rs, to view a Swift and Steele!
How must ill-boding horrors fill her breast,
When she beholds men mark'd above the rest
For qualities most dear, plung'd from that height,
And sunk, deep sunk, in second childhood's night!
Are men, indeed, such things? and are the best
More subject to this evil than the rest;
To drivel out whole years of idiot breath,
And sit the monuments of living Death!
O! galling circumstance to human pride!
Abasing thought! but not to be deny'd.
With curious art the brain, too finely wrought,
Preys on herself, and is destroy'd by thought.
Constant attention wears the active mind,
Blots out her pow'rs, and leaves a blank behind,
But let not youth, to insolence ally'd,
In heat of blood, in full career of pride,
Possess'd of genius, with unhallow'd rage
Mock the infirmities of rev'rend age:
The greatest genius to this fate may bow;
Reynolds in time may be like Hogarth now."

One makes allowance, in reading, for the inflamed temper of the times, for
a judgment disturbed with personal anger, and for the self-consciousness
which, hardly separable from talent, stirs and sustains its energies.
But--Churchill demolishing Hogarth! It is startling--rather
melancholy--and very amusing. One compares fame with fame--the transitory
and the imperishable. The wave, lashed into fury, that comes on,
mountain-swollen, all rage, and froth, and thunder, to dash itself into
spray against some Atlas of the Deep--some huge brother of Time, whose
cheeks the wings of the centuries caress, and of whose hand storms that
distract heaven and earth are but toys.

Of the "PROPHECY OF FAMINE," Wilkes, before its publication, said he "was
sure it would take, as it was at once personal, poetical, and political."
And take it did--going off in thousands, and tens of thousands. The Whig
coteries, of course, cried it up to the skies; and the established
authorities declared that Pope must now hide his diminished head. Such
nonsense Churchill swallowed; for he had tried to take it into his head
that Pope was a fool to him, and in his cups was wont to vent a wish that
little Alec were alive, that he might break his heart. That was the
delusion of delirium. Inflated with vanity as he was, he must, when sober,
have known well he could not with his cudgel, readily though he flourished
it, have lived for five minutes before that Master of the rapier.

Scotsmen as we are to the spine, it is possible