As to the 'Tale of a Tub,' Schlosser is in such Cimmerian vapors that no
system of bellows could blow open a shaft or tube through which he might
gain a glimpse of the English truth and daylight. It is useless talking to
such a man on such a subject. I consign him to the attentions of some
patriotic Irishman.
Schlosser, however, is right in a graver reflection which he makes upon
the prevailing philosophy of Swift, viz., that 'all his views were
directed towards what was _immediately_ beneficial, which is the
characteristic of savages.' This is undeniable. The meanness of Swift's
nature, and his rigid incapacity for dealing with the grandeurs of the
human spirit, with religion, with poetry, or even with science, when it
rose above the mercenary practical, is absolutely appalling. His own
_yahoo_ is not a more abominable one-sided degradation of humanity,
than is he himself under this aspect. And, perhaps, it places this
incapacity of his in its strongest light, when we recur to the fact of his
_astonishment_ at a religious princess refusing to confer a bishoprick
upon one that had treated the Trinity, and all the profoundest mysteries
of Christianity, not with mere scepticism, or casual sneer, but with set
pompous merriment and farcical buffoonery. This dignitary of the church,
Dean of the most conspicuous cathedral in Ireland, had, in full
canonicals, made himself into a regular mountebank, for the sake of giving
fuller effect, by the force of contrast, to the silliest of jests directed
against all that was most inalienable from Christianity.
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