“In every court the parallel will hold; And kings, like private folks, are bought and sold.”

I remember a hack-writer,—­and of such, I am afraid, is too exclusively my literary kingdom,—­who classified the vices which Swift smote so fearfully in “The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms”; and the curious catalogue contained “avarice, fraud, cheating, violence, rapine, extortion, cruelty, oppression, tyranny, rancor, envy, malice, detraction, hatred, revenge, murder, bribery, corruption, pimping, lying, perjury, subornation, treachery, ingratitude, gaming, flattery, drunkenness, gluttony, luxury, vanity, effeminacy, cowardice, pride, impudence, hypocrisy, infidelity, blasphemy, idolatry, and innumerable other vices, many of them the notorious characteristics of the bulk of humankind.”  Delightful catalogue!  How odd, indeed, that a man with such work to do should not have sported with Amaryllis, or played with the tangles of Neaera’s hair,—­should not have worn well-anointed love-locks and snowy linen,—­should, on the other hand, have bared his brawny arm, and sent the hissing flail down swiftly upon the waled and blistered back of Sham!  How much better would it have been, if he had written a history, in twelve elephantine volumes, of the rise, culmination, and decay of the Empire of Barataria, which we would have gone to prison, the rack, and the drop, with rapture rather than read!

How low seems Fielding, with his pot-house heroes, Tom Jones, Squire Western, and Jonathan Wild, when we contrast them with the elegant, cleanly-polished, and extremely proper Sir Charles Grandison!  What a coarse drab is Molly Seagrim, when juxtaposited with the princess of all prudes, the indomitably virtuous Pamela!  How childish was it of Cowper to sing of sofas, poultry, rabbits, orchards, meadows, and barnyards!  How much more nobly employed was John Dryden in manufacturing a brand-new, truculent, loud-voiced, massively-calved, ensiferous Alexander!  Who but an addle-headed sot would have wandered up and down the lanes, like Morland, chalking out pigs and milkmaids, when he might have been painting, like Barry, pictures, by the acre, of gods and goddesses enacting incomprehensible allegories!  Let us be respectable, O my Bobus, and wear good coats and the best hats to be had for money or upon credit; let us carefully conceal our connection with “The Gotham Revolver,” although the honest people who print it do give us our beer and mutton; let us write great histories which nobody will read, engage in tractations to which nobody will listen, build twelve-storied epics which nobody will publish, and invent Gordian philosophies which nobody can untie.  Surely it is quite time for Minerva to have a general house-cleaning, to put on a fresh smock, and to live cleanly.  Rabelais shall be washed, and Sterne sad-ironed into gravity; De Foe shall be made as decorous as a tract; Mandeville shall be reburned, and we will kindle the fire with half the leaves of this dry and yellow Montaigne.  Nobody shall approach the waters of Castaly save upon stilts; and whoever may giggle, as he takes his physic, shall be put upon a dreadfully plentiful allowance of Guieciardini for bread, and of the poems of ----- ------- for water.