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It is Pope of course who is thus imitated:
Blest leaf! whose aromatic gales dispense
To templars modesty, to parsons sense :
So raptured priests, at famed Dodona's shrine,
Drank inspiration from the steam divine.
Poison that cures, a vapour that affords
Content more solid than the smile of lords:
Rest to the weary, to the hungry food,
The last kind refuge of the wise and good.
Inspired by thee, dull cits adjust the scale
Of Europe's peace, when other statesmen fail.
By thee protected, and thy sister beer,
Poets rejoice, nor think the bailiff near.
Nor less the critic owns thy genial aid,
While supperless he plies the piddling trade.
What though to love and soft delights a foe,
By ladies hated, hated by the beau,
Yet social freedom long to courts unknown,
Fair health, fair truth, and virtue are thy own.
Come to thy poet, come with healing wings,
And let me taste thee unexcised by kings!

In the last, beginning:

Boy! bring an ounce of Freeman's best,
And bid the vicar be my guest-

Browne not merely caught the manner of Swift, but successfully reproduced his coarseness.

Matthew Green (1696-1737), author of The Spleen, praised by Pope and Gray, left the austere Dissenting communion of his parents, had a post as clerk in the London Custom-House, performed his duties faithfully, and from time to time wrote and published verses. He was a witty and entertaining companion, but seems to have had personal experience of 'the spleen,' to judge by the aptness with which he discusses its various forms and their appropriate remedies, in comic verse like that of Hudibras and of some of Swift's poems. The poem was first published by Glover, the author of Leonidas, after Green's death. Gray thought that 'even the wood-notes of Green often break out into strains of real poetry and music ;' and the fourth line of the first of the following extracts from The Spleen (alluding to David and Goliath, and not unlike Shakespeare's

Man but a rush against Othello's breast,
And he retires),

soon attained to the dignity of a stock quotation.

Cures for Melancholy.

To cure the mind's wrong bias, spleen,
Some recommend the bowling-green;
Some hilly walks; all exercise;
Fling but a stone, the giant dies;

Laugh and be well. Monkeys have been
Extreme good doctors for the spleen;
And kitten, if the humour hit,
Has harlequined away the fit.
Since mirth is good in this behalf,
At some particulars let us laugh.

If spleen-fogs rise at break of day,
I clear my evening with a play,
Or to some concert take my way.

The company, the shine of lights,
The scenes of humour, music's flights,
Adjust and set the soul to rights. . .

In rainy days keep double guard,
Or spleen will surely be too hard;
Which, like those fish by sailors met,
Fly highest while their wings are wet.
In such dull weather, so unfit
To enterprise a work of wit;
When clouds one yard of azure sky,
That's fit for simile, deny,

I dress my face with studious looks,
And shorten tedious hours with books.
But if dull fogs invade the head,
That memory minds not what is read,
I sit in window dry as ark,

And on the drowning world remark :
Or to some coffee-house I stray
For news, the manna of a day,
And from the hipped discourses gather
That politics go by the weather.

Sometimes I dress, with women sit,
And chat away the gloomy fit;
Quit the stiff garb of serious sense,
And wear a gay impertinence,
Nor think nor speak with any pains,
But lay on Fancy's neck the reins.

I never game, and rarely bet,
Am loath to lend or run in debt.
No Compter-writs me agitate,
Who moralising pass the gate,
And there mine eyes on spendthrifts turn,
Who vainly o'er their bondage mourn.
Wisdom, before beneath their care,
Pays her upbraiding visits there,
And forces Folly through the grate
Her panegyric to repeat.
Experience, joined with common sense,
To mortals is a providence. .

Happy the man who, innocent,
Grieves not at ills he can't prevent ;
His skiff does with the current glide,
Not puffing pulled against the tide.
He, paddling by the scuffling crowd,
Sees unconcerned life's wager rowed,
And when he can't prevent foul play,
Enjoys the folly of the fray.

The gate is the gate of the Compter or debtor's prison; me is the antecedent to the who that follows.

Contentment-A Wish.

May Heaven-it's all I wish for-send
One genial room to treat a friend,
Where decent cupboard, little plate,

Display benevolence, not state.

