Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 9.djvu/237

Rh expose! particularizing that unnatural conjunction of vices and follies, so inconsistent with each other in the same breast: furious and fawning, scurrilous and flattering, cowardly and provoking, insolent and abject; most profligately false, with the strongest professions of sincerity; positive and variable, tyrannical and slavish.

I apprehend, that if all this should be set out to the world, by an angry whig of the old stamp, the unavoidable consequence must be, a confinement of our friend for some months more to his garret; and thereby depriving the publick for so long a time, and in so important a juncture, of his useful talents in their service, while he is fed like a wild beast through a hole; but I hope with a special regard to the quantity and quality of his nourishment.

In vain would his excusers endeavour to palliate his enormities, by imputing them to madness; because it is well known, that madness only operates by inflaming and enlarging the good or evil dispositions of the mind. For the curators of Bedlam assure us, that some lunaticks are persons of honour, truth, benevolence, and many other virtues, which appear in their highest ravings, although after a wild incoherent manner; while others, on the contrary, discover in every word and action, the utmost baseness and depravity of human minds; which infallibly they possessed in the same degree, although perhaps under a better regulation, before their entrance into that academy.

But it may be objected, that there is an argument of much force, to excuse the overflowings of that zeal, which our friend shows or means for our cause. And it must be confessed, that the easy and smooth Rh