in the Short View. In truth all the modes of ridicule, from broad fun to polished and antithetical sarcasm, were at Collier's command. On the other hand, he was complete master of the rhetoric of honest indignation. We scarcely know any volume which contains so many bursts of that peculiar eloquence which comes from the heart and goes to the heart. Indeed the spirit of the book is truly heroic. In order fairly to appreciate it, we must remember the situation in which the writer stood. He was under the frown of power. His name was already a mark for the invectives of one half of the writers of the age, when, in the cause of good taste, good sense, and good morals, he gave battle to the other half. Strong as his political prejudices were, he seems on this occasion to have entirely laid them aside. He has forgotten that he is a Jacobite, and remembers only that he is a citizen and a Christian. Some of his sharpest censures are directed against poetry which had been hailed with delight by the Tory party, and had inflicted a deep wound on the Whigs. It is inspiriting to see how gallantly the solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies, formidable separately, and, it might have been thought, irresistible when combined, distributes his swashing blows right and left among Wycherley, Congreve, and Vanbrugh, treads the wretched D'Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet, and strikes with all his strength full at the towering crest of Dryden.'

The effect produced by the Short View was immense. The nation was on the side of Collier. But it could not be doubted that, in the great host which he had defied, some champion would be found to lift the gauntlet. The general belief was that Dryden would take the field; and all the wits anticipated a sharp contest between the well-paired combat-well ma

ants.

The great poet had been singled out in the most

Wycherley lived between 1640 and 1715. Vanbrugh, who, as the designer of Blenheim, is better known in his character of architect than of dramatist, died in 1726, at the age of sixty. Congreve died in 1729. He was in easy circumstances, and left off writing while still quite a young Tom D'Urfey, a wit and song-writer of the Restoration, lived to amuse and scandalise the subjects of five successive monarchs.

man.

marked manner. It was well known that he was deeply
hurt, that much smaller provocations had formerly roused
him to violent resentment, and that there was no literary
weapon, offensive or defensive, of which he was not master.
But his conscience smote him; he stood abashed, like the
fallen archangel at the rebuke of Zephon, angel who
derecho Jalan selling in An

an

"And felt how awful goodness is, and saw

Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw and pined

the

At a later period he mentioned the Short View in the preface
to his Fables. He complained, with some asperity, of the
harshness with which he had been treated, and urged some
matters in mitigation. But, on the whole, he frankly acknow-
ledged that he had been justly reproved. "If," said he,
"Mr. Collier be my enemy, let him triumph. If he be my
friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be other-
wise, he will be glad of my repentance."

It would have been wise in Congreve to follow his master's
example. He was precisely in that situation in which it is
madness to attempt a vindication; for his guilt was so clear,
that no address or eloquence could obtain an acquittal. On
the other hand, there were in his case many extenuating
circumstances which, if he had acknowledged his error and
promised amendment, would have procured his pardon. The
most rigid censor could not but make great allowances for
the faults into which so young a man had been seduced by
evil example, by the luxuriance of a vigorous fancy, and by
the inebriating effect of popular applause. The esteem, as
well as the admiration, of the public was still within his
reach. He might easily have effaced all memory of his trans-
gressions, and have shared with Addison the glory of showing
that the most brilliant wit may be the ally of virtue. But,
in any case, prudence should have restrained him from
encountering Collier. The nonjuror was a man thoroughly
fitted by nature, education, and habit, for polemical dispute.
Congreve's mind, though a mind of no common fertility and

clearest,

vigour, was of a different class. No man understood so well the art of polishing epigrams and repartees into the clearest" effulgence, and setting them neatly in easy and familiar dialogue. In this sort of jewellery he attained to a mastery unprecedented and inimitable. But he was altogether rude in the art of controversy; and he had a cause to defend which scarcely any art could have rendered victorious.