And may my humble dwelling stand
Upon some chosen spot of land:

A pond before full to the brim,

Where cows may cool, and geese may swim;
Behind, a green, like velvet neat,

Soft to the eye, and to the feet;
Where odorous plants in evening fair
Breathe all around ambrosial air;
From Eurus, foe to kitchen ground,
Fenced by a slope with bushes crowned,
Fit dwelling for the feathered throng,
Who pay their quit-rents with a song;

With opening views of hill and dale,
Which sense and fancy do regale,
Where the half cirque, which vision bounds,
Like amphitheatre surrounds:
And woods impervious to the breeze,
Thick phalanx of embodied trees;

From hills through plains in dusk array,
Extended far, repel the day;

Here stillness, height, and solemn shade
Invite, and contemplation aid:
Here nymphs from hollow oaks relate
The dark decrees and will of fate;

And dreams, beneath the spreading beech,
Inspire, and docile fancy teach;
While soft as breezy breath of wind,
Impulses rustle through the mind:
Here Dryads, scorning Phoebus' ray,
While Pan melodious pipes away,
In measured motions frisk about,
Till old Silenus puts them out.
There see the clover, pea, and bean
Vie in variety of green;

Fresh pastures speckled o'er with sheep,
Brown fields their fallow Sabbaths keep,
Plump Ceres golden tresses wear,
And poppy top-knots deck her hair,
And silver streams through meadows stray,
And Naiads on the margin play,
And lesser nymphs on side of hills,
From plaything urns pour down the rills.

Lord Hervey (1696-1743), the son of a Suffolk knight, is well known as the Sporus of Pope and as husband of the much-besung and beautiful Mary Lepell. A supple politician and a good parliamentary debater, he was successively ViceChamberlain and Lord Privy Seal, and a great favourite with Queen Caroline. His history, called Memoirs of the Reign of George II. from his Accession till the Death of Queen Caroline, edited in 1848 by John Wilson Croker, is very valuable It abounds in minute details drawn

in its way. from personal observation; the characters are cleverly drawn; and he has described at length all the vices, coarseness, and dullness of the court, in a style concise and pointed. His portraits are often spiteful, and he rarely does justice to the good qualities of those-and they were many— whom he disliked. Besides his Memoirs, Lord Hervey published many pamphlets, wrote occasional verses, and joined with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in endeavouring vainly to repel the envenomed shafts of Pope. He was a man of talent and energy, though contending with wretched health, drinking asses' milk, and rouging his countenance to conceal his ghastly appearance; of moral principle or public honour he appears to have been destitute. A few weeks before his death we find him writing thus characteristically to Lady Mary: The last stages of an infirm life are filthy roads, and, like all other roads, I find the further one goes from the capital, the more tedious the miles grow, and the more rough and disagreeable the way. I know of no

turnpikes to mend them; medicine pretends to be such, but doctors who have the management of it, like the commissioners for most other turnpikes, seldom execute what they undertake; they only put the toll of the poor cheated passenger in their pockets, and leave every jolt at least as bad as they found it, if not worse.' The extracts that follow are from the Memoirs.

Traits of George II. and Queen Caroline. The Duke of Richmond asked the king immediately to succeed Lord Scarborough, and the king was not averse to granting his request any further than he was always averse to giving anything to anybody. Many ingredients concurred to form this reluctance in his majesty to bestowing. One was that, taking all his notions from a German measure, he thought every man who served him in England overpaid; another was, that while employments were vacant he saved the salary; but the most prevalent of all was his never having the least inclination to oblige. I do not believe there ever lived a man to whose temper benevolence was so absolutely a stranger. It was a sensation that, I dare say, never accompanied any one act of his power; so that whatever good he did was either extorted from him, or was the adventitious effect of some self-interested act of policy consequently, if any seeming favour he conferred ever obliged the receiver, it must have been because the man on whom it fell was ignorant of the motives from which the giver bestowed. I remember Sir Robert Walpole saying once, in speaking to me of the king, that to talk with him of compassion, consideration of past services, charity, and bounty, was making use of words that with him had no meaning. . . . The queen, by long studying and long experience of his temper, knew how to instil her own sentiments-whilst she affected to receive his majesty's; she could appear convinced whilst she was controverting, and obedient whilst she was ruling; and by this means her dexterity and address made it impossible for anybody to persuade him what was truly his case-that whilst she was seemingly on every occasion giving up her opinion and her will to his, she was always in reality turning his opinion and bending his will to hers. She managed this deified image as the heathen priests used to do the oracles of old, when, kneeling and prostrate before the altars of a pageant god, they received with the greatest devotion and reverence those directions in public which they had before instilled and regulated in private. And as these idols consequently were only propitious to the favourites of the augurers, so nobody who had not tampered with our chief priestess ever received a favourable answer from our god storms and thunder greeted every votary that entered the temple without her protection-calms and sunshine those who obtained it. The king himself was so little sensible of this being his case, that one day, enumerating the people who had governed this country in other reigns, he said Charles I. was governed by his wife, Charles II. by his mistresses, King James by his priests, King William by his men, and Queen Anne by her women-favourites. His father, he added, had been governed by anybody that could get at him. And at the end of this compendious history of our great and wise monarchs, with a significant, satisfied, triumphant air, he turned about, smiling, to one of his auditors, and asked him: And who do they say governs now?' Whether

this is a true or a false story of the king I know not, but it was currently reported and generally believed.

