met with no success,
and which, when reproduced seventeen years later, after the "Beggars'
Opera" had taken the town by storm, fell as flat as before.

Gay had now fairly found his way into the centre of that brilliant circle
called the Wits of Queen Anne. That was certainly one of the most varied
in intellect and attainment which the world has ever seen. Highest far
among them--we refer to the Tory side--darkled the stern brow of the
author of "Gulliver's Travels," who had a mind cast by nature in a form
of naked force, like a gloomy crag without a particle of beauty or
any vegetation, save what will grow on the most horrid rocks, and the
condition of whose existence there, seems to be that it deepens
the desolation--a mind unredeemed by virtue save in the shape of
remorse--unvisited by weakness, until it came transmuted into the tiger
of madness--whose very sermons were satires on God and man--whose very
prayers had a twang of blasphemy--whose loves were more loathsome than
his hatreds, and yet over whose blasted might and most miserable and
withered heart men mourn, while they shudder, blend tears with anathemas,
and agree that the awful mystery of man itself is deepened by its
relation to the mystery of the wickedness, remorse, and wretchedness
of Jonathan Swift. Superior to him in outward show and splendour, but
inferior in real intellect, and, if possible, in moral calibre, shone,
although with lurid brilliance, the "fell genius" of St John or Henry
Bolingbroke. In a former paper we said that Edmund Burke reminded us less
of a man than of a tutelar Angel; and so we can sometimes think of the
"ingrate and cankered Bolingbroke," with his subtle intellect, his showy,
sophistical eloquence, his power of intrigue, his consummate falsehood,
his vice and his infidelity as a "superior fiend"--a kind of human
Belial--

"In act more graceful than humane:
A fairer person lost not heaven: he seem'd

For dignity composed and high exploit;
But all was false and hollow, though his tongue
Dropt manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest counsels."

These two were the giants of the Tory confederacy of wits. But little
inferior to them in brilliance, if vastly less in intellectual size, was
Pope, with his epigrammatic style, his compact sense--like stimulating
essence contained in small smelling bottles--his pungent personalities,
his elegant glitter,