sharpest minds that England ever produced, so frequently reminding you
of a bright sting set in the body, and steeped in the venom, of a wasp.
And yet, withal, he possessed many virtues, which endeared him to a
multitude of friends. He was a kind son. He was a faithful and devoted
friend. He loved, if not _man_, yet many men with deep tenderness. A
keen politician he was not; but, so far as he went along with his party,
he was true to the common cause. In morals, he was greatly superior, in
point of external decorum, to most of the wits of the time; but in
falsehood, finesse, treachery, and envy, he stood at the bottom of the
list, without that plea of poverty, or wretchedness, or despair, which
so many of them might have urged. Uneasy, indeed, he always, and unhappy
he often, was; but very much of his uneasiness and unhappiness sprung
from his own fault. He attacked others, and could not bear to be
attacked in return. He was a bully and a coward. He threw himself into a
thorn-hedge, and was amazed that he came out covered with scratches and
blood. While he shone in satirising many kinds of vice, he laid himself
open to retort by his own want of delicacy. He, as well as Swift, was
fond of alluding in his verse to polluted and forbidden things. _There_,
and there alone, his taste deserted him; and there is something
disgusting and unnatural in the combination of the elegant and the
obscene--the coarse in sentiment and the polished in style. And whatever
may be said for many of the amiable traits of the Man, there is very
little to be said for the general tendency--so far as healthy morality
and Christian principle are concerned--of the writings of the Poet.




CONTENTS