His latter days were imbittered by party animosity, and the malignant stings of literary rivals. Nor was he happy in his domestic life, having married a proud countess, who did not appreciate his genius. He also became addicted to intemperate habits. Still he was ever honored and respected, and, when he died, was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Next to Addison in fame, and superior in genius, was Swift, born in Ireland, in 1677, educated at Dublin, and patronized by Sir William Temple. He was rewarded, finally, with the deanery of St. Patrick's. He was very useful to his party by his political writings; but his fame rests chiefly on his poetry, and his Gulliver's Travels, marked and disgraced by his savage sarcasm on woman, and his vilification of human nature. He was a great master of venomous satire. He spared neither friends nor enemies. He was ambitious, misanthropic and selfish. His treatment of woman was disgraceful and heartless in the extreme. But he was witty, learned, and natural. He was never known to laugh, while he convulsed the circles into which he was thrown. He was rough to his servants, insolent to inferiors, and sycophantic to men of rank. His distinguishing power was his unsparing and unscrupulous sarcasm and his invective was as dreadful as the personal ridicule of Voltaire. As a poet he was respectable, and as a writer he was original. He was indifferent to literary fame, and never attempted any higher style of composition than that in which he could excel. His last days were miserable, and he lingered a long while in hopeless and melancholy idiocy.
[Sidenote: Pope--Bolingbroke--Gay--Prior.]
Pope properly belongs to a succeeding age, though his first writings attracted considerable attention during the life of Addison, who first raised him from obscurity. He is the greatest, after Dryden, of all the second class poets of his country. His Rape of the Lock, the most original of his poems, established his fame. But his greatest works were the translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, the Dunciad, and his Essay on Man. He was well paid for his labors, and lived in a beautiful villa at Twickenham, the friend of Bolingbroke, and the greatest literary star of his age. But he was bitter and satirical, irritable, parsimonious, and vain. As a versifier, he has never been equalled. He died in 1744, in the Romish faith, beloved but by few, and disliked by the world generally.