wine with me, though you supped so much before your
usual time only to spare my pocket?'--'No, we had rather talk with you
than drink with you.'--'But if you had supped with me, as in all reason
you ought to have done, you must then have drunk with me. A bottle
of wine, two shillings--two and two is four, and one is five; just
two-and-sixpence a-piece. There, Pope, there's half a crown for you,
and there's another for you, sir; for I won't save anything by you. I am
determined.'--This was all said and done with his usual seriousness
on such occasions; and, in spite of everything we could say to the
contrary, he actually obliged us to take the money."

In the intercourse of familiar life, he indulged his disposition to
petulance and sarcasm, and thought himself injured if the licentiousness
of his raillery, the freedom of his censures, or the petulance of his
frolics was resented or repressed. He predominated over his companions
with very high ascendancy, and probably would bear none over whom he
could not predominate. To give him advice was, in the style of his
friend Delany, "to venture to speak to him." This customary superiority
soon grew too delicate for truth; and Swift, with all his penetration,
allowed himself to be delighted with low flattery. On all common
occasions, he habitually affects a style of arrogance, and dictates
rather than persuades. This authoritative and magisterial language
he expected to be received as his peculiar mode of jocularity: but he
apparently flattered his own arrogance by an assumed imperiousness,
in which he was ironical only to the resentful, and to the submissive
sufficiently serious. He told stories with great felicity, and delighted
in doing what he knew himself to do well; he was therefore captivated by
the respectful silence of a steady listener, and told the same tales too
often. He did not, however, claim the right of talking alone; for it was
his rule, when he had spoken a minute, to give room by a pause for any
other speaker. Of time, on all occasions, he was an exact computer, and
knew the minutes required to every common operation.

It may be justly supposed that there was in his conversation, what
appears so frequently in his Letters, an affectation of familiarity with
the great, an ambition of momentary equality sought and enjoyed by the
neglect of those ceremonies which custom has established as the
barriers between one order of society and another. This transgression