Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 17.djvu/380

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Learning is like mercury, one of the most powerful and excellent things in the world in skilful hands: in unskilful, the most mischievous.

The nicest constitutions of government are often like the finest pieces of clockwork; which depending on so many motions, are therefore more subject to be out of order.

Every man has just as much vanity as he wants understanding.

Modesty, if it were to be recommended for nothing else, this were enough, that the pretending to little, leaves a man at ease; whereas boasting requires a perpetual labour to appear what he is not. If we have sense, modesty best proves it to others; if we have none, it best hides our want of it. For, as blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.

It is not so much the being exempt from faults, as the having overcome them, that is an advantage to us: it being with the follies of the mind, as with the weeds of a field, which, if destroyed and consumed upon the place of their birth, enrich and improve it more, than if none had ever sprung there. X. To