That the author of "Gulliver" did himself teach many truths, though in his own way, who can doubt? I recognise in him an unflinching champion of right exposing and battling with much sickening wrong: the true ore everywhere pierces and glistens through the incrustation of baser matter. The apostolical hint concerning some classes of evildoers, "It is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret," although it has happily in our own day received a more general recognition, was too little regarded in that of Swift, Even the high intentions of satire are no longer held to be an excuse for the introduction of impure thoughts.
This is the only blame that can attach to Swift, and it attaches in a much higher degree to Juvenal, to Martial, and to Petronius Arbiter. After all, he was infinitely the purest spirit of that age to whose influence the faults of his writing are mainly attributable; purer than Prior, whose poems, whatever Dr. Johnson may say, are certainly not a lady's book; purer than his friend Gay, the author of The Beggar's Opera; who, like La Fontaine, was also a school-fabulist, and whom the worthy and the good (?) remembering, are to strike their pensive bosoms.[1]
For my own part, I wish the noble Dean of St. Patrick's had had his expectation realised;—I wish that he had been made a bishop; and I think he would have been very far the best at that time on the bench. Think of all his great and versatile powers,
"Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver."
Good Churchman, far-sighted politician, keen satirist. Pure in life, uncorrupted in opinions, rebuking spiritual wickedness in high and low places. A whole, if not a perfect man.
Fielding and Smollett, in literature, remind me of Salvator and Wouvermans, in painting, as characterised by Mr. Ruskin.[2] The former seems to me to be a lost spirit, giving
