. Saintsbury, however, less in liking a different
garden from his than in liking a different seat in the same garden. One
who is familiar as he is with all the literature he discusses in the
present volume is bound to indulge all manner of preferences, whims and
even eccentricities. An instance of Mr. Saintsbury's whims is his
complaint that the eighteenth-century essays are almost always reprinted
only in selections and without the advertisements that appeared with them
on their first publication. He is impatient of J. R. Green's dismissal of
the periodical essayist as a "mass of rubbish," and he demands his
eighteenth-century essayists in full, advertisements and all. "Here," he
insists, "these things fringe and vignette the text in the most
appropriate manner, and so set off the quaint variety and the
other-worldly character as nothing else could do." Is not the author's
contention, however, as to the great loss the Addisonian essay suffers
when isolated from its context a severe criticism on that essay as
literature? The man of letters likes to read from a complete _Spectator_
as he does from a complete Wordsworth. At the same time, the best of
Addison, as of Wordsworth, can stand on its own feet in an anthology, and
this is the final proof of its literary excellence. The taste for
eighteenth century advertisements is, after all, only literary
antiquarianism--a delightful indulgence, a by-path, but hardly necessary
to the enjoyment of Addison's genius.

But it is neither Pope nor Addison who is ultimately Mr. Saintsbury's idol
among the poets and prose-writers of the eighteenth century. His idol of
idols is Swift, and next to him he seems most wholeheartedly to love and
admire Dr. Johnson and Fielding. He makes no bones about confessing his
preference of Swift to Aristophanes and Rabelais and Moliere. Swift does
not at once fascinate and cold-shoulder him as he does to so many people.
Mr. Saintsbury glorifies _Gulliver_, and wisely so, right down to the last
word about the Houyhnhnms, and he demands for the _Journal to Stella_
recognition as "the first great novel, being at the same time a marvellous
and absolutely genuine autobiography." His ultimate burst of appreciation
is a beautifully characteristic example of what has before been called
Saintsburyese--not because of any obscurity in it, but because of its
oddity of phrase and metaphor:

Swift never wearies, for, as Bossuet said of human passion
genera