had made away with both his bones and his doctrines. How does it turn out? The historian says: "The brook took them into the Avon, the Avon into the Severn, the Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean, and thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblems of his doctrine, which is now dispersed all the world over." You and I may not have much intellectual power, cur thought may never fill the world's soul; but, if we have stimulated a generous wish or a noble aspiration, if we have ever furnished a medium in which handsome things may be projected and performed, if we have added one leaf to the tree of humanity, one blossom to its wealth of bloom, or aught to its harvest of fruit, we may rely upon the eternal law that neither things present nor things to come can deprive these outgoing particles of their immortality. More fitting and enduring epitaph than this Addison could not have, "He lived wisely and usefully." DE FOE. His imagination was that of a man of business, not of an artist, crammed and, as it were, jammed down with facts. He tells them as they come to him, without arrangement or style, like a conversation......... Never was such a sense of the real before or since.-Taine. Biography.-Born in 1661, the son of a London butcher named Foe. Disliking the family name, he added a prefix to suit his own taste. Studied five years at a Dissenters' academy for the Presbyterian ministry. Joined the Monmouth insurrection, and escaped hanging of transportation. Became a hosier, and failed. Became a merchant-adventurer, visiting Spain and Portugal, and absconded from his creditors in 1692. Subsequently paid their entire claims when legally relieved of the obligation to do so. Became an accountant under William III., but lost his appointment in 1699 by suppression of the Glass Duty. Became a tile-maker, and lost three thousand pounds in the undertaking. Explains in 1705, 'How, with a numerous family and no help but his own industry, he had forced his way with undiscouraged diligence through a sea of misfortunes'. Writes a pamphlet against the High Church party, is misunderstood, fined, pilloried, his ears cut off, imprisoned two years, -charity preventing his wife and six children from dying of hunger during his imprisonment. Caricatured, robbed, and slandered, he withdrew from politics, and at fifty-five, poor and burdened, turned to fiction. Wrote in prose, in verse, on all subjects, in all 254 separate works! and, struck down with apoplexy, died in 1731, penniless, in solvent, immortal. Appearance.—Under order of arrest for a pamphlet misconceived, he was described by the Gazette of January 1702, as 'a middle-sized spare man, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, and dark brown hair, though he wears a wig, having a hook nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth.' Writings.—True-born Englishman (1701), a poetical satire on the foreigners, and a defence of King William and the Dutch. Its sale was almost unexampled; eighty thousand pirated copies were sold on the streets. Tuneless and homely, it shows the ability of its author to reason forcibly in rhyme. The opening lines are characteristic: Wherever God erects a house of prayer, The devil always builds a chapel there; The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), a work wherein he, 'himself a Dissenter, ironically recommends the stake and the gallows. Neither Whig nor Tory could understand De Foe's irony-it was too subtle or obscure, and the work was voted a libel on the nation. The author was condemned to pay a fine, was set in the pillory, and imprisoned.—Confined in Newgate, he commenced the Review, designed to treat of news, foreign and domestic; of politics, English and European; of trade, particular and universal. Realizing that the age, naturally averse to anything serious, would not read unless it could be diverted, he skillfully instituted a Scandal Club, which discussed questions in divinity, morals, war, trade, poetry, love, marriage, drunkenness, and gaming. Thus it is easy to see that the Review pointed the way to the Tatler.-Robinson Crusoe, a novel of adventure. Perhaps the most widely diffused and the most eagerly read of English productions. As long as there are boys and girls, it will continue to find devoted readers. 'Nobody', observed Johnson, 'ever laid it down without wishing it were longer.' Journal of the Great Plague in London (1724), a description of sights, incidents, and persons, as observed by an assumed shopkeeper. Dr. Mead, a famous physician, appealed to it for medical purposes, and it has more than once passed for a genuine history. The Memoirs of a Cavalier (1724), so plausible, so natural, so real, that Lord Chatham was deceived into recommending it as the most authentic account of the Civil War. True Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal, a narrative of facts seemingly as true and indubitable as any that ever passed before our eyes. It was prefixed to a religious book On Death, and not only sold the whole edition of an otherwise unsalable work, but excited extensive inquiries into the alleged facts.-One of his works has the curious title of: Mars stript of his armor; a lashing caricature of the habits and manners of all kinds of military men, written on purpose to delight quiet tradespeople, and cure their daughters of their passion for red-coats. Style.-Pure, simple, clear, vigorous, colloquial, idiomatic. Rank.-Unrivaled in the invention and relation of incidents. 'Never was such a sense of the real before or since'. The grand secret of his art-if that may be called art which is nature itself-consists in an astonishing minuteness of details and an unequaled power of giving REALITY to the incidents which he relates. He deceives not the eye, but the mind, and that literally, as we have noticed. The preface to an old edition of Robinson Crusoe says: The story is told...... to the instruction of others by this example, and to justify and honor the wisdom of Providence. The editor believes the thing to be a just history of facts; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it.' He sat in his closet, traveled round the world in idea, saw with the distinctness of natural vision, then narrated so plausibly as to deceive the most intelligent. His fields of power were: national convulsions, by war, by pestilence, or by tempest; magic, ghost-seeing, witchcraft, and the occult sciences; thieves, rogues, vagabonds, swindlers; buccaneers, pirates. The courage, the wonderful and romantic adventures, and the hairbreadth escapes of pirates seem to have had for him an infinite charm. Character. A poet, a novelist, and a polemic; born a writer, as other men are born generals and statesmen. Without the idea of beauty, he is good and religious, too good and religious to forget the distinctions between virtue and vice. Though his subjects are low, his aims are moral. In