[246] Tooke, Swift's bookseller, died in 1723. His shop was at the Middle Temple Gateway.
[247] Dick's Coffee-house, in Fleet Street, was named after Richard Tornor or Turner, to whom the house was let in 1680. It is called Richard's in the London Gazette for 1693, No. 2939.
[248] See No. 18.
[249] A thick ale, brewed from wheat. Cf. "Dunciad," ii. 385.
[250] See Valerius Maximus, iv. 5.
[No. 87. [Steele.]
From Thursday, Oct. 27, to Saturday, Oct. 29, 1709.
Will's Coffee-house, October 28.
There is nothing which I contemplate with greater pleasure than the dignity of human nature, which often shows itself in all conditions of life: for notwithstanding the degeneracy and meanness that is crept into it, there are a thousand occasions in which it breaks through its original corruption, and shows what it once was, and what it will be hereafter. I consider the soul of man as the ruin of a glorious pile of building; where, amidst great heaps of rubbish, you meet with noble fragments of sculpture, broken pillars and obelisks, and a magnificence in confusion. Virtue and wisdom are continually employed in clearing the ruins, removing these disorderly heaps, recovering the noble pieces that lie buried under them, and adjusting them as well as possible according to their ancient symmetry and beauty. A happy education, conversation with the finest spirits, looking abroad into the works of nature, and observations upon mankind, are the great assistances to this necessary and glorious work. But even among those who have never had the happiness of any of these advantages, there are sometimes such exertions of the greatness that is natural to the mind of man, as show capacities and abilities, which only want these accidental helps to fetch them out, and show them in a proper light. A plebeian soul is still the ruin of this glorious edifice, though encumbered with all its rubbish. This reflection rose in me from a letter which my servant dropped as he was dressing me, and which he told me was communicated to him, as he is an acquaintance of some of the persons mentioned in it. The epistle is from one Sergeant Hall of the Foot Guards. It is directed to Sergeant Cabe, in the Coldstream Regiment of Foot Guards,[251] at the Red Lettice[252] in the Butcher Row,[253] near Temple Bar.
I was so pleased with several touches in it, that I could not forbear showing it to a cluster of critics, who, instead of considering it in the light I have done, examined it by the rules of epistolary writing: for as these gentlemen are seldom men of any great genius, they work altogether by mechanical rules, and are able to discover no beauties that are not pointed out by Bouhours and Rapin.[254] The letter is as follows: