Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 5.djvu/129

Rh making room for vigilant dunces, who were sure to be never out of sight.

He had an excellent faculty in preaching, if he were not sometimes a little too refined, and apt to trust too much to his own way of thinking and reasoning.

When, upon the vacancy of preferment, he was hardly drawn to attend upon some promising lord, he received the usual answer, that he came too late, for it had been given to another the very day before. And he had only this comfort left, that every body said, it was a thousand pities something could not be done for poor Mr. Eugenio.

The remainder of his story will be dispatched in a few words: wearied with weak hopes, and weaker pursuits, he accepted a curacy in Derbyshire of thirty pounds a year, and when he was five and forty, had the great felicity to be preferred by a friend of his father's to a vicarage worth annually sixty pounds, in the most desert parts of Lincolnshire; where, his spirit quite sunk with those reflections that solitude and disappointments bring, he married a farmer's widow, and is still alive utterly undistinguished and forgotten; only some of the neighbours have accidentally heard, that he had been a notable man in his youth. AN