With the death of Stella, Swift's real happiness ended, and he became more and more possessed by the melancholy which too often accompanies the broadest humour, and which, in his case, was constitutional. It was, no doubt, to relieve it, that he resorted to the composition of the doggerel verses, epigrams, riddles, and trifles exchanged betwixt himself and Sheridan, which induced Orrery's remark that "Swift composing Riddles is Titian painting draught-boards;" on which Delany observes that "a Riddle may be as fine painting as any other in the world. It requires as strong an imagination, as fine colouring, and as exact a proportion and keeping as any other historical painting"; and he instances "Pethox the Great," and should also have alluded to the more learned example--"Louisa to Strephon." On Orrery's seventh Letter, Delany says that if some of the "coin is base," it is the fine impression and polish which adds value to it, and cites the saying of another nobleman, that "there is indeed some stuff in it, but it is Swift's stuff." It has been said that Swift has never taken a thought from any writer ancient or modern. This is not literally true, but the instances are not many, and in my notes I have pointed out the lines snatched from Milton, Denham, Butler--the last evidently a great favourite. It seems necessary to state shortly the causes of Swift not having obtained higher preferment. Besides that Queen Anne would never be reconciled to the author of the "Tale of a Tub"--the true purport of which was so ill-understood by her--he made an irreconcilable enemy of her friend, the Duchess of Somerset, by his lampoon entitled "The Windsor Prophecy." But Swift seldom allowed prudence to restrain his wit and humour, and admits of himself that he "had too much satire in his vein"; and that "a genius in the reverend gown must ever keep its owner down"; and says further: Humour and mirth had place in all he writ; He reconciled divinity and wit. But that was what his enemies could not do. Whatever the excellences and defects of the poems, Swift has erected, not only by his works, but by his benevolence and his charities, a _monumentum aere perennius,_ and his writings in prose and verse will continue to afford instruction and delight when the malevolence of Jeffrey, the misrepresentations of Macaulay, and the sneers and false statements of Thackeray shall have been forgotten. #POEMS OF JONATHAN SWIFT# ODE TO DOCTOR WILLIAM SANCROFT[1] LATE LORD BISHOP OF CANTERBURY WRITTEN IN MAY, 1689, AT THE DESIRE OF THE LATE LORD BISHOP OF ELY I