The notorious fact, that whilst the middling and lower classes were generally indifferent to literature, the gay and the great mingled some attentions to it with all their daily frivolities and nightly revelries, may be accounted for, in the beginning of the last century, by the distinctions of Cavalier and Roundhead being not as yet wholly obsolete: the spirit, though not the form, of these distinctions remained. Before the civil wars, and as long as the Stuarts ruled, taste, fancy, wit, the culture of letters, and the patronage of the arts, were cherished by the highly-horn and the well-bred, the more that they were avoided by the Puritans, as temptations to forget the grand business of life. The young nobleman who had not some small amount of poetical fame, amplified into extraordinary fecundity of genius by the gratitude of poorer and wittier men, seemed to the world scarcely to have fulfilled his destiny, as a man born to all the luxuries of praise and fame. The commotions of the second James’s reign, and the indifference of his grave successor to the interests of learning, checked, but did not annihilate the notion, that to nobility some exhibition of literary taste, and an extensive appreciation of it in others, were essential attributes.
The effect of this prevailing fashion of patronage on the one side, and of dependence on the other, was not to destroy our literature, assuredly, for never were its shoots so abundant, nor its blossoms so fair, as in the famed Augustan age; but whilst it called forth imaginative minds, and rendered the pursuit of letters a profession worthy of the name, in so far as emoluments might be procured, it debased the moral character of men in proportion as it rendered their intellectual powers marketable to the rich and the powerful. Adulation became a trade; and when such base commodity was found to be in request, slander was soon perceived to be no less profitable to him who sped the arrow of calumny which flieth by night, or the pestilence of destruction by day.
Indelicacy, and its consequence, immorality, being likewise acceptable, in an age when a father could jest with his son on the success of that son’s amours,[[490]] the taste of the lofty and luxurious patron was even consulted by writers whose nobleness of thought and elevation of fancy might have led the world to expect better fruits from the growth of their own untrammelled inclinations. Hence that mixture of “dissolute licentiousness and abject adulation,” of which Johnson too justly accuses Dryden; but from which our older poets, the pure and exalted Milton, and his inimitable predecessors, Shakspeare, Cowley, Spenser, were nobly exempt. The merriment, and the adulation of Dry den were, as Johnson also remarks, “artificial and constrained, the effects of study and meditation,—his trade, rather than his pleasure;” and the same may, with reverence, be observed of the prince of flatterers, the great, the little, the powerful, the weak, the satirical, the fawning Alexander Pope.
The system of patronage called into being another class of writers, who also “traded in corruption.” These were the political pamphleteers of the day, a paid regiment, in which, to the disgrace of the sex, a female author, unparalleled in any day for the power of invention, or rather of perversion, received no slight encouragement in her gross and horrible attacks upon personal character, from the most eminent in rank and in intellect among the party by whom her services were hired.
Mrs. de la Rivière Manley, or Rivella as she was figuratively called, the pupil, in her early days, of the infamous Madame Mazarin, and the confidante of the scarcely less infamous Duchess of Cleveland, was the disseminator, if not the originator, of those calumnies which party spirit chose to affix to the characters of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, and of the latter in conjunction with Lord Godolphin. Her own history, translated from the French, and supposed in the narrative to be communicated by Louis Duc d’Aumont, ambassador in England, in 1712, to his friend General Tidcomb, whilst taking the air in Somerset-house garden, is said, by its dreadful details, sufficiently to prepare those who are condemned to read it, for the subsequent works of this wretched woman. Of these, the most popular were her “Atalantis,” the “History of Prince Mirabel’s (Marlborough’s) Infancy, Rise, and Disgrace, collected from the Memoirs of a Courtier lately deceased,” and the “Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians,”[[491]] first published and inserted among the State Tracts by Dean Swift, in 1715.[[492]] This patronage on the part of Swift, which scarcely excites our wonder in the clergyman who could remodel and publish the “Tale of a Tub,” ceased only with the life of the abandoned Rivella, which closed at an advanced age, in 1724.
Dr. James Drake, the author of “The Memorial of the Church of England,” was a man of liberal education and of considerable attainments, which, unhappily for him, were applied to serve political rancour, instead of being confined to the medical profession, of which he was a member. Dr. Drake was a native of Cambridge, a Master of Arts in that university, and fellow both of the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society. Yet he found it more profitable, notwithstanding the patronage of Sir Thomas Millington, to devote his talents to the service of booksellers, who quickly appreciated his powers of invective and ridicule. It was disappointment on not being made one of the commissioners of the sick and wounded, which induced Drake, after successive publications, to publish the “Memorial,” in conjunction with Mr. Poley, the member for Ipswich. In this production, after referring to the death of King William, Drake comments upon the “numerous, corrupt, and licentious party throughout the nation, from which the House of Commons was sometimes not free,” who might “entertain hopes, from the advantage of being at the helm, and the assistance of their rabble, to have put into practice their own schemes, and to have given us a new model of government of their own projection,” and “to have mounted their own beast, the rabble, and driven the sober part of the nation like cattle before them.” That this was no conjecture was proved, the author stated, by the conduct of the party to the Queen, towards whom, “not contented with showing her a constant neglect and slight themselves, they also instructed their whole party to treat her with disrespect and slight. They were busy to traduce her with false and scandalous aspersions; and so far they carried the affront, as to make her at one time almost the common subject of the tittle-tattle of every coffee-house and drawing-room, which they promoted with as much zeal, application, and venom, as if a bill of exclusion had been then on the anvil, and these were the introductory ceremonies.”[[493]]
Lord Godolphin, and certain other of the ministry, were so much scandalized at these comments, that they represented to Queen Anne that the publication was an insult to her honour, and prevailed upon her Majesty to address both Houses upon the subject, in the Parliament which met October 27th, 1705. Accordingly, after a long debate, “it was voted that the church was not in danger,” and her Majesty was entreated to punish the authors of the “Memorial.” The printer was accordingly taken into custody, and, being examined before one of the secretaries of state, deposed that the manuscript of the “Memorial” was brought to him by a lady in a mask, accompanied by another lady barefaced, who, together, stipulated to have two hundred and fifty copies printed, which were delivered to four porters sent by the parties who brought the “Memorial.” But although the lady without a mask and three of the porters were found, Dr. Drake remained undiscovered; and the indignant ministry were obliged to convict him upon another publication.
