Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 17.djvu/120

114 for the rest of this piece. It puts me in mind of a fellow, who concluded a bitter lampoon upon the prince and court of his days, with these lines:

God save the king, the commons, and the peers, And grant the author long may wear his ears.

Whatever this author may think of that peace, I imagine it the most extraordinary star, that ever appeared in our hemisphere. A star that is to bring us all the wealth and gold of the Indies; and from whose influence, not Mr. John Partridge alone (whose worthy labours this writer so ungenerously ridicules) but all true Britons may, with no less authority than he, prognosticate the fall of Lewis in the restraint of the exorbitant power of France, and the fate of Rome in the triumphant condition of the church of England.

We have now considered this poem in its political view, wherein we have shown, that it has two different walks of satire; the one in the story itself, which is a ridicule on the late transactions in general; the other in the machinery, which is a satire on the ministers of state in particular. I shall now show that the same poem, taken in another light, has a tendency to popery, which is secretly insinuated through the whole.

In the first place, he has conveyed to us the doctrine of guardian angels and patron saints in the machinery of his sylphs, which being a piece of popish superstition that has been exploded ever since the reformation, he would revive under this disguise. Here are all the particulars which they believe of those beings, which I shall sum up in a few heads.

1st. The spirits are made to concern themselves with all human actions in general. 2dly.