(From Chap. iv.)

Her predominant passion was pride, and the darling pleasure of her soul was power; but she was forced to gratify one to gain the other, as some people do health, by a strict and painful régime, which few besides herself could have had patience to support or resolution to adhere to. She was at least seven or eight hours tête-àtête with the king every day, during which time she was generally saying what she did not think, assenting to what she did not believe, and praising what she did not approve; for they were seldom of the same opinion, and he too fond of his own for her ever at first to dare to controvert it ('Consilii quamvis egregii quod ipse non afferret inimicus'--' An enemy to any counsel, however excellent, which he himself had not suggested.'-Tacitus). She used to give him her opinion as jugglers do a card, by changing it imperceptibly, and making him believe he held the same with that he first pitched upon. But that which made these tête-à-têtes seem heaviest was that he neither liked reading nor being read to (unless it was to sleep) she was forced, like a spider, to spin out of her own bowels all the conversation with which the fly was taken. However, to all this she submitted, for the sake of power, and for the reputation of having it; for the vanity of being thought to possess what she desired was equal to the pleasure of the possession itself. But, either for the appearance or the reality, she knew it was absolutely necessary to have interest in her husband, as she was sensible that interest was the measure by which people would always judge of her power. Her every thought, word, and act therefore tended and was calculated to preserve her influence there; to him she sacrificed her time, for him she mortified her inclination; she looked, spake, and breathed but for him, like a weathercock to every capricious blast of his uncertain temper, and governed him (if such influence so gained can bear the name of government) by being as great a slave to him thus ruled as any other wife could be to a man who ruled her. For all the tedious hours she spent then in watching him whilst he slept, or the heavier task of entertaining him whilst he was awake, her single consolation was in reflecting she had power, and that people in coffee-houses and ruelles were saying she governed this country, without knowing how dear the government of it cost her.

(From Chap. xiii.)

Barton Booth (1681-1733), son of a Lancashire squire of good family, was educated at Westminster, and, spite of opposition, carried out his wish to become an actor and a famous one, his Cato in Addison's play being his greatest part. He wrote a masque on the death of Dido, and a number of poems, many of them to his wife and some of them sprightly. From one of his songs come the lines (based on Hudibras, III., ii. 175):

True as the needle to the pole

Or as the dial to the sun.

Thomas Cooke (1703-1756), the son of an innkeeper at Braintree, studied the classics at Filstead School and privately, and became a Whig journalist. He was the author of dramatic pieces, poems, and translations; his translation

of Hesiod secured him the nickname of 'Hesiod Cooke.' An assault on Pope, Swift, and others in his Battle of the Poets began a lifelong feud. He was editor of the Craftsman.

By

Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was the son of a Presbyterian minister at Armagh, himself the son of a minister of good Ayrshire stock who had settled in Ireland. Francis studied for the ministry at the University of Glasgow, and was tutor to the young Earl of Kilmarnock who was executed for his share in the rebellion of 1745. As a licentiate he was thought to incline too much to a modified or 'new light' Calvinism; and shortly after the completion of his theological course he was invited to open a private academy in Dublin, which proved highly successful. In 1720 he published his Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, and so became known to many influential personages, such as Lord Granville, then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Archbishop King, and others. This work was followed in 1728 by his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions; and in the year after he was called to be professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow. In his lifetime he published various minor books, including a small treatise on Logic; his largest work, A System of Moral Philosophy, was published by his son after his death (with a Life, 1755). classical and literary sympathies, largely learnt from Shaftesbury, Hutcheson rescued philosophy from aridity, and conciliated a new interest in speculative thought. He may in some respects be considered a pioneer of the so-called 'Scotch school' and of the common-sense philosophy, although he was an eclectic, and was largely influenced by Locke; from his professorial work Dugald Stewart dated the metaphysical philosophy of Scotland. But it is as a moral philosopher, rather than as a metaphysician, that Hutcheson was conspicuous. His system is to a large extent that of Shaftesbury, but it is more complete, coherent, and clearly illustrated. He took over the term 'moral sense' (rarely used by his predecessor) and greatly developed the doctrine. He was a strong opponent of the theory that benevolence has a selfish origin; he was practically an early utilitarian. For insisting that we have a knowledge of good and evil without and prior to a knowledge of God,' and like unwonted teaching, he was (unavailingly) prosecuted for heresy by the Presbytery; and his influence powerfully promoted a liberal theology in Scotland. Hume consulted Hutcheson; Adam Smith studied under him, and was much influenced by him. Reid, too, was first stirred by his works to philosophical interests; but Hutcheson's greatest strength lay in his spoken utterances and not in his printed books.

