ramatist. His _Campaign_, celebrating the victory of Blenheim, had one
much admired couplet, in which Marlborough was likened to the angel of
tempest, who,

Pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.

His stately, classical tragedy, _Cato_, which was acted at Drury Lane
Theater in 1712, with immense applause, was pronounced by Dr. Johnson
"unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius." Is is,
notwithstanding, cold and tedious, as a whole, though it has some fine
declamatory passages--in particular the soliloquy of Cato in the fifth
act--

It must be so: Plato, thou reasonest well, etc.

[Illustration: Dryden, Addison, Pope, Swift]

The greatest of the Queen Anne wits, and one of the most savage and
powerful satirists that ever lived, was Jonathan Swift. As secretary in
the family of Sir William Temple, and domestic chaplain to the Earl of
Berkeley, he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and
dependence. Afterward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory
ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the deanery
of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in
a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which
finally overtook him, "The stage dark-ended," said Scott, "ere the
curtain fell." Insanity deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and
for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had
directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, _Ubi saeva
indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit_. "So great a man he seems to
me," wrote Thackeray, "that thinking of him is like thinking of an
empire falling." Swift's first noteworthy publication was his _Tale of a
Tub_, 1704, a satire on religious differences. But his great work was
_Gulliver's Travels_, 1726, the book in which his hate and scorn of
mankind, and the long rage of mortified pride and thwarted ambition
found their fullest expression. Children read the voyages to Lilliput
and Brobdingnag, to the flying island of Laputa and the country of the
Houyhnhnms, as they read _Robinson Crusoe_, as stories of wonderful
adventure. Swift had all of De Foe's realism, his power of giving
veri-similitude to his narrative by the invention of a vast number of
small, exact, consistent details. But underneath its fairy tales
_Gulliver's Travels_ is a satire, far more radical than any of Dryden's
or Pope's, because d