“I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.” — Jonathan Swift

“When a man of true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by this infallible Sign, that all the Dunces are in Conspiracy against him.” — Jonathan Swift

I don’t have much time to read for pleasure these days which is very weird for me, but over this past year I have been slowly making my way (piece by piece) through Jonathan Swift’s work. The poetry, the broadsides, the pamphlets, the letters. It’s taken me months, because I’m only reading a couple pages a day, and I can also only handle a couple pages a day since there are so many footnotes (and I need them). I’m very familiar with his three big ones – Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub, A Modest Proposal … so a lot of this is new to me. It’s tough going because half the time he’s writing about some in-the-moment controversy and I need, really need, the 30 footnotes to understand the backstory about what English lord or Parliamentary decision he’s destroying with his pen. Satire / op-ed columns don’t really travel out of their own era!

I read the eulogy verse he wrote for himself. It’s 20 pages long, it’s in the third person, and it’s all very funny and biting. He calls out his enemies by name, but he’s “protected” because it’s not HIM speaking. He’s also realistic about his chances at immortality. He’s like, “my BFF Alexander Pope will grieve for a month but he’ll be fine.”

This verse really struck me: it is a ringing statement of what Swift was about as a writer, and it’s from his pen! I was very excited by this! (More thoughts to follow)

As for his Works in Verse or Prose,
I own myself no judge of those:
Nor can I tell what critics thought ’em,
But this I know, all people bought ’em,
As with a moral view design’d
To cure the vices of mankind.
Although ironically grave,
He shamed the fool, and lashed the knave.
To steal a hint was never known,
But what he writ, was all his own.

“He shamed the fool and lashed the knave.” He really did! I loved this as an artistic statement of purpose! There was a little asterisk at the end of those last two lines, and so I went dutifully to the footnote:

“To steal a hint…all his own” Cf. “To him no author was unknown / But what he writ was all his own’. (Sir John Denham, On Mr. Abraham Cowley (1677).

Oh my God. He tricked me! Swift’s “what he writ was all his own” is a plagiarized line. This is so funny! I’m assuming he assumed his audience would get the joke. He copied someone else AS he declared his originality. If I hadn’t read the footnote, I would take those lines at face value. It’s so much funnier now. Across 3 centuries, he tricked me.

“[He is] the most vigorous hater we’ve ever had in our literature.” — Edgell Rickword

We’re not supposed to “hate”. “Hate” calls to mind tiki torches. Or “hate crimes.” But there is a productive kind of hate. A galvanizing hate. Some people deserve to be hated because they sow chaos and destruction.

Rebecca West once wrote:

A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.

A resounding YES to that.

More on Swift after the jump:

His rage was so titanic you can still feel it today. Satire is so bastardized now – satire isn’t a “spoof” or a “lampoon” – it’s very specific. Even the word “satire” has lost some of its meaning. We live in an extremely literal age. Watching people – smart people – share bogus news on Facebook, shows the epidemic proportions of the thing (even more so when it was coming from the Oval Office). What is also an epidemic is the reaction I get when I point out something is satire, as opposed to an actual news item. Instead of, “Oops, my bad …” more often than not what comes is a defensive: “Well, it might as WELL be true.”

Yeah. That’s satire.

How can we learn from the past if we don’t even know about the past? One of the casualties of our current environment has been Satire (and also the rhetorical question. I miss being able to use rhetorical questions without having to say “That was a rhetorical question.”) And it’s awful, because we need satire now more than ever. Satire is one of humanity’s most effective weapons against tyranny. During the “reign” of 2017-2021, someone said on Twitter something along the lines of “with who is in the White House , now is not the time for satire.” Hers was not a solitary voice, but it shows the failure of her education, it shows her ignorance, and – worse – it shows such CONFIDENT ignorance. Listen to me, lady: Now more than ever is THE TIME for satire. What else do you think satire is FOR? Satire has TEETH. Satire attacks POWER. Satire calls out injustice. If you’re fine with satire when it’s going after those with whom you disagree, and then balk when it goes after one of YOUR sacred cows, then maybe your cow should not be so sacred. Every belief can use interrogation and/or mockery.

