ummate skill and fierceness. 'Tis said he hath lost his intellect now,
and forgotten his wrongs and his rage against mankind. I have always
thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of that age. I
have read his books (who doth not know them?) here in our calm woods, and
imagine a giant to myself as I think of him, a lonely fallen Prometheus,
groaning as the vulture tears him. Prometheus I saw, but when first I ever
had any words with him, the giant stepped out of a sedan-chair in the
Poultry, whither he had come with a tipsy Irish servant parading before
him, who announced him, bawling out his reverence's name, whilst his
master below was as yet haggling with the chairman. I disliked this Mr.
Swift, and heard many a story about him, of his conduct to men, and his
words to women. He could flatter the great as much as he could bully the
weak; and Mr. Esmond, being younger and hotter in that day than now, was
determined, should he ever meet this dragon, not to run away from his
teeth and his fire.

Men have all sorts of motives which carry them onwards in life, and are
driven into acts of desperation, or it may be of distinction, from a
hundred different causes. There was one comrade of Esmond's, an honest
little Irish lieutenant of Handyside's, who owed so much money to a camp
sutler, that he began to make love to the man's daughter, intending to pay
his debt that way; and at the battle of Malplaquet, flying away from the
debt and lady too, he rushed so desperately on the French lines, that he
got his company; and came a captain out of the action, and had to marry
the sutler's daughter after all, who brought him his cancelled debt to her
father as poor Rogers's fortune. To run out of the reach of bill and
marriage, he ran on the enemy's pikes; and as these did not kill him he
was thrown back upon t'other horn of his dilemma. Our great duke at the
same battle was fighting, not the French, but the Tories in England; and
risking his life and the army's, not for his country but for his pay and
places; and for fear of his wife at home, that only being in life whom he
dreaded. I have asked about men in my own company (new drafts of poor
country boys were perpetually coming over to us during the wars, and
brought from the ploughshare to the sword), and found that a half of them
under the flags were driven thither on account of a woman: one fellow was
jilted by his mistress and took the shilling in despair; another