Devil take her.’

The two short poems against Fruition, that beginning, ‘There never yet
was woman made, nor shall, but to be curst,’—the song, ‘I pr’ythee,
spare me, gentle boy, press me no more for that slight toy, that foolish
trifle of a heart,’—another, ‘’Tis now, since I sat down before, that
foolish fort, a heart,’—_Lutea Alanson_—the set of similes, ‘Hast thou
seen the down in the air, when wanton winds have tost it,’—and his
‘Dream,’ which is of a more tender and romantic cast, are all exquisite
in their way. They are the origin of the style of Prior and Gay in their
short fugitive verses, and of the songs in the Beggar’s Opera. His
Ballad on a Wedding is his masterpiece, and is indeed unrivalled in that
class of composition, for the voluptuous delicacy of the sentiments, and
the luxuriant richness of the images. I wish I could repeat the whole,
but that, from the change of manners, is impossible. The description of
the bride is (half of it) as follows: the story is supposed to be told
by one countryman to another:—

             ‘Her finger was so small, the ring
             Would not stay on, which they did bring;
                 It was too wide a peck:
             And to say truth (for out it must)
             It look’d like the great collar (just)
                 About our young colt’s neck.

             Her feet beneath her petticoat,
             Like little mice, stole in and out,
                 As if they fear’d the light:
             But oh! she dances such a way!
             No sun upon an Easter-day
                 Is half so fine a sight.

             Her cheeks so rare a white was on,
             No daisy makes comparison,
                 (Who sees them is undone)
             For streaks of red were mingled there,
             Such as are on a Cath’rine pear,
                 (The side that’s next the sun.)

             Her lips were red; and one was thin,
             Compar’d to that was next her chin;
                 (Some bee had stung it newly)
             But (Dick) her eyes so guard her face,
             I durst no more upon them gaze,
                 Than on the sun in July.

             Her mouth so small, when she does speak,
             Thoud’st swear her teeth her words did break,
                 That they might passage get;
             But she so handled still the matter,
             They came as good as ours, or better,
                 And are not spent a whit.’

There is to me in the whole of this delightful performance a freshness
and purity like the first breath of morning. Its sportive irony never
trespasses on modesty, though it sometimes (laughing) threatens to do
so! Suckling’s Letters are full of habitual gaiety and good sense. His
Discourse on Reason in Religion is well enough meant. Though he excelled
in the conversational style of poetry, writing verse with the freedom
and readiness, vivacity and unconcern, with which he would have talked
on the most familiar and sprightly topics, his peculiar powers deserted
him in attempting dramatic dialogue. His comedy of the _Goblins_ is
equally defective in plot, wit, and nature; it is a wretched list of
_exits_ and _entrances_, and the whole business of the scene is taken up
in the unaccountable seizure, and equally unaccountable escapes, of a
number of persons from a band of robbers in the shape of goblins, who
turn out to be noblemen and gentlemen in disguise. Suckling was not a
Grub-street author; or it might be said, that this play is like what he
might have written after dreaming all night of duns and a
spunging-house. His tragedies are no better: their titles are the most
interesting part of them, Aglaura, Brennoralt, and the Sad One.

Cowley had more brilliancy of fancy and ingenuity of thought than Donne,
with less pathos and sentiment. His mode of illustrating his ideas
differs also from Donne’s in this: that whereas Donne is contented to
analyse an image into its component elements, and resolve it into its
most abstracted species; Cowley first does this, indeed, but does not
stop till he has fixed upon some other prominent example of the same
general class of ideas, and forced them into a metaphorical union, by
the medium of the generic definition. Thus he says—

              ‘The Phœnix Pindar is a vast species alone.’

He means to say that he stands by himself: he is then ‘a vast species
alone:’ then by applying to this generality the _principium
individuationis_, he becomes a Phœnix, because the Phœnix is the only
example of a species contained in an individual. Yet this is only a
literal or metaphysical coincidence: and literally and metaphysically
speaking, Pindar was not a species by himself, but only seemed so by
pre-eminence or excellence; that is, from qualities of mind appealing to
and absorbing the imagination, and which, therefore, ought to be
represented in poetical language, by some other obvious and palpable
image exhibiting the same kind or degree of excellence in other things,
as when Gray compares him to the Theban eagle,

                    ‘Sailing with supreme dominion
                    Through the azure deep of air.’

Again, he talks in the Motto, or Invocation to his Muse, of ‘marching
the Muse’s Hannibal’ into undiscovered regions. That is, he thinks first
of being a leader in poetry, and then he immediately, by virtue of this
abstraction, becomes a Hannibal; though no two things can really be more
unlike in all the associations belonging to them, than a leader of
armies and a leader of the tuneful Nine. In like manner, he compares
Bacon to Moses; for in _his_ verses extremes are sure to meet. The Hymn
to Light, which forms a perfect contrast to Milton’s Invocation to
Light, in the commencement of the third book of Paradise Lost, begins in
the following manner:—

          ‘First-born of Chaos, who so fair didst come
                From the old negro’s darksome womb!
                Which, when it saw the lovely child,
          The melancholy mass put on kind looks, and smil’d.’

And soon after—

         ‘’Tis, I believe, this archery to show
               That so much cost in colours thou,
               And skill in painting, dost bestow,
         Upon thy ancient arms, the gaudy heav’nly bow.

         Swift as light thoughts their empty career run,
               Thy race is finish’d when begun;
               Let a post-angel start with thee,
         And thou the goal of earth shalt reach as soon as he.’

The conceits here are neither wit nor poetry; but a burlesque upon both,
made up of a singular metaphorical jargon, verbal generalities, and
physical analogies. Thus his calling Chaos, or Darkness, ‘the old
negro,’ would do for abuse or jest, but is too remote and degrading for
serious poetry, and yet it is meant for such. The ‘old negro’ is at best
a nickname, and the smile on its face loses its beauty in such company.
The making out the rainbow to be a species of heraldic painting, and
converting an angel into a post-boy, shew the same rage for comparison;
but such comparisons are as odious as they are unjust. Dr. Johnson has
multiplied instances of the same false style, in its various divisions
and subdivisions.[4] Of Cowley’s serious poems, the Complaint is the one
I like the best; and some of his translations in the Essays, as those on
Liberty and Retirement, are exceedingly good. The Odes to Vandyke, to
the Royal Society, to Hobbes, and to the latter Brutus, beginning
‘Excellent Brutus,’ are all full of ingenious and high thoughts,
impaired by a load of ornament and quaint disguises. The Chronicle, or
list of his Mistresses, is the best of his original lighter pieces: but
the best of his poems are the translations from Anacreon, which remain,
and are likely to remain unrivalled. The spirit of wine and joy
circulates in them; and though they are lengthened out beyond the
originals, it is by fresh impulses of an eager and inexhaustible feeling
of delight. Here are some of them:—

                             DRINKING

               ‘The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,
               And drinks, and gapes for drink again.
               The plants suck in the earth, and are
               With constant drinking fresh and fair.
               The sea itself, which one would think
               Should have but little need of drink,
               Drinks twice ten thousand rivers up,
               So fill’d that they o’erflow the cup.
               The busy sun (and one would guess
               By’s drunken fiery face no less)
               Drinks up the sea, and, when he ‘as done,
               The moon and stars drink up the sun.
               They drink and dance by their own light,
               They drink and revel all the night.
               Nothing in nature’s sober found,
               But an eternal health goes round.
               Fill up the bowl then, fill it high,
               Fill all the glasses there; for why
               Should every creature drink but I;
               Why, man of morals, tell me why?’

This is a classical intoxication; and the poet’s imagination, giddy with
fancied joys, communicates its spirit and its motion to inanimate
things, and makes all nature reel round with it. It is not easy to
decide between these choice pieces, which may be reckoned among the
_delights of human kind_; but that to the Grasshopper is one of the
happiest as well as most serious:—

             ‘Happy insect, what can be
             In happiness compar’d to thee?
             Fed with nourishment divine,
             The dewy morning’s gentle wine!
             Nature waits upon thee still,
             And thy verdant cup does fill;
             ’Tis filled wherever thou dost tread,
             Nature’s self thy Ganymede.
             Thou dost drink, and dance, and sing;
             Happier than the happiest king!
             All the fields which thou dost see,
             All the plants, belong to thee;
             All that summer-hours produce,
             Fertile made with early juice.
             Man for thee does sow and plough,
             Farmer he, and landlord thou!
             Thou dost innocently joy;
             Nor does thy luxury destroy;
             The shepherd gladly heareth thee,
             More harmonious than he.
             Thee country hinds with gladness hear,
             Prophet of the ripen’d year!
             Thee Phœbus loves, and does inspire;
             Phœbus is himself thy sire.
             To thee, of all things upon earth,
             Life is no longer than thy mirth.
             Happy insect, happy thou!
             Dost neither age nor winter know;
             But, when thou’st drunk, and danc’d, and sung
             Thy fill, the flowery leaves among,
             (Voluptuous and wise withal,
             Epicurean animal!)
             Sated with thy summer feast,
             Thou retir’st to endless rest.’

Cowley’s Essays are among the most agreeable prose-compositions in our
language, being equally recommended by sense, wit, learning, and
interesting personal history, and written in a style quite free from the
faults of his poetry. It is a pity that he did not cultivate his talent
for prose more, and write less in verse, for he was clearly a man of
more reflection than imagination. The Essays on Agriculture, on Liberty,
on Solitude, and on Greatness, are all of them delightful. From the last
I may give his account of Senecio as an addition to the instances of the
ludicrous, which I have attempted to enumerate in the introductory
Lecture; whose ridiculous affectation of grandeur Seneca the elder (he
tells us) describes to this effect: ‘Senecio was a man of a turbid and
confused wit, who could not endure to speak any but mighty words and
sentences, till this humour grew at last into so notorious a habit, or
rather disease, as became the sport of the whole town: he would have no
servants, but huge, massy fellows; no plate or household stuff, but
thrice as big as the fashion: you may believe me, for I speak it without
raillery, his extravagancy came at last into such a madness, that he
would not put on a pair of shoes, each of which was not big enough for
both his feet: he would eat nothing but what was great, nor touch any
fruit but horse-plums and pound-pears: he kept a mistress that was a
very giantess, and made her walk too always in chiopins, till, at last,
he got the surname of Senecio Grandio.’ This was certainly the most
absurd person we read of in antiquity. Cowley’s character of Oliver
Cromwell, which is intended as a satire, (though it certainly produces a
very different impression on the mind), may vie for truth of outline and
force of colouring with the masterpieces of the Greek and Latin
historians. It may serve as a contrast to the last extract. ‘What can be
more extraordinary, than that a person of mean birth, no fortune, no
eminent qualities of body, which have sometimes, or of mind, which have
often, raised men to the highest dignities, should have the courage to
attempt, and the happiness to succeed in, so improbable a design, as the
destruction of one of the most ancient and most solidly-founded
monarchies upon the earth? That he should have the power or boldness to
put his prince and master to an open and infamous death; to banish that
numerous and strongly-allied family; to do all this under the name and
wages of a Parliament; to trample upon them too as he pleased, and spurn
them out of doors when he grew weary of them; to raise up a new and
unheard-of monster out of their ashes; to stifle that in the very
infancy, and set up himself above all things that ever were called
sovereign in England; to oppress all his enemies by arms, and all his
friends afterwards by artifice; to serve all parties patiently for a
while, and to command them victoriously at last; to over-run each corner
of the three nations, and overcome with equal facility both the riches
of the south and the poverty of the north; to be feared and courted by
all foreign princes, and adopted a brother to the gods of the earth; to
call together Parliaments with a word of his pen, and scatter them again
with the breath of his mouth; to be humbly and daily petitioned that he
would please to be hired, at the rate of two millions a-year, to be the
master of those who had hired him before to be their servant; to have
the estates and lives of three kingdoms as much at his disposal, as was
the little inheritance of his father, and to be as noble and liberal in
the spending of them; and lastly, (for there is no end of all the
particulars of his glory) to bequeath all this with one word to his
posterity; to die with peace at home, and triumph abroad; to be buried
among kings, and with more than regal solemnity; and to leave a name
behind him, not to be extinguished, but with the whole world; which as
it is now too little for his praises, so might have been too for his
conquests, if the short line of his human life could have been stretched
out to the extent of his immortal designs!’

