Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/359

Rh sulky and distant one day, after having been friendly the last. Swift took him to task at once; and told him that he must not treat him like a boy. He had had enough of that with Temple, when he was young and poor, and only beginning to feel his strength. He tells us so. He had to make that all clear to my Lord-Treasurer,—whose ears must have tingled when he found himself set right on a point of breeding."—But enough to illustrate Mr. Hannay's skill in adaptation of style, and to show that although he has chosen a good model, and trodden closely in his steps—that although, yet a to a provoking degree he certainly is. It would not be provoking, were he not so evidently entitled to take higher rank than attaches to any mimetic art.

The manner in which Mr. Hannay expresses and, so to say, illuminates his meaning, is often fresh and pleasantly fanciful. His images are quaint and telling, sometimes quite felicitous in the way of novelty and suggestiveness. Thus he makes it his especial business to show that the great Satirists have been good and lovable men—avoiding, he says, the too common mistake of supposing Satire to be like a certain poison known to the ancients, which best retained its properties when carried in an ass's hoof. He claims to deal with great men, who would never have known scorn if they had not known love; whose natures foamed into excitement at contact with the base, as the old Venetian glass cracked when the poison was poured into it. Of the Latin Satirists he affirms, that as long as any human society shall have impostors and rogues triumphant, the shades of these dead old Romans will be found stirring, like banshees, near them, and prognosticating doom. Such are by no means the stock similes of the lecture-room—indeed a little too recondite, perhaps, for lecture-room applause. So, again,we are told that Erasmus's light of intellect, a scientific and not spiritual light, was to him, within his church, a Davy's safety-lamp, which he carried safely through all sorts of foul atmosphere, doing his work without explosions, and deserving credit for what work he did. Donne's mind is aptly likened to some costly, dark-hued, solemn church-garment, embroidered with flowers, and with threads of brilliant wit woven into it: the surface is brilliant, but the whole awes you, and the effect is saintly. Boileau's image, calm and majestic, was set up by the French classical party, to receive the barbarians, like the old Roman senators sitting in their curule chairs. Of Swift, again, and his life of gloom, Mr. Hannay says, Hercules had the poisoned shirt on him all his life,—and repeats from "Singleton Fontenoy" the comparison of the Dean's celebrity to the Tower of Pisa, far from straight to the eye, but true for all that to the law of gravitation, and able to stand firm, and defy breeze and rain. An Irish agitator, ill at ease in his Dublin seclusion, the Dean is likened to the giant under Ætna, who, when he moved himself, set going a volcano of fire and mud. And once more, the same Very Reverend Satirist is said, on the strength of his