ichard Steele, as these "Roundabout Papers" show plainly enough. He
admired Fielding, but he loved Steele.

TWO GREAT AUTHORS

SWIFT[1]

I

[Footnote 1: [A review of _The Life of Jonathan Swift_, by John Forster.]]

The cathedral of St. Patrick's, dreary enough in itself seems to grow
damper and chillier as one's footsteps disturb the silence between the
grave of its famous Dean and that of Stella, in death as in life near
yet divided from him, as if to make their memories more inseparable and
prolong the insoluble problem of their relation to each other. Nor was
there wanting, when we made our pilgrimage thither, a touch of grim
humor in the thought that our tipsy guide (Clerk of the Works he had
dubbed himself for the nonce), as he monotonously recited his
contradictory anecdotes of the "sullybrutted Dane," varied by times with
an irrelative hiccough of his own, was no inapt type of the ordinary
biographers of Swift. The skill with which long practice had enabled our
cicerone to turn these involuntary hitches of his discourse into
rhetorical flourishes, and well-nigh to make them seem a new kind of
conjunction, would have been invaluable to the Dean's old servant
Patrick, but in that sad presence his grotesqueness was as shocking as
the clown in one of Shakespeare's tragedies to Chateaubriand. A shilling
sent him back to the neighboring pot-house whence a half-dozen ragged
volunteers had summoned him, and we were left to our musings. One
dominating thought shouldered aside all others--namely, how strange a
stroke of irony it was, how more subtle even than any of the master's
own, that our most poignant association with the least sentimental of
men should be one of sentiment, and that a romance second only to that
of Abelard and Heloise should invest the memory of him who had done more
than all others together to strip life and human nature of their last
instinctive decency of illusion. His life, or such accounts as we had of
it, had been full of antitheses as startling as if some malign enchanter
had embodied one of Macaulay's characters as a conundrum to bewilder the
historian himself. A generous miser; a sceptical believer; a devout
scoffer; a tender-hearted misanthrope; a churchman faithful to his order
yet loathing to wear its uniform; an Irishman hating the Irish, as Heine
did the Jews,[1] because he was one of them, yet defending them with the
scornful fierceness of one who hated their oppress