rce and inventive genius of his
prose writings; but if he had never written either the Tale of a Tub or
Gulliver's Travels, his name merely as a poet would have come down to
us, and have gone down to posterity with well earned honours. His
Imitations of Horace, and still more his Verses on his own Death, place
him in the first rank of agreeable moralists in verse. There is not only
a dry humour, an exquisite tone of irony, in these productions of his
pen; but there is a touching, unpretending pathos, mixed up with the
most whimsical and eccentric strokes of pleasantry and satire. His
Description of the Morning in London, and of a City Shower, which were
first published in the Tatler, are among the most delightful of the
contents of that very delightful work. Swift shone as one of the most
sensible of the poets; he is also distinguished as one of the most
nonsensical of them. No man has written so many lack-a-daisical,
slip-shod, tedious, trifling, foolish, fantastical verses as he, which
are so little an imputation on the wisdom of the writer; and which, in
fact, only shew his readiness to oblige others, and to forget himself.
He has gone so far as to invent a new stanza of fourteen and sixteen
syllable lines for Mary the cookmaid to vent her budget of nothings, and
for Mrs. Harris to gossip with the deaf old housekeeper. Oh, when shall
we have such another Rector of Laracor!--The Tale of a Tub is one of
the most masterly compositions in the language, whether for thought,
wit, or style. It is so capital and undeniable a proof of the author's
talents, that Dr. Johnson, who did not like Swift, would not allow that
he wrote it. It is hard that the same performance should stand in the
way of a man's promotion to a bishopric, as wanting gravity, and at the
same time be denied to be his, as having too much wit. It is a pity the
Doctor did not find out some graver author, for whom he felt a critical
kindness, on whom to father this splendid but unacknowledged production.
Dr. Johnson could not deny that Gulliver's Travels were his; he
therefore disputed their merits, and said that after the first idea of
them was conceived, they were easy to execute; all the rest followed
mechanically. I do not know how that may be; but the mechanism employed
is something very different from any that the author of Rasselas was in
the habit of bringing to bear on such occasions. There is nothing more
futile, as well as invidious, than t