that his intimate friend, Sheridan, could speak of that “spirit of generosity and benevolence whose greatness, and vigour, when pent up in his own breast by poverty and dependence, served only as an evil spirit to torment him”?  Of his private generosity, and his consideration for the poor, for servants, and animals, there are many instances recorded.  For divergent types of womanhood, whether passionate, witty, or intellectual, he possessed the attraction of sympathetic intimacy.  A woman of peculiar charm and noble character was his livelong friend from girlhood, risking reputation, marriage, position, and all that many women most value, just for that friendship and nothing more.  Another woman loved him with more tragic destiny.  To Stella, in the midst of his political warfare, he could write with the playfulness that nursemaids use for children, and most men keep for their kittens or puppies.  In the “Verses on his own Death,” how far removed from the envy, hatred, and malice of the literary nature is the affectionate irony of those verses beginning: 

  “In Pope I cannot read a line,
  But with a sigh I wish it mine;
  When he can in one couplet fix
  More sense than I can do in six,
  It gives me such a jealous fit,
  I cry, ‘Plague take him and his wit.’ 
  I grieve to be outdone by Gay
  In my own humorous biting way;
  Arbuthnot is no more my friend
  Who dares to irony pretend,
  Which I was born to introduce;
  Refined it first, and showed its use.”

And so on down to the lines: 

  “If with such talents Heaven has blest ’em,
  Have I not reason to detest ’em?”

To damn with faint praise is the readiest defence of envious failure; but to praise with jealous damnation reveals a delicate generosity that few would look for in the hater of his kind.  Nor let us forget that Swift was himself the inventor of the phrase “Sweetness and light.”

These elements of charm and generosity have been too much overlooked, and they could not redeem the writer’s savagery in popular opinion, being overshadowed by that cruel indignation which ate his flesh and exhausted his spirit.  Yet it was, perhaps, just from such elements of intuitive sympathy and affectionate goodwill that the indignation sprang.  Like most over-sensitive natures, he found that every new relation in life, even every new friendship that he formed, only opened a gate to new unhappiness.  The sorrows of others were more to him than to themselves, and, like a man or woman that loves a child, he discovered that his affection only exposed a wider surface to pain.  On the death of a lady with whom he was not very intimately acquainted, “I hate life,” he cried, “when I think it exposed to such accidents:  and to see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth while such as her die, makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing.”  It was not any spirit of hatred or cruelty, but an intensely personal sympathy