"Mr. Thackeray took occasion to illustrate by these extracts the characteristic differences of Swift, Addison, and Steele. He had already drawn a ludicrous picture of the relative positions of Steele and Addison, remarking that the latter had been through life to the former what a 'head boy' is to an inferior boy at school. Now by Swift's poem on the 'Day of Judgment'--an extract from the _Spectator_, containing Addison's reflections in Westminster Abbey--and a passage from Steele, he showed how the subject of Death was treated by the three writers. Swift's poem savagely treats as fools all who pretend to know any thing beyond the grave, including the teachers of the several sects. Addison's tone was kinder, but, while he was benevolent in his skepticism, he came to nearly the same result as the ferocious Dean. Steele, on the other hand, was content to remember, as his first grief, the death of his father, when he was five years old, and the dignified sorrow of his mother.
"By way of an additional comical apology for the foibles of Steele, Mr. Thackeray concluded his lecture by remarking on the atrocities of the age when poor Dick lived,--an age when young ladies, at dinner, actually put their knives into their mouths. The social peculiarities of the period he illustrated by a sort of summary of Swift's _Polite Conversation_, which led up to an ironical praise of the nineteenth century, as a century whose anomalies are unknown."
The fourth lecture on the humorists was of Prior, Gay, and Pope, Mr. Thackeray choosing to consider Pope, who was not a humorist, but a wit, the greatest humorist of all:
"Prior he characterizes as the foremost of lucky wits, abounding in good nature and acuteness. He loved--he drank--he sang. Some verses at Cambridge first rendered him an object of notice, and by the 'City Mouse and Country Mouse,' which, jointly with Montague, he wrote against Dryden, and which, Mr. Thackeray ironically asserted, all his hearers knew, of course, by heart, he gained the post of Secretary to the Embassy at the Hague, in accordance with the usage then prevalent of rewarding a talent for correct alcaics or biting epigrams with important diplomatic appointments. However, his fortune was but transient, since he fell with his patron Montague. As a poet, Mr. Thackeray praised Prior highly, calling him the most charming of English lyrists, and comparing him with Horace on one side and Moore on the other. At the same time he referred to a certain statement that Prior, after he had spent the evening with the first men of the day, would retire to Long-acre to smoke a pipe with two very intimate acquaintances--a soldier and his wife--adding that many of his writings seemed to be under the influence of his Long-acre friends."