his 'Urn-burial,' or to Jeremy Taylor's inaugural sections of his 'Holy
Living and Dying,' do you know what would have happened? Are you aware
what sort of ridiculous figure your poor bald Jonathan would have cut?
About the same that would be cut by a forlorn scullion or waiter from
a greasy eating-house at Rotterdam, if suddenly called away in vision to
act as seneschal to the festival of Belshazzar the king, before a thousand
of his lords.

Schlosser, after saying any thing right and true (and he really did say
the true thing about Swift's _essential_ irreligion), usually becomes
exhausted, like a boa-constrictor after eating his half-yearly dinner. The
boa gathers himself up, it is to be hoped for a long fit of dyspepsy, in
which the horns and hoofs that he has swallowed may chance to avenge the
poor goat that owned them. Schlosser, on the other hand, retires into a
corner, for the purpose of obstinately talking nonsense, until the gong
sounds again for a slight refection of sense. Accordingly he likens Swift,
before he has done with him, to whom? I might safely allow the reader
three years for guessing, if the greatest of wagers were depending between
us. He likens him to Kotzebue, in the first place. How faithful the
resemblance! How exactly Swift reminds you of Count Benyowski in Siberia,
and of Mrs. Haller moping her eyes in the 'Stranger!' One really is
puzzled to say, according to the negro's logic, whether Mrs. Haller is
more like the Dean of St. Patrick's, or the Dean more like Mrs. Haller.
Anyhow, the likeness is prodigious, if it is not quite reciprocal. The
other _terminus_ of the comparison is Wieland. Now there _is_ some shadow
of a resemblance there. For Wieland had a touch of the comico-cynical in
his nature; and it is notorious that he was often called the German
Voltaire, which argues some tiger-monkey grin that traversed his features
at intervals. Wieland's malice, however, was far more playful and genial
than Swift's; something of this is shown in his romance of 'Idris,' and