You know, of course, that Swift has had many biographers; his life has
been told by the kindest and most good-natured of men, Scott, who admires
but can't bring himself to love him; and by stout old Johnson, who,
forced to admit him into the company of poets, receives the famous
Irishman, and takes off his hat to him with a bow of surly recognition,
scans him from head to foot, and passes over to the other side of the
street. Dr. Wilde of Dublin, who has written a most interesting volume
on the closing years of Swift's life, calls Johnson "the most malignant
of his biographers:" it is not easy for an English critic to please
Irishmen--perhaps to try and please them. And yet Johnson truly admires
Swift: Johnson does not quarrel with Swift's change of politics, or doubt
his sincerity of religion: about the famous Stella and Vanessa
controversy the Doctor does not bear very hardly on Swift. But he could
not give the Dean that honest hand of his; the stout old man puts it into
his breast, and moves off from him.

Would we have liked to live with him? That is a question which, in
dealing with these people's works, and thinking of their lives and
peculiarities, every reader of biographies must put to himself. Would
you have liked to be a friend of the great Dean? I should like to have
been Shakspeare's shoeblack--just to have lived in his house, just to
have worshipped him--to have run on his errands, and seen that sweet
serene face. I should like, as a young man, to have lived on Fielding's
staircase in the Temple, and after helping him up to bed perhaps, and
opening his door with his latch-key, to have shaken hands with him in the
morning, and heard him talk and crack jokes over his breakfast and his
mug of small beer. Who would not give something to pass a night at the
club with Johnson, and Goldsmith, and James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck?
The charm of Addison's companionship and conversation has passed to us by
fond tradition--but Swift? If you had been his inferior in parts (and
that, with a great respect for all persons present, I fear is only very
likely), his equal in mere social station, he would have bullied,
scorned, and insulted you; if, undeterred by his great reputation, you
had met him like a man, he would have quailed before you, and not had the
pluck to reply, and gone home, and years after written a foul epigram
about you--watched for you in a sewer, and come out to assail you with a
coward's blo