Then he says how pleasant it would have been to have passed some time with Fielding, Johnson, or Goldsmith.

"I should like to have been Shakespeare's shoeblack," he says.

"But Swift! If you had been his inferior in parts,--and that, with a great respect for all persons present, I fear is only very likely,--his equal in mere social station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you.

If, undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would have quailed before you and not had the pluck to reply,--and gone home, and years after written a foul epigram upon you." There is a picture! "If you had been a lord with a blue riband, who flattered his vanity, or could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company in the world....

How he would have torn your enemies to pieces for you, and made fun of the Opposition! His servility was so boisterous that it looked like independence." He was a man whose mind was never fixed on high things, but was striving always after something which, little as it might be, and successful as he was, should always be out of his reach.
It had been his misfortune to become a clergyman, because the way to church preferment seemed to be the readiest.