fortune, or success as a poet, I inquired your principles in the common form, "Is he a whig or a tory?" I am sorry to find they are not so well tallied to the present juncture as I could wish. I always thought the terms of facto and jure had been introduced by the poets, and that possession of any sort in kings was held an unexceptionable title in the courts of Parnassus. If you do not grow a perfect good subject in all its present latitudes, I shall conclude you are become rich, and able to live without dedications to men in power, whereby one great inconvenience will follow, that you and the world and posterity will be utterly ignorant of their virtues. For, either your brethren have miserably deceived us these hundred years past; or power confers virtue, as naturally as five of your popish sacraments do grace. You sleep less, and drink more. But your master Horace was vini somnique benignus:[1] and, as I take it, both are proper for your trade. As to wine, there are a thousand poetical texts to confirm the one; and as to the other, I know, it was anciently the custom to sleep in temples for those who would consult the oracles, "Who dictates to me slumbering[2]," &c.
You are an ill catholick, or a worse geographer, for I can assure you, Ireland is not Paradise, and I appeal even to any Spanish divine, whether addresses were ever made to a friend in Hell or Purgatory. And who are all those enemies you hint at? I can only think of Curll, Gildon, squire Burnet, Blackmore, and a
- ↑ Indulgent to himself in sleep and wine.
- ↑ Milton, Paradise Lost, book ix. verse 23. On this passage Dr. Joseph Warton remarks, that "this is the only time Swift ever alludes to Milton; who was of an order of writers very different from what Swift admired and imitated;" an assertion which we shall take a future opportunity of examining. [See vol. XIX. p. vi.]
