where K. Charles 1st in his troubles used to ride because he found good watering for his horse! If that be all, we have ten thousand such paradises in this kingdom, of which you may have your choice, as my bay mare is ready to depose.

It is either a very low way of thinking, or as great a failure of education in either sex, to imagine that any man increases in his critical faculty in proportion to his wit and learning; it falls out always directly to the contrary. A common carpenter will work more cheerfully for a gentleman skilled in his trade than for a conceited fool who knows nothing of it. I must despise a lady who takes me for a pedant, and you have made me half angry with so many lines in your letter which look like a kind of apology for writing to me. Besides, to say the

truth, the ladies in general are extremely mended both in writing and reading since I was young; only it is to be hoped that, in proper time, gaming and dressing, with some other accomplishments, may reduce them to their native ignorance. A woman of quality, who had excellent good sense, was formerly my correspondent, but she scrawled and spelt like a Wapping wench, having been brought up in a Court at a time before reading was thought of any use to a female; and I know several others of very high quality with the same defect.

I believe, madam, I am mistaken, and think myself to be in your company, where I could never be weary; no, it is otherwise, for in such a case I would rather choose to be your silent hearer and looker-on. But whether you may not be tired for the three minutes past is a different question; the surest way is to put an end to the debate by concluding by assuring you that I am, with the truest respect and esteem, &c., JONATH. SWIFT.*

SWIFT AND RABELAIS.

Swift was a great admirer of Rabelais; and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went so far as to say that 'Swift had stolen all his humour from Cervantes and Rabelais."

Among the Dean's books, sold by auction, 1745, was an edition of Rabelais' works, with remarks and annotations in his own hand. This, could it be recovered, would be a work of no little interest, considering that the germ, both of the Tale of a Tub, and of Gulliver's Travels, may be traced in the works of the French Lucian. Swift was not, indeed, under the necessity of disguising his allegory with the buffoonery and mysticism affected by Rabelais; but the sudden and wide digressive excursions, the strain of extraordinary reading and uncouth learning which is assumed, together with the general style of the whole fable, are indisputably derived from the humorous philosopher of Chinon. A strange passage which Quevedo has put into the mouth of a * Selected from the Autobiography and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany, edited by Lady Llanover, vol. i. 1861.

drunken bully, may, in the opinion of Mr. Theophilus Swift, have suggested the noted ridicule on Transubstantiation.

Pope and Swift differed much in their estimate of Rabelais. Pope tells us : "Dr. Swift was a great reader and admirer of Rabelais; and used sometimes to scold me for not liking him enough. Indeed, there are so many things in his works in which I could not see any manner of meaning driven at, that I never could read him over with any patience." Again he says: "Rabelais has written some sensible pieces, which the world did not regard at all. 'I will write something [says he] that they shall take notice of!' and so sat down to writing nonsense. Everybody allows that there are several things without any manner of meaning in his Pantagruel. Dr. Swift likes it much, and thinks there are more good things in it than I do.”

Swift is characterized by Coleridge, as the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. Can anything beat his remark on King William's motto (Recepit, non rapicet), "that the receiver was as bad as the thief?"

Swift could laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair; though it was still, as Coleridge has remarked, "the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place."

Voltaire (Lettres sur les Anglais, Let. 22,) says: "M. Swift est Rabelais dans son bon sens, et vivant en bonne compagnie. Il n'a pas à la vérité, la gaité du premier, mais il a toute la finesse, la raison, le choix, le bon goût qui manguent à notre curé de Meudon. Ses vers sont d'un goût singulier, et presque inimitable; la bonne plaisanterie est son partage en vers et en prose; mais pour le bien entendre il faut faire un petit voyage dans son pays."

LOVE OF TEASING-IRONY.

The Dean was fond of pranks which bordered on childish sports. It will hardly be believed that he sometimes, by way of exercise, used to chase the Grattans, and other accommodating friends, through the large apartments of the Deanery, and up and down stairs, driving them like horses, with his whip in his hand, till he had accomplished his usual quantity of exercise. It is said that there was an old gentleman, a Scot, or of Scottish extraction, settled in the north of Ireland, whom he used to tease with some story of the dirt and poverty of his country, till the old man, between jest and earnest, started

up with his cane uplifted, when Swift, in great seeming terror, would run away to hide himself.

In 1733, the Dean composed his celebrated Rhapsody, in which the ironical praises which he bestowed on the monarch, queen, and royal family, were taken in such good part, that he assured Dr. King he received a message of thanks. "The Rhapsody," says the Doctor, "might have continued to Swift the favour it had acquired him, if Lord Harvey had not undeceived Queen Caroline, and taken some pains to teach her the use and power of the irony."

