Mr William Congreve.
Congreve’s career is a striking contrast to that proverbially assigned by fortune to the man of letters. Patronage from rival ministers placed him in various sinecure offices, and he died possessed of a large fortune. His funeral was that of a Prince. His body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, and the greatest Peers of England were the bearers of the pall.
Farquhar’s career was less happy than that of Congreve, if indeed success be happiness. The genial Irish spirit of the gallant gentleman could not carry his life beyond its thirtieth year. Over-exertion, necessitated by the impecuniosity inevitable to a nature akin to Goldsmith’s, undermined his health, and, like many another, in seeking to save his life he lost it. To Wilks, the actor, he wrote in a characteristic vein during his last illness:—“Dear Bob, I have not anything to leave thee to perpetuate my memory but two helpless girls. Look upon them sometimes, and think of him that was, to the last moment of his life, thine, George Farquhar.”
In the “Beaux’ Stratagem” and the “Recruiting Officer,” there is far less of the prurient indecency characterising the period than in the comedies of any other member of the famous group. Farquhar’s broad humour resembles that of Chaucer and Shakespeare; it bears no relation to that of Wycherley. A gentleman of letters, he carried with him into his plays the happy lovable disposition of the land of his birth, and the gay indifference to fortune’s buffets of the military adventurer. “He was becoming gayer and gayer,” said Leigh Hunt, “when death, in the shape of a sore anxiety, called him away as if from a pleasant party, and left the house ringing with his jest.”
Among the poets patronised by Frederick, Prince of Wales, at the beginning of the eighteenth century was Henry Brooke, afterwards better known as a novelist by his Fool of Quality, published in the same year as the now famous Vicar of Wakefield. Brooke, in a remarkable poem entitled “Universal Beauty,” wherein every aspect of Nature is described with scientific exactness, anticipating the manner of Darwin in the “Loves of the Plants,” gave promise of a poetic future and fame to which he never attained. In early life a friend of Swift, Pope, and Chesterfield, as a man of letters he was widely known and respected for his public spirit and generous disposition, as well as for the high merit of his work.
Ireland has never produced a more truly original poet than Thomas Parnell, the author of “The Hermit.” After he had acquired in Trinity College the classical training which, in the estimation of Goldsmith, placed him among the most elegant scholars of the day, a country parsonage received him into an oblivion which would have been final but for the kindly encouragement of Swift and Pope. So modest and diffident a man could never have emerged from the obscurity of his position in life unaided by some helping hand. As it was, his poems were not published, except in a posthumous edition by his great contemporary last mentioned. Although unable wholly to effect escape from the influences of the artificial school of the poetry of the so-called Augustan age, there is more real feeling naturally expressed, more genuine poetic sweetness, in Parnell’s “Hymn to Contentment,” or his “Night Piece on Death,” than in any other verse of his time. Without Pope’s incisive vigour or precision, he sounds a note more pure and exquisite, a note which appeals to the modern lover of poetry as Pope’s keen intelligence and perfection of phrase can never do.
Berkeley.
At Kilkenny School, the Eton of Ireland, where Congreve and Swift had also been pupils, George Berkeley received his early education sub ferula a Dr. Hinton. At the age of fifteen he entered Trinity, and soon after became Scholar and Fellow of the house. Mathematics chiefly occupied the attention of the more eminent scholars of the day, but the larger problems claimed Berkeley’s allegiance. The philosophical issues raised by Locke and Malebranche had given a new impulse to the study of metaphysics, now emancipated from the fetters of scholasticism. Dublin was abreast of the thought of the time, for Locke’s Essay was adopted as a text-book immediately on its publication, and is still a part of the course in Logics. On accepting the Deanery of Derry in 1724, Berkeley resigned all his College offices, but before that time his best known work had been done. The New Theory of Vision and The Principles of Human Knowledge are the direct outcome of his thought while a Junior Fellow of Trinity. The originality of Berkeley’s mind was equalled by its purity. The “good Berkeley,” as Kant calls him, charmed, as some rare spirits have the power to charm society which cared nothing for his theories, no less than philosophical friends and foes. To him the satiric vivisector Pope ascribed “every virtue under Heaven;” and Swift, misanthropist and scorner of friendship, made him a confidential friend. In some men, as has often been remarked, there resides a nameless power, the effluence of a character at once strong and good. No less a philosopher in life than in theory, no word of bitterness has ever been breathed against one of the fairest fames in history. In what exquisite words he declined, when Bishop of Cloyne, to apply for the Archiepiscopal See of Armagh: “I am no man’s rival or competitor in this matter. I am not in love with feasts, and crowds, and visits, and late hours, and strange faces, and a hurry of affairs often insignificant. For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my time than wear a diadem.” But in the interest of others he was willing to spend that time. Like every other idealist thinker, he had his Utopia. “He is an absolute philosopher,” wrote Swift to Lord Carteret, “with regard to money, titles, and power, and for three years past has been struck with a notion of founding a University at Bermudas by a charter from the Crown.”