Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 1.djvu/283

Rh be shown to Walpole. If Walpole afterward represented any thing in a different light, whose testimony is to be credited? That of a man of long tried integrity, and undoubted veracity, giving an account of a transaction, wherein he sustained a part exactly suitable to his whole character and conduct in life: or that of a wily statesman, who stuck at nothing to answer his ends, charging Swift with a fact, utterly incompatible with his well known wisdom and grandeur of mind, and which must have shown him in the light of a perfect changeling. But it does not appear that Walpole himself ever made any such charge. Nor was it necessary; his end might be better, and more securely answered without it. Hints and innuendoes were sufficient materials for his tools to work upon, and fabricate what stories they pleased, which were industriously propagated with the strongest asseverations of their truth, by all their partisans, and this was one favourite method then in use, of undermining those characters, which they could not openly assault. I have been the longer