human folly.
But he too believes in culture--though he may despair of its
dissemination. He did his best, during his brief period of power, to
direct patronage towards men of letters, even to Whigs; and tried,
happily without success, to found an English Academy. His zeal was
genuine, though it expressed itself by scorn for dunces and hostility to
Grub Street. He illustrates one little peculiarity of the Wit. In the
society of the clubs there was a natural tendency to form minor cliques
of the truly initiated, who looked with sovereign contempt upon the
hackney author. One little indication is the love of mystifications, or
what were entitled 'bites.' All the Wits, as we know, combined to tease
the unlucky fortune-teller, Partridge, and to maintain that their
prediction of his death had been verified, though he absurdly pretended
to be still alive. So Swift tells us in the journal to Stella how he had
circulated a lie about a man who had been hanged coming to life again,
and how footmen are sent out to inquire into its success. He made a hit
by writing a sham account of Prior's mission to Paris supposed to come
from a French valet. The inner circle chuckled over such performances,
which would be impossible when their monopoly of information had been
broken up. A similar satisfaction was given by the various burlesques
and more or less ingenious fables which were to be fully appreciated by
the inner circle; such as the tasteless narrative of Dennis's frenzy by
which Pope professed to be punishing his victim for an attack upon
Addison: or to such squibs as Arbuthnot's _John Bull_--a parable which
gives the Tory view in a form fitted for the intelligent. The Wits, that
is, form an inner circle, who like to speak with an affectation of
obscurity even if the meaning be tolerably transparent, and show that
they are behind the scenes by occasionally circulating bits of sham
news. They like to form a kind of select upper stratum, which most fully
believes in its own intellectual eminence, and shows a contempt for its
inferiors by burlesque and rough sarcasm.

It is not difficult (especially when we know the result) to guess at the
canons of taste which will pass muster in such regions. Enthusiastical
politicians of recent days have been much given to denouncing modern
clubs, where everybody is a cynic and unable to appreciate the great
ideas which stir the masses. It may be so; my own acquaintance with club
life, though not ve