See Professor Fowler's Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (1882), and the admirable monograph by W. R. Scott, which sheds new light both on his life and his teaching.

The Earl of Chesterfield.

Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694-1773) was an enlightened statesman, an orator, a conspicuous wit, and a man of almost universal accomplishments; but he is chiefly remembered as the author of the famous Letters written to his natural son, Philip Stanhope. Son of the third Earl of Chesterfield, he studied at Cambridge, made the grand tour, and sat in the House of Commons as member for St Germains in Cornwall from 1716 to 1726, when he succeeded his father as fourth Earl. In 1730 he was made Lord Steward of the Household. /Until then, as a Whig, he had supported Walpole; but being ousted from office for voting against an excise bill, he went over to the Opposition, and was one of Walpole's bitterest antagonists. He was above bribes, and, according to his lights, an honest statesman and a true patriot. He joined the Pelham Ministry in 1744; in 1745-46 was a judicious, able, and conciliatory Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland; and was in 1746 one of the principal Secretaries of State, but in 1748 was compelled by ill-health and deafness to retire from public life. He was at one time on terms of intimacy with Swift, Pope, and Bolingbroke, and he patronised Colley Cibber and many other men of letters. Later in life, by obtruding on Samuel Johnson the patronage which he had withheld till the publication of the Dictionary, he drew from the lexicographer the famous indignant letter. The story that Johnson was kept waiting in an anteroom in Chesterfield's house while fops and fribbles passed freely into the presence is not true, and was denied by Johnson himself.

Chesterfield's ambition was gratified neither by success in public life nor in court society. Besides several series of letters, he wrote articles for periodicals and produced some political tracts. The letters to his son were meant to form the young man's mind, mould his manners, and make him an exceptionally accomplished man of the world. They were carried on from the time the boy was five years old till his death as envoy at Dresden at the age of thirty-six. As it happened, though Philip was good-natured and sensible, he was singularly deficient in the graces his courtly father so sedulously inculcated; he filled several minor diplomatic posts with credit, but was shy and diffident in manner and incapable of elegant accomplishments. The correspondence began with 'the dawnings of instruction adapted to the capacity of a boy, rising gradually, by precepts and monition calculated to direct and guard the age of incautious youth, to the advice and knowledge requisite to form the man ambitious to shine as an accomplished courtier, an orator in the senate, or a minister at foreign courts.' The letters contain a vast deal of shrewd advice and observation, show a highly refined taste in literary matters, and are written in singularly pure, perspicuous, and

graceful English. Their ethical level is not high: though Johnson spoke quite unfairly when he said they taught the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master. Chesterfield carefully distinguished between the manners of a gentleman and those of a dancing-master, which he abhorred; his morals, however unsatisfactory, were not those suggested by Johnson. He earnestly reprobated what he regarded as the coarser forms of vice. It might rather be said that he had neither real moral principles nor religious scruples, nor any higher rule of life than a regard for the conventional decencies prescribed by the code of his time-gentlemanliness as then understood. It was not an age of pure lives or lofty aspirations, and Chesterfield was perhaps not far below the

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level of the contemporary man of the world, whose supreme aim in life was to shine in public life or in society. The tone is cynical; self-control and regard for the feelings of others are necessary for our own well-being. Gallantry, its justifications, etiquette, and proper management, are discussed with unpleasant iteration, most unedifying maxims being seriously inculcated. A recent editor apologises for Chesterfield's remarkable counsel to his son to cultivate irregular relations with married women, on the ground that of a total of four hundred and twenty-one letters printed by him only seven or eight gave this unholy advice! The 121st letter-to the boy of eighteen -says women are children of a larger growth, without good sense; 'a man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them.' The 180th has the first actual suggestion; the notorious 202nd opens,

"I have seldom or never written to you on the subject of religion and morality;' insists that 'your moral character [i.e. on the side of honour and truthfulness, not of sexual purity] must be not only pure, but, like Cæsar's wife, unsuspected ;' and, characteristically, proceeds explicitly to re→ commend adultery. The letters were never designed for publication. After the death of Mr Stanhope in 1768, it was found that he had been secretly married, and had left a widow and two children. The widow made over the original letters to their proper owner, Lord Chesterfield, but she preserved copies, and immediately after the death of the eminent wit and statesman, the letters were committed to the press. The copyright was sold for £1500-a sum almost unprecedented for such a work-and five editions were called for within twelve months. In the later years of his life, when almost totally deaf and afflicted by increasing ill-health, Chesterfield wrote another long series of letters to his youthful kinsman, godson, and successor in the earldom -letters similar to the earlier ones in general aim, but less remarkable and less exceptionable. On his deathbed he still endeavoured to carry out his own maxims of punctilious courtesy towards those about him.

