knowledge of him, which they had had the honor of sharing, the ruin of those that put their desertion to the blush. There is a noble burst of indignation on this subject, in Marvell's prose works, against a fellow of the name of Parker, who succeeded in obtaining a bishopric. Parker seems to have thought that Marvell would have been afraid of acknowledging his old acquaintance; but so far from resembling the bishop in that or any other particular, he not only publicly proclaimed and gloried in the friendship of the poet, but reminded Master Parker that he had once done the same.

We must be cautious how we go on quoting verses upon this agreeable subject; for they elbow one's prose out at a great rate. They sit in state, with a great vacancy on each side of them, like Henry the Eighth in a picture of Holbein's. The wits who flourished in the time of the Stuarts and Queen Anne were not behind the great poets of the age of Elizabeth, in doing justice to their contemporaries. Dryden hailed the appearance of Congreve and Oldham. Congreve's merits were universally acknowledged except by the critics. We need not refer to the works of Pope, Gay, Steele, Prior, &c. If Swift abused Dryden (who is said to have told him he would never be a poet), he also abused in a most unwarrantable and outrageous manner Sir Richard Steele, for whose Tatler he had written. His abuse was not a thing of literary jealousy, but of some personal or party spite. The union of all three was a perfection of consciousness, reserved for the present time. But Swift's very fondness vented itself, like Buonaparte's, in slaps of the cheek. He was morbid, and liked to create himself cause for pity or regret. "The Dean was a strange man." According to Mrs. Pilkington, he would give her a pretty hard thump now and then, of course to see how amiably she took it. Upon the same principle, he tells us in the verses on his death, that

Friend Pope will grieve a month, and Gay

A week, and Arbuthnot a day.

This was to vex them, and make them prove his words false by complaining of their injustice. He himself once kept a letter unopened for some days, because he was afraid it contained

news of a friend's death. See how he makes his very coarseness and irritability contribute to a panegyric :

When Pope shall in one couplet fix

More sense than I can do in six,

It gives me such a jealous fit,

I cry, "Pox take him and his wit!"

We must finish our quotations with a part of some sprightly verses addressed to Garth on his Dispensary, by a friend of the name of Codrington. Codrington was one of those happilytempered spirits, who united the characters of the gentleman, the wit, and the man of business. He was, in the best sense of the word, "A person of wit and honor about town."

The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's, eye, tongue, sword.

He was born in Barbadoes, and after residing some time in England, and serving with great gallantry as an officer in various parts of the world, became Governor-General of the Leeward Islands. He resigned his government in the course of a few years, and died in Barbadoes in the midst of his favorite studies. Among the variety of his accomplishments he did not omit divinity; and he was accounted a master of metaphysics. His public life he had devoted to his country; his private he divided among his books and friends. If the verses before us are not so good as those of the old poets they are as good in their way, are as sincere and cordial, and smack of the champagne on his table. We like them on many accounts, for we like the panegyrist, and have an old liking for his friend-we like the taste they express in friendship and in beauty; and we like to fancy that our goodhumored ancestors in Barbadoes enjoyed the Governor's society, and relished their wine with these identical triplets.

TO MY FRIEND THE AUTHOR, DESIRING MY OPINION OF HIS POEM.

Ask me not, friend, what I approve or blame;

Perhaps I know not what I like or damn;

I can be pleased, and I dare own I am,

I read thee over with a lover's eye;

Thou hast no faults, or I no faults can spy;
Thou art all beauty, or all blindness I.

Critics and aged beaux of fancy chaste,

Who ne'er had fire, or else whose fire is past,
Must judge by rules what they want force to taste.

I would a poet, like a mistress, try,

Not by her hair, her hand, her nose, her eye;

But by some nameless power to give me joy.

The nymph has Grafton's, Cecil's, Churchill's charms,
If with resistless fires my soul she warms,

With balm upon her lips, and raptures in her arms.

It

Literary loves and jealousies were much the same in other ages as the present; but we have a great deal more of the loves than the reverse; because genius survives, and ignorance does not. The ancient philosophers had a delicate way of honoring their favorites, by inscribing treatises with their names. is thought a strange thing to Xenophon that he never mentions Plato. The greater part of the miscellaneous poetry of the Greeks is lost; or we should doubtless see numerous evidences of the intercourse of their authors. The Greek poets of Sicily, Theocritus and Moschus, are affectionate in recording the merits of their contemporaries. Varius and Gallus, two eminent Roman poets, scarcely survive but in the panegyrics of their contemporaries. Dante notices his, and his predecessors. Petrarch and Boccaccio publicly honored, as they privately loved one another. Tasso, the greatest poet of his time, was also the greatest panegyrist; and so, as might be expected, was Ariosto. The latter has introduced a host of his friends by name, male and female, at the end of his great work, coming down to the shores of poetry to welcome him home after his voyage. There is a pleasant imitation of it by Gay, applied to Pope's conclusion of Homer. Montaigne, who had the most exalted notions of friendship, which he thought should have everything in common, took as much zeal in the literary reputation of his friends, as in everything else that concerned them. The wits of the time of Henry the Fourth, of Louis the Fourteenth, and of Louis the Fifteenth,-Malherbe, Racan, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Chaulieu, La Fare, D'Alembert, Voltaire, &c., not excepting Boileau, where he was personally intimate with a

brother author-all do honor in this respect to the sociality of their nation. It is the same, we believe, with the German writers; and if the Spanish winced a little under the domination of Lope de Vega, they were chivalrous in giving him perhaps more than his due. Camoëns had the admiration of literary friends as poor as himself, if he had nothing else; but this was something.

CHAPTER LV.

A Word upon Indexes.

INDEX-MAKING has been held to be the driest as well as the lowest species of writing. We shall not dispute the humbleness of it; but since we have had to make an index ourselves,* we have discovered that the task need not be so very dry. Calling to mind indexes in general, we found them presenting us a variety of pleasant memories and contrasts. We thought of those to the Spectator, which we used to look at so often at school, for the sake of choosing a paper to abridge. We thought of the index to the Pantheon of Fabulous Histories of the Heathen Gods, which we used to look at oftener. We remember how we imagined we should feel some day, if ever our name should appear in the list of Hs; as thus, Home, Howard, Hume, Huniades, The poets would have been better, but then the names, though perhaps less unfitting, were not so flattering; as for instance, Halifax, Hammond, Harte, Hughes, did not like to come after Hughes.

We

We have just been looking at the indexes to the Tatler and Spectator, and never were more forcibly struck with the feeling we formerly expressed about a man's being better pleased with other writers than with himself. Our index seemed the poorest and most second-hand thing in the world after theirs; but let any one read theirs, and then call an index a dry thing if he can. As there "is a soul of goodness in things evil," so there is a soul of humor in things dry, and in things dry by profession. Lawyers know this, as well as index-makers, or they would die of sheer thirst and aridity. But as grapes, ready to burst with wine, issue out of the most stony places, like jolly fellows bringing Burgundy out of a cellar; so an index, like the Tatler's,

* To the original edition of the Indicator.