For him, thou oft hast bid the World attend,
Fond to forget the statesman in the friend;
For SWIFT and him despis’d the farce of state,
The sober follies of the wise and great;
Dext’rous the craving, fawning crowd to quit,
And pleas’d to ’scape from Flattery to Wit.
[his sweetly-moral lay.] Cf. The Hermit, the Hymn to Contentment, the Night Piece on Death—which Goldsmith certainly recalled in his own City Night-Piece. Of the last-named Goldsmith says (Life of Parnell, 1770, p. xxxii), not without an obvious side-stroke at Gray’s too-popular Elegy, that it ‘deserves every praise, and I should suppose with very little amendment, might be made to surpass all those night pieces and church yard scenes that have since appeared.’ This is certainly (as Longfellow sings) to
rustling hear in every breeze
The laurels of Miltiades.
Of Parnell, Hume wrote (Essays, 1770, i. 244) that ‘after the fiftieth reading; [he] is as fresh as at the first.’ But Gray (speaking—it should be explained—of a dubious volume of his posthumous works) said: ‘Parnell is the dung-hill of Irish Grub Street’ (Gosse’s Gray’s Works, 1884, ii. 372). Meanwhile, it is his fate to-day to be mainly remembered by three words (not always attributed to him) in a couplet from what Johnson styled ‘perhaps the meanest’ of his performances, the Elegy— to an Old Beauty:—
And all that’s madly wild, or oddly gay,
We call it only pretty Fanny’s way.
[THE CLOWN’S REPLY.]
This, though dated ‘Edinburgh 1753,’ was first printed in Poems and Plays, 1777, p. 79.
[John Trott] is a name for a clown or commonplace character. Miss Burney (Diary, 1904, i. 222) says of Dr. Delap:—‘As to his person and appearance, they are much in the John-trot style.’ Foote, Chesterfield, and Walpole use the phrase; Fielding Scotticizes it into ‘John Trott-Plaid, Esq.’; and Bolingbroke employs it as a pseudonym.
[I shall ne’er see your graces.] ‘I shall never see a Goose again without thinking on Mr. Neverout,’—says the ‘brilliant Miss Notable’ in Swift’s Polite Conversation, 1738, p. 156.