chose for his motto, Eques haud male notus. "Better known than trusted" was the Dean's translation, when some one related the circumstance. Swift had an odd humour of making extempore proverbs. Observing that a gentleman, in whose garden he walked with some friends, seemed to have no intention to request them to eat any of the fruit, Swift observed," It was a saying of his dear grandmother, Always pull a peach When it is within your reach ;" and helping himself accordingly, his example was followed by the whole company. At another time, he framed an "old saying and true" for the benefit of a person who had fallen from his horse into the mire: The more dirt, The less hurt. The man rose much consoled; but as he was a collector of proverbs himself, he wondered he had never before heard that used by the Dean upon the occasion. He threw some useful rules into rhyming adages ;* and indeed, as his Journal to Stella proves, * Sheridan quotes two of them. One of them was a direction to those who ride together through the water : When through the water you do ride, Keep very close, or very wide. had a facility in putting rhymes together on any trifling occasion, which must have added considerably to the flow and facility of his poetical compositions. In his personal habits he was cleanly, even to scrupulousness. At one period of his life he was said to lie in bed till eleven o'clock, and think of wit for the day; but latterly he was an early riser. Swift was fond of exercise, and particularly of walking. And although modern pedestrians may smile at his proposing to journey to Chester, by walking ten miles a day; yet he is said to have taken this exercise too violently, and to a degree prejudicial to his health. He was also a tolerable horseman, fond of riding, and a judge of the noble animal, which he chose to celebrate, as the emblem of moral merit, under the name of Houyhnhnm. Exercise he pressed on his friends, particularly upon Stella and Vanessa, as a sort of duty; and scarce any of his letters conclude without allusion to it; especially as relating to the preservation of his own health, which his constitutional fits of deafness and giddiness rendered very Another related to the decanting of wine: First rack slow, and then rack quick, * Spence's Anecdotes, Singer's Edit. p. 66. precarious. His habit of body in other respects appears to have been indifferent, with a tendency to scrofula, which, perhaps, hastened his mental disorder.* * But the immediate cause was the pressure of water upon the head, as appeared from the dissection after death.† Of his learning we have already spoken; it seems * During his residence at Cavan, he was tormented with an ulcerous shin, often mentioned in his letters; and in his journal there iş a minute, and rather disgusting account of an eruption upon his shoulder. He sent for a surgeon belonging to the barracks, when at Cavan, to dress his wound. The young man entered with fear and trembling, for all men stood in awe of the Dean. "Look ye, sir," said Swift, raising his leg from the stool on which it was extended, " my shin is very badly hurt; I have sent for you, and if you can cure it, by I'll advertise you. Here's five guineas for you, and you need look for no more; so cure me as fast as you can." The young man succeeded; and the Dean, who liked both his skill and his modesty, was kind to him, often asked him to dinner, and when the cure was completed, made him a compliment of five guineas more. In a letter to Mrs Whiteway he says, the shin cost him but three guineas; the rest he probably set down to benevolence. † Dr King says, that about three years before his final decay, he observed, he was affected by the wine which he drank after dinner, and that next day, on his complaining of his health, he took the liberty to tell him he was afraid he had drank too much wine. He was startled, and replied, that he always looked on himself as a very temperate man, and never exceeded the quantity his physician prescribed. "Now his physician," continues King, "never drank less than two bottles of claret after dinner." But it must be remembered that King himself was a strict water-drinker.— King's Anecdotes of his Own Times, p. 16. to have been both extensive and useful, but not profoundly scholastic. Of modern languages, he spoke and wrote French with facility, and understood Italian. His Latin verses indicate an imperfect knowledge of prosody, and no great command of the language in which they are written. The poem called Rupes Carberiæ, has, in particular, been severely criticized. It is seldom that Swift alludes to English literature; yet it is evident he had perused with attention those classics to which his name is now added. How carefully he had read Milton appears from his annotations on the Paradise Lost, for the benefit of Stella. Chaucer appears also to have been his favourite, for I observe among his papers a memorandum of the oaths used in the Canterbury Tales, classed with the personages by whom they are used. It appears from a note upon Mr Todd's edition of Milton, that Swift was a peruser of the ancient romances of chivalry.* But he never mentions the ro * Vol. II. p. 157. "Open fly The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate Harsh thunder." Mr Todd, on Mr Walker's authority, quotes a note of Swift on this passage, from Don Belianis, part ii. ch. 19. "Open flew the brazen folding doors, grating harsh thunder on their turning hinges." This remark does not appear in the editor's copy of Swift's notes on Milton, mentioned page 56, note, neither do the words occur in the stall-copy of Don Belianis. mances and plays of the period in which he lived, without expressing the most emphatic contempt. To the drama, particularly, he was so indifferent, that he never once alludes to the writings of Shakespeare, nor, wonderful to be told, does he appear to have possessed a copy of his works. After noticing this, it will be scarce held remarkable, that the catalogue of his library only contains the works of three dramatic authors, Ben Jonson, Wycherley, and Rowe, the two last being presentation copies from the authors, in 1700 and 1702. History and classical authors formed the Dean's favourite studies, and, during the decay of his faculties, his reading was almost entirely confined to Clarendon. Swift loved the country, like most men of genius, but rather practised rural occupations than rural sports. At Quilca, Gaulstown, and Market-Hill, he delighted in acting as a sort of overseer or bailiff to those employed in improving the property of his friends, and he dwells fondly in his journal on his plantations and canal at Laracor. It does not appear from any part of his works, unless, perhaps, the Latin verses on the rocks of Carbery,* that he was an admirer of the beautiful or * He lay down on his breast to view the precipice, and became so giddy (owing probably to his constitutional vertigo) that he |