Harvard Classics, Volume 28 | Page 8

he had bent his pride so far down as to put his
apostasy out to hire. The paper left behind him, called "Thoughts on
Religion," is merely a set of excuses for not professing disbelief. He
says of his sermons that he preached pamphlets: they have scarce a
Christian characteristic; they might be preached from the steps of a
synagogue, or the floor of a mosque, or the box of a coffee-house
almost. There is little or no cant--he is too great and too proud for that;
and, in so far as the badness of his sermons goes, he is honest. But
having put that cassock on, it poisoned him: he was strangled in his
bands. He goes through life, tearing, like a man possessed with a devil.
Like Abudah in the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury,
and knows that the night will come and the inevitable hag with it. What
a night, my God, it was! what a lonely rage and long agony--what a
vulture that tore the heart of that giant! It is awful to think of the great
sufferings of this great man. Through life he always seems alone,
somehow. Goethe was so. I can't fancy Shakspeare otherwise. The
giants must live apart. The kings can have no company. But this man
suffered so; and deserved so to suffer. One hardly reads anywhere of
such a pain.
The "saeva indignatio" of which he spoke as lacerating his heart, and
which he dares to inscribe on his tombstone--as if the wretch who lay
under that stone waiting God's judgment had a right to be
angry,--breaks out from him in a thousand pages of his writing, and
tears and rends him. Against men in office, he having been overthrown;
against men in England, he having lost his chance of preferment there,
the furious exile never fails to rage and curse. Is it fair to call the
famous "Drapier's Letters" patriotism? They are masterpieces of
dreadful humour and invective: they are reasoned logically enough too,
but the proposition is as monstrous and fabulous as the Lilliputian
island. It is not that the grievance is so great, but there is his enemy--the
assault is wonderful for its activity and terrible rage. It is Samson, with
a bone in his hand, rushing on his enemies and felling them: one
admires not the cause so much as the strength, the anger, the fury of the
champion. As is the case with madmen, certain subjects provoke him,
and awaken his fits of wrath. Marriage is one of these; in a hundred

passages in his writings he rages against it; rages against children; an
object of constant satire, even more contemptible in his eyes than a
lord's chaplain, is a poor curate with a large family. The idea of this
luckless paternity never fails to bring down from him gibes and foul
language. Could Dick Steele, or Goldsmith, or Fielding, in his most
reckless moment of satire, have written anything like the Dean's
famous "modest proposal" for eating children? Not one of these but
melts at the thoughts of childhood, fondles and caresses it. Mr. Dean
has no such softness, and enters the nursery with the tread and gaiety of
an ogre. "I have been assured," says he in the "Modest Proposal," "by a
very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young
healthy child, well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing,
and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I
make no doubt it will equally serve in a ragout." And taking up this
pretty joke, as his way is, he argues it with perfect gravity and logic. He
turns and twists this subject in a score of different ways: he hashes it;
and he serves it up cold; and he garnishes it; and relishes it always. He
describes the little animal as "dropped from its dam," advising that the
mother should let it suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render it
plump and fat for a good table!
"A child," says his Reverence, "will make two dishes at an
entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or
hind quarter will make a reasonable dish," and so on; and, the subject
being so delightful that he can't leave it, he proceeds to recommend, in
place of venison for squires' tables, "the bodies of young lads and
maidens not exceeding fourteen or under twelve." Amiable humourist!
laughing castigator of morals! There was a process well known and
practised in the Dean's gay days: when a lout entered the coffee-house,
the wags proceeded to what they called "roasting" him. This is roasting
a subject with a vengeance. The Dean had a native genius for it. As the