English Lands, Letters and Kings, vol. 2: From Elizabeth to AnneMitchell, Donald Grant
History
English Lands, Letters and Kings, vol. 2: From Elizabeth to Anne
Mitchell, Donald Grant
English literature -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- Intellectual life
“Vanessa, not in years a score,
Dreams of a gown of forty-four;
Imaginary charms can find
In eyes with reading almost blind.
…
Cadenus, common forms apart,
In every scene had kept his heart;
Had sigh’d and languished, vowed and writ,
For pastime or to show his wit.”
But this wit has made conquest of her; she
“----called for his poetic works:
[Cupid] meantime in secret lurks;
And, while the book was in her hand,
The urchin from his private stand
Took aim, and shot with all his strength
A dart of such prodigious length,
It pierced the feeble volume through,
And deep transfixed her bosom too.”
This is part of his story of it, which he put in her hands for her
reading;[114] and which, like the Stella journal, only saw the light
after the woman most interested in it was in the ground.
_In Ireland Again._
Well, Swift at last goes back to Ireland--all his larger designs having
miscarried--a saddened and disappointed man; full of growlings and
impatience; taking with him from that wreck of London life and political
forgatherings, only the poor flotsam of an Irish deanery.
He has some few friends to welcome him there: Miss Hester and Mrs. Dingley
among the rest. How gladly would Stella have put all her woman’s art and
her womanly affection to the work of cheering and making glad the
embittered and disappointed Dean: but no; he has no notion of being
handicapped by marriage; he is sterner, narrower, more misanthropic than
ever. All the old severe proprieties and distance govern their
intercourse. He visits them betimes and listens to their adulatory
prattle; they, too, come up to the deanery when there are friends to
entertain; often take possession when the Dean is away.
The church dignitaries are not open-handed in their advances; the _Tale of
a Tub_, and stories of that London life (not much of it amongst churches)
have put a wall between them and the Dean. But he interests himself in
certain questions of taxation and of currency, which seem of vital
importance to the common people; and he wins, by an influence due to his
sharp pamphleteering, what they count a great relief from their dangers or
burdens. Thus he becomes a street idol, and crowds throw up their caps for
this doctor militant, whom they call the good Dean. He has his private
large charities, too; there are old women, decrepit and infirm, whom he
supports year after year; does this--Swift-like--when he will haggle a
half hour about the difference of a few pennies in the price for a bottle
of wine, and will serve his clerical friends with the lees of the last
dinner: strange, and only himself in everything.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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