The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift/Volume 12/From Allen Bathurst to Jonathan Swift - 3

by Allen Bathurst

FROM LORD BATHURST.

YOU have taken all the precaution, which a reasonable man could possibly take, to break off an impertinent correspondence, and yet it will not do. One must be more stupid than a Dutch burgomaster, not to see through the design of the last letter. "I show all your letters to our Irish wits. One of them is going to write a treatise of English bulls and blunders." And for farther security, you add at last, "I am going to take a progress, God knows where, and shall not be back again, God knows when." I have given you a reasonable breathing time; and now, I must at you again. I receive so much pleasure in reading your letters, that, according to the usual good nature and justice of mankind, I can dispense with the trouble I give you in reading mine. But if you grow obstinate, and would not answer, I will plague and pester you, and do all I can to vex you. I will take your works to pieces, and show you, that they are all borrowed or stolen. Have not you stolen the sweetness of your numbers from Dryden and Waller? Have not you borrowed thoughts from Virgil and Horace? At least, I am sure I have seen something like them in those books. As to your prose writings, which they make such a noise about, they are only some little improvements upon the humour you have stolen from Miguel de Cervantes and Rabelais. Well, but the style — a great matter indeed, for an Englishman to value himself upon, that he can write English: why, I write English too, but it is in another style.

But I would not forget your political tracts. You may say, that you have ventured your ears at one time, and your neck at another, for the good of your country. Why, that other people have done in another manner, upon less occasion, and are not at all proud of it. You have overturned and supported ministers; you have set kingdoms in a flame by your pen. Pray, what is there in that, but having the knack of hitting the passions of mankind? With that alone, and a little knowledge of ancient and modern history, and seeing a little farther into the inside of things than the generality of men, you have made this bustle. There is no wit in any of them: I have read them all over, and do not remember any of those pretty flowers, those just antitheses, which one meets with so frequently in the French writers; none of those clever turns upon words, nor those apt quotations out of Latin authors, which the writers of the last age among us abounded in; none of those pretty similies, which some of our modern authors adorn their works with, that are not only a little like the thing they would illustrate, but are also like twenty other things. In short, as often as I have read any of your tracts, I have been so tired with them, that I have never been easy till I got to the end of them. I have found my brain heated, my imagination fired, just as if I was drunk. A pretty thing indeed for one of your gown to value himself upon, that with sitting still an hour in his study, he has often made three kingdoms drunk at once.

I have twenty other points to maul you upon, if you provoke me; but if you are civil, and good natured, and will send me a long, a very long letter, in answer to this, I will let you alone a good while. Well, adieu. If I had a better pen, I can tell you, that I should not have concluded so soon.