“A.’s book shall prop you up, B.’s shall cover you,
  Here’s C. to be grave with, or D. to be gay;
  And with E. on each side, and F. right over you,
  Dry-rot at ease till the Judgment Day!”

How often, when one is roving through a library in search of adventures, is he encountered by some inflated champion of huge proportions, who turns out to be no better than a barber, after all!  Gazing upon

  “That weight of wood, with leathern coat o’erlaid,
  Those ample clasps, of solid metal made,
  The close-pressed leaves, unloosed for many an age,
  The dull red edging of the well-filled page,
  On the broad back the stubborn ridges rolled,
  Where yet the title stands, in burnished gold,”—­

what wisdom, what wit, what profundity, what vastness of knowledge, what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes and sentries the seraglio of the Sophi or the Sultan!  The big, burly beggars!  For a century nobody has read them, and therefore everybody has admitted them to be great.  They are bulky paradoxes, and find a good reputation in neglect,—­as some fools pass for philosophers by preserving a close mouth and a grave countenance.

“Safe in themselves, the ponderous works remain.”

It was a keen sense of this disproportion between size and sense which barbed the sharpest arrows of Dr. Swift.  Nobody ever imposed upon him either by bigness or by bluster.  “The Devil take stupidity,” once cried the Dean of St. Patrick’s, “that it will not come in to supply the want of philosophy!” So in the Introduction to “The Tale of a Tub,” he, half in jest and half in earnest, declares that “wisdom is like a cheese, whereof to a judicious taste the maggots are the best.” Vive la bagatelle! trembled upon his lips at the age of threescore; and he amused himself with reading the most trifling books he could find, and writing upon the most trifling subjects.  Lord Bolingbroke wrote to him to beg him “to put on his philosophical spectacles,” and wrote with but small success.  Pope wrote to him, “to beg it of him, as a piece of mercy, that he would not laugh at his gravity, but permit him to wear the beard of a philosopher until he pulled it off and made a jest of it himself.”  Old Weymouth, in the latter part of Anne’s reign, said to him, in his lordly Latin, “Philosopha verba ignava opera,” and Swift frequently repeated the sarcasm.  One cannot figure him as the “laughing old man” of Anacreon, for there was certainly a dreadful dash of vinegar in his composition; but if he did not hate hard enough, hit hard enough, and weigh men, motives, and books, nicely enough to satisfy Dr. Johnson, the Bolt-Courtier must have been a very leech of verjuice.  There is a passage in one of his letters to Pope,—­I cannot just now put my hand upon it,—­in which he suggests, in rather coarse language, the subject of “The Beggar’s Opera” as a capital subject for their common friend, Gay.  And yet one can barely suppress a sigh at all this luxury of levity, when he remembers that dreadful “Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit,” and reflects upon the hope deferred which vented itself in that stinging couplet,—­