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Written in November, 1731.
Occasioned by reading the following Maxim in Rochefoucault, "Dans l'adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose, qui ne nous déplaît pas."
"In the adversity of our best friends, we always find something that does not displease us."
AS Rochefoucault his maxims drew
From nature, I believe them true:
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind.
- ↑ These verses have undergone, perhaps, a stranger revolution than any other part of the dean's writings. A manifestly spurious copy, containing 201 lines, under the title of "The Life and Character of Dr. Swift," appeared at London, in April 1733; of which the dean complained heavily, in a letter to Mr. Pope, dated May 1; and, notwithstanding Swift acknowledged in that Letter he had written "a poem of near 500 lines upon the same maxim of Rochefoucault, and was a long time about it," many readers have supposed (not attending to the circumstance of there being two poems on the subject) that the dean disclaimed the Verses on his own Death. The genuine verses having been committed to the care of the celebrated author of "The Toast;" an edition was printed, in 1738-9, in which more than 100 lines were omitted. Dr. King assigned many judicious reasons (though some of them were merely temporary and prudential) for the mutilations: but they were so far from satisfying Dr. Swift, that a complete edition was immediately printed by Faulkner, with the dean's express permission. The poem, as it now stands in this collection, is agreeable to Mr. Faulkner's copy.
This
