Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 2.djvu/240

188 reader, it consisted wholly in certain plain, easy directions, about the management and wearing their coats, with legacies and penalties in case of obedience or neglect; yet he began to entertain a fancy that the matter was deeper and darker, and therefore must needs have a great deal more of mystery at the bottom. Gentlemen, said he, I will prove this very skin of parchment to be meat, drink, and cloth, to be the philosopher's stone, and the universal medicine. In consequence of which raptures, he resolved to make use of it in the most necessary, as well as the most paltry occasions of life. He had a way of working it into any shape he pleased; so that it served him for a night-cap when he went to bed, and for an umbrella in rainy weather. He would lap a piece of it about a sore toe, or, when he had fits, burn two inches under his nose; or, if any thing lay heavy on his stomach, scrape off, and swallow as much of the powder, as would lie on a silver penny; they were all infallible remedies. With analogy to these refinements, his common talk and conversation, ran wholly in the phrase of his will, and he circumscribed the utmost of his eloquence within that compass, not daring to let slip a syllable without authority from that. Once, at a strange house, he was suddenly taken short upon an urgent juncture, whereon it may not be allowed too