Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 11.djvu/198

186 The other part of your grace's advice, to be some way useful to the church and the publick by any talent you are pleased to think I possess, is the only thing for which I should desire some settlement that would make me full master of my time. I have often thought of some subjects, wherein I believe I might succeed: but, my lord, to ask a man floating at sea what he designed to do when he goes on shore, is too hasty a question: let him get there first, and rest and dry himself, and then look about him. I have been pretty well known to several great men in my life; and it was their duty, if they thought I might have been of use, to put me into a capacity for it; but I never yet knew one great man in my life, who was not every day swayed by other motives in distributing his favours, whatever resolutions he had pretended to make to the contrary. I was saying a thing the other day to my lord keeper, which he approved of, and which I believe may be the reason of this: it was, that persons of transcendent merit forced their way in spite of all obstacles; but those whose merit was of a second, third, or fourth rate, were seldom able to do any thing; because the knaves and dunces of the world had all the impudence, assiduity, flattery, and servile compliance divided among them, which kept them perpetually in the way, and engaged every body to be their solicitors. I was asking a great minister, a month ago, how he could possibly happen to pick out a certain person to employ in a commission of discovering abuses, who was the most notorious for the constant practice of the greatest abuses in that very kind, and was very well known not to be at all reformed? He said, he knew all this; but what would I have him to do? I answered,