Nor was
there wanting, when we made our pilgrimage thither, a touch of grim
humor in the thought that our tipsy guide (Clerk of the Works he had
dubbed himself for the nonce), as he monotonously recited his
contradictory anecdotes of the "sullybrutted Dane," varied by times with
an irrelative hiccough of his own, was no inapt type of the ordinary
biographers of Swift. The skill with which long practice had enabled our
cicerone to turn these involuntary hitches of his discourse into
rhetorical flourishes, and well-nigh to make them seem a new kind of
conjunction, would have been invaluable to the Dean's old servant
Patrick, but in that sad presence his grotesqueness was as shocking as
the clown in one of Shakespeare's tragedies to Chateaubriand. A shilling
sent him back to the neighboring pot-house whence a half-dozen ragged
volunteers had summoned him, and we were left to our musings. One
dominating thought shouldered aside all others--namely, how strange a
stroke of irony it was, how more subtle even than any of the master's
own, that our most poignant association with the least sentimental of
men should be one of sentiment, and that a romance second only to that
of Abelard and Heloise should invest the memory of him who had done more
than all others together to strip life and human nature of their last
instinctive decency of illusion.
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