judging him, however, we must take into
account that his first literary hit was made when he was already
thirty-seven, with a confirmed bias towards moody suspicion of others
and distrust of himself.

The reaction in Swift's temper and ambition told with the happiest
effect on his prose. For its own purposes, as good working English, his
style (if that may be called so whose chief success was that it had no
style at all), has never been matched. It has been more praised than
studied, or its manifest shortcomings, its occasional clumsiness, its
want of harmony and of feeling for the finer genialities of language,
would be more often present in the consciousness of those who discourse
about it from a superficial acquaintance. With him language was a means
and not an end. If he was plain and even coarse, it was from choice
rather than because he lacked delicacy of perception; for in badinage,
the most ticklish use to which words can be put, he was a master.

PLUTARCH'S MORALS[1]

[Footnote 1: A review of the English translation edited by William W.
Goodwin with an Introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson.]

Plutarch is perhaps the most eminent example of how strong a hold simple
good humor and good sense lay upon the affections of mankind. Not a man
of genius or heroism himself, his many points of sympathy with both make
him an admirable conductor of them in that less condensed form which is
more wholesome and acceptable to the average mind. Of no man can it be
more truly said that, if not a rose himself, he had lived all his days
in the rose's neighborhood. Such is the delightful equableness of his
temperament and his singular talent for reminiscence, so far is he
always from undue heat while still susceptible of so much enthusiasm as
shall not disturb digestion, that he might seem to have been born
middle-aged. Few men have so amicably combined the love of a good dinner
and of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved the
problem of having your cake and eating it, at which the ascetic
interpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up his
worldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relish
to the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a better
Christian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir Thomas
Browne, love to lose himself in an _O, altitudo!_ yet the sky-piercing
peaks and snowy solitudes of ethical speculation loom always on the
horizon