Due to the downfall of satire, readers don’t recognize it when they see it, which adds to the humorless landscape. There’s a section in Gulliver’s Travels so misogynistic, so vicious, so hateful, that when I re-read the book recently I found myself getting defensive. I immediately caught myself and started laughing. I KNOW Modest Proposal is satire, it’s the prime example of satire in Western literature … and still, I read it and can feel how dangerous it is. Because … what if people don’t get that it’s satire? What if they think he MEANS it?? “A Modest Proposal” is STILL dangerous. Swift, still at it, from across the centuries.

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.” — Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal

We’re supposed to believe, along with Anne Frank, that most people are good at heart. I don’t believe this and I never will. I am glad SHE did and I am glad for her example. But I am not a romantic about human nature. Men are not to be trusted with power. Ever. Women either. Romanticizing women as “better than” or “above” men is just another version of Victorian-era moralizing, putting women on a pedestal of goodness. Nobody can be trusted with the keys to the castle. This is called a “cynical” view of human nature, but I prefer the term “realistic”.

I love it when Gulliver is asked to describe Great Britain, and he goes on and on and on. Gulliver is shocked at the contempt towards Europe, and tries to stick up for his country. But … listen to what he SAYS and watch how it builds and builds and builds until …

He was perfectly astonished with the historical Account I gave him of our Affairs during the last Century, protesting it was only a Heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments, the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, or Ambition could produce.

His Majesty in another Audience was at the Pains to recapitulate the Sum of all I had spoken, compared the Questions he made with the Answers I had given; then taking me into his Hands, and stroaking me gently, delivered himself in these Words, which I shall never forget nor the Manner he spoke them in: My little Friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable Panegyric upon your Country: You have clearly proved that Ignorance, Idleness, and Vice may be sometimes the only Ingredients for qualifying a Legislator: That Laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose Interest and Abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some Lines of an Institution, which in its Original might have been tolerable, but these half erazed, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by Corruptions. It doth not appear from all you have said, how any one Virtue is required towards the Procurement of any one Station among you, much less that Men are ennobled on Account of their Virtue, that Priests are advanced for their Piety or Learning, Soldiers for their Conduct or Valour, Judges for their Integrity, Senators for the Love of their Country, or Counsellors for their Wisdom. As for yourself, (continued the King,) who have spent the greatest Part of your Life in Travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many Vices of your Country. But by what I have gathered from your own Relation, and the Answers I have with much Pain wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.

Jonathan Swift was born in 1667 in Dublin. I am saddened that he wasn’t around to comment on the American Revolution. Just a guess: he would not have been a fan. He did not distinguish himself in anything early on. He came into his own in his 30s. He was very political, as should be obvious. It was impossible to be apolitical in the late 1600s, early 1700s. He was a fierce Whig, and supported the deposition of James II in 1688. He often harangued the Whigs to do this, or do that. He was critical of the Whigs, as well, and his critique came from inside the circle. As often happens, the other side – the Tories – were supportive of what he was saying. When the Tories came into power, they basically recruited Swift, and he was made editor of The Examiner. So now he was on the “other side”, attacking his “own side” – although maybe he just switched sides. Religion played a huge part in all of this. So was he a Whig or was he a Tory? He was, honestly, neither. He didn’t “fit” with either side totally.

He had a high-level job as a secretary to Sir William Temple in Surrey, but he left and got ordained. He lived in Ireland, despised it, moved back to England, moved back to Ireland again, and wherever he went he left a trail of scandal behind him. He made lifelong enemies from his pen. The publishers who brought out his various works were sometimes arrested. His pamphlets were explosive, and he often wrote pseudonymously but everyone knew it was him. He would never have fit into any court community or royal hierarchy. He eventually became Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin. The upheaval in England after Queen Anne died ruined his chances of advancement. Since Swift’s politics seemed ambiguous and not party-line doctrinaire, he was viewed with suspicion. Same shit, different day.

