oo long he tarried,
He should have had my hearty vote,
To cut his throat before he married.

TO QUILCA.

This was a country house of Dr. Sheridan's, where Swift and some of his
friends spent a summer in the year 1725, and being in very bad repair,
Swift wrote the following lines on the occasion:--

Let me thy properties explain;
A rotten cabin dropping rain:
Chimneys with scorn rejecting smoke:
Stools, tables, chairs and bedsteads broke.
Here elements have lost their uses,
Air ripens not, nor earth produces:
In vain we make poor Shelah toil,
Fire will not roast, nor water boil.
Through all the valleys, hills, and plains,
The _goddess Want_ in triumph reigns;
And her chief officers of state;
Sloth, Dirt, and Theft, around her wait.

MR. PULTENEY.

Swift says, in a letter to Mr. Pulteney: "I will do an unmannerly thing,
which is to bequeath you an epitaph for forty years hence, in two words,
_ultimus Britannorum_. You never forsook your party. You might often
have been as great as the court can make any man so; but you preserved
your spirit of liberty when your former colleagues had utterly
sacrificed theirs; and if it shall ever begin to breathe in these days,
it must entirely be owing to yourself and one or two friends; but it is
altogether impossible for any nation to preserve its liberty long under
a tenth part of the present luxury, infidelity, and a million of
corruptions. We see the Gothic system of limited monarchy is
extinguished in all the nations of Europe. It is utterly extirpated in
this wretched kingdom, and yours must be next. Such has ever been human
nature, that a single man, without any superior advantages either of
body or mind, but usually the direct contrary, is able to attach twenty
millions, and drag them voluntarily at his chariot wheels. But no more
of this: I am as sick of the world as I am of age and disease. I live in
a nation of slaves, who sell themselves for nothing."

RESOLUTIONS WHEN I COME TO BE OLD.

These resolutions seem to be of that kind which are easily formed, and
the propriety of which we readily admit at the time we make them, but
secretly never design to put them in practice.

1. Not to marry a young woman.

2. Not to keep young company, unless they really desire it.

3. Not to be peevish, or morose, or suspicious.

4. Not to scorn present ways, or wits, or fashions, or men, or war, &c.

5. Not t