On Good-Breeding.

A friend of yours and mine has very justly defined good-breeding to be, the result of much good-sense, some good-nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others, and with a view to obtain the same indulgence from them.' Taking this for granted-as I think it cannot be disputed it is astonishing to me that anybody, who has good-sense and good-nature, can essentially fail in good-breeding. As to the modes of it indeed, they vary according to persons, places, and circumstances, and are only to be acquired by observation and experience; but the substance of it is everywhere and eternally the same. Goodmanners are to particular societies what good morals are to society in general-their cement and their security. And as laws are enacted to enforce good morals, or at least to prevent the ill-effects of bad ones, so there are certain rules of civility universally implied and received, to enforce good-manners and punish bad ones. And indeed there seems to me to be less difference both between the crimes and punishments than at first one would imagine. The immoral man who invades another's property is justly hanged for it; and the ill-bred man, who by his ill-manners invades and disturbs the quiet and comforts of private life, is by common consent as justly banished society. Mutual complaisances, attentions, and sacrifices of little conveniences are as natural an implied compact between civilised people as protection and obedience are between kings and subjects; whoever in either case violates that compact, justly forfeits all advantages arising from it. For my own part, I really think that, next to the consciousness of doing a good action, that of doing a civil one is the most pleasing; and the epithet which I should covet the most, next to that of Aristides, would be that of well-bred.

Judicious Flattery.

If you would particularly gain the affection and friendship of particular people, whether men or women, endeavour to find out their predominant excellency, if they have one, and their prevailing weakness, which every body has; and do justice to the one, and something more than justice to the other. Men have various objects in which they may excel, or at least would be thought to excel; and, though they love to hear justice done to them where they know that they excel, yet they are most and best flattered upon those points where they wish to excel, and yet are doubtful whether they do or not. As for example Cardinal Richelieu, who was undoubtedly the ablest statesman of his time, or perhaps of any other, had the idle vanity of being thought the best poet too: he envied the great Corneille his repu tation, and ordered a criticism to be written upon the Cid. Those therefore who flattered skilfully said little to him of his abilities in state affairs, or at least but en passant, and as it might naturally occur. But the incense which they gave him, the smoke of which they knew would turn his head in their favour, was as a bel esprit and a poet. Why? Because he was sure of one excellency, and distrustful as to the other. You will easily discover every man's prevailing vanity, by observ ing his favourite topic of conversation; for every man talks most of what he has most a mind to be thought to excel in. Touch him but there, and you touch him to the quick. The late Sir Robert Walpole (who was certainly an able man) was little open to flattery upon that head; for he was in no doubt himself about it; but his prevailing weakness was to be thought to have a polite and happy turn to gallantry; of which he had undoubtedly less than any man living: it was his favourite and frequent subject of conversation; which proved to those who had any penetration that it was his prevailing weakness. And they applied to it with

success.

Women have in general but one object, which is their beauty; upon which, scarce any flattery is too gross for them to swallow. Nature has hardly formed a woman ugly enough to be insensible to flattery upon her person; if her face is so shocking that she must in some degree be conscious of it, her figure and air, she trusts, make ample amends for it. If her figure is deformed, her face, she thinks, counterbalances it. If they are both bad, she comforts herself that she has graces; a certain manner; a je ne sçais quoi, still more engaging than beauty. This truth is evident from the studied and elaborate dress of the ugliest women in the world. An undoubted, uncontested, conscious beauty is of all women the least sensible of flattery upon that head: she knows it is her due, and is therefore obliged to nobody for giving it her. She must be flattered upon her understanding; which, though she may possibly not doubt of herself, yet she suspects that men may distrust.

Do not mistake me, and think that I mean to recom mend to you abject and criminal flattery: no, flatter nobody's vices or crimes; on the contrary, abhor and discourage them. But there is no living in the world without a complaisant indulgence for people's weaknesses, and innocent, though ridiculous vanities. If a man has a mind to be thought wiser, and a woman handsomer, than they really are, their error is a comfortable one to themselves, and an innocent one with regard to other

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