Gay remarks in his pamphlet, “The Present State of Wit, in a Letter to a Friend in the Country,” 1711:  “‘The Examiner’ is a paper which all men, who speak without prejudice, allow to be well writ.  Though his subject will admit of no great variety, he is continually placing it on so many different lights, and endeavouring to inculcate the same thing by so many beautiful changes of expressions, that men who are concerned in no party, may read him with pleasure.  His way of assuming the question in debate is extremely artful; and his ‘Letter to Crassus’ [No. 28] is, I think, a masterpiece....  I presume I need not tell you that ‘The Examiner’ carries much the more sail as ’tis supposed to be writ by the direction, and under the eye of some great persons who sit at the helm of affairs, and is consequently looked on as a sort of public notice which way they are steering us.  The reputed author is Dr. S[wif]t, with the assistance sometimes of Dr. Att[erbur]y and Mr. P[rio]r.”  With the fall of Bolingbroke on the death of Queen Anne and the accession of George I., “The Examiner” collapsed. [T.S.]

THE EXAMINER.

NUMB. 14.[1]

FROM THURSDAY OCTOBER 26 TO THURSDAY NOVEMBER 2, 1710.

  —­Longa est injuria, longae
  Ambages, sed summa sequar fastigia rerum.[2]

It is a practice I have generally followed, to converse in equal freedom with the deserving men of both parties; and it was never without some contempt, that I have observed persons wholly out of employment, affect to do otherwise:  I doubted whether any man could owe so much to the side he was of, though he were retained by it; but without some great point of interest, either in possession or prospect, I thought it was the mark of a low and narrow spirit.

It is hard, that, for some weeks past, I have been forced in my own defence, to follow a proceeding that I have so much condemned in others.  But several of my acquaintance among the declining party, are grown so insufferably peevish and splenetic, profess such violent apprehensions for the public, and represent the state of things in such formidable ideas, that I find myself disposed to share in their afflictions, though I know them to be groundless and imaginary, or, which is worse, purely affected.  To offer them comfort one by one, would be not only an endless, but a disobliging task.  Some of them, I am convinced would be less melancholy, if there were more occasion.  I shall therefore, instead of hearkening to further complaints, employ some part of this paper for the future, in letting such men see, that their natural or acquired fears are ill-grounded, and their artificial ones as ill-intended.  That all our present inconveniencies,[3] are the consequence of the very counsels they so much admire, which would still have increased, if those had continued:  and that neither our constitution in Church or State, could probably have been long preserved, without such methods as have been lately taken.