ayfulness that nursemaids
use for children, and most men keep for their kittens or puppies. In the
"Verses on his own Death," how far removed from the envy, hatred, and
malice of the literary nature is the affectionate irony of those verses
beginning:

"In Pope I cannot read a line,
But with a sigh I wish it mine;
When he can in one couplet fix
More sense than I can do in six,
It gives me such a jealous fit,
I cry, 'Plague take him and his wit.'
I grieve to be outdone by Gay
In my own humorous biting way;
Arbuthnot is no more my friend
Who dares to irony pretend,
Which I was born to introduce;
Refined it first, and showed its use."

And so on down to the lines:

"If with such talents Heaven has blest 'em,
Have I not reason to detest 'em?"

To damn with faint praise is the readiest defence of envious failure;
but to praise with jealous damnation reveals a delicate generosity that
few would look for in the hater of his kind. Nor let us forget that
Swift was himself the inventor of the phrase "Sweetness and light."

These elements of charm and generosity have been too much overlooked,
and they could not redeem the writer's savagery in popular opinion,
being overshadowed by that cruel indignation which ate his flesh and
exhausted his spirit. Yet it was, perhaps, just from such elements of
intuitive sympathy and affectionate goodwill that the indignation
sprang. Like most over-sensitive natures, he found that every new
relation in life, even every new friendship that he formed, only opened
a gate to new unhappiness. The sorrows of others were more to him than
to themselves, and, like a man or woman that loves a child, he
discovered that his affection only exposed a wider surface to pain. On
the death of a lady with whom he was not very intimately acquainted, "I
hate life," he cried, "when I think it exposed to such accidents: and to
see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth while such as her die,
makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing." It was not any
spirit of hatred or cruelty, but an intensely personal sympathy with
suffering, that tore his heart and kindled that furnace of indignation
against the stupid, the hateful, and the cruel to whom most suffering is
due; and it was a furnace in which he himself was consumed. Writing
whilst he was still a youth, in _The Tale of a Tub_, he composed a
terrible sentence, in which all his rage and pity and ironical barenes