How many a message would he send! What gave me ease, and how I slept? Behold the fatal day arrive! "How is the Dean?"-"He's just alive." The news through half the town is run. Now Grub-street wits are all employ'd; To curse the Dean, or bless the Draper.* From Dublin soon to London spread, 'Tis told at court, "The Dean is dead;" Runs laughing up to tell the Queen. • For the papers which he wrote on Irish affairs, under that title The Queen so gracious, mild, and good, Now, Chartres, at Sir Robert's levee, Now Curll his shop from rubbish drains: Here shift the scene, to represent How those I love my death lament. St. John himself will scarce forbear The fools, my juniors by a year, When death approach'd to stand between : "Which the Dean (he says) in vain expected, in return for a smal present he had sent to the Frincess." ↑ Sir Robert Walpole's antagonist, Pulteney. The screen remov'd their hearts are trembling; My female friends, whose tender hearts Six Deans, they say, must bear the pall: Why do we grieve that friends should die? One year is past; a different scene! Who now, alas! no more is miss'd, Where's now the favorite of Apollo? Departed:-and his works must follow. Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.-I give these verses (which comprise about half the original) as a true specimen of Swiftian wit and humor, but not at all (some obvious banter excepted) as agreeing with the spirit of them, or counting them among the evidences of his wisdom. The Dean's prodigious discovery, assisted by his brother wit Rochefoucault, just amounts to this:that Nature in her kindly wisdom has prevented mankind from feeling as much for the pangs of others as for their own; and that when a misfortune happens to a neighbor, they cannot, in spite of their condolence, help congratulating themselves on having escaped it. There are exceptions,-many,—even to these conclusions; and what do the conclusions prove? Why, simply, that existence would be nothing but misery if human beings were otherwise constituted; that the best people would have the power neither to receive nor to give enjoyment; and that meantime (by the same kind providence of nature against worse consequences) they do suffer and sympathize greatly on occasion, often to a far greater degree than the author chooses to think. The sick neighbor feeling for the dying man endures but half the anguish of many (I do not say of all) who are here called "snivellers round a bed," and who would sometimes gladly die instead of the sufferer? What? Have not millions of lives been thrown away for less things than love; and are we to be told by a loveless misanthrope, girding his own friends, that affection never grieves for a death beyond a "month" or a "day ?" Nonsense. I mourn with, and admire Swift, who was a great man, notwithstanding what was little in him; but (wit excepted) he fell to the level of the vulgar when he "sunk in the spleen." Yet how handsome the opportunity he takes of complimenting Pope and others at his own expense, and how pleasantly it tells both against him and for him! 7 R-fin'd it first, and show'd its use.-A bold claim, after Butler and all the other wits and poets who excelled in it! and, indeed, quite unfounded. GREEN. BORN, 1696-DIED, 1737. THE author of the Spleen, a poem admired by Pope, and quoted by Johnson, was a clerk in the custom-house, and had been bred a quaker. He was subject to low spirits, and warded them off by wit and good sense. Something of the quaker may be ob servable in the stiffness of his versification, and its excessive endeavors to be succinct. His style has also the fault of being occasionally obscure; and his wit is sometimes more labored than finished. But all that he says is worth attending to. His thoughts are the result of his own feeling and experience; his opinions rational and cheerful, if not very lofty; his warnings against meddling with superhuman mysteries admirable; and he is remarkable for the brevity and originality of his similes. He is of the school of Butler; and it may be affirmed of him as a rare honor, that no man since Butler has put so much wit and reflection into the same compass of lines. There is an edition of Green's poems by Dr. Aikin, which deserves to be the companion of all who suffer as the author did, and who have sense enough to wish to relieve their sufferings by the like exercise of their reason. In printing the following extracts I have not adopted the asterisks commonly employed for the purpose of implying omission. I always use them unwillingly, on account of the fragmentary air they give to the passages; and the paragraphs closed up so well together in the present instance, that I was tempted to waive them. But the circumstance is mentioned in order to prevent a false conclusion. |