this respect, he is entitled to a much higher praise than is generally awarded him. His heroes and incidents are made the frequent occasion of inculcating the fundamental truths of religion, the being of God, the superintendency of Providence, the certainty of Heaven and Hell, the one to reward, the other to punish. Crusoe is De Foe,honest, open, confidential, laying his inmost thoughts and feelings before us; patient and invincible in difficulty, in disappointment, in toil; sanguine, combatting, conquering. Of his habits, little can now be told more than he has confessed: God, I thank thee I am not a drunkard, or a swearer, or a busybody, or idle, or revengeful; and though this be true, and I challenge all the world to prove the contrary, I must own I see small satisfaction in the negatives of the common virtues; for though I have not been guilty of any of these vices, nor of many more, I have nothing to infer from thence but, Te Deum laudamus. Influence. His moral teaching, as indicated above, is generally unexceptionable. Good and evil are carefully discriminated. Knowing life better than the soul, the course of the world better than the motives of men, his best drawn characters are less instructive and salutary than greater delicacy and profounder insight would have rendered them. His writings, though they did not save him from want, gained him a renown that will descend the stream of time to the remotest generation of men. SWIFT. THE most unhappy man on earth.-Archbishop King. Biography. Born in Dublin, 1667, but of English parentage. Instructed by his nurse, at three he could spell, and at five could read any chapter in the Bible. Passed eight years in the school of Kilkenny, and at fifteen, poorly supported by the charity of an uncle, entered Dublin University. Odd, awkward, proud, and friendless, irregular and desultory as a student, he incurred in two years no less than seventy penalties, meditated An Account of the Kingdom of Absurdities to show his disgust for the routine of scholastic training, and provoked the pitying smiles of the professors for his feeble brain. Failed to take his degree, on account of 'dullness and insuffiiciency' in logic. Presented himself for examination a second time, without having condescended to read logic. Refused to answer the questions propounded, desired to know what he was to learn from 'those books', and was asked how he could expect to reason well without rules; retorted that he did reason without them, and that, so far as he had observed, rules taught men to wrangle rather than to reason. Obtained his degree at last by special favor, a term used in that university to denote want of merit. At twenty-one, left without subsistence, he was received into the house of Sir William Temple as secretary, for twenty pounds a year and his board; dined at the second table, and smothered his rebellion. Studied eight hours a day to correct his former idleness, and ran up and down a hill every two hours to correct a giddiness he had contracted in Ireland. Wrote bad verses to flatter his master, hoped he was a poet, and perpetually hated Dryden, who said of them, 'Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.' Ambitious of preferment, sick of hopes deferred, and galled by his servitude, he attempted independence, and entered the Irish ministry in 1694, at a hundred pounds a year, in a distant, secluded, and half civilized place. Found it a lower deep, to which the hell he had suffered seemed a heaven; was forced to accept Temple's cordial invitation to return, from which time the two appear to have lived in mutual confidence and esteem. Upon Temple's death (1699), who had left him a legacy and his manuscripts, he edited the works of his patron, dedicated them to William III., to remind him of promised advancement, got nothing, and accepted the post of secretary to a nobleman; was circumvented, then promised the rich Deanery of Derry, saw it bestowed on somebody else, and fell back on the post of prebendary.* Constrained to reside in a country which he detested, and longing for the promotion that would enable him to return to England, near the centre of literary and political activity, he launched into politics, advocated Whig principles, received fine promises from party leaders, and was neglected. In 1710, lured by false hopes till his patience was exhausted, and insulted without revenge, he abandoned the Whigs, who were now to be driven from office, joined the Tories, leveled at his former friends the blasting lightning of his satire, was feared as a powerful and unscrupulous pamphleteer, became the familiar associate and adviser of the rich and titled, stretched out his hands for an English bishopric, and received-what he professed to regard as an honorable exile-only the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin; for though favored by the ministers of state, by the Queen and High Church dignitaries, whose party he had espoused, he was disliked as an uncertain friend and a doubtful Christian. He had been the author of a religious lampoon (Tale of a Tub) that was fatal to his eminence in the church. To Ireland he repaired in bitterness of spirit. There he was exiled by the return of the Whigs to power under George I.; and there he was confined, contrary to his expectations, by their continued supremacy under George II. Isolated, even pelted by the populace in the streets, stung by the designations of renegade, traitor, and atheist, conscious of superiority and soured by the feeling of his own impotence, he vented his pent-up rage in torturing, crushing satires against theologians, statesmen, courtiers, society. In 1724, by delivering Ireland from a fraudulent and oppressive measure, from being an object of hatred he became an object of idolatry; and the popularity he thus acquired, he was diligent to keep, by continuing attention to the public, and by various modes of beneficence. But power almost despotic could not reconcile him to himself or his environment, and in 1728 he writes: 'I find myself disposed every year, or rather every month, to be inore angry and revengeful; and my rage is so ignoble that it descends even to resent the folly and baseness of the enslaved people among whom I live.' Sometimes wished to visit England, but the fire was burning low, and he seems to have had a presentiment that he never would. Tells Pope he hopes once more to see him; 'but if not', he says, 'we must part as all human beings have parted.' In the county of Meath, north-west of Dublin. While here, he appointed the reading of prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays. On the first Wednesday, after the bell had ceased ringing for some time, finding that the congregation consisted only of himself and his clerk, Roger, he began: 'Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me in sundry places', &c.; and then proceeded regularly through the whole service. → |