He is a
curious example of what we often remark of the living, but rarely of the
dead,--that they get credit for what they might be quite as much as for
what they are,--and posterity has applied to him one of his own rules of
criticism, judging him by the best rather than the average of his
achievement, a thing posterity is seldom wont to do. On the losing side
in politics, it is true of his polemical writings as of Burke's,--whom in
many respects he resembles, and especially in that supreme quality of a
reasoner, that his mind gathers not only heat, but clearness and
expansion, by its own motion,--that they have won his battle for him in
the judgment of after times.
To us, looking back at him, he gradually becomes a singularly interesting
and even picturesque figure. He is, in more senses than one, in language,
in turn of thought, in style of mind, in the direction of his activity,
the first of the moderns. He is the first literary man who was also a man
of the world, as we understand the term. He succeeded Ben Jonson as the
acknowledged dictator of wit and criticism, as Dr. Johnson, after nearly
the same interval, succeeded him. All ages are, in some sense, ages of
transition; but there are times when the transition is more marked, more
rapid; and it is, perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of letters to arrive
at maturity during such a period, still more to represent in himself the
change that is going on, and to be an efficient cause in bringing it
about.
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