A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon: For the Use of Schools and CollegesLord, John
History
A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon: For the Use of Schools and Colleges
Lord, John
Europe -- History; History, Modern
Next to Addison in fame, and superior in genius, was Swift, born in
Ireland, in 1677, educated at Dublin, and patronized by Sir William
Temple. He was rewarded, finally, with the deanery of St. Patrick's.
He was very useful to his party by his political writings; but his
fame rests chiefly on his poetry, and his Gulliver's Travels, marked
and disgraced by his savage sarcasm on woman, and his vilification of
human nature. He was a great master of venomous satire. He spared
neither friends nor enemies. He was ambitious, misanthropic and
selfish. His treatment of woman was disgraceful and heartless in the
extreme. But he was witty, learned, and natural. He was never known to
laugh, while he convulsed the circles into which he was thrown. He was
rough to his servants, insolent to inferiors, and sycophantic to men
of rank. His distinguishing power was his unsparing and unscrupulous
sarcasm and his invective was as dreadful as the personal ridicule of
Voltaire. As a poet he was respectable, and as a writer he was
original. He was indifferent to literary fame, and never attempted any
higher style of composition than that in which he could excel. His
last days were miserable, and he lingered a long while in hopeless and
melancholy idiocy.
[Sidenote: Pope--Bolingbroke--Gay--Prior.]
Pope properly belongs to a succeeding age, though his first writings
attracted considerable attention during the life of Addison, who first
raised him from obscurity. He is the greatest, after Dryden, of all
the second class poets of his country. His Rape of the Lock, the most
original of his poems, established his fame. But his greatest works
were the translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, the Dunciad, and his
Essay on Man. He was well paid for his labors, and lived in a
beautiful villa at Twickenham, the friend of Bolingbroke, and the
greatest literary star of his age. But he was bitter and satirical,
irritable, parsimonious, and vain. As a versifier, he has never been
equalled. He died in 1744, in the Romish faith, beloved but by few,
and disliked by the world generally.
[Sidenote: Writers of the Age of Queen Anne.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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