But man, at last, is the creature fullest of contradictions, and his vanity is at the bottom of most of them. "What a sensible and agreeable companion is that gentleman who has just left us," said the famous Charles Townshend to the worthy and sensible Fitzherbert; "I never passed an evening with a more entertaining acquaintance in my life." "What could entertain you? the gentleman never opened his lips." "I grant you, my dear Fitz, but he listened faithfully to what I said, and always laughed in the right place." Darwin, speaking of one of his walks in New Zealand, says, "I should have enjoyed it more, if my companion, the chief, had not possessed extraordinary conversational powers. I knew only three words—'good,' 'bad,' and 'yes;' and with these I answered all his remarks, without, of course, having understood one word he said. This, however, was quite sufficient; I was a good listener, an agreeable person, and he never ceased talking to me." John Chester was a delightful companion to Coleridge, on the same principle. This Chester, says Hazlitt, was one of those who was attracted to Coleridge's discourse as flies are to honey, or bees in swarming-time to the sound of a brass pan. He gave Hazlitt his private opinion, though he rarely opened his lips, that Coleridge was a wonderful man! "He followed Coleridge into Germany, where the Kantian philosophers were puzzled how to bring him under any of their categories. When he sat down at table with his idol, John's felicity was complete; Sir Walter Scott's, or Blackwood's, when they sat down at the table with the king, was not more so. Once he was astonished," continues Hazlitt, "that I should be able to suggest anything to Coleridge that he did not already know!" "Demosthenes Taylor, as he was called (that is, the editor of Demosthenes), was the most silent man," said Dr. Johnson to Boswell, "the merest statue of a man, that I have ever seen. I once dined in company with him, and all he said during the whole time was not more than Richard. How a man should say only Richard, it is not easy to imagine. But it was thus: Dr. Douglass was talking of Dr. Zachary Grey, and was ascribing to him something that was written by Dr. Richard Grey. So, to correct him, Taylor said (imitating his affected sententious emphasis and nod) 'Richard.'" "Demosthenes" must have been "a sensible and agreeable companion." That one word was to the point, and was more effective than a dozen would have been to a man like Johnson. Two words, however, if we are to believe the story chronicled by John of Brompton of the mother of Thomas à Becket, performed a still more memorable service. His father, Gilbert à Becket, was taken prisoner during one of the Crusades by a Syrian emir, and held for a considerable period in a kind of honorable captivity. A daughter of the emir saw him at her father's table, heard him converse, fell in love with him, and offered to arrange the means by which both might escape to Europe. The project only partly succeeded; he escaped, but she was left behind. Soon afterward, however, she contrived to elude her attendants, and after many marvelous adventures by sea and land arrived in England, knowing but two English words, "London" and "Gilbert." By constantly repeating the first, she was directed to the city; and there, followed by a mob, she walked for months from street to street, crying as she went, "Gilbert! Gilbert!" She at last came to the street in which her lover lived. The mob and the name attracted the attention of a servant in the house; Gilbert recognized her; and they were married! But there remains one to be spoken of who gained immortal reputation for his sayings, who may be said to have never said anything at all of his own. Joe Miller, whose name as a wit is now current wherever the English language is spoken, was, when living, himself a jest for dullness. According to report, Miller, who was an excellent comic actor, but taciturn and saturnine, "was in the habit of spending his afternoons at the Black Jack, a well-known public-house in London, which at that time was frequented by the most respectable tradesmen in the neighborhood, who from Joe's imperturbable gravity, whenever any risible saying was recounted, ironically ascribed it to him. After his death, having left his family unprovided for, advantage was taken of this badinage. A Mr. Motley, a well-known dramatist of that day, was employed to collect all the stray jests then current on the town. Joe Miller's name was affixed to them, and from that day to this the man who never uttered a jest has been the reputed author of every jest."
VIII.
MUTATIONS.
Swift left some thoughts on various subjects—acute and profound—which it would appear were jotted down at different periods of life, and in different humors. In his most prosperous days, when he dreamed of becoming a bishop, he might have written hopefully, "No wise man ever wished to be younger." At a much later time in life he might have written, sagely and sadly, "Every man desireth to live long, but no man would be old." We can imagine that he wrote the former just after he received the deanery of St. Patrick, and the latter just after he returned from the walk in the neighborhood of Dublin, referred to by the author of Night Thoughts. "Perceiving he did not follow us," says Young, "I went back, and found him fixed as a statue, and earnestly gazing upward at a noble elm, which in its uppermost branches was much decayed. Pointing at it, he said, 'I shall be like that tree; I shall die at the top.'"
Bolingbroke, writing to Swift, says, "It is now six in the morning; I recall the time—and am glad it is over—when about this hour I used to be going to bed surfeited with pleasure, or jaded with business; my head often full of schemes, and my heart as often full of anxiety. Is it a misfortune, think you, that I rise at this hour refreshed, serene, and calm: that the past and even the present affairs of life stand like objects at a distance from me, where I can keep off the disagreeable, so as not to be strongly affected by them, and from whence I can draw the others nearer to me?"
De Foe moralizes in memorable language: "I know too much of the world to expect good in it, and have learned to value it too little to be concerned at the evil. I have gone through a life of wonders, and am the subject of a vast variety of providences. I have been fed more by miracles than Elijah when the ravens were his purveyors. I have some time ago summed up the scenes of my life in this distich:—
'No man has tasted differing fortunes more;
And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.'