only that his mind could be
quickened by the society and spur of equals. In Dublin he felt it dying
daily of the inanition of inferior company. His was not a nature, if
there be any such, that could endure the solitude of supremacy without
impair, and he foreboded with reason a Tiberian old age.

This certainly is not the ordinary temper of a youth on whom the world
is just opening. In a letter to Pope, written in 1725, he says, "I
desire that you and all my friends will take a special care that my
disaffection to the world may not be imputed to my age; for I have
credible witnesses ready to depose that it hath never varied from the
twenty-first to the fifty-eighth year of my age." His contempt for
mankind would not be lessened by his knowledge of the lying subterfuges
by which the greatest poet of his age sought at once to gratify and
conceal his own vanity, nor by listening to the professions of its
cleverest statesman that he liked planting cabbages better than being
prime minister. How he must have laughed at the unconscious parody when
his old printer Barber wrote to him in the same strain of philosophic
relief from the burthensome glories of lord-mayoralty!

Nay, he made another false start, and an irreparable one, in prose also
with the "Tale of a Tub." Its levity, if it was not something worse,
twice balked him of the mitre when it seemed just within his reach.
Justly or not, he had the reputation of scepticism. Mr. Forster would
have us believe him devout, but the evidence goes no further than to
prove him ceremonially decorous. Certain it is that his most intimate
friends, except Arbuthnot, were free-thinkers, and wrote to him
sometimes in a tone that was at least odd in addressing a clergyman.
Probably the feeling that he had made a mistake in choosing a profession
which was incompatible with success in politics, and with perfect
independence of mind, soured him even more than his disappointed hopes.
He saw Addison a secretary of state and Prior an ambassador, while he
was bubbled (as he would have put it) with a shabby deanery among
savages. Perhaps it was not altogether his clerical character that stood
in his way. A man's little faults are more often the cause of his
greatest miscarriages than he is able to conceive, and in whatever
respects his two friends might have been his inferiors, they certainly
had the advantage of him in that _savoir vivre_ which makes so large an
element of worldly success. In