"Never mind, Doctor, I'll send my servants home with you," said St.
John.

"Ay, a nice way of mending the matter--that's curing the itch by
scratching the skin off. I could not give your tall fellows less than a
crown a-piece, and I could buy off the bloodiest Mohawk in the kingdom,
if he's a Whig, for half that sum. But, thank Heaven, the supper is
ready."

And to supper we went. The oysters and champagne seemed to exhilarate,
if it did not refine, the Doctor's wit. St. John was unusually
brilliant. I myself caught the infection of their humour, and
contributed my quota to the common stock of jest and repartee; and that
evening, spent with the two most extraordinary men of the age, had in
it more of broad and familiar mirth than any I have ever wasted in
the company of the youngest and noisiest disciples of the bowl and its
concomitants. Even amidst all the coarse ore of Swift's conversation,
the diamond perpetually broke out; his vulgarity was never that of a
vulgar mind. Pity that, while he condemned St. John's over affectation
of the grace of life, he never perceived that his own affectation of
coarseness and brutality was to the full as unworthy of the simplicity
of intellect;* and that the aversion to cant, which was the strongest
characteristic of his mind, led him into the very faults he despised,
only through a more displeasing and offensive road. That same aversion
to cant is, by the way, the greatest and most prevalent enemy to the
reputation of high and of strong minds; and in judging Swift's
character in especial, we should always bear it in recollection.
This aversion--the very antipodes to hypocrisy--leads men not only to
disclaim the virtues they have, but to pretend to the vices they
have not. Foolish trick of disguised vanity! the world, alas, readily
believes them! Like Justice Overdo, in the garb of poor Arthur of
Bradley, they may deem it a virtue to have assumed the disguise; but
they must not wonder if the sham Arthur is taken for the real, beaten as
a vagabond, and set in the stocks as a rogue!

* It has been said that Swift was only coarse in his later years, and,
with a curious ignorance both of fact and of character, that Pope was
the cause of the Dean's grossness of taste. There is no doubt that he
grew coarser with age; but there is also no doubt that, graceful and
dignified as that great genius could be when he pleased, he affected
at a period earlier than the one in which he is now in