and always an
Irishman: Swift's heart was English and in England, his habits English,
his logic eminently English; his statement is elaborately simple; he
shuns tropes and metaphors, and uses his ideas and words with a wise
thrift and economy, as he used his money: with which he could be generous
and splendid upon great occasions, but which he husbanded when there was
no need to spend it. He never indulges in needless extravagance of
rhetoric, lavish epithets, profuse imagery. He lays his opinion before
you with a grave simplicity and a perfect neatness. Dreading ridicule
too, as a man of his humour--above all an Englishman of his
humour--certainly would, he is afraid to use the poetical power which he
really possessed; one often fancies in reading him that he dares not be
eloquent when he might; that he does not speak above his voice, as it
were, and the tone of society.

His initiation into politics, his knowledge of business, his knowledge of
polite life, his acquaintance with literature even, which he could not
have pursued very sedulously during that reckless career at Dublin, Swift
got under the roof of Sir William Temple. He was fond of telling in
after life what quantities of books he devoured there, and how King
William taught him to cut asparagus in the Dutch fashion. It was at
Shene and at Moor Park, with a salary of twenty pounds and a dinner at
the upper servants' table, that this great and lonely Swift passed a ten
years' apprenticeship--wore a cassock that was only not a livery--bent
down a knee as proud as Lucifer's to supplicate my lady's good graces, or
run on his honour's errands. It was here, as he was writing at Temple's
table, or following his patron's walk, that he saw and heard the men who
had governed the great world--measured himself with them, looking up from
his silent corner, gauged their brains, weighed their wits, turned them,
and tried them, and marked them. Ah! what platitudes he must have heard!
what feeble jokes! what pompous commonplaces! what small men they must
have seemed under those enormous periwigs, to the swarthy, uncouth,
silent Irish secretary. I wonder whether it ever struck Temple, that
that Irishman was his master? I suppose that dismal conviction did not
present itself under the ambrosial wig, or Temple could never have lived
with Swift. Swift sickened, rebelled, left the service--ate humble pie
and came back again; and so for ten years went on, gathering learnin