ostasy out to
hire." I doubt whether any of Swift's works are very much read now, but
perhaps Gulliver's travels are oftener in the hands of modern readers
than any other. Of all the satires in our language it is probably the
most cynical, the most absolutely illnatured, and therefore the falsest.
Let those who care to form an opinion of Swift's mind from the best
known of his works, turn to Thackeray's account of Gulliver. I can
imagine no greater proof of misery than to have been able to write such
a book as that.

It is thus that the lecturer concludes his lecture about Swift. "He
shrank away from all affections sooner or later. Stella and Vanessa both
died near him, and away from him. He had not heart enough to see them
die. He broke from his fastest friend, Sheridan. He slunk away from his
fondest admirer, Pope. His laugh jars on one's ear after seven-score
years. He was always alone,--alone and gnashing in the darkness, except
when Stella's sweet smile came and shone on him. When that went, silence
and utter night closed over him. An immense genius, an awful downfall
and ruin! So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like
thinking of an empire falling. We have other great names to
mention,--none I think, however, so great or so gloomy." And so we pass
on from Swift, feeling that though the man was certainly a humorist, we
have had as yet but little to do with humour.

Congreve is the next who, however truly he may have been a humorist, is
described here rather as a man of fashion. A man of fashion he certainly
was, but is best known in our literature as a comedian,--worshipping
that comic Muse to whom Thackeray hesitates to introduce his audience,
because she is not only merry but shameless also. Congreve's muse was
about as bad as any muse that ever misbehaved herself,--and I think, as
little amusing. "Reading in these plays now," says Thackeray, "is like
shutting your ears and looking at people dancing. What does it
mean?--the measures, the grimaces, the bowing, shuffling, and
retreating, the cavaliers seuls advancing upon their ladies, then ladies
and men twirling round at the end in a mad galop, after which everybody
bows and the quaint rite is celebrated?" It is always so with Congreve's
plays, and Etherege's and Wycherley's. The world we meet there is not
our world, and as we read the plays we have no sympathy with these
unknown people. It was not that they lived so long ago. They are much
ne