There was found among Swift's papers a bitter epigram which he himself had written, with this characteristic endorsement:"A wicked treasonable libel. I wish I knew the author, that I might hang him."

But the inimitable piece of irony by which Swift, in one of his tracts on Ireland, proposes to relieve the distresses of the poor, by converting their children into food for the rich, has never been equalled in any age or country. The grave, formal, and business-like mode in which the calculations are given; the projector's protestation of absolute disinterest in the success of his plan; the economy with which he proposes the middling class should use this new species of food; and the magnificence which he attaches to the idea of a well-grown fat yearling child roasted whole, for a lord-mayor's feast; the style of a projector, and the terms of the shambles, so coolly and yet carefully preserved from beginning to end; render it one of the most extraordinary pieces of humour in our language. A foreign author was so much imposed upon by the gravity of the style, that he quoted it as an instance of the extreme distress of Ireland, which appeared to equal that of Jerusalem in its last siege, since a dignitary of the church was reduced to propose, as the only mode cf alleviating the general misery, the horrid resource of feeding upon the children of the poor.

Mrs. Pilkington relates that she saw Swift cut the leaves out of a handsomely bound book of poems, and put them into the chimney-grate, saying, he would give them what they wanted greatly-fire-and that she was employed by him to paste into the cover the letters of his friends. Now, among Dr. Lyons' papers, there are actually the folio boards of a book which has suffered this operation, and in the inside, a list, in Swift's hand, of the letters which had been pasted in to supply the original contents.

PUNS AND PROVERBS.

Swift's fondness for puns is well known. Perhaps, the application of the line of Virgil to the lady who threw down with her mantua a Cremona fiddle, is the best ever made:

Mantua, væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremona !

To an elderly gentleman who had lost his spectacles, the Dean said: "If this rain continues all night, you will certainly recover them in the morning betimes:

Nocte pluit tota-redeunt spectacula mane."

Here is legitimate wit. A man of distinction, not remarkable for regularity in his private concerns, chose for his motto, Eques haud male notus. "Better known than trusted," was the Dean's translation, when some one related the circumstance.

Swift had an odd humour of making extempore proverbs. Observing that a gentleman in whose garden he walked with some friends, seemed to have no intention to request them to eat any of the fruit, Swift observed, "It was a saying of his dear grandmother,

Always pull a peach

When it is within your reach ;"

66

and helping himself accordingly, his example was followed by the whole company. At another time he framed an old saying and true," for the benefit of a person who had fallen from his horse into the mire :

:

"The more dirt,
The less hurt.

The fallen man rose much consoled.

He threw some very useful rules into rhyming adages. Sheridan quotes two. One was a direction to those who ride together through the water:

"When through the water you do ride,
Keep very close, or very wide."

Another related to the decanting of wine :

"First rack slow, and then rack quick,
Then rack slow till you come to the thick."

ANGLO-LATIN AND ANGLO-ENGLISH.

Swift left a manuscript collection of jeux d'esprit of that particular class invented by himself, and designated AngloLatin and Anglo-English; in which Latin or English sentences are so contrived as, by adopting a different combination of the syllables, to make other sentences in English. The following is an example:

Ire membri meta citi zeno fures at nans a citra velle do verto Itali. I remember I met a citizen of yours at Nantes as I travelled over to Italy.

THE DEAN'S VERSES.

Swift's poems are not, properly speaking, poetry, nor is Swift a poet; his imagination is not of the kind which produces poetry; it is not filled with the beauty and magnificence of nature, but with the petty details of artificial life; he is a satirist of the first class; as a poetical describer of manners, he has never been excelled: as a poetical humourist he almost stands alone; indeed the most delightful of his poems are those in which he expresses the notions and uses the language of some assumed character, as in "Mrs. Harris's Petition." In this species of humour he had no model, and, with the exception of Thomas Hood, no imitator has ever approached him. Of the general style of his poems, Dr. Johnson remarks that "the diction is correct, the numbers are smooth, and the rhymes exact. There seldom occurs a hard-laboured expres sion or a redundant epithet. All his verses exemplify his own definition of a good style-they consist of proper words in proper places."

THE LAST EPIGRAM.

The last thing the Dean wrote was an epigram on the building of a magazine for arms and stores, which was pointed out to him as he was taking exercise during his mental disease:

Behold a proof of Irish sense;

Here Irish wit is seen;

When nothing's left that's worth defence,

They build a magazine!

SWIFT AND ADDISON.

Swift, writing to Addison, says: "I read your character in Mrs. Manly's noble Memoirs of Europe, [a scandalous lampoon,