ascribed to Swift, and is usually printed among Swift's works. Swift said of him-"He has more wit than we all have, and his humanity is equal to his wit." Arbuthnot was one of the northern Scots that were now beginning to push their fortunes in London. He was born in Kincardineshire, at a town of his own name, and studied medicine in Aberdeen. Immediately after completing his studies he went to London, and made a livelihood at first by teaching mathematics. He soon brought himself into notice by some tracts on mathematical and medical subjects. In 1705 he was appointed physician extraordinary to Queen Anne; in 1709 physician ordinary. He became a leading wit in the coffeehouses. When Swift came over from Ireland in 1708, and the Tories concerted a grand assault upon the Whigs, Arbuthnot's ready pen supplied some of the most effective missiles of offence. The History of John Bull' by Arbuthnot, the 'Conduct of the Allies' by Swift, and 'The Defence of Sacheverell' by Atterbury, were the three great literary contributions to the fall of the Whig Government: the eulogist of Arbuthnot usually gives the honour to Arbuthnot's performance, the eulogist of Swift to Swift's, the eulogist of Atterbury to Atterbury's. Arbuthnot's other great production is his share in the writings of Martinus Scriblerus,' sometimes printed with Swift's works, sometimes with Pope's. The Scriblerus Club was instituted in 1714 by Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, Gay, Parnell, Atterbury, Congreve, and others. The object was to satirise the absurdities of literature. The members were actuated a good deal by the spirit of Pope's 'Dunciad.' Arbuthnot bore a large share in the works published under the signature of Scriblerus. In the essay on the Art of Sinking,' his hand can be traced in several of the chapters.-Arbuthnot's fortunes declined at the accession of George, and his later days were made unhappy by poverty and ill-health.-There is no collected edition of his works. The 'John Bull' is usually printed in Swift's works, the 'Scriblerus' papers partly in Swift's, partly in Pope's. He was exceedingly careless of what he wrote; all was done to serve a passing purpose, and he took no pains to preserve either manuscript or print. He must have been a man of great social tact and amiability. Swift seems to have loved him like a brother-"If the world had a dozen Arbuthnots in it," he wrote in one of his letters, "I would burn my Travels." The power of his satire was proved by its effects. He is the most versatile, as regards mood, of all the great wits of the period. When his feelings are not specially roused he is genial, lambent, good-humoured; but he was capable of genuine indignation, and sometimes lays on the lash with unsparing severity. His paper on the 'Altercation or Scolding of the Ancients' is in very happy humour; his 'Art of Political Lying' is more sarcastic; and some

sallies usually attributed to him against Bishop Burnet, the favourite butt of Swift, are worthy of the savage Dean himself.

One imposing figure in the public transactions of the time also demands a high place in the history of our literature-Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751). His chief philosophical and political works were written during the forced inaction of the latter half of his life, and in this manual he should, in strict method, be placed in the following generation; but he is so thoroughly identified with the Queen Anne men that it would be an unprofitable violation of the usual arrangement not to mention him here.

Entering Parliament in 1701 at the age of twenty-three, he had not to watch and wait for distinction; his splendid powers placed him at once in the front rank. He gained a seat in the Cabinet in 1704 as Secretary at War, and remained in office four years. During the four last years of Queen Anne, he and Harley were the leaders of the Administration. He quarrelled with Harley, and supplanted him as formal head of the Government about a week before the Queen's death. With the death of the Queen his power came to an end: he was suspected of having intrigued for the succession of the Pretender Prince, and had to flee the country. For some time he was secretary to the Pretender; and, turning to literary composition, produced Reflections on Exile,' and a defence of his conduct in the form of a letter to Sir William Wyndham. After seven years' exile, he was permitted to return, but was not suffered to resume his place in the House of Lords. Upon his return he wrote in the Craftsman' a series of letters, afterwards reprinted as 'A Dissertation on Parties,' and busied himself with other studies and writings. In 1735 he went to France, this time voluntarily, and lived there for seven years, during which he published Letters on the Study of History' and a 'Letter on the True Use of Retirement.' On his final return to England in 1742, he settled at Battersea; wrote 'Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism;' the Idea of a Patriot King' (pub. in 1749); and the various philosophical and other works published after his death by his literary executor, David Mallet.-Much has been said of the splendid personality of Bolingbroke. Pope gave poetic expression to a very general feeling when he said that, on the appearance of a comet, he could not help thinking that it had been sent as a chariot to take his friend St John away. "Nature," writes Goldsmith, "seemed not less kind to him in her external embellishments, than in adorning his mind. With the graces of a handsome person, and a face in which dignity was happily blended with sweetness, he had a manner of address that was very engaging. His vivacity was always awake, his apprehension was quick, his wit refined, and his memory amazing; his

subtlety in thinking and reasoning was profound; and all these talents were adorned with an elocution that was irresistible." His constitutional energy was prodigious, appearing in the wild excesses of his dissolute youth, no less than in his hard work and complicated intrigues as a Minister of State. The most striking feature of his style is splendour of declamation. All his works, philosophical as well as political, are written in a declamatory strain, and read like elaborate speeches. Not only have the words an oratorical glow and vehemence, but the general structure is the structure of spoken rather than of written style. The dedication of his Dissertation on Parties,' addressed to Sir Robert Walpole, is an extreme example:

'Let me now appeal to you, sir. Are these designs which any man, who is born a Briton, in any circumstances, in any situation, ought to be ashamed or afraid to avow? You cannot think it. You will not say it. That never can be the case, until we cease to think like freemen, as well as to be free. Are these designs in favour of the Pretender? I appeal to the whole world; and I scorn with a just indignation to give any other answer to so shameless and so senseless an objection. No; they are designs in favour of the constitution; designs to secure, to fortify, to perpetuate that excellent system of government. I court no other cause; I claim no other merit."