Cowley has left one comedy, called Cutter of Coleman Street, which met
with an unfavourable reception at the time, and is now (not
undeservedly) forgotten. It contains, however, one good scene, which is
rich both in fancy and humour, that between the puritanical bride,
Tabitha, and her ranting royalist husband. It is said that this play was
originally composed, and afterwards revived, as a satire upon the
Presbyterian party; yet it was resented by the court party as a satire
upon itself. A man must, indeed, be sufficiently blind with
party-prejudice, to have considered this as a compliment to his own side
of the question. ‘Call you this backing of your friends?’ The cavaliers
are in this piece represented as reduced to the lowest shifts in point
of fortune, and sunk still lower in point of principle.

The greatest single production of wit of this period, I might say of
this country, is Butler’s Hudibras. It contains specimens of every
variety of drollery and satire, and those specimens crowded together
into almost every page. The proof of this is, that nearly one half of
his lines are got by heart, and quoted for mottos. In giving instances
of different sorts of wit, or trying to recollect good things of this
kind, they are the first which stand ready in the memory; and they are
those which furnish the best tests and most striking illustrations of
what we want. Dr. Campbell, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, when treating
of the subject of wit, which he has done very neatly and sensibly, has
constant recourse to two authors, Pope and Butler, the one for ornament,
the other more for use. Butler is equally in the hands of the learned
and the vulgar; for the sense is generally as solid, as the images are
amusing and grotesque. Whigs and Tories join in his praise. He could
not, in spite of himself,

                             ——‘narrow his mind,
           ‘And to party give up what was meant for mankind.’

Though his subject was local and temporary, his fame was not
circumscribed within his own age. He was admired by Charles II. and has
been rewarded by posterity. It is the poet’s fate! It is not, perhaps,
to be wondered at, that arbitrary and worthless monarchs like Charles
II. should neglect those who pay court to them. The idol (if it had
sense) would despise its worshippers. Indeed, Butler hardly merited any
thing on the score of loyalty to the house of Stuart. True wit is not a
parasite plant. The strokes which it aims at folly and knavery on one
side of a question, tell equally home on the other. Dr. Zachary Grey,
who added notes to the poem, and abused the leaders of Cromwell’s party
by name, would be more likely to have gained a pension for his services
than Butler, who was above such petty work. A poem like Hudibras could
not be _made to order of a court_. Charles might very well have
reproached the author with wanting to shew his own wit and sense rather
than to favour a tottering cause; and he has even been suspected, in
parts of his poem, of glancing at majesty itself. He in general
ridicules not persons, but things, not a party, but their principles,
which may belong, as time and occasion serve, to one set of solemn
pretenders or another. This he has done most effectually, in every
possible way, and from every possible source, learned or unlearned. He
has exhausted the moods and figures of satire and sophistry.[5] It would
be possible to deduce the different forms of syllogism in Aristotle,
from the different violations or mock-imitations of them in Butler. He
fulfils every one of Barrow’s conditions of wit, which I have enumerated
in the first Lecture. He makes you laugh or smile by comparing the high
to the low,[6] or by pretending to raise the low to the lofty;[7] he
succeeds equally in the familiarity of his illustrations,[8] or their
incredible extravagance,[9] by comparing things that are alike or not
alike. He surprises equally by his coincidences or contradictions, by
spinning out a long-winded flimsy excuse, or by turning short upon you
with the point-blank truth. His rhymes are as witty as his reasons,
equally remote from what common custom would suggest;[10] and he
startles you sometimes by an empty sound like a blow upon a
drum-head,[11] by a pun upon one word,[12] and by splitting another in
two at the end of a verse, with the same alertness and power over the
odd and unaccountable in the combinations of sounds as of images.[13]

There are as many shrewd aphorisms in his works, clenched by as many
quaint and individual allusions, as perhaps in any author whatever. He
makes none but palpable hits, that may be said to give one’s
understanding a rap on the knuckles.[14] He is, indeed, sometimes too
prolific, and spins his antithetical sentences out, one after another,
till the reader, not the author, is wearied. He is, however, very seldom
guilty of repetitions or wordy paraphrases of himself; but he sometimes
comes rather too near it; and interrupts the thread of his argument (for
narrative he has none) by a tissue of epigrams, and the tagging of
points and conundrums without end. The fault, or original sin of his
genius, is, that from too much leaven it ferments and runs over; and
there is, unfortunately, nothing in his subject to restrain and keep it
within compass. He has no story good for any thing; and his characters
are good for very little. They are too low and mechanical, or too much
one thing, personifications, as it were, of nicknames, and bugbears of
popular prejudice and vulgar cant, unredeemed by any virtue, or
difference or variety of disposition. There is no relaxation or shifting
of the parts; and the impression in some degree fails of its effect, and
becomes questionable from its being always the same. The satire looks,
at length, almost like special-pleading: it has nothing to confirm it in
the apparent good humour or impartiality of the writer. It is something
revolting to see an author persecute his characters, the cherished
offspring of his brain, in this manner, without mercy. Hudibras and
Ralpho have immortalised Butler; and what has he done for them in
return, but set them up to be ‘pilloried on infamy’s high and lasting
stage?’ This is ungrateful!

The rest of the characters have, in general, little more than their
names and professions to distinguish them. We scarcely know one from
another, Cerdon, or Orsin, or Crowdero, and are often obliged to turn
back, to connect their several adventures together. In fact, Butler
drives only at a set of obnoxious opinions, and runs into general
declamations. His poem in its essence is a satire, or didactic poem. It
is not virtually dramatic, or narrative. It is composed of digressions
by the author. He instantly breaks off in the middle of a story, or
incident, to comment upon and turn it into ridicule. He does not give
characters but topics, which would do just as well in his own mouth
without agents, or machinery of any kind. The long digression in Part
III. in which no mention is made of the hero, is just as good and as
much an integrant part of the poem as the rest. The conclusion is lame
and impotent, but that is saying nothing; the beginning and middle are
equally so as to historical merit. There is no keeping in his
characters, as in Don Quixote; nor any enjoyment of the ludicrousness of
their situations, as in Hogarth. Indeed, it requires a considerable
degree of sympathy to enter into and describe to the life even the
ludicrous eccentricities of others, and there is no appearance of
sympathy or liking to his subject in Butler. His humour is to his wit,
‘as one grain of wheat in a bushel of chaff: you shall search all day,
and when you find it, it is not worth the trouble.’ Yet there are
exceptions. The most decisive is, I think, the description of the battle
between Bruin and his foes, Part I. Canto iii., and again of the
triumphal procession in Part II. Canto ii. of which the principal
features are copied in Hogarth’s election print, the Chairing of the
successful candidate. The account of Sidrophel and Whackum is another
instance, and there are some few others, but rarely sprinkled up and
down.[15]

The widow, the termagant heroine of the poem, is still more disagreeable
than her lover; and her sarcastic account of the passion of love, as
consisting entirely in an attachment to land and houses, goods and
chattels, which is enforced with all the rhetoric the author is master
of, and hunted down through endless similes, is evidently false. The
vulgarity and meanness of sentiment which Butler complains of in the
Presbyterians, seems at last from long familiarity and close
contemplation to have tainted his own mind. Their worst vices appear to
have taken root in his imagination. Nothing but what was selfish and
groveling sunk into his memory, in the depression of a menial situation
under his supposed hero. He has, indeed, carried his private grudge too
far into his general speculations. He even makes out the rebels to be
cowards and well beaten, which does not accord with the history of the
times. In an excess of zeal for church and state, he is too much
disposed to treat religion as a cheat, and liberty as a farce. It was
the cant of that day (from which he is not free) to cry down sanctity
and sobriety as marks of disaffection, as it is the cant of this, to
hold them up as proofs of loyalty and staunch monarchical principles.
Religion and morality are, in either case, equally made subservient to
the spirit of party, and a stalking-horse to the love of power. Finally,
there is a want of pathos and humour, but no want of interest in
Hudibras. It is difficult to lay it down. One thought is inserted into
another; the links in the chain of reasoning are so closely rivetted,
that the attention seldom flags, but is kept alive (without any other
assistance) by the mere force of writing. There are occasional
indications of poetical fancy, and an eye for natural beauty; but these
are kept under or soon discarded, judiciously enough, but it should
seem, not for lack of power, for they are certainly as masterly as they
are rare. Such are the burlesque description of the stocks, or
allegorical prison, in which first Crowdero, and then Hudibras, is
confined: the passage beginning—

               ‘As when an owl that’s in a barn,
               Sees a mouse creeping in the corn,
               Sits still and shuts his round blue eyes,
               As if he slept,’ &c.

And the description of the moon going down in the early morning, which
is as pure, original, and picturesque as possible:—

                ‘The queen of night, whose large command
                Rules all the sea and half the land,
                And over moist and crazy brains
                In high spring-tides at midnight reigns,
                Was now declining to the west,
                To go to bed and take her rest.’

Butler is sometimes scholastic, but he makes his learning tell to good
account; and for the purposes of burlesque, nothing can be better fitted
than the scholastic style.

Butler’s Remains are nearly as good and full of sterling genius as his
principal poem. Take the following ridicule of the plan of the Greek
tragedies as an instance.

 —‘Reduce all tragedy, by rules of art,
 Back to its ancient theatre, a cart,
 And make them henceforth keep the beaten roads
 Of reverend choruses and episodes;
 Reform and regulate a puppet-play,
 According to the true and ancient way;
 That not an actor shall presume to squeak,
 Unless he have a license for ‘t in Greek:
 Nor devil in the puppet-play be allowed
 To roar and spit fire, but to fright the crowd,
 Unless some god or demon chance to have piques
 Against an ancient family of Greeks;
 That other men may tremble and take warning
 How such a fatal progeny they’re born in;
 For none but such for tragedy are fitted,
 That have been ruined only to be pitied:
 And only those held proper to deter,
 Who have th’ ill luck against their wills to err;
 Whence only such as are of middling sizes,
 Betwixt morality and venial vices,
 Are qualified to be destroyed by fate,
 For other mortals to take warning at.’

                                                       _Upon Critics._

His ridicule of Milton’s Latin style is equally severe, but not so well
founded.

I have only to add a few words respecting the dramatic writers about
this time, before we arrive at the golden period of our comedy. Those of
Etherege[16] are good for nothing, except The Man of Mode, or Sir
Fopling Flutter, which is, I think, a more exquisite and airy picture of
the manners of that age than any other extant. Sir Fopling himself is an
inimitable coxcomb, but pleasant withal. He is a suit of clothes
personified. Dorimant (supposed to be Lord Rochester) is the genius of
grace, gallantry, and gaiety. The women in this courtly play have very
much the look and air (but something more demure and significant) of Sir
Peter Lely’s beauties. Harriet, the mistress of Dorimant, who ‘tames his
wild heart to her loving hand,’ is the flower of the piece. Her natural,
untutored grace and spirit, her meeting with Dorimant in the Park,
bowing and mimicking him, and the luxuriant description which is given
of her fine person, altogether form one of the _chef d’œuvres_ of
dramatic painting. I should think this comedy would bear reviving; and
if Mr. Liston were to play Sir Fopling, the part would shine out with
double lustre, ‘like the morn risen on mid-noon.’—Dryden’s comedies have
all the point that there is in ribaldry, and all the humour that there
is in extravagance. I am sorry I can say nothing better of them. He was
not at home in this kind of writing, of which he was himself conscious.
His play was _horse-play_. His wit (what there is of it) is ingenious
and scholar-like, rather than natural and dramatic. Thus Burr, in the
Wild Gallant, says to Failer, ‘She shall sooner cut an atom than part
us.’—His plots are pure _voluntaries_ in absurdity, that bend and shift
to his purpose without any previous notice or reason, and are governed
by final causes. Sir Martin Mar-all, which was taken from the Duchess of
Newcastle, is the best of his plays, and the origin of the Busy Body.
Otway’s comedies do no sort of credit to him: on the contrary, they are
as desperate as his fortunes. The Duke of Buckingham’s famous Rehearsal,
which has made, and deservedly, so much noise in the world, is in a
great measure taken from Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning
Pestle, which was written in ridicule of the London apprentices in the
reign of Elizabeth, who had a great hand in the critical decisions of
that age. There were other dramatic writers of this period, noble and
plebeian. I shall only mention one other piece, the Committee, I believe
by Sir Robert Howard, which has of late been cut down into the farce
called Honest Thieves, and which I remember reading with a great deal of
pleasure many years ago.

