Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/277

 Rh was ever less of a hero; he was but a hearty, plain-spoken fellow, loving his laugh, his friends, his glass, his roast beef of Old England, and hating all things foreign—foreign painters first and foremost. The tender, the touching, the imaginative—never mention anything of that sort in connexion with his name. Another scandal, to those who respond to Elia's estimate of William Hogarth—to those who, like Southey, make bold to imparadise, in the seventh heaven of invention,There still survive sturdy Britishers who persist, like Hartley Coleridge, in setting him high above every name in British art, or rather who would separate him altogether from our painters, to fix his seat among our greatest poets.

Swift, who comes first in the series, is the humorist upon whose portraiture most care seems to have been bestowed. He at least meets with his full deserts, so far as admiration is concerned. Some pretty hard hits are dealt him, notwithstanding. Mr. Thackeray would like, as we have seen, to have been Shakspeare's shoeblack and errand-boy—to have "kept" on the same staircase with Harry Fielding, to help him up to bed if need be, and in the morning shake hands with him, and hear him crack jokes over his mug of small-beer at breakfast—to hob-a-nob with Dick Steele—to sit a fellow-clubman with brave old Samuel Johnson—to go holiday-making with Noll Goldsmith. But Swift?—what says the lecturer to "hail fellow" intimacy with the dean? Why, this. "If you had been his inferior in parts (and that, with a great respect for all persons present, I fear is only very likely), his equal in mere social station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you; if, undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would have quailed before you, and not had the pluck to reply, and gone home, and years after written a foul epigram about you—watched for you in a sewer, and come out to assail you with a coward's blow and a dirty bludgeon. If you had been a lord with a blue riband, who flattered his vanity, or could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company in the world. He would have been so manly, so sarcastic, so bright, odd, and original, that you might think he had no object in view but the indulgence of his humour, and that he was the most reckless, simple creature in the world. How he would have torn your enemies to pieces for you! and made fun of the Opposition! His servility was so boisterous that it looked like independence; he would have done your errands, but with the air of patronising you; and after fighting your battles masked in the street or the press, would have kept on his hat before your wife and daughters in the drawing-room, content to take that sort of pay for his tremendous services as a bravo." Excellent is the conduct of the metaphor by which the dean is made to stand out as an outlaw, who says, "These are my brains; with these I'll win titles and compete with fortune. These are my bullets; these I'll turn into gold,"—and who takes the road accordingly, like Macheath,