Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 5.djvu/260

252 is it like? as of great use in common practice, to quicken slow capacities, and improve the quickest: but the chief end of it is, to supply the fancy with varieties of similes for all subjects. It will teach you to bring things to a likeness, which have not the least imaginable conformity in nature, which is properly creation, and the very business of a poet, as his name implies; and let me tell you, a good poet can no more be without a stock of similes by him, than a shoemaker without his lasts. He should have them sized, and ranged, and hung up in order in his shop, ready for all customers, and shaped to the feet of all sorts of verse: and here I could more fully (and I long to do it) insist upon the wonderful harmony and resemblance between a poet and a shoemaker, in many circumstances common to both; such as the binding of their temples, the stuff they work upon, and the paring-knife they use, &c. but that I would not digress, nor seem to trifle in so serious a matter.

Now I say, if you apply yourself to these diminutive sports (not to mention others of equal ingenuity, such as draw gloves, cross purposes, questions and commands, and the rest) it is not to be conceived what benefit (of nature) you will find by them, and how they will open the body of your invention. To these devote your spare hours, or rather spare all your hours to them, and then you will act as becomes a wise man, and make even diversions an improvement; like the inimitable management of the bee, which does the whole business of life at once, and at the same time both feeds, and works, and diverts itself.

Your own prudence will, I doubt not, direct you to