One cause of the difference between the immediate reception and lasting
success of dramatic works at this period may be, that after the court
took the play-houses under its particular protection, every thing became
very much an affair of private patronage. If an author could get a
learned lord or a countess-dowager to bespeak a box at his play, and
applaud the doubtful passages, he considered his business as done. On
the other hand, there was a reciprocity between men of letters and their
patrons; critics were ‘mitigated into courtiers, and submitted,’ as Mr.
Burke has it, ‘to the soft collar of social esteem,’ in pronouncing
sentence on the works of lords and ladies. How ridiculous this seems
now! What a hubbub it would create, if it were known that a particular
person of fashion and title had taken a front-box in order to decide on
the fate of a first play! How the newspaper critics would laugh in their
sleeves! How the public would sneer! But at this time there was no
public. I will not say, therefore, that these times are better than
those; but they are better, I think, in this respect. An author
now-a-days no longer hangs dangling on the frown of a lord, or the smile
of a lady of quality (the one governed perhaps by his valet, and the
other by her waiting-maid), but throws himself boldly, making a lover’s
leap of it, into the broad lap of public opinion, on which he falls like
a feather-bed; and which, like the great bed of Ware, is wide enough to
hold us all very comfortably!

                               LECTURE IV
             ON WYCHERLEY, CONGREVE, VANBRUGH, AND FARQUHAR

Comedy is a ‘graceful ornament to the civil order; the Corinthian
capital of polished society.’ Like the mirrors which have been added to
the sides of one of our theatres, it reflects the images of grace, of
gaiety, and pleasure double, and completes the perspective of human
life. To read a good comedy is to keep the best company in the world,
where the best things are said, and the most amusing happen. The
wittiest remarks are always ready on the tongue, and the luckiest
occasions are always at hand to give birth to the happiest conceptions.
Sense makes strange havoc of nonsense. Refinement acts as a foil to
affectation, and affectation to ignorance. Sentence after sentence
tells. We don’t know which to admire most, the observation, or the
answer to it. We would give our fingers to be able to talk so ourselves,
or to hear others talk so. In turning over the pages of the best
comedies, we are almost transported to another world, and escape from
this dull age to one that was all life, and whim, and mirth, and humour.
The curtain rises, and a gayer scene presents itself, as on the canvass
of Watteau. We are admitted behind the scenes like spectators at court,
on a levee or birth-day; but it is the court, the gala day of wit and
pleasure, of gallantry and Charles II.! What an air breathes from the
name! what a rustling of silks and waving of plumes! what a sparkling of
diamond earrings and shoe-buckles! What bright eyes, (ah, those were
Waller’s Sacharissa’s as she passed!) what killing looks and graceful
motions! How the faces of the whole ring are dressed in smiles! how the
repartee goes round! how wit and folly, elegance and awkward imitation
of it, set one another off! Happy, thoughtless age, when kings and
nobles led purely ornamental lives; when the utmost stretch of a
morning’s study went no farther than the choice of a sword-knot, or the
adjustment of a side-curl; when the soul spoke out in all the pleasing
eloquence of dress; and beaux and belles, enamoured of themselves in one
another’s follies, fluttered like gilded butterflies, in giddy mazes,
through the walks of St. James’s Park!

The four principal writers of this style of comedy (which I think the
best) are undoubtedly Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. The
dawn was in Etherege, as its latest close was in Sheridan.—It is hard to
say which of these four is best, or in what each of them excels, they
had so many and such great excellences.

Congreve is the most distinct from the others, and the most easily
defined, both from what he possessed, and from what he wanted. He had by
far the most wit and elegance, with less of other things, of humour,
character, incident, &c. His style is inimitable, nay perfect. It is the
highest model of comic dialogue. Every sentence is replete with sense
and satire, conveyed in the most polished and pointed terms. Every page
presents a shower of brilliant conceits, is a tissue of epigrams in
prose, is a new triumph of wit, a new conquest over dulness. The fire of
artful raillery is nowhere else so well kept up. This style, which he
was almost the first to introduce, and which he carried to the utmost
pitch of classical refinement, reminds one exactly of Collins’s
description of wit as opposed to humour,

                ‘Whose jewels in his crisped hair
                Are placed each other’s light to share.’

Sheridan will not bear a comparison with him in the regular antithetical
construction of his sentences, and in the mechanical artifices of his
style, though so much later, and though style in general has been so
much studied, and in the mechanical part so much improved since then. It
bears every mark of being what he himself in the dedication of one of
his plays tells us that it was, a spirited copy taken off and carefully
revised from the most select society of his time, exhibiting all the
sprightliness, ease, and animation of familiar conversation, with the
correctness and delicacy of the most finished composition. His works are
a singular treat to those who have cultivated a taste for the niceties
of English style: there is a peculiar flavour in the very words, which
is to be found in hardly any other writer. To the mere reader his
writings would be an irreparable loss: to the stage they are already
become a dead letter, with the exception of one of them, Love for Love.
This play is as full of character, incident, and stage-effect, as almost
any of those of his contemporaries, and fuller of wit than any of his
own, except perhaps the Way of the World. It still acts, and is still
acted well. The effect of it is prodigious on the well-informed
spectator. In particular, Munden’s Foresight, if it is not just the
thing, is a wonderfully rich and powerful piece of comic acting. His
look is planet-struck; his dress and appearance like one of the signs of
the Zodiac taken down. Nothing can be more bewildered; and it only wants
a little more helplessness, a little more of the doating querulous
garrulity of age, to be all that one conceives of the superannuated,
star-gazing original. The gay, unconcerned opening of this play, and the
romantic generosity of the conclusion, where Valentine, when about to
resign his mistress, declares—‘I never valued fortune, but as it was
subservient to my pleasure; and my only pleasure was to please this
lady,’—are alike admirable. The peremptory bluntness and exaggerated
descriptions of Sir Sampson Legend are in a vein truly oriental, with a
Shakespearian cast of language, and form a striking contrast to the
quaint credulity and senseless superstitions of Foresight. The
remonstrance of his son to him, ‘to divest him, along with his
inheritance, of his reason, thoughts, passions, inclinations,
affections, appetites, senses, and the huge train of attendants which he
brought into the world with him,’ with his valet’s accompanying
comments, is one of the most eloquent and spirited specimens of wit,
pathos, and morality, that is to be found. The short scene with
Trapland, the money-broker, is of the first water. What a picture is
here drawn of Tattle! ‘More misfortunes, Sir!’ says Jeremy. _Valentine._
‘What, another dun?’ _Jeremy._ ‘No, Sir, but Mr. Tattle is come to wait
upon you.’ What an introduction to give of an honest gentleman in the
shape of a misfortune! The scenes between him, Miss Prue, and Ben, are
of a highly coloured description. Mrs. Frail and Mrs. Foresight are
‘sisters every way;’ and the bodkin which Mrs. Foresight brings as a
proof of her sister’s levity of conduct, and which is so convincingly
turned against her as a demonstration of her own—‘Nay, if you come to
that, where did you find that bodkin?’—is one of the trophies of the
moral justice of the comic drama. The Old Bachelor and Double Dealer are
inferior to Love for Love, but one is never tired of reading them. The
fault of the last is, that Lady Touchwood approaches, in the turbulent
impetuosity of her character, and measured tone of her declamation, too
near to the tragedy-queen; and that Maskwell’s plots puzzle the brain by
their intricacy, as they stagger our belief by their gratuitous
villainy. Sir Paul and Lady Pliant, and my Lord and Lady Froth, are also
scarcely credible in the extravagant insipidity and romantic vein of
their follies, in which they are notably seconded by the lively Mr.
Brisk and ‘dying Ned Careless.’

The Way of the World was the author’s last and most carefully finished
performance. It is an essence almost too fine; and the sense of pleasure
evaporates in an aspiration after something that seems too exquisite
ever to have been realised. After inhaling the spirit of Congreve’s wit,
and tasting ‘love’s thrice reputed nectar’ in his works, the head grows
giddy in turning from the highest point of rapture to the ordinary
business of life; and we can with difficulty recal the truant Fancy to
those objects which we are fain to take up with here, _for better, for
worse_. What can be more enchanting than Millamant and her morning
thoughts, her _doux sommeils_? What more provoking than her reproach to
her lover, who proposes to rise early, ‘Ah! idle creature!’ The meeting
of these two lovers after the abrupt dismissal of Sir Wilful, is the
height of careless and voluptuous elegance, as if they moved in air, and
drank a finer spirit of humanity.

        ‘_Millamant._ Like Phœbus sung the no less amorous boy.

        _Mirabell._ Like Daphne she, as lovely and as coy.’

Millamant is the perfect model of the accomplished fine lady:

            ‘Come, then, the colours and the ground prepare,
            Dip in the rainbow, trick her off in air;
            Choose a firm cloud, before it falls, and in it
            Catch ere she change, the Cynthia of a minute.’

She is the ideal heroine of the comedy of high life, who arrives at the
height of indifference to every thing from the height of satisfaction;
to whom pleasure is as familiar as the air she draws; elegance worn as a
part of her dress; wit the habitual language which she hears and speaks;
love, a matter of course; and who has nothing to hope or to fear, her
own caprice being the only law to herself, and rule to those about her.
Her words seem composed of amorous sighs—her looks are glanced at
prostrate admirers or envious rivals.

            ‘If there’s delight in love, ’tis when I see
            That heart that others bleed for, bleed for me.’

She refines on her pleasures to satiety; and is almost stifled in the
incense that is offered to her person, her wit, her beauty, and her
fortune. Secure of triumph, her slaves tremble at her frown: her charms
are so irresistible, that her conquests give her neither surprise nor
concern. ‘Beauty the lover’s gift?’ she exclaims, in answer to
Mirabell—‘Dear me, what is a lover that it can give? Why one makes
lovers as fast as one pleases, and they live as long as one pleases, and
they die as soon as one pleases; and then if one pleases, one makes
more.’ We are not sorry to see her tamed down at last, from her pride of
love and beauty, into a wife. She is good-natured and generous, with all
her temptations to the contrary; and her behaviour to Mirabell
reconciles us to her treatment of Witwoud and Petulant, and of her
country admirer, Sir Wilful.

Congreve has described all this in his character of Millamant, but he
has done no more; and if he had, he would have done wrong. He has given
us the finest idea of an artificial character of this kind; but it is
still the reflection of an artificial character. The springs of nature,
passion, or imagination are but feebly touched. The impressions appealed
to, and with masterly address, are habitual, external, and conventional
advantages: the ideas of birth, of fortune, of connexions, of dress,
accomplishment, fashion, the opinion of the world, of crowds of
admirers, continually come into play, flatter our vanity, bribe our
interest, soothe our indolence, fall in with our prejudices;—it is these
that support the goddess of our idolatry, with which she is every thing,
and without which she would be nothing. The mere fine lady of comedy,
compared with the heroine of romance or poetry, when stripped of her
adventitious ornaments and advantages, is too much like the doll
stripped of its finery. In thinking of Millamant, we think almost as
much of her dress as of her person: it is not so with respect to
Rosalind or Perdita. The poet has painted them differently; in colours
which ‘nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on,’ with health, with
innocence, with gaiety, ‘wild wit, invention ever new;’ with pure red
and white, like the wilding’s blossoms; with warbled wood-notes, like
the feathered choir’s; with thoughts fluttering on the wings of
imagination, and hearts panting and breathless with eager delight. The
interest we feel is in themselves; the admiration they excite is for
themselves. They do not depend upon the drapery of circumstances. It is
nature that ‘blazons herself’ in them. Imogen is the same in a lonely
cave as in a court; nay more, for she there seems something heavenly—a
spirit or a vision; and, as it were, shames her destiny, brighter for
the foil of circumstances. Millamant is nothing but a fine lady; and all
her airs and affectation would be blown away with the first breath of
misfortune. Enviable in drawing-rooms, adorable at her toilette,
fashion, like a witch, has thrown its spell around her; but if that
spell were broken, her power of fascination would be gone. For that
reason I think the character better adapted for the stage: it is more
artificial, more theatrical, more meretricious. I would rather have seen
Mrs. Abington’s Millamant, than any Rosalind that ever appeared on the
stage. Some how, this sort of acquired elegance is more a thing of
costume, of air and manner; and in comedy, or on the comic stage, the
light and familiar, the trifling, superficial, and agreeable, bears,
perhaps, rightful sway over that which touches the affections, or
exhausts the fancy.—There is a callousness in the worst characters in
the Way of the World, in Fainall, and his wife and Mrs. Marwood, not
very pleasant; and a grossness in the absurd ones, such as Lady Wishfort
and Sir Wilful, which is not a little amusing. Witwoud wishes to
declaim, as far as he can, his relationship to this last character, and
says, ‘he’s but his half-brother;’ to which Mirabell makes answer—‘Then,
perhaps, he’s but half a fool.’ Peg is an admirable caricature of rustic
awkwardness and simplicity, which is carried to excess without any
offence, from a sense of contrast to the refinement of the chief
characters in the play. The description of Lady Wishfort’s face is a
perfect piece of painting. The force of style in this author at times
amounts to poetry. Waitwell, who personates Sir Rowland, and Foible, his
accomplice in the matrimonial scheme upon her mistress, hang as a dead
weight upon the plot. They are mere tools in the hands of Mirabell, and
want life and interest. Congreve’s characters can all of them speak
well, they are mere machines when they come to act. Our author’s
superiority deserted him almost entirely with his wit. His serious and
tragic poetry is frigid and jejune to an unaccountable degree. His
_forte_ was the description of actual manners, whether elegant or
absurd; and when he could not deride the one or embellish the other, his
attempts at romantic passion or imaginary enthusiasm are forced,
abortive, and ridiculous, or common-place. The description of the ruins
of a temple in the beginning of the Mourning Bride, was a great stretch
of his poetic genius. It has, however, been over-rated, particularly by
Dr. Johnson, who could have done nearly as well himself for a single
passage in the same style of moralising and sentimental description. To
justify this general censure, and to shew how the lightest and most
graceful wit degenerates into the heaviest and most bombastic poetry, I
will give one description out of his tragedy, which will be enough. It
is the speech which Gonsalez addresses to Almeria:

