omprehensible. What place have those who
fret not themselves because of evildoers--what place in their tolerant
society have they for uncouth personalities, terrible with indignation?
It is true that Swift was himself accounted a valued friend among the
best wits and writers of his time. Bolingbroke wrote to him: "I loved
you almost twenty years ago; I thought of you as well as I do now,
better was beyond the power of conception." Pope, also after twenty
years of intimate friendship, could write of him: "My sincere love of
that valuable, indeed incomparable, man will accompany him through life,
and pursue his memory were I to live a hundred lives." Arbuthnot could
write to him:

"DEAR FRIEND,--The last sentence of your letter plunged
a dagger in my heart. Never repeat those sad, but tender,
words, that you will try to forget me. For my part, I can never
forget you--at least till I discover, which is impossible, another
friend whose conversation could procure me the pleasure I
have found in yours."

The friends of Swift--the men who could write like this--men like
Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Addison, Steele, and Gay--were no
sentimentalists; they rank among the shrewdest and most clear-eyed
writers of our literature. And, indeed, to me at all events, the
difficulty of Swift's riddle lies, not in his savagery, but in his
charm. When we think of that tiger burning in the forests of the night,
how shall we reconcile his fearful symmetry with eyes "azure as the
heavens," which Pope describes as having a surprising archness in them?
Or when a man is reputed the most embittered misanthrope in history, how
was it that his intimate friend, Sheridan, could speak of that "spirit
of generosity and benevolence whose greatness, and vigour, when pent up
in his own breast by poverty and dependence, served only as an evil
spirit to torment him"? Of his private generosity, and his consideration
for the poor, for servants, and animals, there are many instances
recorded. For divergent types of womanhood, whether passionate, witty,
or intellectual, he possessed the attraction of sympathetic intimacy. A
woman of peculiar charm and noble character was his livelong friend from
girlhood, risking reputation, marriage, position, and all that many
women most value, just for that friendship and nothing more. Another
woman loved him with more tragic destiny. To Stella, in the midst of his
political warfare, he could write with the pl