Sometimes he reminds us of
an impure angel, who has surprised man naked and asleep, looked at him
with microscopic eyes, ignored all his peculiar marks of fallen dignity
and incipient godhood, and in heartless rhymes reported accordingly.
Swift belonged to the same school as Pope, although the feminine element
which was in the latter modified and mellowed his feelings. Pope was a
more successful and a happier man than Swift. He was much smaller, too,
in soul as well as in body, and his gall-organ was proportionably less.
Pope's feeling to humanity was a tiny malice; Swift's became, at length,
a black malignity. Pope always reminds us of an injured and pouting hero
of Lilliput, 'doing well to be angry' under the gourd of a pocket-flap,
or squealing out his griefs from the centre of an empty snuff-box; Swift
is a man, nay, monster of misanthropy. In minute and microscopic vision
of human infirmities, Pope excels even Swift; but then you always
conceive Swift leaning down a giant, though gnarled, stature to behold
them, while Pope is on their level, and has only to look straight before
him. Pope's wrath is always measured; Swift's, as in the 'Legion-Club'
is a whirlwind of 'black fire and horror,' in the breath of which no
flesh can live, and against which genius and virtue themselves furnish
no shield.
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