nature, became yet more slow by irresolution; and was content
to hear that dilatoriness lamented as natural, which he applauded in
himself as politick.

Without the tories, however, nothing could be done; and, as they were
not to be gratified, they must be appeased; and the conduct of the
minister, if it could not be vindicated, was to be plausibly excused.

Early in the next year he published a Proposal for correcting,
improving, and ascertaining the English Tongue, in a letter to the earl
of Oxford; written without much knowledge of the general nature of
language, and without any accurate inquiry into the history of other
tongues. The certainty and stability which, contrary to all experience,
he thinks attainable, he proposes to secure by instituting an academy;
the decrees of which every man would have been willing, and many would
have been proud to disobey, and which, being renewed by successive
elections, would, in a short time, have differed from itself.

Swift now attained the zenith of his political importance: he published,
1712, the Conduct of the Allies, ten days before the parliament
assembled. The purpose was to persuade the nation to a peace; and never
had any writer more success. The people, who had been amused with
bonfires and triumphal processions, and looked with idolatry on the
general and his friends, who, as they thought, had made England the
arbitress of nations, were confounded between shame and rage, when they
found that "mines had been exhausted, and millions destroyed," to secure
the Dutch, or aggrandize the emperour, without any advantage to
ourselves; that we had been bribing our neighbours to fight their own
quarrel; and that amongst our enemies, we might number our allies.

That is now no longer doubted, of which the nation was then first
informed, that the war was unnecessarily protracted to fill the pockets
of Marlborough; and that it would have been continued without end, if he
could have continued his annual plunder. But Swift, I suppose, did not
yet know what he has since written, that a commission was drawn which
would have appointed him general for life, had it not become
ineffectual by the resolution of lord Cowper, who refused the seal.

"Whatever is received," say the schools, "is received in proportion to
the recipient." The power of a political treatise depends much upon the
disposition of the people; the nation was then combustible, and a spark
set it on fire. It is boaste