       ‘Be every day of your long life like this.
       The sun, bright conquest, and your brighter eyes
       Have all conspired to blaze promiscuous light,
       And bless this day with most unequal lustre.
       Your royal father, my victorious lord,
       Loaden with spoils, and ever-living laurel,
       Is entering now, in martial pomp, the palace.
       Five hundred mules precede his solemn march,
       Which groan beneath the weight of Moorish wealth.
       Chariots of war, adorn’d with glittering gems,
       Succeed; and next, a hundred neighing steeds,
       White as the fleecy rain on Alpine hills;
       That bound, and foam, and champ the golden bit,
       As they disdain’d the victory they grace.
       Prisoners of war in shining fetters follow:
       And captains of the noblest blood of Afric
       Sweat by his chariot-wheels, and lick and grind,
       With gnashing teeth, the dust his triumphs raise.
       The swarming populace spread every wall,
       And cling, as if with claws they did enforce
       Their hold, through clifted stones stretching and staring
       As if they were all eyes, and every limb
       Would feed its faculty of admiration,
       While you alone retire, and shun this sight;
       This sight, which is indeed not seen (though twice
       The multitude should gaze) in absence of your eyes.’

This passage seems, in part, an imitation of Bolingbroke’s entry into
London. The style is as different from Shakspeare, as it is from that of
Witwoud and Petulant. It is plain that the imagination of the author
could not raise itself above the burlesque. His Mask of Semele, Judgment
of Paris, and other occasional poems, are even worse. I would not advise
any one to read them, or if I did, they would not.

Wycherley was before Congreve; and his Country Wife will last longer
than any thing of Congreve’s as a popular acting play. It is only a pity
that it is not entirely his own; but it is enough so to do him
never-ceasing honour, for the best things are his own. His humour is, in
general, broader, his characters more natural, and his incidents more
striking than Congreve’s. It may be said of Congreve, that the
workmanship overlays the materials: in Wycherley, the casting of the
parts and the fable are alone sufficient to ensure success. We forget
Congreve’s characters, and only remember what they say: we remember
Wycherley’s characters, and the incidents they meet with, just as if
they were real, and forget what they say, comparatively speaking. Miss
Peggy (or Mrs. Margery Pinchwife) is a character that will last for
ever, I should hope; and even when the original is no more, if that
should ever be, while self-will, curiosity, art, and ignorance are to be
found in the same person, it will be just as good and as intelligible as
ever in the description, because it is built on first principles, and
brought out in the fullest and broadest manner. Agnes, in Moliere’s
play, has a great deal of the same unconscious impulse and heedless
_naïveté_, but hers is sentimentalised and varnished over (in the French
fashion) with long-winded apologies and analytical distinctions. It
wants the same simple force and _home_ truth. It is not so direct and
downright. Miss Peggy is not even a novice in casuistry: she blurts out
her meaning before she knows what she is saying, and she speaks her mind
by her actions oftener than by her words. The outline of the plot is the
same; but the point-blank hits and master-strokes, the sudden thoughts
and delightful expedients, such as her changing the letters, the meeting
her husband plump in the Park, as she is running away from him as fast
as her heels can carry her, her being turned out of doors by her jealous
booby of a husband, and sent by him to her lover disguised as Alicia,
her sisterin-law—occur first in the modern play. There are scarcely any
incidents or situations on the stage, which tell like these for
pantomimic effect, which give such a tingling to the blood, or so
completely take away the breath with expectation and surprise. Miss
Prue, in Love for Love, is a lively reflection of Miss Peggy, but
without the bottom and weight of metal. Hoyden is a match for her in
constitution and complete effect, as Corinna, in the Confederacy, is in
mischief, but without the wit. Mrs. Jordan used to play all these
characters; and as she played them, it was hard to know which was best.
Pinchwife, or Moody, (as he is at present called) is, like others of
Wycherley’s moral characters, too rustic, abrupt, and cynical. He is a
more disagreeable, but less tedious character than the husband of Agnes,
and both seem, by all accounts, to have been rightly served. The
character of Sparkish is quite new, and admirably hit off. He is an
exquisite and suffocating coxcomb; a pretender to wit and letters,
without common understanding, or the use of his senses. The class of
character is thoroughly exposed and understood; but he persists in his
absurd conduct so far, that it becomes extravagant and disgusting, if
not incredible, from mere weakness and foppery. Yet there is something
in him that we are inclined to tolerate at first, as his professing that
‘with him a wit is the first title to respect;’ and we regard his
unwillingness to be pushed out of the room, and coming back, in spite of
their teeth, to keep the company of wits and raillers, as a favourable
omen. But he utterly disgraces his pretensions before he has done. With
all his faults and absurdities, he is, however, a much less offensive
character than Tattle.—Horner is a stretch of probability in the first
concoction of that ambiguous character, (for he does not appear at
present on the stage as Wycherley made him) but notwithstanding the
indecency and indirectness of the means he employs to carry his plans
into effect, he deserves every sort of consideration and forgiveness,
both for the display of his own ingenuity, and the deep insight he
discovers into human nature—such as it was in the time of Wycherley. The
author has commented on this character, and the double meaning of the
name in his Plain Dealer, borrowing the remarks, and almost the very
words of Moliere, who has brought forward and defended his own work
against the objections of the precise part of his audience, in his
_Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes_. There is no great harm in these
occasional plagiarisms, except that they make one uncomfortable at other
times, and distrustful of the originality of the whole.—The Plain Dealer
is Wycherley’s next best work; and is a most severe and poignant moral
satire. There is a heaviness about it, indeed, an extravagance, an
overdoing both in the style, the plot, and characters, but the truth of
feeling and the force of interest prevail over every objection. The
character of Manly, the Plain Dealer, is violent, repulsive, and
uncouth, which is a fault, though one that seems to have been intended
for the sake of contrast; for the portrait of consummate, artful
hypocrisy in Olivia, is, perhaps, rendered more striking by it. The
indignation excited against this odious and pernicious quality by the
masterly exposure to which it is here subjected, is ‘a discipline of
humanity.’ No one can read this play attentively without being the
better for it as long as he lives. It penetrates to the core; it shews
the immorality and hateful effects of duplicity, by shewing it fixing
its harpy fangs in the heart of an honest and worthy man. It is worth
ten volumes of sermons. The scenes between Manly after his return,
Olivia, Plausible, and Novel, are instructive examples of unblushing
impudence, of shallow pretensions to principle, and of the most
mortifying reflections on his own situation, and bitter sense of female
injustice and ingratitude, on the part of Manly. The devil of hypocrisy
and hardened assurance seems worked up to the highest pitch of
conceivable effrontery in Olivia, when, after confiding to her cousin
the story of her infamy, she, in a moment, turns round upon her for some
sudden purpose, and affecting not to know the meaning of the other’s
allusions to what she has just told her, reproaches her with forging
insinuations to the prejudice of her character, and in violation of
their friendship. ‘Go! you’re a censorious ill woman.’ This is more
trying to the patience than any thing in the Tartuffe. The name of this
heroine, and her overtures to Fidelia, as the page, seem to have been
suggested by Twelfth Night. It is curious to see how the same subject is
treated by two such different authors as Shakspeare and Wycherley. The
widow Blackacre and her son are like her lawsuit—everlasting. A more
lively, palpable, bustling, ridiculous picture cannot be drawn. Jerry is
a hopeful lad, though undutiful and gets out of bad hands into worse.
Goldsmith evidently had an eye to these two precious characters, in She
Stoops to Conquer. Tony Lumpkin and his mother are of the same family,
and the incident of the theft of the casket of jewels, and the bag of
parchments, is nearly the same in both authors. Wycherley’s other plays
are not so good. The Gentleman Dancing Master is a long, foolish farce,
in the exaggerated manner of Moliere, but without his spirit or
whimsical invention. Love in a Wood, though not what one would wish it
to be for the author’s sake or our own, is much better, and abounds in
several rich and highly-coloured scenes, particularly those in which
Miss Lucy, her mother Crossbite, Dapperwit, and Alderman Gripe are
concerned. Some of the subordinate characters and intrigues in this
comedy are grievously spun out. Wycherley, when he got hold of a good
thing, or sometimes even of a bad one, was determined to make the most
of it; and might have said with Dogberry, truly enough, ‘Had I the
tediousness of a king, I could find in my heart to bestow it all upon
your worships.’ In reading this author’s best works, those which one
reads most frequently over, and knows almost by heart, one cannot help
thinking of the treatment he received from Pope about his verses. It was
hardly excusable in a boy of sixteen to an old man of seventy.

Vanbrugh comes next, and holds his own fully with the best. He is no
writer at all, as to mere authorship; but he makes up for it by a
prodigious fund of comic invention and ludicrous description, bordering
somewhat on caricature. Though he did not borrow from him, he was much
more like Moliere in genius than Wycherley was, who professedly imitated
him. He has none of Congreve’s graceful refinement, and as little of
Wycherley’s serious manner and studied insight into the springs of
character; but his exhibition of it in dramatic contrast and
unlooked-for situations, where the different parties play upon one
another’s failings, and into one another’s hands, keeping up the jest
like a game at battledore and shuttlecock, and urging it to the utmost
verge of breathless extravagance, in the mere eagerness of the fray, is
beyond that of any other of our writers. His fable is not so profoundly
laid, nor his characters so well digested as Wycherley’s (who, in these
respects, bore some resemblance to Fielding). Vanbrugh does not lay the
same deliberate train from the outset to the conclusion, so that the
whole may hang together, and tend inevitably from the combination of
different agents and circumstances to the same decisive point: but he
works out scene after scene, on the spur of the occasion, and from the
immediate hold they take of his imagination at the moment, without any
previous bias or ultimate purpose, much more powerfully, with more
_verve_, and in a richer vein of original invention. His fancy warms and
burnishes out as if he were engaged in the real scene of action, and
felt all his faculties suddenly called forth to meet the emergency. He
has more nature than art: what he does best, he does because he cannot
help it. He has a masterly eye to the advantages which certain
accidental situations of character present to him on the spot, and he
executes the most difficult and rapid theatrical movements at a moment’s
warning. Of this kind are the inimitable scenes in the Provoked Wife,
between Razor and Mademoiselle, where they repeat and act over again the
rencontre in the Mulberry-walk between Constant and his mistress, than
which nothing was ever more happily conceived, or done to more absolute
perfection; that again in the Relapse, where Loveless pushes Berinthia
into the closet; the sudden meeting in the Confederacy between Dick and
Mrs. Amlet; the altercation about the letter between Flippanta and
Corinna, in the same play, and that again where Brass, at the house of
Gripe the money-scrivener, threatens to discover his friend and
accomplice, and by talking louder and louder to him, as he tries to
evade his demands, extorts a grudging submission from him. This last
scene is as follows:—

  ‘_Dick._ I wish my old hobbling mother han’t been blabbing something
  here she should not do.

