“I remember when I was a little boy, (writes Swift in a letter to
Bolingbroke,) I felt a great fish at the end of my line, which I drew up
almost on the ground, but it dropt in, and the disappointment vexes me
to this day; and I believe it was the type of all my future
disappointments.”
“This little incident,” writes Percival, “perhaps gave the first wrong
bias to a mind predisposed to such impressions; and by operating with so
much strength and permanency, it might possibly lay the foundation of
the Dean’s subsequent peevishness, passion, misanthropy, and final
insanity.”