The worst is,
that he never seems to have been seduced into sin through the bewildering
and bewitching mists of imagination. It was naked sensuality that he
appeared to worship, and he always sinned with his eyes open. Yet his
moral sense, though blunted, was never obliterated; and many traits of
generosity and good feeling mingled with his excesses. Choosing satire as
the field of his Muse, was partly the cause and partly the effect of an
imperfect _morale_. We are far from averring that no satirist can be a
good man, but certainly most satirists have either been very good or very
bad men. To the former class have belonged Cowper, Crabbe, &c.; to the
latter, such names as Swift, Dryden, Byron, and, we must add, Churchill.
Robust manhood, honesty, and hatred of pretence, we admit him to have
possessed; but of genuine love to humanity he seems to have been as
destitute as of fear of God, or regard for the ordinary moralities.
We have to deal with him, however, principally as a poet; and there can,
we think, now be but one opinion as to his peculiar merits. He possessed,
beyond all doubt, a strong understanding, a lively imagination, a keen
perception of character--especially in its defects and
weaknesses--considerable wit without any humour, fierce passions and
hatreds, and a boundless command of a loose, careless, but bold and
energetic diction; add to this, a constant tone of self-assertion, and
rugged independence.
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