which he has no competitor.

It is always interesting to observe the influence of a work of genius on
other minds, and in connection with the _Tale of a Tub_ a story told of
his boyhood by William Cobbett is worth recording:

'I was trudging through Richmond,' he writes, 'in my blue smock-frock,
and my red garters tied under my knees, when, staring about me, my eyes
fell upon a little book in a bookseller's window, on the outside of
which was written, "_Tale of a Tub_, price threepence." The title was so
odd that my curiosity was excited.... It was something so new to my mind
that though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me
beyond description; and it produced what I have always considered a sort
of birth of intellect. I read on till it was dark, without any thought
of supper or bed.' Cobbett adds, that having read till he could see no
longer, he put the volume in his pocket, and 'tumbled down' by the side
of a haystack, 'where I slept till the birds in Kew Gardens awakened me
in the morning; when off I started to Kew, reading my little book.'

One of the greatest masters of prose in the language has also recorded
the impression made upon him by this wonderful book. At the age of
eighty-three Landor wrote: 'I am reading once more the work I have read
oftener than any other prose work in our language.... What a writer! Not
the most imaginative or the most simple, not Bacon or Goldsmith had the
power of saying more forcibly or completely whatever he meant to say.'
'Simplicity,' said Swift, 'is the best and truest ornament of most
things in human life;' and Landor, commenting on Swift's style, observes
that 'he never attempted to round his sentences by redundant words,
aware that from the simplest and the fewest arise the secret springs of
genuine harmony.'

The volume containing the _Tale of a Tub_ had also within its covers the
_Battle of the Books_, which was suggested by a controversy that
originated in France, and had been carried on by Sir W. Temple in
England, as to the relative merits of the Ancients and the Moderns. Out
of this, too, arose a discussion by some _savants_, with Richard Bentley
(1662-1742), the greatest scholar of the age, at their head, with regard
to the genuineness of the _Epistles of Phalaris_, a subject discussed in
Macaulay's essay on Temple in his usually brilliant style. Swift, in the
_Battle of the Books_ sides with Temple and with Charles Boyle, the
nominal editor of