Swift

Jonathan Swift aimed at mankind the most venomous arrow that scorn has ever yet let loose. Mankind, bland abstraction, caught his arrow, laughed at it, and turned it over to chi...

Swift went to Temple hoping to learn the ways of the world from a man, also from Ireland, who had risen to influence and very near to power. For Temple Ireland had been but a sp...

Moreover, Stella, fifteen when Swift returned from Kilroot, was an old comfort and a new delight. “She was sickly from her childhood until about the age of fifteen; but then gre...

“Are you in a condition to manage domestic affairs, with an income of less perhaps than three hundred pounds a year? Have you such an inclination to my person and humour as to c...

But he wrote less like a philosopher than like a governor, contemptuous of political metaphysics. No doubt there ought to be a proper balance of power among the forces in a stat...

Swift, learning on this visit to England that the great are not always to be trusted by the proud and truthful, should have become finally aware that he was not a Whig, perhaps...

The political situation was intricate in detail but simple in outline. King William, Prince of Orange, had involved his adoptive England with his native Holland in the Grand All...

This was the career and this the climax of Swift’s life among the great. After a summer in Ireland he was, it is true, called back to London for the fourth and last winter of th...

Oxford had called Swift Dr. Martin, “because martin is a sort of a swallow, and so is a swift.” From that had come the name of Martinus Scriblerus, a phantom pedant whose career...

Was the actual Vanessa, when she had read this far, pleased with the figure she cut in the fable? Or did the actual Cadenus, if he read it to her, notice that she twisted in her...

On the Catholic majority, those “savage old Irish,” he spent little sympathy. They might be above the vermin of the island but they were below the voters. He had no patience wit...

From that compromise Gulliver escaped to Blefuscu, and back to England, knowing that the smallest people in the world had all the familiar follies and vices of mankind in general.

Secret enough, but not half as secret as Swift was about something dearer to him than any book. From the beginning of his visit he was worried about Stella, who was very sick at...

Swift’s Travels, Gay’s Opera, Pope’s Dunces: Twickenham had borne its satiric fruits. “Pope, Gay, and I,” Swift later wrote, had done their best “to make folks merry and wise,”...

The “Sunday spongers,” who did not come till evening, found Swift as a rule more amiable than he let on to the English friends. More amiable than he generally let on to the spon...

An extraordinary man, with a boundless appetite for power, must master or please ordinary men, or else go hungry. Swift was born without the rank and fortune which are such a ma...

Johnson, Esther (Hester), 23-24, 29, 35, 36, 47, 57, 58-66, 74, 79, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 102, 109, 117, 123, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131, 147, 148, 149, 158, 162, 163, 166, 168,...