heard many an argument, and joined in many a
conversation over Pope's port, or St. John's burgundy, which would not
bear to be repeated at other men's boards.

I know of few things more conclusive as to the sincerity of Swift's
religion than his advice to poor John Gay to turn clergyman, and look out
for a seat on the Bench. Gay, the author of the "Beggar's Opera"--Gay,
the wildest of the wits about town--it was this man that Jonathan Swift
advised to take orders--to invest in a cassock and bands--just as he
advised him to husband his shillings and put his thousand pounds out at
interest. 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 upon
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'