ed. We do, in fact, know it to be true,--even though it be admitted
that there is still room left for a book to be written on the life of
the fearful dean. Here was a man endued with an intellect pellucid as
well as brilliant; who could not only conceive but see also,--with some
fine instincts too; whom fortune did not flout; whom circumstances
fairly served; but who, from first to last, was miserable himself, who
made others miserable, and who deserved misery. Our business, during the
page or two which we can give to the subject, is not with Swift but
with Thackeray's picture of Swift. It is painted with colours terribly
strong and with shadows fearfully deep. "Would you like to have lived
with him?" Thackeray asks. Then he says how pleasant it would have been
to have passed some time with Fielding, Johnson, or Goldsmith. "I should
like to have been Shakespeare's shoeblack," he says. "But Swift! If you
had been his inferior in parts,--and that, with a great respect for all
persons present, I fear is only very likely,--his equal in mere social
station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you. If,
undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would
have quailed before you and not had the pluck to reply,--and gone home,
and years after written a foul epigram upon you." There is a picture!
"If you had been a lord with a blue riband, who flattered his vanity, or
could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company
in the world.... How he would have torn your enemies to pieces for you,
and made fun of the Opposition! His servility was so boisterous that it
looked like independence." He was a man whose mind was never fixed on
high things, but was striving always after something which, little as it
might be, and successful as he was, should always be out of his reach.
It had been his misfortune to become a clergyman, because the way to
church preferment seemed to be the readiest. He became, as we all know,
a dean,--but never a bishop, and was therefore wretched. Thackeray
describes him as a clerical highwayman, seizing on all he could get. But
"the great prize has not yet come. The coach with the mitre and crozier
in it, which he intends to have for _his_ share, has been delayed on the
way from St. James's; and he waits and waits till nightfall, when his
runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different way and
escaped him. So he fires his pistol into the air with a cu