'Love of my life, and life of love,' Cupid rules our fates above, Ever let us vow to join In homage at his happy shrine. And with sportive sneeze divine, Complete. From "Curiosities of Literature.* AUSTIN DOBSON (1840-) USTIN DOBSON, one of the most pleasing writers of English vers de société, has given the world essays as charming as his poems. In prose he is at his best in his studies of Swift, Addison, and the worthies of Queen Anne's reign. He was born at Plymouth, England, January 18th, 1840, and educated for a civil engineer, but the prosaic work of his life has been done chiefly in a position under the Board of Trade. His Vignettes in Rhyme," "Proverbs in Porcelain," and "Old World Idyls," are admirable examples of his delicate treatment of subjects which belong to the lighter moods of poetry. His rhymes are always perfect, and he has written nothing but what will help to make the world better than he found it. A SWIFT AND HIS STELLA DIM light was burning in the back room of a first floor in Bury Street, St. James's. The apartment it illumined was not a spacious one; and the furniture, adequate rather than luxurious, had that indefinable. lack of physiognomy which only lodging-house furniture seems to acquire. There was no fireplace; but in the adjoining parlor, partly visible through the open door, the last embers were dying in a grate from which the larger pieces of coal had been lifted away and carefully ranged in order on the hobs. Across the heavy, high-backed chairs in the bedroom lay various neatly-folded garments, one of which was the black gown with pudding sleeves usually worn in public by the eighteenth-century clergyman, while at the bottom of the bed hung a clerical-looking periwig. In the bed itself, and leaning toward a tall wax candle at his side (which, from a faint smell of burnt woolen still lingering about the chamber, must have recently come into contact with the now tucked-back bed curtain) was a gentleman of forty or thereabouts, writing in a very small hand upon a very large sheet of paper, folded, for greater convenience, into one long horizontal slip. He had dark, fierce-looking eyebrows; a slightly aquiline nose; full-lidded and rather prominent clear blue eyes; a firmly-cut, handsome mouth; and a wide, massive forehead, the extent of which for the moment was abnormally exaggerated by the fact that, in the energy of composition, the fur-lined cap he had substituted for his wig had been slightly tilted backward. As his task proceeded his expression altered from time to time, now growing grave and stern, now inexpressibly soft and tender. Occasionally, the look almost passed into a kind of grimace, resembling nothing so much as the imitative motion of the lips which one makes in speaking to a pet bird. He continued writing until in the distance the step of the watchman, first pausing deliberately, then passing slowly forward for a few paces, was heard in the street below. "Past twelve o'clock!" came a wheezy cry at the window. "P-a-a-a-a-ast twelve o'clock!" followed the writer, dragging out his letters so as to produce the speaker's drawl. After this he rapidly set down a string of words in what looked like some unknown tongue, ending off with a trail of seeming hieroglyphics. "Nite, noun, deelest sollahs. Nite dee litt MD, Pdfr's MD. Rove Pdfr, poo Pdfr, MD MD MD TW TW TW. Lele Lele Lele Lele michar MD." Then, tucking his paper under his pillow, he popped out the guttering candle, and, turning round upon his side with a smile of exceeding sweetness, settled himself to sleep. The personage thus depicted was Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Divinity, Vicar of Laracor by Trim, in the diocese of Meath, in the kingdom of Ireland, and Prebendary of Dunlaven in St. Patrick's Cathedral. He had not been long in London, having but recently come over at the suggestion of Dr. William King, Archbishop of Dublin, to endeavor to obtain for the Irish clergy the remission (already conceded to their English brethren) of the first fruits payable to the crown; and he was writing off, or up, his daily records of his doings to Mrs. Rebecca Dingley and Mrs. Esther Johnson, two maiden ladies, who, in his absence from the Irish capital, were temporarily occupying his lodgings in Capel Street. At this date he must have been looking his best, for he had just been sitting to Pope's friend, Charles Jervas, who, having painted him two years earlier, had found him grown so much fatter and better for his sojourn in Ireland that he had volunteered to retouch the portrait. He had given it He had given it "quite another turn," Swift tells his correspondents, "and now approves it entirely." Nearly twenty years later Alderman Barber presented this very picture to the Bodleian, where it is still to be seen; and it is, besides, familiar to the