But when our writer commends his virtues towards his parents, brethren, servants, humanity to all, love to his country, chastity, temperance, and frugality; he ought to reflect that he takes the character from Laërtius, a domestic witness, and one of the sect; and consequently of little credit where he speaks for his master. I could draw a picture of Epicurus in features and colours quite contrary; and bring many old witnesses, who knew and saw him, to vouch for its likeness. But these things are trite and common among men of true letters; and our author and his pamphlet are too contemptible to require commonplaces in answer.

But the noble quality of all, the most divine of his and all virtues was his friendship; so cultivated in perfection by him and his followers, that the succession of his school lasted many hundred years after all the others had failed. This last part is true in the author from whom it is taken; but our gleaner here misunderstands it. The succession indeed continued at Athens, in the garden dedicated to it, longer than the other sects possessed their first stations. But it's utterly false that professors of it lasted longer in general than those of the others. Quite contrary: 'tis well known that the Platonists, Peripatetics, and Stoics, or rather a jumble and compound of them all, subsisted long after the empire was Christian; when there was no school, no footstep of the Epicureans left in the world.

But how does our writer prove that this noble quality, friendship, was so eminently cultivated by Epicurus? Why, Cicero, says he, though otherwise a great adversary to his philosophical opinions, gives him this noble testimony. I confess it raises my scorn and indignation at this mushroom scribbler, to see him by and by, with an air of superiority, prescribing to the whole body of your clergy the true method of quoting Cicero. "They consider not," says he, "he writes in dialogue, but quote anything that fits their purpose, as Cicero's opinion, without attending to the person that speaks it; any false argument, which he makes the Stoic or Epicurean use, and which they have thought fit to sanctify, they urge it as Cicero's own." Out of his own mouth this pert teacher of his betters: Αλλων ἰατρὸς, αὐτὸς ἕλκεσι βρύων.1

For this very noble testimony, which he urges here as Cicero's own, comes from the mouth of Torquatus, an Epicurean; and is afterwards refuted by Cicero in his own name and person.

1 Physician of others, himself teeming with sores. VOL. III

2 C

Nay,

so purblind and stupid was our writer, as not to attend to the beginning of his own passage, which he ushers in thus docked and curtailed: Epicurus ita dicit, etc. 'Epicurus declares it to be his opinion, that friendship is the noblest, most extensive, and most delicious pleasure." Whereas in Torquatus it lies thus: "The remaining head to be spoken to is friendship; which, if pleasure be declared to be the chief good, you affirm will be all gone and extinct:" de qua Epicurus quidem ita dicit, "concerning which Epicurus declares his opinion," etc. Where it's manifest that affirmatis, "you affirm," is spoken of and to Cicero. So that here's an Epicurean testimony, of small credit in their own case (though our writer has thought fit to sanctify it), slurred upon us for Cicero's; and where the very Epicurean declares that Cicero was of a contrary opinion. (From the Same.)

JONATHAN SWIFT

[Jonathan Swift was born in Ireland, of English parents, on the 30th of November 1667. He received his education chiefly in Ireland; and after more than one period of prolonged residence in the house of Sir William Temple, he took orders in the Church of Ireland, and became Vicar of Laracor. His first literary attempts were poems in the involved style which had become usual from the current imitation of the Pindaric Ode; and after an essay in political pamphleteering, he published (anonymously) the Tale of a Tub and the Battle of the Books in 1704. Soon after he became immersed in politics; for a short time an ally of the Whigs, but eventually as the close ally of the Tory ministry, and the defender of the Church. Before the fall of Queen Anne's last ministry he was appointed Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, and his influence was before long felt as Irish patriot, and as defender of the rights of Ireland against the ministry of Walpole (in the Drapier Letters and other pamphlets). In 1726 he published (also anonymously) Gulliver's Travels; and the remainder of his many works consists of occasional pieces of sarcastic humour and of political invective. After his first poetical attempts in the Pindaric kind, his verses also were inspired only by sarcasm, humour, and invective. He died, after a long period of apathy and mental decay, in 1745.]

