too high.  He was even ranked above Fielding,—­a position which no one would have been so eager in disclaiming as himself.  No, let us leave the old fames on their pedestals.  Fielding is the greatest creative artist who has written in English since Shakespeare.  Of a broader and deeper nature, of a larger brain than Thackeray, his theme is Man, as that of the latter is Society.  The Englishman with whom Thackeray had most in common was Richard 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