and to which they were prepared with no satisfactory answer. To stir the very foundations of society, a man must be prompted either by a passionate love of speculation, or by a distinct prospect of some fruitful result, or by a conviction of the absolute necessity of social reconstruction. Neither of the last two elements was present; and the pure love of enquiry is at all times the rarest of endowments. The hidden fear of dangerous consequences, which kept the deists to half-truths, led men of strong, but not really speculative, intellects to object to speculation altogether. 44. This sentiment is curiously expressed in the ablest writing of the time, down to the very end of the century, when it takes a rather different colouring. Why can't you let things alone? is the unanimous cry of the intellectual leaders. The old theology is effete; but a creed which is effete (an unlucky but a plausible doctrine!) is harmless. The deists are almost uniformly mentioned with a mixture of contempt and dislike. Addison dislikes them as much as he can dislike. anyone. Swift dislikes them, also, as much as he can dislike anyone; and the phrase in his case represents, perhaps, the greatest intensity of aversion of which the human soul is capable. With the whole body of essayists, from Steele downwards, a deist is a futile coxcomb, to be ridiculed like the 'virtuoso' and the fine gentleman. The novelists are equally clear. De Foe makes Robinson Crusoe preach sermons fit for a dissenting pulpit. Richardson has so great a contempt for infidels that he will not contemplate the possibility that even a Lovelace should disbelieve in a future state of rewards and punishments. Fielding, laughing over his beer and pipe at Richardson's namby-pamby sentiment, still has as hearty a contempt for a deist as for a methodist. Johnson turns the roughest side of his contempt to anyone suspected of scepticism, and calls Adam Smith a 'son of a bitch.' When Burke endeavours to blast the deists with his fiery rhetoric at the end of the century, it is only that the wrath which had been smouldering whilst the Deism was comparatively masked bursts into flame as soon as the concealment vanishes. The common sense of the country was entirely on the side of Revelation as against Deism, and the ablest writers were but the mouthpiece of the common sense. The result, however, of this sentiment was not to give an actively orthodox tone to the writing of the time; for theology was for the most part almost as deistical as the deists. 45. A hatred for enthusiasm was as strongly impressed upon the whole character of contemporary thought as a hatred of scepticism. And thus the literary expression of the feeling is rather a dislike to all speculation than a dislike to a particular school of speculatists. The whole subject was dangerous, and should be avoided by reasonable men. A good common-sense religion should be taken for granted, and no questions asked. If the philosophy of the time was unfitted for poetry, it was, for the same reason, unfitted to stimulate the emotions, and therefore for practical life. With Shakespeare, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Jeremy Taylor, or Milton, man is contemplated in his relations to the universe; he is in presence of eternity and infinity; life is a brief dream; we are ephemeral actors in a vast drama; heaven and hell are behind the veil of phenomena; at every step our friends vanish into the vast abyss of ever-present mystery. To all such thoughts the writers of the eighteenth century seemed to close their eyes as resolutely as possible. They do not, like Sir Thomas Browne, delight to lose themselves in an Oh! Altitudo! or to snatch a solemn joy from the giddiness which follows a steady gaze into the infinite. The greatest men amongst them, a Swift or a Johnson, have indeed a senseperhaps a really stronger sense than Browne or Taylor-of the pettiness of our lives and the narrow limits of our knowledge. No great man could ever be without it. But the awe of the infinite and the unseen does not induce them to brood over the mysterious, and find utterance for bewildered musings on the inscrutable enigma. 46. It is felt only in a certain habitual sadness which clouds their whole tone of thought. They turn their backs upon the infinite and abandon the effort at a solution. Their eyes are fixed upon the world around them, and they regard as foolish and presumptuous anyone who dares to contemplate the great darkness. The expression of this sentiment in literature is a marked disposition to turn aside from pure speculation, combined with a deep interest in social and moral laws. The absence of any deeper speculative ground makes the immediate practical questions of life all the more interesting. We know not what we are, nor whither we are going, nor whence we come; but we can, by the help of common sense, discover a sufficient share of moral maxims for our guidance in life, and we can analyse human passions, and discover what are the moving forces of society, without going back to first principles. Knowledge of human nature, as it actually presented itself in the shifting scene before them, and a vivid appreciation of the importance of the moral law, are the staple of the best literature of the time. As ethical speculation was prominent in the philosophy, the enforcement of ethical principles is the task of those who were inclined to despise philosophy. When a creed is dying, the importance of preserving the moral law naturally becomes a pressing consideration with all strong natures. 