philosophers account (as I am informed) the highest good to a state!  Time will show that their doctrines are pernicious to society, pernicious to government; and that yours, tempered and moderated so as to render them more practicable in the present circumstances of your country, are wise, salutary, and deserving of the general thanks of mankind.  But lest you should think, from the praise I have given you, that flattery can find a place in Elysium, allow me to lament, with the tender sorrow of a friend, that a man so superior to all other follies could give into the reveries of a Madame Guyon, a distracted enthusiast.  How strange was it to see the two great lights of France, you and the Bishop of Meaux, engaged in a controversy whether a madwoman was a heretic or a saint!

Fenelon.—­I confess my own weakness, and the ridiculousness of the dispute; but did not your warm imagination carry you also into some reveries about divine love, in which you talked unintelligibly, even to yourself?

Plato.—­I felt something more than I was able to express.

Fenelon.—­I had my feelings too, as fine and as lively as yours; but we should both have done better to have avoided those subjects in which sentiment took the place of reason.

DIALOGUE IV.

MR. ADDISON—­DR. SWIFT.

Dr. Swift.—­Surely, Addison, Fortune was exceedingly inclined to play the fool (a humour her ladyship, as well as most other ladies of very great quality, is frequently in) when she made you a minister of state and me a divine!

Addison.—­I must confess we were both of us out of our elements; but you don’t mean to insinuate that all would have been right if our destinies had been reversed?

Swift.—­Yes, I do.  You would have made an excellent bishop, and I should have governed Great Britain, as I did Ireland, with an absolute sway, while I talked of nothing but liberty, property, and so forth.

Addison.—­You governed the mob of Ireland; but I never understood that you governed the kingdom.  A nation and a mob are very different things.

Swift.—­Ay, so you fellows that have no genius for politics may suppose; but there are times when, by seasonably putting himself at the head of the mob, an able man may get to the head of the nation.  Nay, there are times when the nation itself is a mob, and ought to be treated as such by a skilful observer.

Addison.—­I don’t deny the truth of your proposition; but is there no danger that, from the natural vicissitudes of human affairs, the favourite of the mob should be mobbed in his turn?

Swift.—­Sometimes there may, but I risked it, and it answered my purpose.  Ask the lord-lieutenants, who were forced to pay court to me instead of my courting them, whether they did not feel my superiority.  And if I could make myself so considerable when I was only a dirty Dean of St. Patrick’s, without a seat in either House of Parliament, what should I have done if Fortune had placed me in England, unencumbered with a gown, and in a situation that would have enabled me to make myself heard in the House of Lords or of Commons?