arguments used by these would-be politicians, to show that in hypocrisy, selfishness, and treachery, they do not come up to many of their betters? The exclamation of Mrs. Peachum, when her daughter marries Macheath, "Hussy, hussy, you will be as ill used, and as much neglected, as if you had married a lord," is worth all Miss Hannah More's laboured invectives on the laxity of the manners of high life!

I shall conclude this account of Gay with his verses on Sir Richard Blackmore, which may serve at once as a specimen of his own manner, and as a character of a voluminous contemporary poet, who was admired by Mr. Locke, and knighted by King William III.

"See who ne'er was nor will be half-read,
Who first sung Arthur, then sung Alfred;
Praised great Eliza in God's anger,

Till all true Englishmen cried, "Hang her!".
Maul'd human wit in one thick satire;

Next in three books spoil'd human nature:

Undid Creation at a jerk,

And of Redemption made damn'd work.

Then took his Muse at once, and dipt her
Full in the middle of the Scripture.

What wonders there the man, grown old, did?

Sternhold himself he out Sternholded.

Made David seem so mad and freakish,

All thought him just what thought King Achish.
No mortal read his Solomon

But judg'd Re'boam his own son.

Moses he serv'd as Moses Pharaoh,
And Deborah as she Siserah;
Made Jeremy full sore to cry,

And Job himself curse God and die.
What punishment all this must follow?
Shall Arthur use him like King Tollo?
Shall David as Uriah slay him?

Or dextrous Deborah Siserah him?

No!-none of these! Heaven spare his life!
But send him, honest Job, thy wife!"

Gay's Trivia, or Art of Walking the Streets, is as pleasant as walking the streets must have been at the time when it was written. His ballad of Black Eyed Susan is one of the most delightful that can be imagined; nor do I see that it is a bit the worse for Mr. Jekyll's parody on it.

Swift's reputation as a poet has been in a manner obscured by the greater splendour, by the natural force and inventive genius of his prose writings; but if he had never written either the Tale of a Tub or Gulliver's Travels, his name merely as a poet would have come down to us, and have gone down to posterity with well-earned honours. His Imitations of Horace, and still more his

Verses on his own Death, place him in the first rank of agreeable moralists in verse. There is not only a dry humour, an exquisite tone of irony, in these productions of his pen; but there is a touching, unpretending pathos, mixed up with the most whimsical and eccentric strokes of pleasantry and satire. His Description of the Morning in London, and of a City Shower, which were first published in the Tatler, are among the most delightful of the contents of that very delightful work. Swift shone as one of the most sensible of the poets; he is also distinguished as one of the most nonsensical of them. No man has written so many lack-a-daisical, slip-shod, tedious, trifling, foolish, fantastical verses as he, which are so little an imputation on the wisdom of the writer; and which, in fact, only shew his readiness to oblige others, and to forget himself. He has gone so far as to invent a new stanza of fourteen and sixteen syllable lines for Mary the cookmaid to vent her budget of nothings, and for Mrs. Harris to gossip with the deaf old housekeeper. Oh, when shall we have such another Rector of Laracor!-The Tale of a Tub is one of the most masterly compositions in the language, whether for thought, wit, or style. It is so capital and undeniable a proof of the author's talents, that Dr. Johnson, who did not like Swift, would not allow that he wrote it.

It is hard that the same pe

in the way of a man's prom. wanting gravity, and at the

to be his, as having too much w..

the Doctor did not find out some grave

for whom he felt a critical kindness, on whom to father this splendid but unacknowledged production. Dr. Johnson could not deny that Gulliver's Travels were his; he therefore disputed their merits, and said that after the first idea of them was conceived, they were easy to execute; all the rest followed mechanically. I do not know how that may be; but the mechanism employed is something very different from any that the author of Rasselas was in the habit of bringing to bear on such occasions. There is nothing more futile, as well as invidious, than this mode of criticising a work of original genius. Its greatest merit is supposed to be in the invention; and you say, very wisely, that it is not in the execution. You might as well take away the merit of the invention of the telescope, by saying that, after its uses were explained and understood, any ordinary eyesight could look through it. Whether the excellence of Gulliver's Travels is in the conception or the execution, is of little consequence; the power is somewhere, and it is a power that has moved the world. The power is not that of big words and

Verunting common places. Swift left these to those
rwho wanted them; and has done what his acute-
ness and intensity of mind alone could enable any
one to conceive or to perform. His object was to
strip empty pride and grandeur of the imposing
air which external circumstances throw around
them; and for this purpose he has cheated the
imagination of the illusions which the prejudices
of sense and of the world put upon it, by reducing
every thing to the abstract predicament of size.
He enlarges or diminishes the scale, as he wishes
to shew the insignificance or the grossness of
our overweening self-love. That he has done this
with mathematical precision, with complete pre-
sence of mind and perfect keeping, in a manner
that comes equally home to the understanding of
the man and of the child, does not take away
from the merit of the work or the genius of the
author. He has taken a new view of human na-
ture, such as a being of a higher sphere might
take of it; he has torn the scales from off his
moral vision; he has tried an experiment upon
human life, and sifted its pretensions from the alloy
of circumstances; he has measured it with a rule, has
weighed it in a balance, and found it, for the most
part, wanting and worthless-in substance and in
shew. Nothing solid, nothing valuable is left in his
system
but virtue and wisdom. What a libel is this

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