To fancy they can be unkind.
Me, surely me, you ought to spare
Who gladly would your suffering share,
Or give my scrap of life to you
And think it far beneath your due;
You, to whose care so oft I owe
That I’m alive to tell you so.’
We are all strangely woven in one piece, as Shakespeare says. These verses of Swift irresistibly remind their readers of Cowper’s lines to Mrs. Unwin.
Swift’s prose is famous all the world over. To say anything about it is superfluous. David Hume indeed found fault with it. Hume paid great attention to the English language, and by the time he died had come to write it with much facility and creditable accuracy; but Swift is one of the masters of English prose. But how admirable also is his poetry—easy, yet never slipshod! It lacks one quality only—imagination. There is not a fine phrase, a magical line to be found in it, such as may occasionally be found in—let us say—Butler. Yet, as a whole, Swift is a far more enjoyable poet than Butler.
Swift has unhappily written some abominable verses, which ought never to have been set up in type; but the ‘Legion Club,’ the verses on his own death, ‘Cadenus and Vanessa,’ the ‘Rhapsody on Poetry,’ the tremendous lines on the ‘Day of Judgment,’ and many others, all belong to enjoyable poetry, and can never lose their freshness, their charm, their vitality. Amongst the poets of the eighteenth century Swift sits secure, for he can never go out of fashion.