‘The great prize has not come yet. The coach with the mitre and crosier in it, which he intends to have for his share, has been delayed on the way from St. James’s. The mails wait until nightfall, when his runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different road and escaped him. So he fires his pistols into the air with a curse, and rides away in his own country.’
Thackeray’s criticism is severe, but is it not just? Are we to stand by and hear our nature libelled, and our purest affections beslimed, without a word of protest? ‘I think I would rather have had a potato and a friendly word from Goldsmith than have been beholden to the Dean for a guinea and a dinner.’ So would I. But no one of the Dean’s numerous critics was more keenly alive than Thackeray to the majesty and splendour of Swift’s genius, and to his occasional flashes of tenderness and love. That amazing person, Lord Jeffrey, in one of his too numerous contributions to the Edinburgh Review, wrote of the poverty of Swift’s style. Lord Jeffrey was, we hope, a professional critic, not an amateur.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] ‘Jonathan Swift,’ by J. Churton Collins: Chatto & Windus, 1893.
LORD BOLINGBROKE.
The most accomplished of all our political rascals, Lord Bolingbroke, who once, if the author of ‘Animated Nature’ is to be believed, ran naked through the Park, has, in his otherwise pinchbeck ‘Reflections in Exile,’ one quaint fancy. He suggests that the exile, instead of mourning the deprivation of the society of his friends, should take a pencil (the passage is not before me) and make a list of his acquaintances, and then ask himself which of the number he wants to see at the moment. It is, no doubt, always wise to be particular. Delusion as well as fraud loves to lurk in generalities.
As for this Bolingbroke himself, that he was a consummate scoundrel is now universally admitted; but his mental qualifications, though great, still excite differences of opinion. Even those who are comforted by his style and soothed by the rise and fall of his sentences, are fain to admit that had his classic head been severed from his shoulders a rogue would have met with his deserts. He has been long since stripped of all his fine pretences, and, morally speaking, runs as naked through the pages of history as erst he did (according to Goldsmith) across Hyde Park.