_Will's Coffee-house, August 24._
The author of the ensuing letter, by his name, and the quotations he
makes from the ancients, seems a sort of spy from the old world, whom we
moderns ought to be careful of offending; therefore I must be free, and
own it a fair hit where he takes me, rather than disoblige him.
"SIR, Having a peculiar humour of desiring to be somewhat the better or
wiser for what I read, I am always uneasy when, in any profound writer
(for I read no others) I happen to meet with what I cannot understand.
When this falls out, it is a great grievance to me that I am not able to
consult the author himself about his meaning; for commentators are a sect
that has little share in my esteem. Your elaborate writings have, among
many others, this advantage, that their author is still alive, and ready
(as his extensive charity makes us expect) to explain whatever may
be found in them too sublime for vulgar understandings. This, Sir, makes
me presume to ask you, how the Hampstead hero's character could be
perfectly new[1] when the last letters came away, and yet Sir John
Suckling so well acquainted with it sixty years ago? I hope, Sir, you
will not take this amiss: I can assure you, I have a profound respect
for you; which makes me write this, with the same disposition with which
Longinus bids us read Homer and Plato.
"'When in reading,' says he, 'any of those celebrated authors, we meet
with a passage to which we cannot well reconcile our reasons, we ought
firmly to believe, that were those great wits present to answer for
themselves, we should to our wonder be convinced, that we only are guilty
of the mistakes we before attributed to them.' If you think fit to
remove the scruple that now torments me, it will be an encouragement to
me to settle a frequent correspondence with you, several things falling
in my way which would not, perhaps, be altogether foreign to your
purpose, and whereon your thoughts would be very acceptable to
"Your most humble servant,
"OBADIAH GREENHAT."
[Footnote 1: In No. 57 of "The Tatler" Steele wrote: "Letters from
Hampstead say, there is a coxcomb arrived there, of a kind which is
utterly new. The fellow has courage, which he takes himself to be obliged
to give proofs of every hour he lives. He is ever fighting with the men,
and contradicting the women. A lady, who sent him to me, superscribed
him with this description out of Suckling:
"'I am a man of war and might,
And know thus much, that I can fight,
Whether I am i' th' wrong or right.
Devoutly.
'No woman under Heaven I fear,
New oaths I can exactly swear;
And forty healths my brains will bear,
Most stoutly.'"
The "description out of Suckling" is from that writer's rondeau, "A
Soldier." As the poet died in 1642, Swift ridicules the statement
that this kind of coxcomb was "utterly new." [T.S.]]