Page 304 - DENG502_PROSE

Prose

Notes Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions, and consequently of
no use to a good king or a good ministry; for which reason Courts are so overrun with politics. A
nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
Apollo was held the god of physic and sender of diseases. Both wore originally the same trade,
and still continue. Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long
beards, and pretences to foretell events.
A person was asked at court, what he thought of an ambassador and his train, who were all
embroidery and lace, full of bows, cringes, and gestures; he said, it was Solomon’s importation,
gold and apes. Most sorts of diversion in men, children, and other animals, is an imitation of
fighting.
Augustus meeting an ass with a lucky name foretold himself good fortune. I meet many asses, but
none of them have lucky names. If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is he keeps his
at the same time.
Who can deny that all men are violent lovers of truth when we see them so positive in their errors,
which they will maintain out of their zeal to truth, although they contradict themselves every day
of their lives? That was excellently observed, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his
opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.
Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time. Laws
penned with the utmost care and exactness, and in the vulgar language, are often perverted to
wrong meanings; then why should we wonder that the Bible is so? Although men are accused for
not knowing their weakness, yet perhaps as few know their own strength.
A man seeing a wasp creeping into a vial filled with honey, that was hung on a fruit tree, said
thus: “Why, thou scottish animal, art thou mad to go into that vial, where you see many hundred
of your kind there dying in it before you?” “The reproach is just,” answered the wasp, “but not
from you men, who are so far from taking example by other people’s follies, that you will not take
warning by your own. If after falling several times into this vial, and escaping by chance, I should
fall in again, I should then but resemble you.”
An old miser kept a tame jackdaw, that used to steal pieces of money, and hide them in a hole,
which the cat observing, asked why he would hoard up those round shining things that he could
make no use of? “Why,” said the jackdaw, “my master has a whole chest full, and makes no more
use of them than I.”
Men are content to be laughed at for their wit, but not for their folly. If the men of wit and genius
would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not
know that they ever had any.
After all the maxims and systems of trade and commerce, a stander- by would think the affairs of
the world were most ridiculously contrived. There are few countries which, if well cultivated,
would not support double the number of their inhabitants, and yet fewer where one-third of the
people are not extremely stinted even in the necessaries of life. I send out twenty barrels of corn,
which would maintain a family in bread for a year, and I bring back in return a vessel of wine,
which half a dozen good follows would drink in less than a month, at the expense of their health
and reason. A man would have but few spectators, if he offered to show for three pence how he
could thrust a red-hot iron into a barrel of gunpowder, and it should not take fire.
Self-Assessment
1. Fill in the blanks:
(i) Miscellanies in Prose and Verse published in ............... .
(ii) Swift had offered to send this incremental installment to Pope in December ............... .

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