CHAPTER III.
Swift—"Tale of a Tub"—Essays—Gulliver's Travels—Variety of Swift's Humour—Riddles—Stella's Wit—Directions for Servants—Arbuthnot.
The year 1667 saw the birth of Swift, one of the most highly gifted and successful humorists any country ever produced. A bright fancy runs like a vein of gold through nearly all his writings, and enriches the wide and varied field upon which he enters. He says of himself—
"Swift had the sin of wit, no venial crime;
Nay, 'tis affirmed he sometimes dealt in rhyme:
Humour and mirth had place in all he writ,
He reconciled divinity and wit."
Whether religion, politics, social follies, or domestic peculiarities come before him, he was irresistibly tempted to regard them in a ludicrous point of view. He observes—
"It is my peculiar case to be often under a temptation to be witty, upon occasions where I could be neither wise nor sound, nor anything to the matter in hand."
This general tendency was the foundation of his fortunes, and gained him the favour of Sir William Temple, and of such noblemen as Berkeley, Oxford, and Bolingbroke. They could nowhere find so pleasant a companion, for his natural talent was improved by cultivation, and it is when humour is united with learning—a rare combination—that it attains its highest excellence. There was much classical erudition at that day, and it was exhibited by men of letters in their ordinary conversation in a way which would appear to us pedantic. Thus many of Swift's best sayings turned on an allusion to some ancient author, as when speaking of the emptiness of modern writers, who depend upon compilations and digressions for filling up a treatise "that shall make a very comely figure on a bookseller's shelf, there to be preserved neat and clean for a long eternity, never to be thumbed or greased by students: but when the fulness of time is come, shall happily undergo the trial of purgatory in order to ascend the sky." He continues:—
"From such elements as these I am alive to behold the day, wherein the corporation of authors can outvie all its brethren in the guild. A happiness derived to us, with a great many others, from our Scythian ancestors, among whom the number of pens was so infinite that Grecian eloquence had no other way of expressing it than by saying that in the regions of the north it was hardly possible for a man to travel—the very air was so replete with feathers."