have 26

The event was such as might have been foreseen. Congreve's answer was a complete failure. He was angry, obscure, and dull. Even the Green Room and Will's Coffee-House A coffer were compelled to acknowledge that in wit, as well as in argument, the parson had a decided advantage over the poet. Not only was Congreve unable to make any show of a case where he was in the wrong; but he succeeded in putting himself completely in the wrong where he was in the right. Collier had taxed him with profaneness for calling a clergyman Mr. Prig, and for introducing a coachman named Jehu, in allusion to the King of Israel, who was known at a distance by his furious driving. Had there been nothing worse in the two diam. Old Bachelor and Double Dealer, Congreve might pass for as My on pure a writer as Cowper himself, who in poems revised by so austere a censor as John Newton, calls a fox-hunting squire Nimrod, and gives to a chaplain the disrespectful name of Smug. Congreve might with good effect have appealed to the public whether it might not be fairly presumed that, when such frivolous charges were made, there were no very serious charges to make. Instead of doing this, he pretended that he meant no allusion to the Bible by the name of Jehu, and no reflection by the name of Prig. Strange, that a man of such parts should, in order to defend himself against imputations which nobody could regard as important, teli untruths which it was certain that nobody would believe !

One of the pleas which Congreve set up for himself and his brethren was that, though they might be guilty of a little levity here and there, they were careful to inculcate a moral, packed close into two or three lines, at the end of every play. Had the fact been as he stated it, the defence would be worth

very little. For no man acquainted with human nature could think that a sententious couplet would undo all the mischief brief. that five profligate acts had done. But it would have been wise in Congreve to have looked again at his own comedies before he used this argument. Collier did so; and found that the moral of the Old Bachelor, the grave apophthegm which is to be a set-off against all the libertinism of the piece, is contained in the following triplet :

ence?

What rugged ways attend the noon of life!
Our sun declines, and with what anxious strife,
What pain, we tug that galling load- —a wife.”

"Love for Love," says Collier, "may have a somewhat
better farewell, but it would do a man little service should he
remember it to his dying day: "

"The miracle to-day is, that we find

A lover true, not that a woman's kind.”

Collier's reply was severe, and triumphant. One of his repartees we will quote, not as a favourable specimen of his manner, but because it was called forth by Congreve's characteristic affectation. The poet spoke of the Old Bachelor as a trifle to which he attached no value, und which had become public by a sort of accident. "I wrote it," he said, "to amuse myself in a slow recovery from a fit of sickness." "What his disease was," replied Collier, "I am not to enquire but it must be a very ill one to be worse than the remedy."

All that Congreve gained by coming forward on this occa-
sion was that he completely deprived himself of the excuse
which he might with justice have pleaded for his early
offences. "Why," asked Collier, "should the man laugh at
the mischief of the boy, and make the disorders of his nonage
when
wasnot
his own, by an after approbation?”
안
of age
Congreve was not Collier's only opponent. Vanbrugh,
Dennis, and Settle took the field.' And, from a passage in a

'Settle, who lived between 1648 and 1723, was immortalised as Doeg
"Absalom and Achitopel." The closing lines of the passage about him

mees

& novel

contemporary satire, we are inclined to think that among the answers to the Short View was one written, or supposed to be written, by Wycherley. The victory remained with Collier. A great and rapid reform in almost all the departments of our lighter literature was the effect of his labours. A new race of wits and poets arose, who generally treated with reverence the great ties which bind society together, and whose very in-coural the decencies were decent when compared with those of the school which flourished during the last forty years of the seventeenth century.

THE COURT LIFE OF MISS BURNEY.

(Essay on Madame D'Arblay.)

LIFE still smiled upon Frances.1 Domestic happiness, friendship, independence, leisure, letters, all these things were hers; and she flung them all away.

In December 1785, Miss Burney was on a visit to Mrs. Delany at Windsor. The dinner was over. The old lady was taking a nap. Her grandniece, a little girl of seven, was

and Shadwell, who is satirised under the name of Og, are equal to any. thing in the poem. Og is thus apostrophised:

"I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes;

For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes ?

But of King David's foes be this the doom:

May all be like the young man Absalom!

And, for my own, may this my blessing be:

To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee!"

Dennis lives in the hatred of Pope, who has proclaimed his indifference to the attacks of the critic in invectives as virulent as were ever penned. It would not be easy to name two lines containing two more unfounded statements than the celebrated couplet wherein Pope announces that he can sleep without a poem in his head

"Nor know if Dennis be alive or dead."

'Miss Burney, afterwards Madame D'Arblay, had already established her fame by writing "Evelina " and "Cecilia."