and volcanic circumstances: Dante and Milton were both lone men, soured and discontented, unfortunate in their domestic, and uneasy in their political, life; Shakspere was poor and despised, long a wanderer and an adventurer, and not too well mated either. And this brings us to the consideration of the more accessible and human side of their nature, one which is intensely interesting to us; for the more we read, the more we think, the more do we see how alike mankind is at all stages of its career, how little difference there is in human relations between us and our forefathers—nay, our remotest ancestors, whether in other climes or in a totally different civilization. Modes of thought have grown antiquated, systems of philosophy have crumbled, faiths have disappeared, customs have changed, but man and his passions remain the same as when he was first made. And the men who are but names to us, whose record is in forgotten tablets and antique parchments, even those whose works and sayings are known to us in part, all lived the same common life to the eye of their contemporaries, shared the same lowly necessities and the same agitating feelings, and went through the same kind of outward, prescribed life as the rind of their inner and individual one, as our modern poets, artists, savants, discoverers, and even our single selves. For ourselves, we almost invariably care more for the life of a man than for his works; and as this century has
developed a peculiar turn for biography, even that of ordinary and obscure persons—which is often none the less interesting—it has been a liking easy to satisfy. If, however, readers of poets prefer to see their ideal with their own eyes and look upon him as a demigod, biography is not a thing likely to be pleasant to them. It is often disenchanting, and many people shrink from the true if it be not likewise in accordance with their preconceived notions. The English poets of the last century were emphatically men, good specimens of their time and surroundings, by no means souls stranded on a foreign world and accidentally fitted with clogging bodies whose necessities were a vexation to the spirit.
The earliest of the rising generation of that time who came prominently before the public, and has never since lost his place, is Dean Swift. He was “of the earth, earthy,” yet not a type of very common humanity. His life was full of strange incidents and extraordinary contradictions. He was, like Milton, by inclination rather a politician than a writer, and yet his poems have outlived his pamphlets. Sometimes he was coarse in language and brutal in manner—a fashion of his age, itself a contrast to the other extreme affected by society, that of a finical and artificial delicacy. Yet he won the almost unsolicited affection of pure-minded, sensitive, well-educated women. Now he was a miser, now a prodigal; now he entered a state which so many other poets conscientiously eschewed, himself worse fitted for it than they were; and now he showed a tenderness of feeling and a nobleness of soul which seemed inconsistent with this one life-act of defiant recklessness. For it was not hypocrisy; to that
lowest of depths he, at least, did not sink. His education was desultory and his early circumstances narrow. His first situation was a poor one, though in a refined home and with a great statesman—Sir William Temple, whose reader and secretary he was. He got only twenty pounds a year, but had the chance of a troop of horse which King William offered him when he came to visit the youth’s patron at Moor Park. His mind was inflamed by the stirring scenes during which his poor mother had fled from Ireland—the times following the Revolution and the Boyne—and he vindicated and abused his native country by turns, like an indignant lover, always ready fiercely to defend her if attacked by others, yet conscious of the unhappy state into which civilization and literature had fallen, consequent on the civil troubles since Elizabeth’s Reformation. At Richmond he owed an illness to his gluttony, as he boldly if exaggeratedly confesses: “About two hours before you were born,” he writes to a lady, “I got my giddiness by eating a hundred golden pippins at a time; and when you were four years and a quarter old, bating two days, having made a fine seat about twenty miles further in Surrey, where I used to read, there I got my deafness; and these two friends have visited me, one or other, every year since, and, being old acquaintance, have now thought fit to come together.” Dryden did not recognize the young poet as a brother, and wrote him his opinion most bluntly, which Swift never forgave or forgot, and for which once or twice he revenged himself on other hapless and obscure poets who better deserved the same criticism. One of the good deeds of his youth was his giving up an appointment in the National Church, worth £100
