you in all the elegant
graces, in the fine touches of delicate sentiment, in developing the
secret springs of the soul, in showing the mild lights and shades of a
character, in distinctly marking each line, and every soft gradation of
tints, which would escape the common eye? Who ever painted like you the
beautiful parts of human nature, and brought them out from under the
shade even of the greatest simplicity, or the most ridiculous weaknesses;
so that we are forced to admire and feel that we venerate, even while we
are laughing? Swift was able to do nothing that approaches to this. He
could draw an ill face, or caricature a good one, with a masterly hand;
but there was all his power, and, if I am to speak as a god, a worthless
power it is. Yours is divine. It tends to exalt human nature.

_Swift_.--Pray, good Mercury (if I may have liberty to say a word for
myself) do you think that my talent was not highly beneficial to correct
human nature? Is whipping of no use to mend naughty boys?

_Mercury_.--Men are generally not so patient of whipping as boys, and a
rough satirist is seldom known to mend them. Satire, like antimony, if
it be used as a medicine, must be rendered less corrosive. Yours is
often rank poison. But I will allow that you have done some good in your
way, though not half so much as Addison did in his.

_Addison_.--Mercury, I am satisfied. It matters little what rank you
assign me as a wit, if you give me the precedence as a friend and
benefactor to mankind.

_Mercury_.--I pass sentence on the writers, not the men, and my decree is
this:--When any hero is brought hither who wants to be humbled, let the
talk of lowering his arrogance be assigned to Swift. The same good
office may be done to a philosopher vain of his wisdom and virtue, or to
a bigot puffed up with spiritual pride. The doctor's discipline will
soon convince the first, that with all his boasted morality, he is but a
Yahoo; and the latter, that to be holy he must necessarily be humble. I
would also have him apply his anticosmetic wash to the painted face of
female vanity, and his rod, which draws blood at every stroke, to the
hard back of insolent folly or petulant wit. But Addison should be
employed to comfort those whose delicate minds are dejected with too
painful a sense of some infirmities in their nature. To them he should
hold his fair and charitable mirror, which would bring to their sight
their hidden excellences,