  _Brass._ Fear nothing, all’s safe on that side yet. But how speaks
  young mistress’s epistle? soft and tender?

  _Dick._ As pen can write.

  _Brass._ So you think all goes well there?

  _Dick._ As my heart can wish.

  _Brass._ You are sure on’t?

  _Dick._ Sure on’t!

  _Brass._ Why then, ceremony aside—[_Putting on his hat_]—you and I
  must have a little talk, Mr. Amlet.

  _Dick._ Ah, Brass, what art thou going to do? wo’t ruin me?

  _Brass._ Look you, Dick, few words; you are in a smooth way of
  making your fortune; I hope all will roll on. But how do you intend
  matters shall pass ’twixt you and me in this business?

  _Dick._ Death and furies! What a time does take to talk on’t?

  _Brass._ Good words, or I betray you; they have already heard of one
  Mr. Amlet in the house.

  _Dick._ Here’s a son of a whore. [_Aside._

  _Brass._ In short, look smooth, and be a good prince. I am your
  valet, ’tis true: your footman, sometimes, which I’m enraged at; but
  you have always had the ascendant I confess: when we were
  schoolfellows, you made me carry your books, make your exercise, own
  your rogueries, and sometimes take a whipping for you. When we were
  fellow-’prentices, though I was your senior, you made me open the
  shop, clean my master’s shoes, cut last at dinner, and eat all the
  crust. In our sins too, I must own you still kept me under; you
  soar’d up to adultery with the mistress, while I was at humble
  fornication with the maid. Nay, in our punishments you still made
  good your post; for when once upon a time I was sentenced but to be
  whipp’d, I cannot deny but you were condemn’d to be hang’d. So that
  in all times, I must confess, your inclinations have been greater
  and nobler than mine; however, I cannot consent that you should at
  once fix fortune for life, and I dwell in my humilities for the rest
  of my days.

  _Dick._ Hark thee, Brass, if I do not most nobly by thee, I’m a dog.

  _Brass._ And when?

  _Dick._ As soon as ever I am married.

  _Brass._ Ay, the plague take thee.

  _Dick._ Then you mistrust me?

  _Brass._ I do, by my faith. Look you, Sir, some folks we mistrust,
  because we don’t know them: others we mistrust, because we do know
  them: and for one of these reasons I desire there may be a bargain
  beforehand: if not [_raising his voice_] look ye, Dick Amlet—

  _Dick._ Soft, my dear friend and companion. The dog will ruin me
  [_Aside_]. Say, what is’t will content thee?

  _Brass._ O ho!

  _Dick._ But how canst thou be such a barbarian?

  _Brass._ I learnt it at Algiers.

  _Dick._ Come, make thy Turkish demand then.

  _Brass._ You know you gave me a bank-bill this morning to receive
  for you.

  _Dick._ I did so, of fifty pounds; ’tis thine. So, now thou art
  satisfied all is fixed.

  _Brass._ It is not indeed. There’s a diamond necklace you robb’d
  your mother of e’en now.

  _Dick._ Ah, you Jew!

  _Brass._ No words.

  _Dick._ My dear Brass!

  _Brass._ I insist.

  _Dick._ My old friend!

  _Brass._ Dick Amlet [_raising his voice_] I insist.

  _Dick._ Ah, the cormorant [_Aside_].—Well, ’tis thine: thou’lt never
  thrive with it.

  _Brass._ When I find it begins to do me mischief, I’ll give it you
  again. But I must have a wedding suit.

  _Dick._ Well.

  _Brass._ A stock of linen.

  _Dick._ Enough.

  _Brass._ Not yet——a silver-hilted sword.

  _Dick._ Well, thou shalt have that too. Now thou hast every thing.

  _Brass._ Heav’n forgive me, I forgot a ring of remembrance. I would
  not forget all these favours for the world: a sparkling diamond will
  be always playing in my eye, and put me in mind of them.

  _Dick._ This unconscionable rogue! [_Aside_]—Well, I’ll bespeak one
  for thee.

  _Brass._ Brilliant.

  _Dick._ It shall. But if the thing don’t succeed after all—

  _Brass._ I am a man of honour and restore: and so, the treaty being
  finish’d, I strike my flag of defiance, and fall into my respects
  again.’

                                                 [_Takes off his hat._

The Confederacy is a comedy of infinite contrivance and intrigue, with a
matchless spirit of impudence. It is a fine careless _exposé_ of
heartless want of principle: for there is no anger or severity against
vice expressed in it, as in Wycherley. The author’s morality in all
cases (except his Provoked Wife, which was undertaken as a penance for
past peccadillos) sits very loose upon him. It is a little upon the
turn; ‘it does somewhat smack.’ Old Palmer, as Dick Amlet, asking his
mother’s blessing on his knee, was the very idea of a graceless son.—His
sweetheart Corinna is a Miss Prue, but nature works in her more
powerfully.—Lord Foppington, in the Relapse, is a most splendid
caricature: he is a personification of the foppery and folly of dress
and external appearance in full feather. He blazes out and dazzles sober
reason with ridiculous ostentation. Still I think this character is a
copy from Etherege’s Sir Fopling Flutter, and upon the whole, perhaps,
Sir Fopling is the more natural grotesque of the two. His soul is more
in his dress; he is a more disinterested coxcomb. The lord is an
ostentatious, strutting, vain-glorious blockhead: the knight is an
unaffected, self-complacent, serious admirer of his equipage and person.
For instance, what they severally say on the subject of contemplating
themselves in the glass, is a proof of this. Sir Fopling thinks a
looking-glass in the room ‘the best company in the world;’ it is another
self to him: Lord Foppington merely considers it as necessary to adjust
his appearance, that he may make a figure in company. The finery of the
one has an imposing air of grandeur about it, and is studied for effect:
the other is really in love with a laced suit, and is hand and glove
with the newest-cut fashion. He really thinks his tailor or peruke-maker
the greatest man in the world, while his lordship treats them familiarly
as necessary appendages of his person. Still this coxcomb-nobleman’s
effeminacy and mock-heroic vanity are admirably depicted, and held up to
unrivalled ridicule; and his courtship of Miss Hoyden is excellent in
all its stages, and ends oracularly.

_Lord Foppington._—‘Now, for my part, I think the wisest thing a man can
do with an aching heart, is to put on a serene countenance; for a
philosophical air is the most becoming thing in the world to the face of
a person of quality: I will therefore bear my disgrace like a great man,
and let the people see I am above an affront. [_then turning to his
brother_] Dear Tam, since things are thus fallen out, pr’ythee give me
leave to wish thee joy, I do it _de bon cœur_, strike me dumb: you have
married a woman beautiful in her person, charming in her airs, prudent
in her conduct, constant in her inclinations, and of a nice
morality—stap my vitals!’

Poor Hoyden fares ill in his lordship’s description of her, though she
could expect no better at his hands for her desertion of him. She wants
sentiment, to be sure, but she has other qualifications—she is a fine
bouncing piece of flesh and blood. Her first announcement is
decisive—‘Let loose the greyhound, and lock up Hoyden.’ Her declaration,
‘It’s well they’ve got me a husband, or ecod, I’d marry the baker,’
comes from her mouth like a shot from a culverin, and leaves no doubt,
by its effect upon the ear, that she would have made it good in the
sequel, if she had not been provided for. Her indifference to the man
she is to marry, and her attachment to the finery and the title, are
justified by an attentive observation of nature in its simplest guise.
There is, however, no harm in Hoyden; she merely wishes to consult her
own inclination: she is by no means like Corinna in the Confederacy, ‘a
devilish girl at the bottom,’ nor is it her great delight to plague
other people.—Sir Tunbelly Clumsy is the right worshipful and worthy
father of so delicate an offspring. He is a coarse, substantial contrast
to the flippant and flimsy Lord Foppington. If the one is not without
reason ‘proud to be at the head of so prevailing a party’ as that of
coxcombs, the other may look big and console himself (under some
affronts) with being a very competent representative, a knight of the
shire, of the once formidable, though now obsolete class of country
squires, who had no idea beyond the boundaries of their own estates, or
the circumference of their own persons. His unwieldy dulness gives, by
the rule of contraries, a lively sense of lightness and grace: his
stupidity answers all the purposes of wit. His portly paunch repels a
jest like a woolsack: a sarcasm rebounds from him like a ball. His
presence is a cure for gravity; and he is a standing satire upon himself
and the class in natural history to which he belonged.—Sir John Brute,
in the Provoked Wife, is an animal of the same English growth, but of a
cross-grained breed. He has a spice of the demon mixed up with the
brute; is mischievous as well as stupid; has improved his natural parts
by a town education and example; opposes the fine-lady airs and graces
of his wife by brawling oaths, impenetrable surliness, and pot-house
valour; overpowers any tendency she might have to vapours or hysterics,
by the fumes of tobacco and strong beer; and thinks to be master in his
own house by roaring in taverns, reeling home drunk every night,
breaking lamps, and beating the watch. He does not, however, find this
lordly method answer. He turns out to be a coward as well as a bully,
and dares not resent the injuries he has provoked by his unmanly
behaviour. This was Garrick’s favourite part; and I have heard that his
acting in the drunken scene, in which he was disguised not as a
clergyman, but as a woman of the town, which was an alteration of his
own to suit the delicacy of the times, was irresistible. The ironical
conversations in this play between Belinda and Lady Brute, as well as
those in the Relapse between Amanda and her cousin Berinthia, will do to
compare with Congreve in the way of wit and studied raillery, but they
will not stand the comparison. Araminta and Clarissa keep up the ball
between them with more spirit, for their conversation is very like that
of kept-mistresses; and the mixture of fashionable _slang_ and professed
want of principle gives a sort of zest and high seasoning to their
confidential communications, which Vanbrugh could supply as well as any
body. But he could not do without the taint of grossness and
licentiousness. Lady Townly is not the really vicious character, nor
quite the fine lady, which the author would have her to be. Lady Grace
is so far better; she is what she pretends to be, merely _sober_ and
insipid.—Vanbrugh’s _forte_ was not the sentimental or didactic; his
genius flags and grows dull when it is not put into action, and wants
the stimulus of sudden emergency, or the fortuitous collision of
different motives, to call out all its force and vivacity. His
antitheses are happy and brilliant contrasts of character; his _double
entendres_ equivocal situations; his best jokes are practical devices,
not epigrammatic conceits. His wit is that which is emphatically called
_mother-wit_. It brings those who possess it, or to whom he lends it,
into scrapes by its restlessness, and brings them out of them by its
alacrity. Several of his favourite characters are knavish, adroit
adventurers, who have all the gipsy jargon, the cunning impudence, cool
presence of mind, selfishness, and indefatigable industry; all the
excuses, lying, dexterity, the intellectual juggling and legerdemain
tricks, necessary to fit them for this sort of predatory warfare on the
simplicity, follies, or vices of mankind. He discovers the utmost
dramatic generalship in bringing off his characters at a pinch, and by
an instantaneous _ruse de guerre_, when the case seems hopeless in any
other hands. The train of his associations, to express the same thing in
metaphysical language, lies in following the suggestions of his fancy
into every possible connexion of cause and effect, rather than into
every possible combination of likeness or difference. His ablest
characters shew that they are so by displaying their ingenuity, address,
and presence of mind in critical junctures, and in their own affairs,
rather than their wisdom or their wit ‘in intellectual gladiatorship,’
or in speculating on the affairs and characters of other people.

