ure. He had his
limitations, of course; but just here lies the power of his special
genius. He never attempted to express what he did not fully comprehend.
If he saw things narrowly, he saw them definitely, and there was no
mistaking the ideas he wished to convey. "He understands himself," said
Dr. Johnson, "and his reader always understands him." Within his
limitations Swift swayed a sovereign power. His narrowness of vision,
however, did never blind him to the relations that exist between fact and
fact, between object and subject, between the actual and the possible. At
the same time it was not his province, as it was not his nature, to
handle such relations in the abstract. The bent of his mind was towards
the practical and not the pure reason. The moralist and the statesman
went hand in hand in him--an excellent example of the eighteenth century
thinker.

But to say this of Swift is not to say that he was a journalist. The
journalist is the man of the hour writing for the hour in harmony with
popular opinion. Both his text and his heads are ready-made for him. He
follows the beaten road, and only essays new paths when conditions
have become such as to force him along them. Such a man Swift certainly
was not. Journalism was not his way to the goal. If anything, it was, as
Epictetus might have said, but a tavern by the way-side in which he took
occasion to find the means by which the better to attain his goal. If
Swift's contributions to the literature of his day be journalism, then
did journalism spring full-grown into being, and its history since his
time must be considered as a history of its degeneration. But they were
much more than journalism. That they took the form they did, in
contributions to the periodicals of his day, is but an accident which
does not in the least affect the contributions themselves. These, in
reality, constitute a criticism of the social and political life of the
first thirty years of the English eighteenth century. From the time of
the writing of "A Tale of a Tub" to the days of the Drapier's Letters,
Swift dissected his countrymen with the pitiless hand of the
master-surgeon. So profound was his knowledge of human anatomy, individual
and social, that we shudder now at the pain he must have inflicted in his
unsparing operations. So accurate was his judgment that we stand amazed
at his knowledge, and our amazement often turns to a species of horror as
we see the cuticle flapped open revea