One of his lifelong friends was a woman named Esther Johnson (whom he tutored as a child). He called her “Stella” and he wrote an annual birthday poem for her for years. The “Stella” poems are so different from everything else he wrote and provide nuance to his persona – but they’re also mysterious. The whole Stella thing has generated libraries of commentary. Like, what WAS this relationship? I don’t really care, but others do, and literally entire books have been written delving into this relationship. (Was Stella an illegitimate daughter of such-and-such which would have made Swift her uncle? And maybe THAT’S why his tone is so different?) Google it! Swift had no known romances, but he did maintain friendships with women, kind of a rare thing. Was he impotent? Asexual? He found the human body disgusting. It was an obsession. You could say some of his observations on womens’ bodies were misogynistic, but Jesus, have you heard how he talks about male bodies? He thought the whole damn thing was disgusting!

As dean of St. Patrick’s, Swift did a lot of good, speaking about Irish issues England would prefer to ignore. But he was staunchly Anglo-Irish, and … he may have been ordained but he doesn’t seem particularly religious to me. And does he believe in the afterlife? I mean, I find no evidence of it. He despised “Popery” in general – so factor that in – but he was also in a way not a bigot, meaning he saw the poverty in which the Catholic Irish lived and recognized it was because of politics, not because it was the natural order of things that they be reduced to sub-human living standards. They were FORCED to live in poverty because of English rule. Swift saw that. In today’s parlance, Jonathan Swift didn’t “punch down”. He punched up. Okay, sometimes he punched down. It depended on who was above and below.

No discussion of Swift is complete without mention of his epitaph, which he wrote himself. Swift’s final years were very sad. He was extremely ill and showed signs of madness, quite separate from dementia. He stopped speaking. When he died, he left his fortune to found a hospital for the mentally ill. He is buried at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and I have been there on a pilgrimage to see his plaque, and his epitaph. He is buried beside Esther Johnson, aka his “Stella”.

Hic depositum est Corpus
IONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D.
Hujus Ecclesiæ Cathedralis
Decani,
Ubi sæva Indignatio
Ulterius
Cor lacerare nequit,
Abi Viator
Et imitare, si poteris,
Strenuum pro virili
Libertatis Vindicatorem.
Obiit 19º Die Mensis Octobris
A.D. 1745 Anno Ætatis 78º.

William Butler Yeats said that Swift’s epitaph made him question his sanity, he felt the earth beneath him shift if he thought about it for too long. “Served human liberty.” This was key. Liberty. Yeats wasn’t a huge fan of liberty, so it makes sense he would be disturbed. He wrote copiously about the choice of the word “liberty” and what he thought Swift meant by it. Swift certainly didn’t mean liberty for the unwashed masses. Liberty was a concept to serve, to devote one’s life to.

Here is Yeats’ famous poem on all this, his meditation on those Latin words, and how Swift’s life spoke to him across the centuries.

Translation of Swift’s Epitaph, by William Butler Yeats

Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

A crater on one of Mars’ moons (discovered in 1877) is named for Swift. Nearby (ish) is a crater named for Voltaire. I love this so much. In 1752, Voltaire wrote a short story called “Micromégas” where he predicted Mars had two moons. 30 years before, Swift published Gulliver’s Travels, where Mars’ then-undiscovered moons also get a cameo. Gulliver visits Balnibarbi, and also goes up to Lagado, an island floating above Balnibarbi. The rulers of Balnibarbi live in Lagado, engrossed in their studies, especially astronomy. (Swift did not consider this kind of engrossment a proper use of one’s time. The people in Balnibarbi live in squalor while their rulers peer at the stars._ Nevertheless:

They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars; whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost, five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the centre of Mars; which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies.