47. I have coupled Swift and Johnson as the two most vigorous representatives of this tendency. Between them there is a curious analogy as well as a striking contrast. They are alike in that shrewd humorous common sense which seems to be the special endowment of the English race. They are alike, too, in this that they express the reaction against the complacent optimism of the Pope-Shaftesbury variety. They illustrate the incapacity of that system of thought to satisfy men of powerful emotional nature. The writings of each might be summed up in a phrase embodying the most uncompromising protest against the optimist philosophy. Swift says, with unrivalled intensity, that the natural man is not, as theorists would maintain, a reasonable and virtuous animal; but, for the most part, a knave and a fool. Johnson denies, with equal emphasis, though with inferior literary power, that the business of life can be carried on by help of rose-coloured sentiments and general complacency. The world is, at best, but a melancholy place, full of gloom, of misery, of wasted purpose, and disappointed hopes. 'Whatever is, is right,' say the philosophers. Make up the heavy account of suffering, of disease, vice, cruelty, of envy, hatred, and malice, of corruption in high places, of starvation and nakedness amongst the low, of wars, and pestilences, and famines, of selfish ambition trampling on thousands, and wasted heroism strengthening oppression by its failure, of petty domestic tyranny, of lying, hypocrisy, and treachery, which run through all the social organism like a malignant ulcer, and see how far your specious maxim will take you. 48. That is the melancholy burden of the teaching of each of these great men; and it was echoed in various tones by many who felt that the grain of a sham philosophy consisted chiefly of unprofitable husks. Between Swift and Johnson, indeed, there was a wide difference; and the sturdy moralist had a hearty dislike for the misanthropist whose teaching was so far at one with his own. The strong sense of evil which, in Johnson's generous nature, produced rather sadness than anger, had driven Swift to moody hatred of his species. He is the most tragic figure in our literature. Beside the deep agony of his soul, all other suffering, and especially that which takes a morbid delight in contemplating itself, is pale and colourless. He resembles a victim tied to the stake and slowly tortured to madness and death; whilst from his proudly compressed lips there issue no weak lamentations, but the deep curses of which one syllable is more effective than a volume of shrieks. Through the more petty feelings of mere personal spite and disappointed ambition we feel the glow of generous passions doomed to express themselves only in the language of defiant hatred. The total impression made by Swift's writings is unique and almost appalling; for even the sheer brutality suggests some strange disease, and the elaborate triflings remind us of a statesman amusing himself with spiders in a Bastille. If we ask what were the genuine creeds of this singular intellect, the answer must be a blank. The Tale of a Tub' is the keenest of satire against all theologians; 'Gulliver's Travels' expresses the 4xoncentrated essence of contempt for all other classes of mankind; the sermons and tracts defend the Church of England in good set terms, and prove beyond all question his scorn of dissenters, deists, and papists; but it would be an insult to that fiery intellect to suppose that his official defence of the Thirty-nine Articles represents any very vivid belief. He could express himself in very different fashion when he was Jove's address, in the 'Day of Judgment,' shows in earnest. : Offending race of human kind, I damn such fools! Go, go, you're bit. That is genuine feeling. The orthodox phrases are no more part of Swift than his bands and cassock. 49. Swift's idiosyncrasy would doubtless have made itself felt at any time. The special direction of his haughty passions and intense intellect is determined by the conditions of the time. In a time of strong beliefs he would have been a vehement partisan. But what to an intellect contemptuous of all shams were the specious varnish which Clarke and Shaftesbury spread over the hard facts of life, or the lifeless exuviæ of dead creeds which satisfied conventional theologians, or the pompous phrases with which the politicians of both sides disguised their struggles for the division of the spoils ? Mere tawdry frippery, incapable of satisfying a man with brains fit for something more than the manipulation of extinct formulæ. Swift called himself an old Whig and an orthodox churchman; but he cared little enough for the Thirty-nine Articles, or the platitudes about standing armies or social contracts. He felt to the depths of his soul the want of any of the principles which in trying times take concrete shape in heroic natures; and he assumed that the whole race of the courtiers of kings and mobs in all ages were such vile crawling creatures as could sell England or starve Ireland to put a few thousands in their pockets. He felt the want of some religion, and therefore scalped poor Collins, and argued with his marvellous ingenuity of irony against 'the abolition of Christianity; but the dogmas of theologians were mere matter for the Homeric laughter of the Tale of a Tub.' He had not the unselfish qualities or the indomitable belief in the po |