Drake was the editor of a newspaper, entitled “The Mercurius Politicus,” for which he was prosecuted in the Queen’s Bench in the ensuing year, but acquitted upon a flaw in the information, the word NOR being inserted in the written information, and, in the libel given in evidence, the word NOT. Eventually the prosecution killed Drake, for the anxieties attending it, and the ill usage of some of his party, brought on a fever of which he died, bitterly exclaiming against the severity of his enemies. Thus speedily were extinguished an energetic spirit, and abilities adapted to higher purposes than those to which they were applied. Besides displaying in his writings great command of language, Dr. Drake possessed a well-stored and philosophic mind. Amid historical, political, and even dramatic works, he published a “New System of Anatomy,” which met with deserved praise and success.[[494]]
It would require a work of some extent to describe the innumerable productions of the day in which the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, under fictitious names, were alternately defamed and defended. The authors of these productions came forth like bats and owls, in the twilight and in darkness, when the political day of the great Colossus, as the Duke was called, and of “Queen Sarah,” was overcast by the shades of night. They were for the most part answered, and they cannot, on the whole, be said to have affixed any stain upon the memory of the great hero, or on the more faulty conduct of the imperious favourite, whom they assaulted generally in the grossest manner, and with invective rather than facts.[[495]]
Attacks so violent as these soon pass out of remembrance, consumed in their own heat; for it is only the wary and well-directed operations of a cautious hand that wound, and injure, and endure. Already had the Duke, and Duchess, and their party a powerful, though latent foe, who, in the retirement of an Irish parsonage, divided his days between the gentler arts of deluding the affections, and alternately beguiling and breaking the hearts, of weak, but fondly disinterested women; and of advancing the cause of the church,—if those efforts could be called advancement, which disseminated immorality, whilst they advocated the constitution of the hierarchy. Jonathan Swift, by all accounts the least lovable, and yet the most dangerous, of mankind, was at this time nominally a Whig, but a disappointed Whig, in his inert and chrysalis state, awaiting only the necessary change to become a Tory. Brought up in dependence, and his deportment as a “fine gentleman spoiled,” as he declared, by a subservience half affectionate, half abject, towards his great patron, Sir William Temple,[[496]] the arbitrary, sarcastic, and selfish spirit of this most able, but most unhappy man, grew under the check of adversity, which cannot soften all natures. He was a tyrant,—from the domestic cruelty of forcing a guest to eat asparagus in King William’s way,[[497]] to the monstrous ingratitude, indelicacy, and perfidy of influencing his supposed wife, the beautiful, the devoted Stella, to bear the imputed ignominy of being his mistress. He was a timeserver, as selfish men may be expected to become; and a calumniator, from the same narrow principles of self-advancement. Swift, at this period, was living in the unrestrained enjoyment of the attachment with which he had inspired the unhappy Stella, then scarcely twenty years of age, in all the bloom of that beauty of form and face which were destined to fade beneath the pressure of suspense, expectation, disappointment, and despair. Already had the moral profligate, if we may so call him, secured his Stella from the addresses of a respectable clergyman, who had applied to Swift in the capacity of the lady’s guardian, acting in which office Swift had demanded such unreasonable terms of settlement, that the honest lover was unable to accede to them.[[498]] This love of evasion, this mixture of moderation with passion, of prudence with grasping desires, marked the political, as well as the personal character of Swift. Generally speaking, the high churchmen of those days were Tories, and the low churchmen Whigs. It is not easy to say why, except for the purposes of party, this should be the case; nor can we reasonably justify a suspicion that an ardent promoter of the principles of the Revolution, like Swift, could not be equally sincere in his ultra notions of liberty, and in his vehement advocacy of the high church cause. His subsequent abandonment of the Whig party confirms the uncomfortable and foreboding feelings with which we behold him, in one poem extolling the constancy of Archbishop Sancroft, who refused the oaths to William and Mary,[[499]] and, in another, on the burning of Whitehall,[[500]] declaring that nothing could purify that ancient palace, after the residence of the Stuarts. Speaking of James the Second—