Farquhar’s chief characters are also adventurers; but they are
adventurers of a romantic, not a knavish stamp, and succeed no less by
their honesty than their boldness. They conquer their difficulties, and
effect their ‘hair-breadth ‘scapes’ by the impulse of natural enthusiasm
and the confidence of high principles of gallantry and honour, as much
as by their dexterity and readiness at expedients. They are real
gentlemen, and only pretended impostors. Vanbrugh’s upstart heroes are
without ‘any relish of salvation,’ without generosity, virtue, or any
pretensions to it. We have little sympathy for them, and no respect at
all. But we have every sort of good-will towards Farquhar’s heroes, who
have as many peccadillos to answer for, and play as many rogue’s tricks,
but are honest fellows at bottom. I know little other difference between
these two capital writers and copyists of nature, than that Farquhar’s
nature is the better nature of the two. We seem to like both the author
and his favourites. He has humour, character, and invention, in common
with the other, with a more unaffected gaiety and spirit of enjoyment,
which overflows and sparkles in all he does. He makes us laugh from
pleasure oftener than from malice. He somewhere prides himself in having
introduced on the stage the class of comic heroes here spoken of, which
has since become a standard character, and which represents the
warm-hearted, rattle-brained, thoughtless, high-spirited young fellow,
who floats on the back of his misfortunes without repining, who forfeits
appearances, but saves his honour—and he gives us to understand that it
was his own. He did not need to be ashamed of it. Indeed there is
internal evidence that this sort of character is his own, for it
pervades his works generally, and is the moving spirit that informs
them. His comedies have on this account probably a greater appearance of
truth and nature than almost any others. His incidents succeed one
another with rapidity, but without premeditation; his wit is easy and
spontaneous; his style animated, unembarrassed, and flowing; his
characters full of life and spirit, and never overstrained so as to
‘o’erstep the modesty of nature,’ though they sometimes, from haste and
carelessness, seem left in a crude, unfinished state. There is a
constant ebullition of gay, laughing invention, cordial good humour, and
fine animal spirits, in his writings.

Of the four writers here classed together, we should perhaps have
courted Congreve’s acquaintance most, for his wit and the elegance of
his manners; Wycherley’s, for his sense and observation on human nature;
Vanbrugh’s, for his power of farcical description and telling a story;
Farquhar’s, for the pleasure of his society, and the love of good
fellowship. His fine gentlemen are not gentlemen of fortune and fashion,
like those in Congreve; but are rather ‘God Almighty’s gentlemen.’ His
valets are good fellows: even his chambermaids are some of them
disinterested and sincere. But his fine ladies, it must be allowed, are
not so amiable, so witty, or accomplished, as those in Congreve. Perhaps
they both described women in high-life as they found them: Congreve took
their conversation, Farquhar their conduct. In the way of fashionable
vice and petrifying affectation, there is nothing to come up to his Lady
Lurewell, in the Trip to the Jubilee. She by no means makes good Mr.
Burke’s courtly and chivalrous observation, that the evil of vice
consists principally in its want of refinement; and one benefit of the
dramatic exhibition of such characters is, that they overturn false
maxims of morality, and settle accounts fairly and satisfactorily
between theory and practice. Her lover, Colonel Standard, is indeed an
awkward incumbrance upon so fine a lady: it was a character that the
poet did not like; and he has merely sketched him in, leaving him to
answer for himself as well as he could, which is but badly. We have no
suspicion, either from his conduct, or from any hint dropped by
accident, that he is the first seducer and the possessor of the virgin
affections of Lady Lurewell. The double transformation of this virago
from vice to virtue, and from virtue to vice again, her plausible
pretensions and artful wiles, her violent temper and dissolute passions,
shew a thorough knowledge of the effects both of nature and habit in
making up human character. Farquhar’s own heedless turn for gallantry
would be likely to throw him upon such a character; and his goodness of
heart and sincerity of disposition would teach him to expose its wanton
duplicity and gilded rottenness. Lurewell is almost as abandoned a
character as Olivia, in the Plain Dealer; but the indignation excited
against her is of a less serious and tragic cast. Her peevish disgust
and affected horror at every thing that comes near her, form a very
edifying picture. Her dissatisfaction and _ennui_ are not mere airs and
graces worn for fashion’s sake; but are real and tormenting inmates of
her breast, arising from a surfeit of pleasure and the consciousness of
guilt. All that is hateful in the caprice, ill humour, spite, _hauteur_,
folly, impudence, and affectation of the complete woman of quality, is
contained in the scene between her and her servants in the first act.
The depravity would be intolerable, even in imagination, if the weakness
were not ludicrous in the extreme. It shews, in the highest degree, the
power of circumstances and example to pervert the understanding, the
imagination, and even the senses. The manner in which the character of
the gay, wild, free-hearted, but not altogether profligate or unfeeling
Sir Harry Wildair is played off against the designing, vindictive,
imperious, uncontroulable, and unreasonable humours of Lurewell, in the
scene where she tries to convince him of his wife’s infidelity, while he
stops his ears to her pretended proofs, is not surpassed in modern
comedy. I shall give it here:—

  ‘_Wildair._ Now, dear madam, I have secur’d my brother, you have
  dispos’d of the colonel, and we’ll rail at love till we ha’n’t a
  word more to say.

  _Lurewell._ Ay, Sir Harry. Please to sit a little, Sir. You must
  know I’m in a strange humour of asking you some questions. How did
  you like your lady, pray, Sir?

  _Wild._ Like her! Ha, ha, ha. So very well, faith, that for her very
  sake I’m in love with every woman I meet.

  _Lure._ And did matrimony please you extremely?

  _Wild._ So very much, that if polygamy were allow’d, I would have a
  new wife every day.

  _Lure._ Oh, Sir Harry! this is raillery. But your serious thoughts
  upon the matter, pray.

  _Wild._ Why, then, Madam, to give you my true sentiments of wedlock:
  I had a lady that I married by chance, she was virtuous by chance,
  and I lov’d her by great chance. Nature gave her beauty, education
  an air; and fortune threw a young fellow of five-and-twenty in her
  lap. I courted her all day, lov’d her all night; she was my mistress
  one day, and my wife another: I found in one the variety of a
  thousand, and the very confinement of marriage gave me the pleasure
  of change.

  _Lure._ And she was very virtuous.

  _Wild._ Look ye, Madam, you know she was beautiful. She had good
  nature about her mouth, the smile of beauty in her cheeks, sparkling
  wit in her forehead, and sprightly love in her eyes.

  _Lure._ Pshaw! I knew her very well; the woman was well enough. But
  you don’t answer my question, Sir.

  _Wild._ So, Madam, as I told you before, she was young and
  beautiful, I was rich and vigorous; my estate gave a lustre to my
  love, and a swing to our enjoyment; round, like the ring that made
  us one, our golden pleasures circled without end.

  _Lure._ Golden pleasures! Golden fiddlesticks. What d’ye tell me of
  your canting stuff? Was she virtuous, I say?

  _Wild._ Ready to burst with envy; but I will torment thee a little.
  [_Aside._] So, Madam, I powder’d to please her, she dress’d to
  engage me; we toy’d away the morning in amorous nonsense, loll’d
  away the evening in the Park or the playhouse, and all the
  night—hem!

  _Lure._ Look ye, Sir, answer my question, or I shall take it ill.

  _Wild._ Then, Madam, there was never such a pattern of unity. Her
  wants were still prevented by my supplies; my own heart whisper’d me
  her desires, ‘cause she herself was there; no contention ever rose,
  but the dear strife of who should most oblige: no noise about
  authority; for neither would stoop to command, ‘cause both thought
  it glory to obey.

  _Lure._ Stuff! stuff! stuff! I won’t believe a word on’t.

  _Wild._ Ha, ha, ha. Then, Madam, we never felt the yoke of
  matrimony, because our inclinations made us one; a power superior to
  the forms of wedlock. The marriage torch had lost its weaker light
  in the bright flame of mutual love that join’d our hearts before;
  then—

  _Lure._ Hold, hold, Sir; I cannot bear it; Sir Harry, I’m affronted.

  _Wild._ Ha, ha, ha. Affronted!

  _Lure._ Yes, Sir; ’tis an affront to any woman to hear another
  commended; and I will resent it.—In short, Sir Harry, your wife was
  a—

  _Wild._ Buz, Madam—no detraction! I’ll tell you what she was. So
  much an angel in her conduct, that though I saw another in her arms,
  I should have thought the devil had rais’d the phantom, and my more
  conscious reason had given my eyes the lie.

  _Lure._ Very well! Then I a’n’t to be believ’d, it seems. But, d’ye
  hear, Sir?

  _Wild._ Nay, Madam, do you hear! I tell you, ’tis not in the power
  of malice to cast a blot upon her fame; and though the vanity of our
  sex, and the envy of yours, conspir’d both against her honour, I
  would not hear a syllable.

                                                 [_Stopping his ears._

  _Lure._ Why then, as I hope to breathe, you shall hear it. The
  picture! the picture! the picture!

                                                     [_Bawling aloud._

  _Wild._ Ran, tan, tan. A pistol-bullet from ear to ear.

  _Lure._ That picture which you had just now from the French marquis
  for a thousand pound; that very picture did your very virtuous wife
  send to the marquis as a pledge of her very virtuous and dying
  affection. So that you are both robb’d of your honour, and cheated
  of your money.

                                                             [_Aloud._

  _Wild._ Louder, louder, Madam.

  _Lure._ I tell you, Sir, your wife was a jilt; I know it, I’ll swear
  it. She virtuous! she was a devil!

  _Wild._ [_Sings._] Tal, al, deral.

  _Lure._ Was ever the like seen! He won’t hear me. I burst with
  malice, and now he won’t mind me! Won’t you hear me yet?

  _Wild._ No, no, Madam.

  _Lure._ Nay, then I can’t bear it. [_Bursts out a crying._] Sir, I
  must say that you’re an unworthy person, to use a woman of quality
  at this rate, when she has her heart full of malice; I don’t know
  but it may make me miscarry. Sir, I say again and again, that she
  was no better than one of us, and I know it; I have seen it with my
  eyes, so I have.

  _Wild._ Good heav’ns deliver me, I beseech thee. How shall I ’scape!

  _Lure._ Will you hear me yet? Dear Sir Harry, do but hear me; I’m
  longing to speak.

  _Wild._ Oh! I have it.—Hush, hush, hush.

  _Lure._ Eh! what’s the matter?

  _Wild._ A mouse! a mouse! a mouse!

  _Lure._ Where? where? where?

  _Wild._ Your petticoats, your petticoats, Madam. [_Lurewell shrieks
  and runs._] O my head! I was never worsted by a woman before. But I
  have heard so much to know the marquis to be a villain.
  [_Knocking._] Nay, then, I must run for’t. [_Runs out, and
  returns._] The entry is stopt by a chair coming in; and something
  there is in that chair that I will discover, if I can find a place
  to hide myself. [_Goes to the closet door._] Fast! I have keys about
  me for most locks about St. James’s. Let me see. [_Tries one key._]
  No, no; this opens my Lady Planthorn’s back-door. [_Tries another._]
  Nor this; this is the key to my Lady Stakeall’s garden. [_Tries a
  third._] Ay, ay, this does it, faith. [_Goes into the closet._]’

The dialogue between Cherry and Archer, in the Beaux’ Stratagem, in
which she repeats her well-conned love catechism, is as good as this,
but not so fit to be repeated any where but on the stage. The Beaux’
Stratagem is the best of his plays, as a whole; infinitely lively,
bustling, and full of point and interest. The assumed disguise of the
two principal characters, Archer and Aimwell, is a perpetual amusement
to the mind. Scrub is an indispensable appendage to a country
gentleman’s kitchen, and an exquisite confidant for the secrets of young
ladies. The Recruiting Officer is not one of Farquhar’s best comedies,
though it is light and entertaining. It contains chiefly sketches and
hints of characters; and the conclusion of the plot is rather lame. He
informs us, in the dedication to the published play, that it was founded
on some local and personal circumstances that happened in Shropshire,
where he was himself a recruiting officer; and it seems not unlikely,
that most of the scenes actually took place at the foot of the Wrekin.
The Inconstant is much superior to it. The romantic interest and
impressive catastrophe of this play I thought had been borrowed from the
more poetical and tragedy-practised muse of Beaumont and Fletcher; but I
find they are taken from an actual circumstance which took place in the
author’s knowledge, at Paris. His other pieces, Love and a Bottle, and
the Twin Rivals, are not on a par with these; and are no longer in
possession of the stage. The public are, after all, not the worst
judges.—Farquhar’s Letters, prefixed to the collection of his plays, are
lively, good humoured, and sensible; and contain, among other things, an
admirable exposition of the futility of the dramatic unities of time and
place. This criticism preceded Dennis’s remarks on that subject, in his
Strictures on Mr. Addison’s Cato; and completely anticipates all that
Dr. Johnson has urged so unanswerably on the subject, in his preface to
Shakspeare.

