en sometimes over-praised. If
we regard the writer's end, it must be admitted that his language is
admirably fitted for that end. What more then, it may be asked, can be
needed? The reply is, that in composition, as in other things, there are
different orders of excellence. The kind, although perfect, may be a low
kind, and Swift's style wants the 'sweetness and light,' to quote a
phrase of his own, which distinguish our greatest prose writers. It
lacks also the elevation which inspires, and the persuasiveness that
convinces while it charms. With infinitely more vigour than Addison,
Swift, apart from his _Letters_, has none of Addison's attractiveness.
No style, perhaps, is better fitted to exhibit scorn and contempt; but
its author cannot express, because he does not possess, the sense of
beauty.

Unlike Pope, Swift was a man of affairs rather than of letters. He wrote
neither for literary fame nor for money. His ambition was to be a ruler
of men, and in imperious will he was strong enough to make a second
Strafford. 'When people ask me,' said Lord Carteret, 'how I governed
Ireland, I say that I pleased Dr. Swift, "_quaesitam meritis sume
superbiam_."' As a political pamphleteer he succeeded, because he was
savagely in earnest, and had the special genius of a combatant. If
argument was against him he used satire; if satire failed he tried
invective; his armoury was full of weapons, and there was not one of
them he could not wield. He loved power, and exercised it on the
ministers who needed the services of his pen. And, as we have already
said, he dispensed his favours like a king! Swift's commanding genius
gives even to his most trivial productions a measure of vitality. The
student of our eighteenth century literature is arrested by the man and
his works, and to treat either him or them with indifference would be to
neglect a significant chapter in the history of the time.

[Sidenote: John Arbuthnot (1667-1735).]

John Arbuthnot, one of the most prominent of the Queen Anne wits, and
the warm friend of Swift and Pope, was born at Arbuthnot, near Montrose,
in 1667. He studied medicine at Aberdeen, and having taken his doctor's
degree at St. Andrews, came, after the wont of ambitious Scotchmen, to
seek his fortune in London, where in 1700 he published an _Essay on the
Usefulness of Mathematical Learning_, and having won high reputation as
a man of science, was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. A few years
later