"timorous meaning" which sometimes lurks under his "boldest words;" or
on the deep _chiaroscuro_ which discolours all his pictures of man,
nature, society, and human life. We have now only to speak of his
poetry. That is, unfortunately, small in amount, although its quality
is so excellent as to excite keen regret that he had not, as he once
intended, written many more pieces in the style of "London," and the
"Vanity of Human Wishes." In these, the model of his mere manner is
Pope, although coloured by Juvenal, his Latin original; but the matter
and spirit are intensely his own. In "London," satire seems swelling
out of itself into something stronger and statelier--it is the
apotheosis of that kind of poetry. You see in it a mind purer and
sterner than Dryden's, or Pope's, or Churchill's, or even Juvenal's;
"doing well to be angry" with a degenerate age, and a false, cowardly
country, of which he deems himself unworthy to be a citizen. If there
is rather too much of the _saeva indignatio_, which Swift speaks of as
lacerating his heart, it is a nobler and less selfish ire than his,
and the language and verse which it inspires are full of the very soul
of dignity. In the "Vanity of Human Wishes," he becomes one of those
"hunters whose game is man" (to use the language of Soame Jenyns, in
that essay on "The Origin of Evil," which Johnson, in the _Literary
Review_, so mercilessly lashed); and from assailing premiers,
parliaments, and the vices of London and England, he passes, in a very
solemn spirit, to expose the vain hopes, wishes, and efforts of
humanity at large. Parts of this poem are written more in sorrow than
in anger, and parts more in anger than in sorrow. The portraits of
Wolsey, Bacon, and Charles the Twelfth, are admirable in their
execution, and in their adaptation to the argument of the piece; and
the last paragraph, for truth and masculine energy is unsurpassed, we
believe, in the whole compass of ethical poetry. We are far from
assenting to the statement we once heard ably and elaborately