Here not only the vehement eloquence, but the short sentences, the pointed balance, the repetition of the leading word (as in "designs"), the figures of interrogation and exclamation-all belong to oratory. We meet some or all of these characteristics in every page. Although, however, in almost every page we

meet with the short oratorical sentence familiar to readers of Macaulay, his sentences are not in general so short as in the above extract. On the contrary, he is rather famous for long sentences remarkable on this ground, that the conclusion of the predicate is put off by one clause after another, and yet these clauses are so admirably placed that there is seldom the least confusion. The structure of these long sentences is all the more simple that very often the latter part is a paraphrase or extension in apposition to some word in the former part. Thus

"How different the case is, on the other side, will appear not only from the actions, but from the principles of the Court party, as we find them avowed in their writings; principles more dangerous to liberty, though not so directly, nor so openly levelled against it, than even any of those, bad as they were, which some of these men value themselves for having formerly opposed."

This structure is also oratorical.1 To call Bolingbroke a splendid

1 In singling out certain features of Bolingbroke's style as oratorical, I do not mean to imply that these are confined to oratory. I call them oratorical because they are such as occur in nearly every Parliamentary speech of the eighteenth century, and because they are peculiarly fitted to spoken address.

declaimer is to give him little more than half his due. He is also a wit; and at every turn he electrifies the reader with some felicitous stroke of brevity, or happy adjustment of words to his meaning.

6

To enumerate all the miscellaneous writers of this time would be as much out of place in the present work as to enumerate all that have written to newspapers or magazines within the nineteenth century. A great many periodicals, weekly, bi-weekly, or daily, some continued for a few weeks, some for one or two years, were published contemporaneously with, and after the decease of, Defoe's 'Review;' Steele's 'Tatler,' 'Spectator,' and 'Guardian;' and Swift's 'Examiner.' A long list is given in the beginning of vol. iv. of Drake's Essays on Steele, Addison, and Johnson. The names that we meet with are such as 'The Re-Tatler;' The Female Tatler;' The Tory Tatler;' The Grumbler; The Medley' (conducted by an accomplished man, Mr Maynwaring); "The Lay Monastery' (conducted by the poet Sir Richard Blackmore); The Censor' (conducted by Lewis Theobald, the annotator of Shakspeare); The Free-thinker (supported by Ambrose Phillips, the friend of Addison, and George Stubbs, a scholarly elegant recluse clergyman); The Plain Dealer' (started by Aaron Hill); 'The Intelligencer' (by Dr Sheridan, the friend and biographer of Swift). Most of the periodicals of the day were political; others diversified politics with literature, on the plan of the Review;' and some consisted of a few numbers directed against an object of aversion in literature, manners, or even commerce. Periodicals were the fashion; most of them very short-lived. A periodical sheet was started to vent an opinion that, in the present day, would be expressed in a letter, or a series of letters, to a daily newspaper; and expired either when the author had exhausted the idea, or when the public had received enough and refused to purchase

more.

409

CHAPTER VII.

FROM 1730 TO 1760.

SAMUEL

JOHNSON,

1709-1784.

THE great "Moralist and "Lexicographer" was the son of a respectable bookseller in Lichfield, where he was born on the 18th of September. The mistress of a dame's school there praised him as the best scholar she ever had. After five years at a higher school in Lichfield, one year at the school of Stourbridge, and two years loitering at home, he was sent, at the age of nineteen, to Pembroke College, Oxford. He was too desultory to confine himself to the studies of the place, and continued in the library of the college the wide miscellaneous reading he had practised in his father's shop. Yet his fluent command of Latin procured him marked attention. A Latin hexameter version of Pope's 'Messiah,' which he executed as a Christmas exercise, was considered so good that Pope is said to have declared that posterity would be in doubt which was the original and which the translation. Owing to poverty, he left Oxford in 1731 without taking a degree. Too constitutionally irregular to settle down to a profession, he lived at home for several months; acted for several months as an usher; lived with a friend in Birmingham; translated for a Birmingham bookseller 'Lobo's Journey to Abyssinia' (pub. in 1735); returned to Lichfield; married Mrs Porter of Birmingham, a widow with £800; and set up a boarding-school near Lichfield. Finally, the school not succeeding, he removed to London in 1737, and for the next quarter of a century maintained himself by his pen.

Had he been born a generation sooner, and gone to London in