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coxcombs, and buffoons. If your holiness has a mind to be diverted like a rational man, you have a great opportunity for it, in disrobing all the impertinents you have favoured of all their riches and trappings at once, and bestowing them on the humble, the virtuous, and the meek. If your holiness is not concerned for the sake of virtue and religion, be pleased to reflect, that for the sake of your own safety, it is not proper to be so very much in jest. When the pope is thus merry, the people will in time begin to think many things, which 10 they have hitherto beheld with great veneration, are in themselves objects of scorn and derision. If they once get a trick of knowing how to laugh, your holiness's saying this sentence in one night-cap, and the other with the other, the change of your slippers, bringing you your staff in the midst of a prayer, then stripping you of one vest, and clapping on a second during divine service, will be found out to have nothing in it. Consider, Sir, that at this rate a head will be reckoned never the wiser for being bald; and the ignorant will be apt to say, that going barefoot does not at all help on in the way to 20 heaven. The red cap and the cowl will fall under the same contempt; and the vulgar will tell us to our faces, that we shall have no authority over them but from the force of our arguments, and the sanctity of our lives.'

Spectator, No. 497.]

[September 30, 1712.

No. 20. On Satire.

Quis iniquæ

Tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus ut teneat se?
Juv. Sat. i. 30.

It was with very great displeasure I heard this day a man say of a companion of his, with an air of approbation, 'You know Tom never fails of saying a spiteful thing. He has a great deal of wit, but satire is his particular talent. Did you mind how he put the young fellow out of countenance that pretended to talk to him?' Such impertinent applauses, which 30 one meets with every day, put me upon considering, what true raillery and satire were in themselves; and this, methought,

occurred to me from reflection upon the great and excellent persons that were admired for talents this way. When I had run over several such in my thoughts, I concluded, however unaccountable the assertion might appear at first sight, that good-nature was an essential quality in a satirist, and that all the sentiments which are beautiful in this way of writing, must proceed from that quality in the author. Good nature produces a disdain of all baseness, vice, and folly; which prompts them to express themselves with smartness against to the errors of men, without bitterness towards their persons. This quality keeps the mind in equanimity, and never lets an offence unseasonably throw a man out of his character. When Virgil said, 'he that did not hate Bavius might love Mævius,' he was in perfect good humour; and was not so much moved at their absurdities, as passionately to call them sots, or blockheads in a direct invective, but laughed at them with a delicacy of scorn, without any mixture of anger.

The best good man with the worst-natur'd muse,

was the character" among us of a gentleman as famous for his 20 humanity as his wit.

The ordinary subjects for satire are such as incite the greatest indignation in the best tempers, and consequently men of such a make are the best qualified for speaking of the offences in human life. These men can behold vice and folly, when they injure persons to whom they are wholly unacquainted, with the same severity as others resent the ills they do to themselves. A good-natured man cannot see an overbearing fellow put a bashful man of merit out of countenance, or out-strip him in the pursuit of any advantage, but he is on fire to succour the 30 oppressed, to produce the merit of the one, and confront the impudence of the other.

The men of the greatest character in this kind were Horace and Juvenal. There is not, that I remember, one ill-natured expression in all their writings, nor one sentence of severity, which does not apparently proceed from the contrary disposition. Whoever reads them, will, I believe, be of this mind; and if they were read with this view, it might possibly persuade our young fellows, that they may be very witty men without speaking ill of any but those who deserve it. But in

the perusal of these writers, it may not be unnecessary to consider, that they lived in very different times. Horace was intimate with a prince of the greatest goodness and humanity imaginable, and his court was formed after his example: therefore the faults that poet falls upon were little inconsistencies in behaviour, false pretences to politeness, or impertinent affectations of what men were not fit for. Vices of a coarser sort could not come under his consideration, or enter the palace of Augustus. Juvenal, on the other hand, lived under 10 Domitian, in whose reign every thing that was great and noble was banished the habitations of the men in power. Therefore he attacks vice as it passes by in triumph, not as it breaks into conversation. The fall of empire, contempt of glory, and a general degeneracy of manners, are before his eyes in all his writings. In the days of Augustus, to have talked like Juvenal had been madness; or in those of Domitian, like Horace. Morality and virtue are every where recommended in Horace, as became a man in a polite court, from the beauty, the propriety, the convenience of pursuing them. Vice and corruption 20 are attacked by Juvenal in a style which denotes, he fears he shall not be heard without he calls to them in their own language, with a barefaced mention of the villanies and obscenities of his contemporaries.

