me die
_Like simple Cato in the play_,
For anything that he can say.

It was the same spirit which would not allow that Garth was the author
of his celebrated poem--

Garth did not write his own Dispensary,

as Pope ironically alludes to the story of the times:--a contemporary
wit has recorded this literary injury, by repeating it.[342] And
Swift, who once exclaimed to Pope, "The deuce take party!" was himself
the greatest sinner of them all. He, once the familiar friend of
Steele till party divided them, not only emptied his shaft of quivers
against his literary character, but raised the horrid yell of the
war-whoop in his inhuman exultation over the unhappy close of the
desultory life of a man of genius. Bitterly has he written--

From perils of a hundred jails,
Withdrew to starve, and die in Wales.

When Steele published "The Crisis," Swift attacked the author in so
exquisite a piece of grave irony, that I am tempted to transcribe his
inimitable parallels of a triumvirate composed of the writer of the
_Flying Post_, Dunton the literary projector, and poor Steele: the
one, the Iscariot of hackney scribes; the other a crack-brained
scribbling bookseller, who boasted he had a thousand projects, fancied
he had methodised six hundred, and was ruined by the fifty he
executed. The following is a specimen of that powerful irony in which
Swift excelled all other writers; that fine Cervantic humour, that
provoking coolness which Swift preserves while he is panegyrising the
objects of his utter contempt.

"Among the present writers on the Whig side, I can recollect but
_three_ of any great distinction, which are the _Flying Post_, Mr.
Dunton, and the Author of 'The Crisis.' The first of these seems to
have been much sunk in reputation since the sudden retreat of the only
true, genuine, original author, Mr. Ridpath, who is celebrated by the
_Dutch Gazetteer_ as one of _the best pens in England_. Mr. Dunton
hath been longer and more conversant in books than any of the three,
as well as more voluminous in his productions: however, having
employed his studies in so great a variety of other subjects, he hath,
I think, but lately turned his genius to politics. His famous tract
entitled 'Neck or Nothing' must be allowed to be the shrewdest piece,
and written with the most spirit of any which hath appeared from that
side since the change of the ministry. It is indeed a most cutting
satire upon the Lord Treasurer and