IV CROXALL 139 his poetical ambition rather too arrogantly, when he said that his aim was "to set off the dry and insipid stuff" of the age by publishing "a whole piece of rich glowing scarlet." Two stanzas from his utterly neglected poetry will show how little Croxall shared the manner of his contemporaries : "Unlock the tresses of your burnish'd hair, Loose let your ringlets o'er your shoulders spread ; So Phoebus o'er the yielding ether streams, And streaks the silver clouds with brighter beams. What rosy odours your soft bosom yields, Heaving and falling gently as you breathe! Like hills that rise amidst fair fertile fields, With round smooth tops and flowery vales beneath ; So swell the candid Alps with fleecy snow, While myrtles bud, and violets bloom below." The long life of Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), the Edinburgh wig-maker, projects beyond that of Pope at both ends. He gave up the outside of the head for the inside by becoming a bookseller and a publisher; from his shop at the sign of the Mercury he regarded the wits of distant London with almost superstitious reverence. He wrote a great deal of absolute rubbish, but his pastoral drama of The Gentle Shepherd (1725) is the best British specimen of its class, and contains some very beautiful passages both of dialogue and of description. Most of Ramsay's original songs were poor, but he preserved the habit of writing in the Doric dialect, and as an editor and collector of national poetry he did thoroughly efficient and valuable work. His two miscellanies, The Tea-Table and The Evergreen, were not without their direct usefulness in preparing the Scottish ear for Burns. CHAPTER V SWIFT AND THE DEISTS THREE years before the close of the seventeenth century two short works were ready for publication, which a mere accident postponed into the age of Anne. At the darkest moment of English literature, when every branch of original writing except comedy seemed dying or dead, a genius of the very first order was preparing for the press The Battle of the Books and A Tale of a Tub. It is desirable to remember that these works were complete in 1697, although not published until 1704, since the fact emphasises Swift's precedence of all the other wits of the reign of Anne. It cannot, indeed, be too strongly insisted upon that he was the leader of their chorus. In poetry, Pope, though stimulated and sustained by his sympathy, was quite independent. of Swift; but the masters of prose, the great essayists, did not begin to flourish till his mighty spirit had breathed upon them. Swift is the dominant intellectual figure of the first half of the century, as Johnson of the second, and it is hard to deny that he is altogether greater than Johnson. He is original in the first degree. His personal character is such as to illuminate, or else obscure, every other individual that meets him. Swift's love or Swift's hatred colours our conception of every important literary figure of his age. If the saeva indignatio which he so adroitly indicated in his own draft of an epitaph has been over-insisted upon, no one can deny or evade the splendida bilis. The mag CHAP. V SWIFT 141 nificence of Swift's anger, scintillating with wit, glowing with passion, throws its cometary splendour right across the Augustan heavens. There was an almost superhuman greatness about his cruelty, a feline charm in his caresses, a childishness, like the merriment of a tiger-cub, in his humour; he was irresponsible and terrible; his ambition threw dice with his reckless waggishness, till all was lost and won. He was the most unhappy, the most disappointed man of his age, and yet the greatest and the most illustrious. He is altogether wonderful and inscrutable, a bundle of paradoxes, the object of universal curiosity, the repulsion of the many, the impassioned worship of the few. Jonathan Swift, "the great Irish patriot," had nothing Irish about him except the accident of being born in Dublin. His father was a Herefordshire man, and his mother was a Leicestershire woman. The elder Jonathan Swift was made steward to the Society of the King's Inns, Dublin, in 1666, and there died about a year afterwards. Some months later his widow bore him a posthumous son, on the 30th of November 1667, and this was the famous writer. His mother was reduced to great poverty, and had to be supported by the charity of her husband's brothers, Godwin and Dryden Swift. As an infant.Swift was stolen by his nurse and carried to Whitehaven; his mother, enervated by distress, seems to have acquiesced in this exile for three years, during which time she lodged once more with her relatives in Leicestershire. From 1674 to 1682 Swift was being educated at Kilkenny, the most famous of Irish schools, where Congreve was one of his companions. He was only fourteen when he was removed from Kilkenny to be entered at Trinity