We may date the decline of English comedy from the time of Farquhar. For
this several causes might be assigned in the political and moral changes
of the times; but among other minor ones, Jeremy Collier, in his View of
the English Stage, frightened the poets, and did all he could to spoil
the stage, by pretending to reform it; that is, by making it an echo of
the pulpit, instead of a reflection of the manners of the world. He
complains bitterly of the profaneness of the stage; and is for fining
the actors for every oath they utter, to put an end to the practice; as
if common swearing had been an invention of the poets and stage-players.
He cannot endure that the fine gentlemen drink, and the fine ladies
intrigue, in the scenes of Congreve and Wycherley, when things so
contrary to law and gospel happened nowhere else. He is vehement against
duelling, as a barbarous custom, of which the example is suffered with
impunity nowhere but on the stage. He is shocked at the number of
fortunes that are irreparably ruined by the vice of gaming on the boards
of the theatres. He seems to think that every breach of the ten
commandments begins and ends there. He complains that the tame husbands
of his time are laughed at on the stage, and that the successful
gallants triumph, which was without precedent either in the city or the
court. He does not think it enough that the stage ‘shews vice its own
image, scorn its own feature,’ unless they are damned at the same
instant, and carried off (like Don Juan) by real devils to the infernal
regions, before the faces of the spectators. It seems that the author
would have been contented to be present at a comedy or a farce, like a
Father Inquisitor, if there was to be an _auto da fé_ at the end, to
burn both the actors and the poet. This sour, nonjuring critic has a
great horror and repugnance at poor human nature, in nearly all its
shapes; of the existence of which he appears only to be aware through
the stage: and this he considers as the only exception to the practice
of piety, and the performance of the whole duty of man; and seems fully
convinced, that if this nuisance were abated, the whole world would be
regulated according to the creed and the catechism.—This is a strange
blindness and infatuation! He forgets, in his overheated zeal, two
things: First, That the stage must be copied from real life, that the
manners represented there must exist elsewhere, and ‘denote a foregone
conclusion,’ to satisfy common sense.—Secondly, That the stage cannot
shock common decency, according to the notions that prevail of it in any
age or country, because the exhibition is public. If the pulpit, for
instance, had banished all vice and imperfection from the world, as our
critic would suppose, we should not have seen the offensive reflection
of them on the stage, which he resents as an affront to the cloth, and
an outrage on religion. On the contrary, with such a sweeping
reformation as this theory implies, the office of the preacher, as well
as of the player, would be gone; and if the common peccadillos of lying,
swearing, intriguing, fighting, drinking, gaming, and other such
obnoxious dramatic common-places, were once fairly got rid of in
reality, neither the comic poet would be able to laugh at them on the
stage, nor our good-natured author to consign them over to damnation
elsewhere. The work is, however, written with ability, and did much
mischief: it produced those _do-me-good_, lack-a-daisical, whining,
make-believe comedies in the next age, (such as Steele’s Conscious
Lovers, and others,) which are enough to set one to sleep, and where the
author tries in vain to be merry and wise in the same breath; in which
the utmost stretch of licentiousness goes no farther than the gallant’s
being suspected of keeping a mistress, and the highest proof of courage
is given in his refusing to accept a challenge.

In looking into the old editions of the comedies of the last age, I find
the names of the best actors of those times, of whom scarcely any record
is left but in Colley Cibber’s Life, and the monument to Mrs. Oldfield,
in Westminster Abbey; which Voltaire reckons among the proofs of the
liberality, wisdom, and politeness of the English nation:—

                     ‘Let no rude hand deface it,
                     And its forlorn _hic jacet_.’

Authors after their deaths live in their works; players only in their
epitaphs and the breath of common tradition. They ‘die and leave the
world no copy.’ Their uncertain popularity is as short-lived as it is
dazzling: and in a few years nothing is known of them but that _they
were_.

                               LECTURE V
                      ON THE PERIODICAL ESSAYISTS

                  ‘THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND IS MAN’

I now come to speak of that sort of writing which has been so
successfully cultivated in this country by our periodical Essayists, and
which consists in applying the talents and resources of the mind to all
that mixed mass of human affairs, which, though not included under the
head of any regular art, science, or profession, falls under the
cognizance of the writer, and ‘comes home to the business and bosoms of
men.’ _Quicquid agunt homines nostri farrago libelli_, is the general
motto of this department of literature. It does not treat of minerals or
fossils, of the virtues of plants, or the influence of planets; it does
not meddle with forms of belief, or systems of philosophy, nor launch
into the world of spiritual existences; but it makes familiar with the
world of men and women, records their actions, assigns their motives,
exhibits their whims, characterises their pursuits in all their singular
and endless variety, ridicules their absurdities, exposes their
inconsistencies, ‘holds the mirror up to nature, and shews the very age
and body of the time its form and pressure;’ takes minutes of our dress,
air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shews us what we are, and what
we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by
making us enlightened spectators of its many-coloured scenes, enables us
(if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which
we have to perform a part. ‘The act and practic part of life is thus
made the mistress of our theorique.’ It is the best and most natural
course of study. It is in morals and manners what the experimental is in
natural philosophy, as opposed to the dogmatical method. It does not
deal in sweeping clauses of proscription and anathema, but in nice
distinctions and liberal constructions. It makes up its general accounts
from details, its few theories from many facts. It does not try to prove
all black or all white as it wishes, but lays on the intermediate
colours, (and most of them not unpleasing ones,) as it finds them
blended with ‘the web of our life, which is of a mingled yarn, good and
ill together.’ It inquires what human life is and has been, to shew what
it ought to be. It follows it into courts and camps, into town and
country, into rustic sports or learned disputations, into the various
shades of prejudice or ignorance, of refinement or barbarism, into its
private haunts or public pageants, into its weaknesses and littlenesses,
its professions and its practices—before it pretends to distinguish
right from wrong, or one thing from another. How, indeed, should it do
so otherwise?

         ‘Quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non,
         Plenius et melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit.’

The writers I speak of are, if not moral philosophers, moral historians,
and that’s better: or if they are both, they found the one character
upon the other; their premises precede their conclusions; and we put
faith in their testimony, for we know that it is true.

Montaigne was the first person who in his Essays led the way to this
kind of writing among the moderns. The great merit of Montaigne then
was, that he may be said to have been the first who had the courage to
say as an author what he felt as a man. And as courage is generally the
effect of conscious strength, he was probably led to do so by the
richness, truth, and force of his own observations on books and men. He
was, in the truest sense, a man of original mind, that is, he had the
power of looking at things for himself, or as they really were, instead
of blindly trusting to, and fondly repeating what others told him that
they were. He got rid of the go-cart of prejudice and affectation, with
the learned lumber that follows at their heels, because he could do
without them. In taking up his pen he did not set up for a philosopher,
wit, orator, or moralist, but he became all these by merely daring to
tell us whatever passed through his mind, in its naked simplicity and
force, that he thought any ways worth communicating. He did not, in the
abstract character of an author, undertake to say all that could be said
upon a subject, but what in his capacity as an inquirer after truth he
happened to know about it. He was neither a pedant nor a bigot. He
neither supposed that he was bound to know all things, nor that all
things were bound to conform to what he had fancied or would have them
to be. In treating of men and manners, he spoke of them as he found
them, not according to preconceived notions and abstract dogmas; and he
began by teaching us what he himself was. In criticising books he did
not compare them with rules and systems, but told us what he saw to like
or dislike in them. He did not take his standard of excellence
‘according to an exact scale’ of Aristotle, or fall out with a work that
was good for any thing, because ‘not one of the angles at the four
corners was a right one.’ He was, in a word, the first author who was
not a book-maker, and who wrote not to make converts of others to
established creeds and prejudices, but to satisfy his own mind of the
truth of things. In this respect we know not which to be most charmed
with, the author or the man. There is an inexpressible frankness and
sincerity, as well as power, in what he writes. There is no attempt at
imposition or concealment, no juggling tricks or solemn mouthing, no
laboured attempts at proving himself always in the right, and every body
else in the wrong; he says what is uppermost, lays open what floats at
the top or the bottom of his mind, and deserves Pope’s character of him,
where he professes to

            ‘——pour out all as plain
            As downright Shippen, or as old Montaigne.’[17]

He does not converse with us like a pedagogue with his pupil, whom he
wishes to make as great a blockhead as himself, but like a philosopher
and friend who has passed through life with thought and observation, and
is willing to enable others to pass through it with pleasure and profit.
A writer of this stamp, I confess, appears to me as much superior to a
common bookworm, as a library of real books is superior to a mere
book-case, painted and lettered on the outside with the names of
celebrated works. As he was the first to attempt this new way of
writing, so the same strong natural impulse which prompted the
undertaking, carried him to the end of his career. The same force and
honesty of mind which urged him to throw off the shackles of custom and
prejudice, would enable him to complete his triumph over them. He has
left little for his successors to achieve in the way of just and
original speculation on human life. Nearly all the thinking of the two
last centuries of that kind which the French denominate _morale
observatrice_, is to be found in Montaigne’s Essays: there is the germ,
at least, and generally much more. He sowed the seed and cleared away
the rubbish, even where others have reaped the fruit, or cultivated and
decorated the soil to a greater degree of nicety and perfection. There
is no one to whom the old Latin adage is more applicable than to
Montaigne, ‘_Pereant isti qui ante nos nostra dixerunt_.’ There has been
no new impulse given to thought since his time. Among the specimens of
criticisms on authors which he has left us, are those on Virgil, Ovid,
and Boccaccio, in the account of books which he thinks worth reading, or
(which is the same thing) which he finds he can read in his old age, and
which may be reckoned among the few criticisms which are worth reading
at any age.[18]

Montaigne’s Essays were translated into English by Charles Cotton, who
was one of the wits and poets of the age of Charles II.; and Lord
Halifax, one of the noble critics of that day, declared it to be ‘the
book in the world he was the best pleased with.’ This mode of familiar
Essay-writing, free from the trammels of the schools, and the airs of
professed authorship, was successfully imitated, about the same time, by
Cowley and Sir William Temple, in their miscellaneous Essays, which are
very agreeable and learned talking upon paper. Lord Shaftesbury, on the
contrary, who aimed at the same easy, _degagé_ mode of communicating his
thoughts to the world, has quite spoiled his matter, which is sometimes
valuable, by his manner, in which he carries a certain flaunting,
flowery, figurative, flirting style of amicable condescension to the
reader, to an excess more tantalising than the most starched and
ridiculous formality of the age of James I. There is nothing so
tormenting as the affectation of ease and freedom from affectation.

The ice being thus thawed, and the barrier that kept authors at a
distance from common sense and feeling broken through, the transition
was not difficult from Montaigne and his imitators, to our Periodical
Essayists. These last applied the same unrestrained expression of their
thoughts to the more immediate and passing scenes of life, to temporary
and local matters; and in order to discharge the invidious office of
_Censor Morum_ more freely, and with less responsibility, assumed some
fictitious and humorous disguise, which, however, in a great degree
corresponded to their own peculiar habits and character. By thus
concealing their own name and person under the title of the Tatler,
Spectator, &c. they were enabled to inform us more fully of what was
passing in the world, while the dramatic contrast and ironical point of
view to which the whole is subjected, added a greater liveliness and
_piquancy_ to the descriptions. The philosopher and wit here commences
newsmonger, makes himself master of ‘the perfect spy o’ th’ time,’ and
from his various walks and turns through life, brings home little
curious specimens of the humours, opinions, and manners of his
contemporaries, as the botanist brings home different plants and weeds,
or the mineralogist different shells and fossils, to illustrate their
several theories, and be useful to mankind.

