Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 12.djvu/86

74 an equitable judge, I shall only tax him with avarice in his prosperity, adulation in his adversity, and affectation in every state of life. Were I considerable enough to be banished from my country, methinks I would not purchase my restoration, at the expense of writing such a letter to the prince himself, as your christian stoick wrote to the emperor's slave, Polybius. Thus I think of the man, and yet I read the author with pleasure; though I join in condemning those points, which he introduced into the Latin style; those eternal witticisms, strung like beads together, and that impudent manner of talking to the passions, before he has gone about to convince the judgment; which Erasmus, if I remember right, objects to him. He is seldom instructive, but he is perpetually entertaining; and when he gives you no new idea, he reflects your own back upon you with new lustre. I have lately writ an excellent treatise in praise of exile. Many of the hints are taken from Consolatio ad Helviam, and other parts of his works. The whole is turned in his style and manner; and there is as much of the spirit of the portique, as I could infuse without running too far into the mirabilia, inopinata, et paradoxa; which Tully, and I think Seneca himself, ridicules the school of Zeno for. That you may laugh at me in your turn, I own ingenuously, that I began in jest, grew serious at the third or fourth page, and convinced myself, before I had done, of what perhaps I shall never convince any other, that a man of sense and virtue may be unfortunate, but can never be