he disparagement to her personal
charms, her good-nature remains the same amiable quality as before. I
cannot see the harm, the misanthropy, the immoral and degrading tendency
of this. The moral lesson is as fine as the intellectual exhibition is
amusing. It is an attempt to tear off the mask of imposture from the
world; and nothing but imposture has a right to complain of it. It is,
indeed, the way with our quacks in morality to preach up the dignity of
human nature, to pamper pride and hypocrisy with the idle mockeries of
the virtues they pretend to, and which they have not: but it was not
Swift's way to cant morality, or any thing else; nor did his genius
prompt him to write unmeaning panegyrics on mankind!

I do not, therefore, agree with the estimate of Swift's moral or
intellectual character, given by an eminent critic, who does not seem to
have forgotten the party politics of Swift. I do not carry my political
resentments so far back: I can at this time of day forgive Swift for
having been a Tory. I feel little disturbance (whatever I might think of
them) at his political sentiments, which died with him, considering how
much else he has left behind him of a more solid and imperishable
nature! If he had, indeed, (like some others) merely left behind him the
lasting infamy of a destroyer of his country, or the shining example of
an apostate from liberty, I might have thought the case altered.

The determination with which Swift persisted in a preconcerted
theory, savoured of the morbid affection of which he died. There is
nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid
of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an
obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable. Swift
was not a Frenchman. In this respect he differed from Rabelais and
Voltaire. They have been accounted the three greatest wits in modern
times; but their wit was of a peculiar kind in each. They are little
beholden to each other; there is some resemblance between Lord Peter in
the Tale of a Tub, and Rabelais' Friar John; but in general they are all
three authors of a substantive character in themselves. Swift's wit
(particularly in his chief prose works) was serious, saturnine, and
practical; Rabelais' was fantastical and joyous; Voltaire's was light,
sportive, and verbal. Swift's wit was the wit of sense; Rabelais', the
wit of nonsense; Voltaire's, of indifference to both. The l