Swift was right (and, to be fair, astronomers had been theorizing this long before him): Mars has two moons in close orbit with one another. So Voltaire and Swift crouch on the empty rock Demios, close neighbors, but not too close!

Jonathan Swift continues to speak to us in all his savage indignation.

QUOTES:

< Wyndham Lewis, from the Blast Manifesto (1914):

T.S. Eliot, from “Andrew Marvell”, 1921:

Swift, the great master of disgust.

George Orwell, Politics vs. Literature: Am Examination of Gulliver’s Travels, 1946:

He denounces injustice and oppression, but he gives no evidence of liking democracy.

Jonathan Swift:

“Every man, as a member of the commonwealth, ought to be content with the possession of his own opinion in private.”

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

Swift is a brilliant savage who understands – though he cannot control – the political and literary jungle in which he lives.

from “The Vanity of Human Wishes”
by Dr. Samuel Johnson:
From Marlborough’s eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires a driveller and a show.

Robert Graves on Swift’s poems:

“Trifles, but these trifles, though darkened by a morbid horror of man’s physical circumstances, demonstrate the proper use of English: they are clear, simple, inventive, pungent, unaffected, original, generous, utterly outspoken.

John Dryden (a distant relation, after reading one of Swift’s first published poem):

“Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.”

George Orwell, Politics vs. Literature: Am Examination of Gulliver’s Travels, 1946:

He is in favour of civilisation and the arts of civilisation. Not only does he see the value of good manners, good conversation, and even learning of a literary and historical kind, he also sees that agriculture, navigation and architecture need to be studied and could with advantage be improved. But his implied aim is a static, incurious civilisation–the world of his own day, a little cleaner, a little saner, with no radical change and no poking into the unknowable. More than one would expect in anyone so free from accepted fallacies, he reveres the past, especially classical antiquity, and believes that modern man has degenerated sharply during the past hundred years.

Jonathan Swift, letter to his great friend Alexander Pope, 1725:

I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians – I will not speak of my own trade – soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell, and so I shall go on till I have done with them. I have got materials toward a treatise, proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale, and to show it would be only rationis capax. Upon this great foundation of misanthropy, though not in Timon’s manner, the whole building of my Travels is erected; and I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my opinion. By consequence you are to embrace it immediately, and procure that all who deserve my esteem may do so too. The matter is so clear that it will admit of no dispute; nay, I will hold a hundred pounds that you and I agree in the point.

John Stubbs, The Reluctant Rebel:

[He is] a deranged yet icily rational social pragmatist.

George Orwell, Funny, But Not Vulgar, 1945:

Obscenity is, after all, a kind of subversiveness. Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” is a rebellion in the moral sphere, as Gulliver’s Travels is a rebellion in the political sphere. The truth is that you cannot be memorably funny without at some point raising topics which the rich, the powerful and the complacent would prefer to see left alone.

Ford Madox Ford:

Most unusual power of conveying scenes vividly … scenes rather of the sensibility than of material objects and landscapes.

Jonathan Swift, defining style:

Proper words in proper places.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

“anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco, — the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place.”

Jonathan Swift:

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

George Orwell, The English People, 1944:

So much has our language been weakened that the imbecile chatter in Swift’s essay on Polite Conversation (a satire on the upper-class talk of Swift’s own day) would actually be rather a good conversationalist by modern standards.

F.R. Leavis:

Lacking the Augustan politeness, he seems with his dry force of presentment, both to make the Augustan positives … look like negatives, and to give the characteristic Augustan lacks and disabilities a positive presence.

