Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 18.djvu/23

Rh understanding could not answer expectation. Proving unserviceable, he was consequently discountenanced, dropped by degrees, and afterward totally neglected; his pension ill paid, and himself reduced to extremity. This put him upon making his peace with France: a common practice of such villains; whose only business being to support an infamous life in fulness of luxury, they never weigh what stands between them and the end.

The marquis de Guiscard had no religion, knew nothing of principles, or indeed humanity: brutish, bold, desperate, an engine fit for the blackest mischief; revengeful, busy to design, though full of inconsistencies, and preposterous in his management: his schemes impracticable to any less rash and inconsiderate, as may be seen at large in those his ill formed projects of rebellion against his prince: his aspect gloomy and forbidding, no false indication of the malignancy within. Nor could the evil in his nature be diverted by benefits. The present ministry, regarding him as a man of family, one who had been caressed in England, though they liked neither his principles nor his practice, thought it against the glory of the queen (who is the sanctuary of distressed foreigners) to let a gentleman of such birth want the supports of life; and therefore entered upon measures to pay him four hundred pounds a year, as part of that pension which at first was granted him, and had been for some time discontinued. He could no longer with any pretence be a malecontent: but he would not forego his treacherous design,