Harvard Classics, Volume 28 | Page 5

was only not a livery--bent
down a knee as proud as Lucifer's to supplicate my lady's good graces,
or run on his honour's errands. It was here, as he was writing at
Temple's table, or following his patron's walk, that he saw and heard
the men who had governed the great world--measured himself with
them, looking up from his silent corner, gauged their brains, weighed
their wits, turned them, and tried them, and marked them. Ah! what
platitudes he must have heard! what feeble jokes! what pompous
commonplaces! what small men they must have seemed under those
enormous periwigs, to the swarthy, uncouth, silent Irish secretary. I
wonder whether it ever struck Temple, that that Irishman was his
master? I suppose that dismal conviction did not present itself under the
ambrosial wig, or Temple could never have lived with Swift. Swift
sickened, rebelled, left the service--ate humble pie and came back again;
and so for ten years went on, gathering learning, swallowing scorn, and
submitting with a stealthy rage to his fortune.
Temple's style is the perfection of practised and easy good-breeding. If
he does not penetrate very deeply into a subject, he professes a very
gentlemanly acquaintance with it; if he makes rather a parade of Latin,
it was the custom of his day, as it was the custom for a gentleman to
envelope his head in a periwig and his hands in lace ruffles. If he wears
buckles and square-toed shoes, he steps in them with a consummate
grace, and you never hear their creak, or find them treading upon any
lady's train or any rival's heels in the Court crowd. When that grows too
hot or too agitated for him, he politely leaves it. He retires to his retreat
of Shene or Moor Park; and lets the King's party and the Prince of
Orange's party battle it out among themselves. He reveres the
Sovereign (and no man perhaps ever testified to his loyalty by so
elegant a bow); he admires the Prince of Orange; but there is one
person whose ease and comfort he loves more than all the princes in
Christendom, and that valuable member of society is himself,
Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat; between his
study-chair and his tulip-beds, clipping his apricots and pruning his
essays,--the statesman, the ambassador no more; but the philosopher,
the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at
Shene; where in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the

Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or dallies
by the south wall with the ruddy nymph of gardens.
Temple seems to have received and exacted a prodigious deal of
veneration from his household, and to have been coaxed, and warmed,
and cuddled by the people round about him, as delicately as any of the
plants which he loved. When he fell ill in 1693, the household was
aghast at his indisposition: mild Dorothea, his wife, the best companion
of the best of men--
"Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great, Trembling beheld the
doubtful hand of fate."
As for Dorinda, his sister,--
"Those who would grief describe, might come and trace Its watery
footsteps in Dorinda's face. To see her weep, joy every face forsook,
And grief flung sables on each menial look. The humble tribe mourned
for the quickening soul, That furnished spirit and motion through the
whole."
Isn't that line in which grief is described as putting the menials into a
mourning livery, a fine image? One of the menials wrote it, who did
not like that Temple livery nor those twenty-pound wages. Cannot one
fancy the uncouth young servitor, with downcast eyes, books and
papers in hand, following at his honour's heels in the garden walk; or
taking his honour's orders as he stands by the great chair, where Sir
William has the gout, and his feet all blistered with moxa? When Sir
William has the gout or scolds it must be hard work at the second table;
the Irish secretary owned as much afterwards: and when he came to
dinner, how he must have lashed and growled and torn the household
with his gibes and scorn! What would the steward say about the pride
of them Irish schollards--and this one had got no great credit even at his
Irish college, if the truth were known--and what a contempt his
Excellency's own gentleman must have had for Parson Teague from
Dublin. (The valets and chaplains were always at war. It is hard to say
which Swift thought the more contemptible.) And what must have been
the sadness, the sadness and terror, of the housekeeper's little daughter

with the curling black ringlets and the sweet smiling face, when the
secretary who teaches her to read and write,