Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 17.djvu/13

Rh administering pleasure to the reader: from whence it follows demonstrably, that their productions must be suited to the present state. And I cannot but congratulate our age on this peculiar felicity, that though we have made indeed great progress in all other branches of luxury, we are not yet debauched with any high relish in poetry, but are in this one taste less nice than our ancestors. If an art is to be estimated by its success, I appeal to experience, whether there have not been, in proportion to their number, as many starving good poets, as bad ones?

Nevertheless, in making gain the principal end of our art, far be it from me to exclude any great geniuses of rank or fortune from diverting themselves this way. They ought to be praised no less than those princes, who pass their vacant hours in some ingenious mechanical or manual art. And to such as these, it would be ingratitude not to own, that our art has been often infinitely indebted.

ARTHERMORE, it were great cruelty and injustice, if all such authors as cannot write in the other way, were prohibited from writing at all. Against this I draw an argument from what seems to me an undoubted physical maxim that poetry is a natural or morbid secretion from the brain. As I would not suddenly stop a cold in the head, or dry up my Rh