On the other hand, Smollett is only funny,
hardly witty, where he condenses all his wrath against the Dutch into an
epigram of two lines:
Amphibious creatures, sudden be your fall,
May man undam you and God damn you all.
Of satirists I have hitherto said nothing, because some, perhaps the
most eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor.
With them, as Juvenal said of himself, "facit indignatio versus," and
wrath is the element, as a general rule, neither of wit nor humor.
Swift, in the epitaph he wrote for himself, speaks of the grave as a
place "ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequeat," and this
hints at the sadness which makes the ground of all humor. There is
certainly humor in "Gulliver," especially in the chapters about the
Yahoos, where the horses are represented as the superior beings, and
disgusted at the filthiness of the creatures in human shape. But
commonly Swift, too, must be ranked with the wits, if we measure him
rather by what he wrote than by what he was. Take this for an example
from the "Day of Judgment":
With a whirl of thought oppressed
I sank from reverie to rest,
A horrid vision seized my head,
I saw the graves give up their dead!
Jove, armed with terrors, burst the skies,
And thunder roars, and lightning flies!
Amazed, confused, its fate unknown,
The world stands trembling at his throne!
While each pale sinner hung his head,
Jove, nodding, shook the heavens, and said:
"Offending race of human kind;
By nature, reason, learning, blind,
You who through frailty stepped aside.
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