Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 12.djvu/361

 thoughts from Virgil and Horace? At least, I am sure I have seen something like them in those books. As to your prose writings, which they make such a noise about, they are only some little improvements upon the humour you have stolen from Miguel de Cervantes and Rabelais. Well, but the style a great matter indeed, for an Englishman to value himself upon, that he can write English: why, I write English too, but it is in another style.

But I would not forget your political tracts. You may say, that you have ventured your ears at one time, and your neck at another, for the good of your country. Why, that other people have done in another manner, upon less occasion, and are not at all proud of it. You have overturned and supported ministers; you have set kingdoms in a flame by your pen. Pray, what is there in that, but having the knack of hitting the passions of mankind? With that alone, and a little knowledge of ancient and modern history, and seeing a little farther into the inside of things than the generality of men, you have made this bustle. There is no wit in any of them: I have read them all over, and do not remember any of those pretty flowers, those just antitheses, which one meets with so frequently in the French writers; none of those clever turns upon words, nor those apt quotations out of Latin authors, which the writers of the last age among us abounded in; none of those pretty similies, which some of our modern authors adorn their works with, that are not only a little like the thing they would illustrate, but are also like twenty other things. In short, as often as I have read any of your tracts, I have been so tired with them, that I have never been easy till I got to the end