Mercury.—­Don’t be discouraged, friend Addison.  Apollo perhaps would have given a different judgment.  I am a wit, and a rogue, and a foe to all dignity.  Swift and I naturally like one another.  He worships me more than Jupiter, and I honour him more than Homer; but yet, I assure you, I have a great value for you.  Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Honeycomb, Will Wimble, the Country Gentleman in the Freeholder, and twenty more characters, drawn with the finest strokes of unaffected wit and humour in your admirable writings, have obtained for you a high place in the class of my authors, though not quite so high a one as the Dean of St. Patrick’s.  Perhaps you might have got before him if the decency of your nature and the cautiousness of your judgment would have given you leave.  But, allowing that in the force and spirit of his wit he has really the advantage, how much does he yield to you in all the elegant graces, in the fine touches of delicate sentiment, in developing the secret springs of the soul, in showing the mild lights and shades of a character, in distinctly marking each line, and every soft gradation of tints, which would escape the common eye?  Who ever painted like you the beautiful parts of human nature, and brought them out from under the shade even of the greatest simplicity, or the most ridiculous weaknesses; so that we are forced to admire and feel that we venerate, even while we are laughing?  Swift was able to do nothing that approaches to this.  He could draw an ill face, or caricature a good one, with a masterly hand; but there was all his power, and, if I am to speak as a god, a worthless power it is.  Yours is divine.  It tends to exalt human nature.

Swift.—­Pray, good Mercury (if I may have liberty to say a word for myself) do you think that my talent was not highly beneficial to correct human nature?  Is whipping of no use to mend naughty boys?

Mercury.—­Men are generally not so patient of whipping as boys, and a rough satirist is seldom known to mend them.  Satire, like antimony, if it be used as a medicine, must be rendered less corrosive.  Yours is often rank poison.  But I will allow that you have done some good in your way, though not half so much as Addison did in his.

Addison.—­Mercury, I am satisfied.  It matters little what rank you assign me as a wit, if you give me the precedence as a friend and benefactor to mankind.

Mercury.—­I pass sentence on the writers, not the men, and my decree is this:—­When any hero is brought hither who wants to be humbled, let the talk of lowering his arrogance be assigned to Swift.  The same good office may be done to a philosopher vain of his wisdom and virtue, or to a bigot puffed up with spiritual pride.  The doctor’s discipline will soon convince the first, that with all his boasted morality, he is but a Yahoo; and the latter, that to be holy he must necessarily be humble.