So he dies, and the first question asked is, 'What has he left and who's his heir?' and when these questions are answered, the Dean is blamed for his bequests. The news spreads to London and is told at Court:
'Kind Lady Suffolk, in the spleen,
Runs laughing up to tell the Queen.
The Queen so gracious, mild, and good,
Cries, "Is he gone? 'tis time he should."'
But the loss of the Dean will cause a brief regret to his most intimate friends:
'Poor Pope will grieve a month; and Gay
A week; and Arbuthnot a day.
St. John himself will scarce forbear
To bite his pen and drop a tear.
The rest will give a shrug, and cry,
"I'm sorry—but we all must die."'
Why grieve, indeed, at the death of friends, since no loss is more easy to supply, and in a year the Dean will be forgotten, and his wit be out of date.
'Some country squire to Lintot goes,
Inquires for "Swift in Verse and Prose."
Says Lintot, "I have heard the name;
He died a year ago." "The same."
He searches all the shop in vain.
"Sir, you may find them in Duck Lane,
I sent them with a load of books
Last Monday to the pastrycook's.
To fancy they could live a year!
I find you're but a stranger here.
The Dean was famous in his time,
And had a kind of knack at rhyme.
His way of writing now is past,
The town has got a better taste."'
Enough has been transcribed to show Swift's art in this poem, which is of considerable, but not of wearisome length. Perhaps ten or twelve pieces, in addition to those already mentioned, will repay the student's attention. One of the worthiest is a Rhapsody on Poetry. Baucis and Philemon, too, is a lively piece that pleased Goldsmith, and will please every reader. It was much altered from the original draught at Addison's suggestion; but the alterations are not improvements.[43] The City Shower is a piece of Dutch painting, reminding us of Crabbe. Mrs. Harris's Petition is an admirable bit of fooling; Mary the Cook-Maid's Letter, is in its way inimitable; and so, too, is the amusing talk of 'my lady's waiting-woman' in The Grand Question Debated.
It is difficult, unhappily, to pursue one's way through Swift's poems, without being repelled again and again by the filth in which it pleases him to wade. The Beast's Confession, which has been reprinted in the Selections from Swift (Clarendon Press), is not obscene, like The Lady's Dressing-Room, Strephon and Chloe, and other poems of the class; but it has the inhumanity which deforms the description of the Houyhnhnms. Strange to say, in private life Swift appears to have been not only moral in conduct, but refined in conversation, and he is even said to have rebuked Stella on one occasion for a slightly coarse remark. His imagination was diseased, and he was himself always apprehensive of the calamity under which he became at last 'a driveller and a show.' 'I shall be like that tree,' he said once to the poet Young, 'I shall die at the top.'
It has been already said that The Tale of a Tub was written at Moor Park. It appeared in 1704, and although published anonymously and never owned, the book effectually stood in the way of Swift's high preferment in the Church. Queen Anne declined, and not without reason, to make its author a bishop.