It was a keen sense of this disproportion between size and sense which
barbed the sharpest arrows of Dr. Swift. Nobody ever imposed upon him
either by bigness or by bluster. "The Devil take stupidity," once cried
the Dean of St. Patrick's, "that it will not come in to supply the want
of philosophy!" So in the Introduction to "The Tale of a Tub," he, half
in jest and half in earnest, declares that "wisdom is like a cheese,
whereof to a judicious taste the maggots are the best." _Vive la
bagatelle!_ trembled upon his lips at the age of threescore; and he
amused himself with reading the most trifling books he could find, and
writing upon the most trifling subjects. Lord Bolingbroke wrote to him
to beg him "to put on his philosophical spectacles," and wrote with
but small success. Pope wrote to him, "to beg it of him, as a piece of
mercy, that he would not laugh at his gravity, but permit him to wear
the beard of a philosopher until he pulled it off and made a jest of it
himself." Old Weymouth, in the latter part of Anne's reign, said to
him, in his lordly Latin, "_Philosopha verba ignava opera,_" and Swift
frequently repeated the sarcasm. One cannot figure him as the "laughing
old man" of Anacreon, for there was certainly a dreadful dash of vinegar
in his composition; but if he did not hate hard enough, hit hard enough,
and weigh men, motives, and books, nicely enough to satisfy Dr. Johnson,
the Bolt-Courtier must have been a very leech of verjuice. There is a
passage in one of his letters to Pope,--I cannot just now put my hand
upon it,--in which he suggests, in rather coarse language, the subject
of "The Beggar's Opera" as a capital subject for their common friend,
Gay. And yet one can barely suppress a sigh at all this luxury of
levity, when he remembers that dreadful "_Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius
cor lacerare nequit_," and reflects upon the hope deferred which vented
itself in that stinging couplet,--

"In every court the parallel will hold; And kings, like private folks,