Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 18.djvu/218

204 in the same view as I left them when I was a boy: but to my utter disappointment, I found them wonderfully shrunk, and lessened almost out of my knowledge. I looked with contempt on the tribes painted on the church walls, which I once so much admired, and on the carved chimneypiece in the esquire's hall. I found my old master to be a poor ignorant pedant; and, in short, the whole scene to be extremely changed for the worse. This I could not help mentioning, because though it be of no consequence in itself, yet it is certain, that most prejudices are contracted and retained by this narrow way of thinking, which in matters of the greatest moment are hardly shook off; and which we only think true, because we were made to believe so before we were capable to distinguish between truth and falsehood. But there was one prepossession, which I confess to have parted with, much to my regret: I mean the opinion of that native honesty and simplicity of manners, which I had always imagined to be inherent in country people. I soon observed it was with them and us, as they say of animals; That every species at land has one to resemble it at sea; for it was easy to discover the seeds and principles of every vice and folly that one meets with in the more known world, though shooting up in different forms. I took a fancy, out of the several inhabitants round to furnish the camp, the bar, and the Exchange, and some certain chocolate and coffeehouses, with exact parallels to what, in many instances, they already produce. There was a drunken quarrelsome smith, whom I have a hundred