rary in search of adventures,
is he encountered by some inflated champion of huge proportions, who
turns out to be no better than a barber, after all! Gazing upon

"That weight of wood, with leathern coat o'erlaid,
Those ample clasps, of solid metal made,
The close-pressed leaves, unloosed for many an age,
The dull red edging of the well-filled page,
On the broad back the stubborn ridges rolled,
Where yet the title stands, in burnished gold,"--

what wisdom, what wit, what profundity, what vastness of knowledge,
what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we
anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no
more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes and sentries the
seraglio of the Sophi or the Sultan! The big, burly beggars! For a
century nobody has read them, and therefore everybody has admitted them
to be great. They are bulky paradoxes, and find a good reputation in
neglect,--as some fools pass for philosophers by preserving a close
mouth and a grave countenance.

"Safe in themselves, the ponderous works remain."

It was a keen sense of this disproportion between size and sense which
barbed the sharpest arrows of Dr. Swift. Nobody ever imposed upon him
either by bigness or by bluster. "The Devil take stupidity," once cried
the Dean of St. Patrick's, "that it will not come in to supply the want
of philosophy!" So in the Introduction to "The Tale of a Tub," he, half
in jest and half in earnest, declares that "wisdom is like a cheese,
whereof to a judicious taste the maggots are the best." _Vive la
bagatelle!_ trembled upon his lips at the age of threescore; and he
amused himself with reading the most trifling books he could find, and
writing upon the most trifling subjects. Lord Bolingbroke wrote to him
to beg him "to put on his philosophical spectacles," and wrote with
but small success. Pope wrote to him, "to beg it of him, as a piece of
mercy, that he would not laugh at his gravity, but permit him to wear
the beard of a philosopher until he pulled it off and made a jest of it
himself." Old Weymouth, in the latter part of Anne's reign, said to
him, in his lordly Latin, "_Philosopha verba ignava opera,_" and Swift
frequently repeated the sarcasm. One cannot figure him as the "laughing
old man" of Anacreon, for there was certainly a dreadful dash of vinegar
in his composition; but if he did not hate hard enough, hit hard enough,
and weigh men, motive