a year, in favor of a poor struggling curate with less than half that income and eight children to support; but some of his friends thought that the loss of congenial society which this small preferment involved somewhat moved him to this renunciation. Going back to Moor Park, he made acquaintance with “Stella”—Esther Johnson—a ward of his patron, a girl of fifteen, who loved him devotedly, and whose heart he broke. He became her tutor, and his genius, his appearance, and his manner captivated the child-woman. Engaged at the time to a Miss Waryng, whom he fancifully styled “Varina,” he broke his promise to her, and in the details of their quarrel showed himself as insolent as dishonorable. At this time of his life he was, if not a handsome, at least a very striking man. He was tall and well made, with deep-blue eyes and black hair and eyebrows, the last very bushy, and his expression stern and haughty—the very hero of a young girl’s dreams. After Sir William’s death he removed Stella to the neighborhood of his own parsonage, where she lived in a little cottage with an elderly companion, and never saw Swift except in the presence of a third person. Sir Walter Scott charitably attributes his avoidance of marriage with her to prudential reasons, and in this anomalous relation to the woman he loved he sees an attempt “in the pride of talent and of wisdom … to frame a new path to happiness”; and the consequences, he continues, were such as to render him “a warning, where the various virtues with which he was endowed ought to have made him a pattern.” In one of his visits to London he met “Vanessa”—Esther Vanhomrigh—to whom he offered the same Platonic
friendship, with nearly the same results. The girl died of grief and “hope deferred.” Another version of his luckless love-affairs asserts that he ultimately married Stella, but refused to live with her, and visited her formally the same as before.
Swift’s fits of avarice were great sources of amusement to his visitors. It is said that he occasionally allowed some guests of his, ladies of high rank, a shilling each to provide for themselves when asked to dine with him. Another such droll tale, but rather illustrating the contrary disposition, is told of him by Pope: “One evening Gay and I went to see him. On our coming in, ‘Heyday, gentlemen,’ says the doctor, ‘what’s the meaning of this visit? How came you to leave all the great lords you are so fond of, to come hither and see a poor dean?’ ‘Because we would rather see you than any of them!’ ‘Ay, any one that did not know so well might believe you. But since you are come, I must get some supper for you, I suppose?’ ‘No, doctor, we have supped already.’ ‘Supped already? That’s impossible! Why, it is not eight o’clock yet. That’s very strange; but if you had not supped, I must have got something for you. Let me see; what should I have had? A couple of lobsters; ay, that would have done very well—two shillings; tarts, a shilling. But you will drink a glass of wine with me, though you supped so much before your usual time only to spare my pocket.’ ‘No; we had rather talk with you than drink with you.’ ‘But if you had supped with me, as, in all reason, you ought to have done, you must then have drunk with me. A bottle of wine, two shillings. Two and two is four, and one is five—just two and sixpence
apiece. There, Pope, there’s half a crown for you, and there’s another for you sir; for I won’t save by you, I am determined.’ In spite of everything we could say to the contrary, he actually obliged us to take the money.”
Among the literary practical jokes he sometimes played was a book of prophecies he published in ridicule of a yearly almanac of predictions by one Partridge. The chief event foretold was the astrologer’s own death on the 29th of March, 1708. As soon as the date was past an elaborate account of Partridge’s last moments and sayings came out in “a letter to a person of honor.” Partridge found it hard to persuade people of his continued existence, and, having once complained to a Doctor Yalden, was repaid by the latter by an additional account of his sufferings and end by his supposed attendant physician. The poor man was driven frantic; he says the undertaker and the sexton came to him “on business”; people taunted him in the streets with not having paid his funeral expenses; his wife was distracted by being persistently addressed as Widow Partridge, and was “cited once a term into court to take out letters of administration”; while “the very reader of our parish, a good, sober, discreet person, has two or three times sent for me to come and be buried decently, or, if I have been interred in any other parish, to produce my certificate, as the act requires.” Sir Walter Scott remarks, as an odd coincidence, that in 1709 the Company of Stationers obtained an injunction against any almanac published under the name of John Partridge, as if the poor man had been dead in sad earnest.
Unsatisfactory as was the homelife