g of
permanent validity and remembrance, should be unread and its author
forgotten except by scholars, is too curious a fact not to have a deep
cause in its own character. The cause is not hard to find: it is one of
the books which try to turn the world's current backward, and which the
world dislikes as offending its ideals of progress. Stripped of its
broad humor, its object, rubbed in with no great delicacy of touch, was
to uphold the most extreme and reactionary Toryism of the time, and to
jeer at political liberalism from the ground up. Its theoretic loyalty
is the non-resistant Jacobitism of the Nonjurors, which it is so hard
for us now to distinguish from abject slavishness; though like the
principles of the casuists, one must not confound theory with practice.
It seems the loyalty of a mujik or a Fiji dressed in cultivated modern
clothes, not that of a conceivable cultivated modern community as a
whole; but it would be very Philistine to pour wholesale contempt on a
creed held by so many large minds and souls. It was of course produced
by the experience of what the reverse tenets had brought on,--a long
civil war, years of military despotism, and immense social and moral
disorganization. In 'John Bull,' the fidelity of a subject to a king is
made exactly correspondent, both in theory and practice, with the
fidelity of a wife to her husband and her marriage vows; and an
elaborate parallel is worked out to show that advocating the right of
resistance to a bad king is precisely the same, on grounds of either
logic or Scripture, as advocating the right of adultery toward a bad
husband. This is not even good fooling; and, its local use past and no
longer buoyed by personal liking for the author, the book sinks back
into the limbo of partisan polemics with many worse ones and perhaps
some better ones, dragging its real excellences down with it.

In 1714 the famous Scriblerus Club was organized, having for its members
Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, Gay, Congreve, Lord Oxford, and Bishop
Atterbury. They agreed to write a series of papers ridiculing, in the
words of Pope, "all the false tastes in learning, under the character of
a man of capacity enough, but that had dipped into every art and
science, but injudiciously in each." The chronicle of this club was
found in 'The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries
of Martinus Scriblerus,' which is thought to have been written entirely
by Arbuthnot, and which des