With a style sinewy as Cobbett's, and
simple and clear as Swift's; with his sturdy, peasant nature showing
itself in the roundness and directness of his utterance, how little
has he of their coarseness. He was not, on the one hand, like
Cobbett, an anarchist, or libeller; but yet, on the other hand, as
little was he ever a lackey, cringing at the gates of Power, or a
train-bearer in the retinue of Fashion. Still less was he, like
Swift, the satirist of his times and of his kind, snarling at his
rulers, and turning at last to gnaw, in venomous rage, his own
heart. And yet he who portrayed the character of By-ends, and noted
the gossipings of Mrs. Bats-eyes, lacked neither keenness of vision,
nor niceness of hand, to have made him most formidable in satire and
irony.
His present station in the literature of Britain affords an
illustration, familiar and obvious to every eye, of God's
sovereignty, and of the arrangements of Him "who seeth not as man
seeth." Had Pepys, or any other contemporary courtier that hunted
for place and pension, or fluttered in levity and sin, in the
antechambers of the later Stuarts, been asked, who of all the
writers of the times were likely to go down to posterity among the
lights of their age, how ludicrously erroneous would have been his
apportionments of fame.
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