'Could I from the building's top Hear the rattling thunder drop, While the devil upon the roof (If the devil be thunder-proof) Should with poker fiery red Crack the stones and melt the lead; Drive them down on every skull, While the den of thieves is full; Quite destroy that harpies' nest, How might then our isle be blest!' It should be observed at the same time that even in his declining days, when his heart was heavy with bitterness, Swift indulged in practical jokes and in the most trivial pursuits. _Vive la bagatelle_ was his cry, but it was the cry of a man who had as deep a contempt for the wiser pursuits of life as for its frivolities. Of the mirth that is the natural outcome of a cheerful nature, the Dean knew nothing. His hilarity was but a vain attempt to escape from despair. In 1740 he writes of being very miserable, extremely deaf, and full of pain. Sometimes he gave way to furious bursts of temper, and for several years before the end came, he fell into a state resembling idiocy. Swift died on October 19th, 1745, leaving his money to a hospital for lunatics, 'And showed by one satiric touch No nation needed it so much.' A brilliant writer, who has undertaken to prove the 'glaring injustice' of the popular estimate of Swift, and by his forcible epithets has strengthened the grounds on which that estimate is built, observes that Swift's 'philosophy of life is ignoble, base, and false,' that 'his impious mockery extends even to the Deity,' and that 'a large portion of his works exhibit, and in intense activity, all the worst attributes of our nature--revenge, spite, malignity, uncleanness.'[47]