The first of these papers that was attempted in this country was set up
by Steele in the beginning of the last century; and of all our
periodical Essayists, the _Tatler_ (for that was the name he assumed)
has always appeared to me the most amusing and agreeable. Montaigne,
whom I have proposed to consider as the father of this kind of personal
authorship among the moderns, in which the reader is admitted behind the
curtain, and sits down with the writer in his gown and slippers, was a
most magnanimous and undisguised egotist; but Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.
was the more disinterested gossip of the two. The French author is
contented to describe the peculiarities of his own mind and
constitution, which he does with a copious and unsparing hand. The
English journalist good-naturedly lets you into the secret both of his
own affairs and those of others. A young lady, on the other side Temple
Bar, cannot be seen at her glass for half a day together, but Mr.
Bickerstaff takes due notice of it; and he has the first intelligence of
the symptoms of the _belle_ passion appearing in any young gentleman at
the West-end of the town. The departures and arrivals of widows with
handsome jointures, either to bury their grief in the country, or to
procure a second husband in town, are punctually recorded in his pages.
He is well acquainted with the celebrated beauties of the preceding age
at the court of Charles II.; and the old gentleman (as he feigns
himself) often grows romantic in recounting ‘the disastrous strokes
which his youth suffered’ from the glances of their bright eyes, and
their unaccountable caprices. In particular, he dwells with a secret
satisfaction on the recollection of one of his mistresses, who left him
for a richer rival, and whose constant reproach to her husband, on
occasion of any quarrel between them, was ‘I, that might have married
the famous Mr. Bickerstaff, to be treated in this manner!’ The club at
the Trumpet consists of a set of persons almost as well worth knowing as
himself. The cavalcade of the justice of the peace, the knight of the
shire, the country squire, and the young gentleman, his nephew, who came
to wait on him at his chambers, in such form and ceremony, seem not to
have settled the order of their precedence to this hour;[19] and I
should hope that the upholsterer and his companions, who used to sun
themselves in the Green Park, and who broke their rest and fortunes to
maintain the balance of power in Europe, stand as fair a chance for
immortality as some modern politicians. Mr. Bickerstaff himself is a
gentleman and a scholar, a humourist, and a man of the world; with a
great deal of nice easy _naïveté_ about him. If he walks out and is
caught in a shower of rain, he makes amends for this unlucky accident by
a criticism on the shower in Virgil, and concludes with a burlesque copy
of verses on a city-shower. He entertains us, when he dates from his own
apartment, with a quotation from Plutarch, or a moral reflection; from
the Grecian coffee-house with politics; and from Wills’, or the Temple,
with the poets and players, the beaux and men of wit and pleasure about
town. In reading the pages of the Tatler, we seem as if suddenly carried
back to the age of Queen Anne, of toupees and full-bottomed periwigs.
The whole appearance of our dress and manners undergoes a delightful
metamorphosis. The beaux and the belles are of a quite different species
from what they are at present; we distinguish the dappers, the smarts,
and the pretty fellows, as they pass by Mr. Lilly’s shop-windows in the
Strand; we are introduced to Betterton and Mrs. Oldfield behind the
scenes; are made familiar with the persons and performances of Will
Estcourt or Tom Durfey; we listen to a dispute at a tavern, on the
merits of the Duke of Marlborough, or Marshal Turenne; or are present at
the first rehearsal of a play by Vanbrugh, or the reading of a new poem
by Mr. Pope. The privilege of thus virtually transporting ourselves to
past times, is even greater than that of visiting distant places in
reality. London, a hundred years ago, would be much better worth seeing
than Paris at the present moment.

It will be said, that all this is to be found, in the same or a greater
degree, in the Spectator. For myself, I do not think so; or at least,
there is in the last work a much greater proportion of commonplace
matter. I have, on this account, always preferred the Tatler to the
Spectator. Whether it is owing to my having been earlier or better
acquainted with the one than the other, my pleasure in reading these two
admirable works is not in proportion to their comparative reputation.
The Tatler contains only half the number of volumes, and, I will venture
to say, nearly an equal quantity of sterling wit and sense. ‘The first
sprightly runnings’ are there; it has more of the original spirit, more
of the freshness and stamp of nature. The indications of character and
strokes of humour are more true and frequent; the reflections that
suggest themselves arise more from the occasion, and are less spun out
into regular dissertations. They are more like the remarks which occur
in sensible conversation, and less like a lecture. Something is left to
the understanding of the reader. Steele seems to have gone into his
closet chiefly to set down what he observed out of doors. Addison seems
to have spent most of his time in his study, and to have spun out and
wire-drawn the hints, which he borrowed from Steele, or took from
nature, to the utmost. I am far from wishing to depreciate Addison’s
talents, but I am anxious to do justice to Steele, who was, I think,
upon the whole, a less artificial and more original writer. The humorous
descriptions of Steele resemble loose sketches, or fragments of a
comedy; those of Addison are rather comments or ingenious paraphrases on
the genuine text. The characters of the club not only in the Tatler, but
in the Spectator, were drawn by Steele. That of Sir Roger de Coverley is
among the number. Addison has, however, gained himself immortal honour
by his manner of filling up this last character. Who is there that can
forget, or be insensible to, the inimitable nameless graces and varied
traits of nature and of old English character in it—to his unpretending
virtues and amiable weaknesses—to his modesty, generosity, hospitality,
and eccentric whims—to the respect of his neighbours, and the affection
of his domestics—to his wayward, hopeless, secret passion for his fair
enemy, the widow, in which there is more of real romance and true
delicacy, than in a thousand tales of knight-errantry—(we perceive the
hectic flush of his cheek, the faltering of his tongue in speaking of
her bewitching airs and ‘the whiteness of her hand’)—to the havoc he
makes among the game in his neighbourhood—to his speech from the bench,
to shew the Spectator what is thought of him in the country—to his
unwillingness to be put up as a sign-post, and his having his own
likeness turned into the Saracen’s head—to his gentle reproof of the
baggage of a gipsy that tells him ‘he has a widow in his line of
life’—to his doubts as to the existence of witchcraft, and protection of
reputed witches—to his account of the family pictures, and his choice of
a chaplain—to his falling asleep at church, and his reproof of John
Williams, as soon as he recovered from his nap, for talking in
sermon-time. The characters of Will. Wimble, and Will. Honeycomb are not
a whit behind their friend, Sir Roger, in delicacy and felicity. The
delightful simplicity and good-humoured officiousness in the one, are
set off by the graceful affectation and courtly pretension in the other.
How long since I first became acquainted with these two characters in
the Spectator! What old-fashioned friends they seem, and yet I am not
tired of them, like so many other friends, nor they of me! How airy
these abstractions of the poet’s pen stream over the dawn of our
acquaintance with human life! how they glance their fairest colours on
the prospect before us! how pure they remain in it to the last, like the
rainbow in the evening-cloud, which the rude hand of time and experience
can neither soil nor dissipate! What a pity that we cannot find the
reality, and yet if we did, the dream would be over. I once thought I
knew a Will. Wimble, and a Will. Honeycomb, but they turned out but
indifferently; the originals in the Spectator still read, word for word,
the same that they always did. We have only to turn to the page, and
find them where we left them!—Many of the most exquisite pieces in the
Tatler, it is to be observed, are Addison’s, as the Court of Honour, and
the Personification of Musical Instruments, with almost all those papers
that form regular sets or series. I do not know whether the picture of
the family of an old college acquaintance, in the Tatler, where the
children run to let Mr. Bickerstaff in at the door, and where the one
that loses the race that way, turns back to tell the father that he is
come; with the nice gradation of incredulity in the little boy, who is
got into Guy of Warwick, and the Seven Champions, and who shakes his
head at the improbability of Æsop’s Fables, is Steele’s or Addison’s,
though I believe it belongs to the former. The account of the two
sisters, one of whom held up her head higher than ordinary, from having
on a pair of flowered garters, and that of the married lady who
complained to the Tatler of the neglect of her husband, with her answers
to some _home_ questions that were put to her, are unquestionably
Steele’s.—If the Tatler is not inferior to the Spectator as a record of
manners and character, it is superior to it in the interest of many of
the stories. Several of the incidents related there by Steele have never
been surpassed in the heart-rending pathos of private distress. I might
refer to those of the lover and his mistress, when the theatre, in which
they were, caught fire; of the bridegroom, who by accident kills his
bride on the day of their marriage; the story of Mr. Eustace and his
wife; and the fine dream about his own mistress when a youth. What has
given its superior reputation to the Spectator, is the greater gravity
of its pretensions, its moral dissertations and critical reasonings, by
which I confess myself less edified than by other things, which are
thought more lightly of. Systems and opinions change, but nature is
always true. It is the moral and didactic tone of the Spectator which
makes us apt to think of Addison (according to Mandeville’s sarcasm) as
‘a parson in a tie-wig.’ Many of his moral Essays are, however,
exquisitely beautiful and quite happy. Such are the reflections on
cheerfulness, those in Westminster Abbey, on the Royal Exchange, and
particularly some very affecting ones on the death of a young lady in
the fourth volume. These, it must be allowed, are the perfection of
elegant sermonising. His critical Essays are not so good. I prefer
Steele’s occasional selection of beautiful poetical passages, without
any affectation of analysing their beauties, to Addison’s finer-spun
theories. The best criticism in the Spectator, that on the Cartoons of
Raphael, of which Mr. Fuseli has availed himself with great spirit in
his Lectures, is by Steele.[20] I owed this acknowledgment to a writer
who has so often put me in good humour with myself, and every thing
about me, when few things else could, and when the tomes of casuistry
and ecclesiastical history, with which the little duodecimo volumes of
the Tatler were overwhelmed and surrounded, in the only library to which
I had access when a boy, had tried their tranquillising effects upon me
in vain. I had not long ago in my hands, by favour of a friend, an
original copy of the quarto edition of the Tatler, with a list of the
subscribers. It is curious to see some names there which we should
hardly think of, (that of Sir Isaac Newton is among them,) and also to
observe the degree of interest excited by those of the different
persons, which is not determined according to the rules of the Herald’s
College. One literary name lasts as long as a whole race of heroes and
their descendants! The Guardian, which followed the Spectator, was, as
may be supposed, inferior to it.

The dramatic and conversational turn which forms the distinguishing
feature and greatest charm of the Spectator and Tatler, is quite lost in
the Rambler by Dr. Johnson. There is no reflected light thrown on human
life from an assumed character, nor any direct one from a display of the
author’s own. The Tatler and Spectator are, as it were, made up of notes
and memorandums of the events and incidents of the day, with finished
studies after nature, and characters fresh from the life, which the
writer moralises upon, and turns to account as they come before him: the
Rambler is a collection of moral Essays, or scholastic theses, written
on set subjects, and of which the individual characters and incidents
are merely artificial illustrations, brought in to give a pretended
relief to the dryness of didactic discussion. The Rambler is a splendid
and imposing common-place book of general topics, and rhetorical
declamation on the conduct and business of human life. In this sense,
there is hardly a reflection that had been suggested on such subjects
which is not to be found in this celebrated work, and there is, perhaps,
hardly a reflection to be found in it which had not been already
suggested and developed by some other author, or in the common course of
conversation. The mass of intellectual wealth here heaped together is
immense, but it is rather the result of gradual accumulation, the
produce of the general intellect, labouring in the mine of knowledge and
reflection, than dug out of the quarry, and dragged into the light by
the industry and sagacity of a single mind. I am not here saying that
Dr. Johnson was a man without originality, compared with the ordinary
run of men’s minds, but he was not a man of original thought or genius,
in the sense in which Montaigne or Lord Bacon was. He opened no new vein
of precious ore, nor did he light upon any single pebbles of uncommon
size and unrivalled lustre. We seldom meet with any thing to ‘give us
pause;’ he does not set us thinking for the first time. His reflections
present themselves like reminiscences; do not disturb the ordinary march
of our thoughts; arrest our attention by the stateliness of their
appearance, and the costliness of their garb, but pass on and mingle
with the throng of our impressions. After closing the volumes of the
Rambler, there is nothing that we remember as a new truth gained to the
mind, nothing indelibly stamped upon the memory; nor is there any
passage that we wish to turn to as embodying any known principle or
observation, with such force and beauty that justice can only be done to
the idea in the author’s own words. Such, for instance, are many of the
passages to be found in Burke, which shine by their own light, belong to
no class, have neither equal nor counterpart, and of which we say that
no one but the author could have written them! There is neither the same
boldness of design, nor mastery of execution in Johnson. In the one, the
spark of genius seems to have met with its congenial matter: the shaft
is sped; the forked lightning dresses up the face of nature in ghastly
smiles, and the loud thunder rolls far away from the ruin that is made.
Dr. Johnson’s style, on the contrary, resembles rather the rumbling of
mimic thunder at one of our theatres; and the light he throws upon a
subject is like the dazzling effect of phosphorus, or an _ignis fatuus_
of words. There is a wide difference, however, between perfect
originality and perfect common-place: neither ideas nor expressions are
trite or vulgar because they are not quite new. They are valuable, and
ought to be repeated, if they have not become quite common; and
Johnson’s style both of reasoning and imagery holds the middle rank
between startling novelty and vapid common-place. Johnson has as much
originality of thinking as Addison; but then he wants his familiarity of