Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 17.djvu/23

Rh confined his labours to the greater poetry, and thereby left room for others to acquire a due share of praise in inferiour kinds. Many painters, who could never hit a nose or an eye, have with felicity copied a smallpox, or been admirable at a toad or a redherring: and seldom are we without geniuses for still-life, which they can work up and stiffen with incredible accuracy.

A universal genius rises not in an age; but when he rises, armies rise in him! he pours forth five or six epic poems with greater facility, than five or six pages can be produced by an elaborate and servile copier after nature or the ancients. It is affirmed by Quintilian, that the same genius, which made Germanicus so great a general, would, with equal application, have made him an excellent heroic poet. In like manner, reasoning from the affinity there appears between arts and sciences, I doubt not, but an active catcher of butterflies, a careful and fanciful pattern-drawer, an industrious collector of shells, a laborious and tuneful bag-piper, or a diligent breeder of tame rabbits, might severally excel in their respective parts of the bathos.

I shall range these confined and less copious geniuses under proper classes, and (the better to give their pictures to the reader) under the names of animals of some sort or other; whereby he will be enabled, at the first sight of such as shall daily come forth, to know to what kind to refer, and with what authors to compare them.

1. The flying fishes: these are writers, who now and then rise upon their fins, and fly out of the profund; but their wings are soon dry, and they drop down to the bottom. G. S. A. H. C. G. . XVII.