This accidental talk of these two great men carries me from my design, which was to tell some coxcombs that run about this town with the name of smart satirical fellows, that they are by no means qualified for the characters they pretend to, of being severe upon other men; for they want good-nature. There is no foundation in them for arriving at what they aim 30 at; and they may as well pretend to flatter as rally agreeably, without being good-natured.

There is a certain impartiality necessary to make what a man says bear any weight with those he speaks to. This quality, with respect to men's errors and vices, is never seen but in good-natured men. They have ever such a frankness of mind, and benevolence to all men, that they cannot receive impressions of unkindness without mature deliberation; and writing or speaking ill of a man upon personal considerations, is so irreparable and mean an injury, that no one possessed of 40 this quality is capable of doing it but in all ages there have

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been interpreters to authors when living, of the same genius with the commentators into whose hands they fall when dead. I dare say it is impossible for any man of more wit than one of these to take any of the four-and-twenty letters, and form out of them a name to describe the character of a vicious man with greater life, but one of these would immediately cry, 'Mr. Such-a-one is meant in that place.' But the truth of it is, satirists describe the age, and backbiters assign their descriptions to private men.

In all terms of reproof, when the sentence appears to arise from personal hatred or passion, it is not then made the cause of mankind, but a misunderstanding between two persons. For this reason the representations of a good-natured man bear a pleasantry in them, which shows there is no malignity at heart, and by consequence they are attended to by his hearers or readers, because they are unprejudiced. This deference is only what is due to him; for no man thoroughly nettled can say a thing general enough, to pass off with the air of an opinion declared, and not a passion gratified. I remember a humorous 20 fellow at Oxford, when he heard any one had spoken ill of him, used to say, 'I will not take my revenge of him until I have forgiven him.' What he meant by this was, that he would not enter upon this subject until it was grown as indifferent to him as any other and I have by this rule, seen him more than once triumph over his adversary with an inimitable spirit and humour; for he came to the assault against a man full of sore places and he himself invulnerable.

There is no possibility of succeeding in a satirical way of writing or speaking, except a man throws himself quite out of 30 the question. It is great vanity to think any one will attend to a thing, because it is your quarrel. You must make your satire the concern of society in general if you would have it regarded. When it is so, the good-nature of a man of wit will prompt him to many brisk and disdainful sentiments and replies, to which all the malice in the world will not be able to repartee.

Tatler, No. 242.]

[October 26, 1710.

F

No. 21. On Raillery.

Hæc scripsi non otii abundantia, sed amoris erga te.
TULL. Epist.

I do not know any thing which gives greater disturbance to conversation, than the false notion some people have of raillery. It ought, certainly, to be the first point to be aimed at in society, to gain the good-will of those with whom you converse: the way to that is, to show you are well inclined towards them. What then can be more absurd than to set up for being extremely sharp and biting, as the term is, in your expressions to your familiars? A man who has no good quality but courage, is in a very ill way towards making an agreeable 10 figure in the world, because that which he has superior to other people cannot be exerted without raising himself an enemy. Your gentleman of a satirical vein is in the like condition. To say a thing which perplexes the heart of him you speak to, or brings blushes into his face, is a degree of murder; and it is, I think, an unpardonable offence to show a man you do not care whether he is pleased or displeased. But will you not then take a jest?—Yes: but pray let it be a jest. It is no jest to put me, who am so unhappy as to have an utter aversion to speaking to more than one man at a time, under 20 a necessity to explain myself in much company, and reducing me to shame and derision, except I perform what my infirmity of silence disables me to do.

Callisthenes has great wit, accompanied with that quality without which a man can have no wit at all-a sound judgment. This gentleman rallies the best of any man I know; for he forms his ridicule upon a circumstance which you are in your heart not unwilling to grant him; to wit, that you are guilty of an excess in something which is in itself laudable. He very well understands what you would be, and needs not fear your 30 anger for declaring you are a little too much that thing. The generous will bear being reproached as lavish, and the valiant as rash, without being provoked to resentment against their monitor. What has been said to be a mark of a good writer will fall in with the character of a good companion. The

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