Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 19.djvu/98

86 most effectual toward promoting any change of government in England, by the extreme facility of raising a fright in the good people there, whenever the Trojan horse is supposed to be filled with Irishmen. This may suffice to excuse that honest generation of mortals (for whom I have a great regard, as I have a real concern for all men that are easily thrown into a panick fear) from having had any hand in introducing the opinion of Irish dulness. That grand arcanum could be discovered only by the sublimer geniuses of England.

However, this opinion, foolishly attributed to the climate, has some truth in it, with regard to those remnants of old nobility and gentry, who have been stripped, by the iniquity of Cromwell, and the greater one of Clarendon, of all they had a title to, except the blood and spirit of their ancestors. These are a severe and a very inconvenient burden to them at home, where they are obliged to keep them under hatches in the neighbourhood of barracks, and of more tyrannical justices of peace. There are in Ireland a thousand well born Brutuses of this kind, whose souls are stupified by the perpetual dread of persecution, and dare not peep out of their bodies, lest they should fall under the lash of the penal laws. But snatch these potatoe mongers from their immediate slavery, or from the ploughshares to which their fathers have been reduced, into an air of liberty and politeness; transplant them but for one month into the hotbeds of London, how sudden is the change! how surprising the improvement! The booby instantly commences beau, bully, sharper, and cuckoldmaker with a vengeance! he is passe, presto, vite, Jack of all trades; all fire, all mercury, in the turn