It was the pious answer made by Dr. Delany to Swift at the time when, torn by cruel rage, Swift was entering upon the struggle against Ireland’s misery.  Swift appealed to him one day “whether the corruptions and villainies of men in power did not eat his flesh and exhaust his spirits?” But Delany answered, “That in truth they did not.”  “Why—­why, how can you help it?  How can you avoid it?” asked the indignant heart.  And the judicious answer came:  “Because I am commanded to the contrary; ‘Fret not thyself because of the ungodly.’” Under the qualities revealed in Swift and Delany by that characteristic scene, is also revealed a deeply-marked distinction between two orders of mankind, and the two speakers stand as their types.  Dr. Delany we all know.  He may be met in any agreeable society—­himself agreeable and tolerant, unwilling to judge lest he be judged, solicitous to please, careful not to lose esteem, always welcome among his numerous acquaintances, sweetly reasonable, and devoutly confident that the tale of hideous wrong will right itself without his stir.  No figure is more essential for social intercourse, or moves round the cultivated or political circle of his life with more serene success.

To the great comfort of cultivated and political circles, the type of Swift is not so frequent or so comprehensible.  What place have those who fret not themselves because of evildoers—­what place in their tolerant society have they for uncouth personalities, terrible with indignation?  It is true that Swift was himself accounted a valued friend among the best wits and writers of his time.  Bolingbroke wrote to him:  “I loved you almost twenty years ago; I thought of you as well as I do now, better was beyond the power of conception.”  Pope, also after twenty years of intimate friendship, could write of him:  “My sincere love of that valuable, indeed incomparable, man will accompany him through life, and pursue his memory were I to live a hundred lives.”  Arbuthnot could write to him: 

“DEAR FRIEND,—­The last sentence of your letter plunged a dagger in my heart.  Never repeat those sad, but tender, words, that you will try to forget me.  For my part, I can never forget you—­at least till I discover, which is impossible, another friend whose conversation could procure me the pleasure I have found in yours.”

The friends of Swift—­the men who could write like this—­men like Bolingbroke, Pope, Arbuthnot, Addison, Steele, and Gay—­were no sentimentalists; they rank among the shrewdest and most clear-eyed writers of our literature.  And, indeed, to me at all events, the difficulty of Swift’s riddle lies, not in his savagery, but in his charm.  When we think of that tiger burning in the forests of the night, how shall we reconcile his fearful symmetry with eyes “azure as the heavens,” which Pope describes as having a surprising archness in them?  Or when a man is reputed the most embittered misanthrope in history, how was it