College, Dublin, where he stayed until the Revolution of 1688. His college career was not distinguished. He tells us that "he was so discouraged and sunk in his spirits that he neglected his academic studies," and "was stopped of his degree for dulness and insufficiency." He was made a B.A. in 1686, by special grace, which he chose to consider a humiliating distinction in such a case as his. Circumstances seem to have made him reckless, and the remainder of his college course is marked by penalty after penalty incurred for riotous behaviour. He read nothing but history and poetry, and probably the crisis of 1688 came only just .n time to save him from final expulsion. Destitute and friendless, Swift fled to his only less destitute mother in Leicestershire. This lady remembered that the wealthy and urbane Sir William Temple was her relative, and to him she applied for patronage with success. Temple accepted the raw young student to read to him and be his amanuensis. But Swift's manners were uncouth, and he had no address which could ingratiate him with the most elegant of living Englishmen. It seems probable that Temple slowly learned to value Swift, but at first his patronage of him must have been merely the observance of a duty claimed by family ties. The young man's health was very bad, and in 1689, after a surfeit of golden pippins, he began to be a sufferer from the mysterious. disease of his lifetime, which, as modern science has conjectured, became what is now called a labyrinthine vertigo. After a short visit to Ireland he returned to Temple's service, and on terms more honourable and confidential. Presently the king became aware of his existence, and promised him vague promotion in the army or in the church. When he took his degree of M.A. at Oxford in 1692 he had reputation enough, reflected from the glory of Temple, to meet with a warm reception, and now, at the age of twenty-five, he occasionally versified. His four Pindaric Odes, unlucky compositions in the worst manner of Cowley, were his first literary production; with one exception, these did not see the light till a century later, but they were shown to Dryden, who was Swift's relative, and were slain in the cradle by the famous rejoinder, "Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet," or, according to another and more credible report, "a Pindaric poet." In spite of Swift's eager ambition he seems to have written little in these early years, and to have had less desire to print. In the house of Temple he was at the centre of tradition, where anything new, anything not in strict accordance with Gallic taste, must have been contemptuously frowned upon. The fact that V SWIFT AT MOOR PARK 143 Temple wrote so well and was held to be so fine a literary oracle must in itself have vexed and paralysed a man whose instincts lay in the direction of novel and unlicensed literary forms. In May 1694 he broke the strained cord which bound him to Sir William Temple's household, and returned to Ireland. Eight months later he had taken priest's orders in Dublin, and had obtained the small living of Kilroot in Downshire. While there he met Miss Waring (Varina) at Belfast. He soon became disgusted with solitude at Kilroot, and in May 1696 he went back to Temple's household at Moor Park. Thus a third time the experiment was tried, and now without further vexation. Swift and his patron had learned, if not to love, at least to respect and admire each other. The young clergyman presently resigned his living in favour of a friend, and continued to reside at Moor Park till Temple died in 1699. This final residence with Temple coincided with Swift's first serious development as a writer. The year 1696-97, the thirtieth of Swift's life, seems to be that in which he first waked up to a consciousness of his original talents. The Tale of a Tub has been attributed to an earlier date, but upon no trustworthy evidence, and Swift in 1709 asserted that it was written in 1696 and 1697. That The Battle of the Books belongs to the latter year we know, and the resemblance in style between the two works is so close as to suggest that there was no interval between their composition. They seem to be pieces of the self-same mental fabric. To 1697 also belong Swift's earliest characteristic verses, and this year of active production is followed by four of apparent sterility. It seems therefore desirable to discuss the two remarkable prose works which have been just mentioned before proceeding any further with the life of their author, instead of waiting for the date of their publication, in an anonymous octavo volume, in 1704. They were prepared to issue from the press in the winter of 1698, when Temple's illness and death postponed their publication. is uncertain whether Swift wrote or only proposed to write the other facetious treatises which he announced on the fly-leaf of the It |