Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 5.djvu/264

256 a word more than is necessary to make them intelligible, which is as poor and niggardly, as it would be to set down no more meat than your company will be sure to eat up. Words are but lackeys to sense, and will dance attendance without wages or compulsion; Verba non invita sequentur.

Farthermore, when you set about composing, it may be necessary, for your ease, and better distillation of wit, to put on your worst clothes, and the worse the better; for an author, like a limbeck, will yield the better for having a rag about him: besides, that I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree, (which is the surtout of it) to make it bear well: and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad. I have always a sacred veneration for any one I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet, or a philosopher; because the richest minerals are ever found under the most ragged and withered surface of the earth.

As for your choice of subjects, I have only to give you this caution: that as a handsome way of praising, is certainly the most difficult point in writing or speaking, I would by no means advise any young man to make his first essay in panegyrick, beside the danger of it: for a particular encomium, is ever attended with more illwill, than any general invective, for which I need give no reasons; wherefore, my counsel is, that you use the point of your pen, not the feather: let your first attempt be a coup d'éclat in the way of libel, lampoon, or satire. Knock down half a score reputations, and you will