artlessness, but in a coarse inartificiality. To be artless, and to be
inartificial, are very different things; as different as being natural and
being gross; as different as being simple and being homely.

2. That whatever, meantime, be the particular sort of excellence, or the
value of the excellence, in the style of Swift, he had it in common with
multitudes beside of that age. De Foe wrote a style for all the world the
same as to kind and degree of excellence, only pure from Hibernicisms. So
did every honest skipper [Dampier was something more] who had occasion to
record his voyages in this world of storms. So did many a hundred of
religious writers. And what wonder should there be in this, when the main
qualification for such a style was plain good sense, natural feeling,
unpretendingness, some little scholarly practice in putting together the
clockwork of sentences, so as to avoid mechanical awkwardness of
construction, but above all the advantage of a _subject_, such in its
nature as instinctively to reject ornament, lest it should draw off
attention from itself? Such subjects are common; but grand impassioned
subjects insist upon a different treatment; and _there_ it is that
the true difficulties of style commence.

3. [Which partly is suggested by the last remark.] That nearly all the
blockheads with whom I have at any time had the pleasure of conversing
upon the subject of style (and pardon me for saying that men of the most
sense are apt, upon two subjects, viz., poetry and style, to talk
_most_ like blockheads), have invariably regarded Swift's style not
as if _relatively_ good [_i.e. given_ a proper subject], but as if
_absolutely_ good--good unconditionally, no matter what the subject. Now,
my friend, suppose the case, that the Dean had been required to write a
pendant for Sir Walter Raleigh's immortal apostrophe to Death, or to many
passages that I will select in Sir Thomas Brown's 'Religio Medici,' and