Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 3.djvu/155

N° 30. may, as he thinks, be of dangerous consequence; and I entirely agree with him. If these be the principles of the high kirk, God preserve, at least the southern parts from their tyranny!

Garrit aniles Ex re fabellas.

Never fails To cheer our converse with his pithy tales.

HAD last week sent me, by an unknown hand, a passage out of Plato, with some hints how to apply it. That author puts a fable into the mouth of Aristophanes, with an account of the original of love: that mankind was at first created with four arms and legs, and all other parts double to what they are now; till Jupiter, as a punishment for his sins, cleft him in two with a thunderbolt; since which time we are always looking out for our other half; and this is the cause of love. But Jupiter threatened, that if they did not mend their manners, he would give them t' other slit, and leave them to hop about in the shape of figures in basso relievo. The effect of this last threatening, my correspondent imagines, is now come to pass; and that as the first splitting was the original of love, by inclining us to search for our other half; so the second was the Rh