and so forth. Nothing that inspired skill and spite can do is better than this satire; had Addison been alive when it was given to the world he could not have hit a return blow, for cruelty was not in his nature, and Pope was so sensitive that any retort on him was cruel.
In 1715 Addison conducted for six months another paper, "The Freeholder," in the Whig interest; was made one of the Commissioners for Trade and the Colonies, and married the Dowager-Countess of Warwick. He died in 1719, "three years after that splendid but dismal union," says Thackeray. A dowager-countess is not usually splendid, and we really have no reason to think that the union was "dismal". Addison's position as Secretary of State was sufficiently good, not to speak of his fame, popularity, and genius. In 1719 Addison was matched against Steele in a newspaper controversy: Steele probably was not welcome to Lady Warwick at Holland House, but the two men, says Steele, "still preserved the most passionate concern for their mutual welfare. When they met they were as unreserved as boys...."
Addison with Steele, founded a school of essayists of merit, who never came near the supremacy of their masters: Addison not only delighted his world, but left it better than he found it; not by preaching violent sermons, not by "lashing the vices of the age," but by sensibly lowering the tyranny of the fashion which insisted on the duty of being vicious.
Swift.
Concerning the genius, character, and career of Jonathan Swift there are interesting varieties of opinion, but nobody denies that the genius was great or that the career was sad, strange, even mysterious. In an old-fashioned comedy of Humours, Swift would have been cast for the part of Wycherley's Captain Manly in "The Plain Dealer"; the man of tender heart who hates an age and a society that do not come up to his ideals. Swift had, indeed, depths of affection, and a noble capacity for friendship, but, unlike Captain Manly, he would never have made Fidelia, or any other woman, happy. He lived in this world the life of a flogging schoolmaster. He expresses a hope, at about the age of 26, that, in his poems,
Each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire.
He hopes, at the same hopeful period, that
My hate, whose lash just heaven has long decreed,
Shall on a day make Sin and Folly bleed.
He lashed away, but Sin and Folly remained "more than usual calm," they did not hear, they did not heed him; and the presentable part of his most comprehensive and ferocious satire of humanity, the one book published by him which is still generally known, "Gulliver's Travels," has been an innocent source of amusement to many generations of children.