He was always alone,--alone and gnashing in the darkness, except when Stella's sweet smile came and shone on him.

When that went, silence and utter night closed over him.

An immense genius, an awful downfall and ruin! So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling.

We have other great names to mention,--none I think, however, so great or so gloomy." And so we pass on from Swift, feeling that though the man was certainly a humorist, we have had as yet but little to do with humour.
Congreve is the next who, however truly he may have been a humorist, is described here rather as a man of fashion.

A man of fashion he certainly was, but is best known in our literature as a comedian,--worshipping that comic Muse to whom Thackeray hesitates to introduce his audience, because she is not only merry but shameless also.