"PROPER words, in proper places, make the true definition of a style." This is Swift's own maxim in his Letter to a Young Clergyman, dated 1719. It has the common defect of such apophthegms, that we are left to interpret it each in his own way. But Swift has developed his views upon style with some fulness in several passages; and from these we can gather what his ideal was, although it is only natural that a genius such as his refused in practice to be bound very strictly by his own theories. In the Tatler for 28th September 1710 he commented severely upon the defects of contemporary prose-the mutilation of words and syllables, the introduction of what we should now call slang, and the sacrifice of dignity, taste, and orderly arrangement to caprice, affectation, and ever-changing fashion. He elaborated this more fully in his Letter to the Lord Treasurer (Lord Oxford) of the following year,

in which he urged the minister to use his influence to check the vulgarising of our language, by founding an academy which should be empowered to regulate and fix the language, and preserve it against the changing whims of fashion. The project was a strange one, and it may be doubted whether there is not something of irony in Swift's advocacy of it; but his hatred of the absurd straining after originality, which succeeded only in attaining to an affected oddity and eccentricity, was not only serious and earnest, but was of a piece with the whole body of Swift's thought and taste. In both these pieces he points to the prose of the Elizabethan age as the most perfect type. Its distinctive mark he asserts to have been its simplicity—“The best and truest ornament of most things in human life," or, as he repeats in the Letter to the Young Clergyman, "That simplicity without which no human performance can arrive to any great perfection.” As instances of this perfection he adduces Parsons the Jesuit and Hooker, and he contrasts them with the over-elaboration which was distinctive of the following age. Repeatedly he urges this as the first and most essential quality in good prose, and he found the excellence of the prose writers of the reign of Charles I. to be due to their having recovered for a few years some of the simplicity which marked the Elizabethan age. Clarendon was warmly admired by Swift, and was in great measure his model in his chief historical work, the Memoirs of the Last Four Years of the Queen, and he tells with approval of Lord Falkland's practice of testing the intelligibility of a word by consulting a servant, and being guided "by her judgment whether to receive or reject it." There is another passage this time from Mrs. Pilkington's Memoirs-which helps us to understand Swift's conception of good prose. "I would have every man write his own English," said the Dean to Mrs. Pilkington; and when she assented, he followed up his dictum by asking her to explain it. "Not to confine one's self to a set of phrases, as some of our ancient English historians, Camden in particular, seems to have done, but to make use of such words as naturally occur on the subject." It was thus that Mrs. Pilkington represents herself to have replied. Swift seems to have approved the interpretation, and we may reasonably guess that he had given Mrs. Pilkington some help towards it.

These indications of the Dean's opinions are not without interest; but he was the last man to be bound by rules, even of his own making. He inveighs against grammatical errors and

looseness of construction, but there is scarcely a page of his own writings in which some trifling infringement of grammatical accuracy is not to be found. Of all prose styles his is perhaps the least subject to parody or to imitation, because it is so admirably adapted to each variety in subject, in tone, in treatment. He wields it with the elastic power of the consummate master, so that, once expressed, each thought seems to be fitted with its natural dress, and no variation in the expression is conceivable without the obscuring and even the destruction of the thought. To the genuine lover of Swift the Tale of a Tub will probably always be the chief treasure in his works; and it is there that his style..is seen at its perfection. The mere story in the book is of the flimsiest description, and the fact that the story is an allegory rather weakens than increases its interest. Its genius lies in the range of thought, in the light play of fancy, in the absolute ease with which he passes, in one undeviating mood of contemptuous sarcasm, through every varying phase of human interestmetaphysical and social, literary and historical, ecclesiastical and political, with no sign of effort, and yet without relaxing for one moment the restrained irony which dominates the reader with a sense of reserved power.

This is the quality of Swift's prose in which his genius shows its mastery. That genius had, of course, other elements; but merely as a writer of prose, Swift's highest excellence is his consummate ease, his absolute concealment of the art and the artist, and the perfect subordination of his instruments to his subject. It is a necessary consequence of this that his style should have variety; but although it is easy to trace the deliberate effort to assume a certain dialect with a view to dramatic effect, yet Swift never allows his reader to be impressed with the fact that the dialect is purposely assumed. Thus in the Drapier Letters there is a distinct homeliness of tone, but he is always careful to avoid any exaggeration; and he never openly imitates a jargon or reproduces peculiarities throughout a prose piece as he frequently does in his verse. Master of prose as he was, he yet denied himself any but what he deemed legitimate methods, and even in Gulliver's Travels, his imitations of nautical jargon are never carried on for more than a few lines, and even then they are introduced not so much for the purpose of caricature as to heighten the effect of reality in the narrative.

Of all English prose Swift's has the most of flexibility, the most