interest.(43) The
Queen, and the bishops, and the world, were right in mistrusting the
religion of that man.

I am not here, of course, to speak of any man's religious views, except in
so far as they influence his literary character, his life, his humour. The
most notorious sinners of all those fellow mortals whom it is our business
to discuss--Harry Fielding and Dick Steele, were especially loud, and I
believe really fervent, in their expressions of belief; they belaboured
freethinkers, and stoned imaginary atheists on all sorts of occasions,
going out of their way to bawl their own creed, and persecute their
neighbour's, and if they sinned and stumbled, as they constantly did with
debt, with drink, with all sorts of bad behaviour, they got up on their
knees, and cried "Peccavi" with a most sonorous orthodoxy. Yes; poor Harry
Fielding and poor Dick Steele were trusty and undoubting Church of England
men; they abhorred Popery, atheism, and wooden shoes, and idolatries in
general; and hiccupped "Church and State" with fervour.

But Swift? _His_ mind had had a different schooling, and possessed a very
different logical power. _He_ was not bred up in a tipsy guard-room, and
did not learn to reason in a Covent Garden tavern. He could conduct an
argument from beginning to end. He could see forward with a fatal
clearness. In his old age, looking at the _Tale of a Tub_, when he said,
"Good God, what a genius I had when I wrote that book!" I think he was
admiring not the genius, but the consequences to which the genius had
brought him--a vast genius, a magnificent genius, a genius wonderfully
bright, and dazzling, and strong,--to seize, to know, to see, to flash upon
falsehood and scorch it into perdition, to penetrate into the hidden
motives, and expose the black thoughts of men,--an awful, an evil spirit.

Ah, man! you, educated in Epicurean Temple's library, you whose friends
were Pope and St. John--what made you to swear to fatal vows, and bind
yourself to a lifelong hypocrisy before the Heaven which you adored with
such real wonder, humility, and reverence? For Swift was a reverent, was a
pious spirit--for Swift could love and could pray. Through the storms and
tempests of his furious mind, the stars of religion and love break out in
the blue, shining serenely, though hidden by the driving clouds and the
maddened hurricane of his life.

It is my belief that he suffered frightfully from the consciousness of his
own scep