collector in George Vertue's fine engraving. But even more interesting than the similitude of Swift in the fullness of his ungrateful ambition are the letters we have seen him writing. With one exception, those of them which were printed, and garbled, by his fatuous namesake, Mrs. Whiteway's son-in-law, are destroyed or lost; but all the latter portion, again, with the exception of one, which Hawkesworth, a more conscientious, though by no means an irreproachable editor, gave to the world in 1766, are preserved in the MSS. Department of the British Museum, having fortunately been consigned in the same year, by their confederated publishers, to the safe-keeping of that institution. They still bear, in many cases, the little seal (a classic female head) with which, after addressing them in laboriously legible. fashion, "To Mrs. Dingley, at Mr. Curry's House, over against the Ram in Capel Street, Dublin, Ireland," Swift was wont to fasten up his periodical dispatches. Several of them are written on quarto paper with faint gilding at the edges,-the "pretty small gilt sheet" to which he somewhere refers; but the majority are on a wide folio page crowded from top to bottom with an extremely minute and often abbreviated script, which must have tried other eyes besides those of Esther Johnson. "I looked over a bit of my last letter," he says himself on one occasion, "and could hardly read it"; elsewhere, in one of the letters now lost, he counts up no fewer than one hundred and ninety-nine lines; and in another of those that remain, taken at a venture, there are on the first side sixty-nine lines, making, in the type of Scot's edition, rather more than five octavo pages. As for the little language" which produced the facial contortions above referred to ("When I am writing in our language I make up my mouth, just as if I were speaking"), it has been sadly mutilated by Hawkesworth's relentless pen. Many of the passages which he struck through were, with great ingenuity, restored by the late John Forster, from whom, in the little picture at the beginning of this paper, we borrowed a few of those recovered hieroglyphics. But the bulk of their "huge babyisms" and "dear diminutives" are almost too intimate and particular for the rude publicities of type. Dans ce ravissant opéra qu'on appelle l'amour, says Vic tor Flugo, le libretto n'est presque rien; and if for amour we read amitié, the aphorism, it must be admitted, is not untrue of Swift's famous "special code" to Stella. There can, however, be no doubt of the pleasure with which Swift's communications must have been welcomed by the two ladies at Capel Street, not occupied, as was the writer, with the ceaseless bustle of an unusually busy world, but restricted to such minor dissipations as a little horse exercise, or a quiet game of ombre at Dean Sterne's, to the modest accompaniment of claret and oranges. Swift's unique and wonderful command of his mother tongue has never been shown to such advantage as in these familiar records, bristling with proverbs and folklore, invented ad hoc, with puns good and bad, with humor, irony, common sense, and playfulness. One can imagine with what eagerness the large sheet must have been unfolded, and readnot all at once, but in easy stages-by Mrs. Dingley to the impatient Mrs. Johnson, for whom it was primarily intended, but whose eyes were too weak to read it. Yet to the modern student, the "Journal to Stella," taken as a whole, scarcely achieves the success which its peculiar attributes lead one to anticipate. It remains, as must always be remembered, strictly a journal with a journal's defects. There is a lack of connected interest; there is also a superfluity of detail. Regarded in the light of a historical picture, it is like Hogarth's "March to Finchley": the crowd in the foreground obscures the central action. It treats, indeed, of a stirring and momentous time, for power was changing hands. The Whigs had given place to the Tories; adroit Mrs. Masham had supplanted "Mrs. Freeman"; the great Captain himself was falling with a crash. Abroad, the long Continental war was dwindling to its close; at home, the treaty of Utrecht was preparing. Of all this, however, one rather overhears than hears. In Swift's gallery there are no portraits à la Cameron with sweeping robes; at best they are but thumb-nail sketches. Nowhere have we such a finished full length as that of Bolingbroke in the "Inquiry into the Behavior of the Ministry "; nowhere a scathing satire like the "Verres" kitcat of Wharton in the seventeenth Examiner. Nor are there anywhere accounts of occurrences which loom much larger than the stabbing of Harley by Guiscard, or the duel of Hamilton and Mohun. Not the less does the canvas swarm with figures, many of whom bear famous names. Now it is Anna Augusta herself, driving |