s library, you whose friends
were Pope and St. John--what made you to swear to fatal vows, and bind
yourself to a life-long hypocrisy before the Heaven which you adored with
such real wonder, humility, and reverence? For Swift was a reverent, was
a pious spirit--for Swift could love and could pray. Through the storms
and tempests of his furious mind, the stars of religion and love break
out in the blue, shining serenely, though hidden by the driving clouds
and the maddened hurricane of his life.

It is my belief that he suffered frightfully from the consciousness of
his own scepticism, and that he had bent his pride so far down as to put
his apostasy out to hire. The paper left behind him, called "Thoughts on
Religion," is merely a set of excuses for not professing disbelief. He
says of his sermons that he preached pamphlets: they have scarce a
Christian characteristic; they might be preached from the steps of a
synagogue, or the floor of a mosque, or the box of a coffee-house almost.
There is little or no cant--he is too great and too proud for that; and,
in so far as the badness of his sermons goes, he is honest. But having
put that cassock on, it poisoned him: he was strangled in his bands. He
goes through life, tearing, like a man possessed with a devil. Like
Abudah in the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and
knows that the night will come and the inevitable hag with it. What a
night, my God, it was! what a lonely rage and long agony--what a vulture
that tore the heart of that giant! It is awful to think of the great
sufferings of this great man. Through life he always seems alone,
somehow. Goethe was so. I can't fancy Shakspeare otherwise. The giants
must live apart. The kings can have no company. But this man suffered
so; and deserved so to suffer. One hardly reads anywhere of such a pain.

The "saeva indignatio" of which he spoke as lacerating his heart, and
which he dares to inscribe on his tombstone--as if the wretch who lay
under that stone waiting God's judgment had a right to be angry,--breaks
out from him in a thousand pages of his writing, and tears and rends him.
Against men in office, he having been overthrown; against men in England,
he having lost his chance of preferment there, the furious exile never
fails to rage and curse. Is it fair to call the famous "Drapier's
Letters" patriotism? They are masterpieces of dreadful humour and
invective: they are reasoned log