Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 5.djvu/90

82 one in my station, to one in yours. However, I must venture to affirm, that if genius and learning be not encouraged under your lordship's administration, you are the most inexcusable person alive. All your other virtues, my lord, will be defective without this; your affability, candour, and good nature; that perpetual agreeableness of conversation, so disengaged in the midst of such a weight of business and opposition; even your justice, prudence, and magnanimity, will shine less bright without it. Your lordship is universally allowed to possess a very large portion in most parts of literature; and to this you owe the cultivating of those many virtues, which, otherwise, would have been less adorned, or in lower perfection. Neither can you acquit yourself of these obligations, without letting the arts, in their turn, share your influence and protection: besides, who knows but some true genius may happen to arise under your ministry, exortus ut ætherius sol. Every age might perhaps produce one or two of these to adorn it, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants: I do not mean by a true genius any bold writer, who breaks through the rules of decency, to distinguish himself by the singularity of his opinions: but one, who, upon a deserving subject, is able to open new scenes, and discover a vein of true and noble thinking, which never entered into any imagination before: every stroke of whose pen is worth all the paper blotted by hundreds of others in the compass of their lives. I know, my lord, your friends will offer in your defence, that in your private capacity, you never refused your purse and credit to the service and port