Michael Schmidt:

Swift is hard to recommend as a poet because he is hard to quote out of context. There are few purple passages, detachable maxims; the poetry is drawn evenly through the poem in ways that out-of-context quotation violates. The epitaphs, the spoofs, the eclogues, the anecdotes spoken by various voices, the ironic love poems, the first-person poems, will not be broken up into tags like the rich couplet bric-a-brac of Pope. In Swift we come upon a writer who might have preferred to be called versifier rather than poet. There is a difference in kind in his work from that of his predecessors; and he is not “polite” enough to have beguiled his contemporaries into imitation. He stands alone, he doesn’t sing, he never ingratiates himself. He speaks, and he understands how the world wags.

John Stubbs, The Reluctant Rebel:

He was unsmiling, while comic; ruthless in print, yet touchingly sincere and sensitive in his personal relationships. He was a keen walker and rider, and strong in body; and he was extremely delicate on the matter of his personal hygiene . . . Meanwhile, you might say what you liked against Dr Swift – if you dared; the rather fearsome figure in his black coat and wig. But you could not escape having your attention caught by Presto, the spirit of play in Swift’s nature; or by his stories and asides at the club or in the drawing room; or by the hilarious touches in his many sorties in print. Those who knew him also knew there was, however, another facet to Swift, which, for all his seeming robustness and indeed belligerence, could render him helpless in the space of minutes. In the trinity of his nature, along with Father Swift and Presto, the joking Son, this third element was a marauding unholy ghost.

George Orwell, Can Socialists Be Happy?, 1943:

Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness. This is the case even with a great writer like Swift, who can flay a bishop or a politician so neatly, but who, when he tries to create a superman, merely leaves one with the impression — the very last he can have intended — that the stinking Yahoos had in them more possibility of development than the enlightened Houyhnhnms.

John Gay to Jonathan Swift, 1728, after Beggar’s Opera opened:

For writing in the cause of Virtue, and against the fashionable vices, I am lookt upon at present as the most obnoxious person almost in England.

Jonathan Swift to Alexander Pope on Gulliver’s Travels:

“[I wrote it] to vex the world rather than divert it [by] proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale”

George Orwell, Politics vs. Literature: Am Examination of Gulliver’s Travels, 1946:

But Swift’s greatest contribution to political thought, in the narrower sense of the words, is his attack, especially in Part III, on what would now be called totalitarianism. He has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted ‘police State’, with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials, all really designed to neutralise popular discontent by changing it into war hysteria. And one must remember that Swift is here inferring the whole from a quite small part, for the feeble governments of his own day did not give him illustrations ready-made.

Michael Schmidt:

His vexed relations with women, especially “Stella” and “Vanessa”, and his disgust with physical functions, have given much latitude to Freudian interpretations. Disgust informs much of the prose and verse, but so does a real interest in common people, their language, actions and concerns. The verse opens on this area of his genius, and on his darker musings. It possesses the satiric virtues of the prose with an additional element: the “I” speaks, speaks as itself, with an uncompromised acerbity that few poets have masterd. When he died in 1745, Ireland and England were in his debt. The topicality that limits the appeal of some of his prose is itself the appeal of the verse: it catches inflections and remembers small actions now lost — the voices of gardeners, street vendors, laborers … the tone of a cryptic man of conscience speaking of his world, his bitter, life, his wary loves.

Jonathan Swift:

I take it to be part of the honesty of poets that they cannot write well except they think the subject deserves it.

George Orwell, Can Socialists Be Happy?, 1943:

Jonathan Swift, one of the greatest imaginative writers who have ever lived, is no more successful in constructing a ‘favorable’ Utopia than the others.

Lord Bolingbroke to Swift:

If you despised the world as much as you pretend, and perhaps believe, you would not be so angry with it.

Michael Schmidt:

He is merciless not to those below him on the social ladder but to those above, the empowered, and to the vain who persist in self-deception.

Jonathan Swift:

“The common saying of life being a farce is true in every sense but the most important one, for it is a ridiculous tragedy, which is the worst kind of composition.”

George Orwell, Politics vs. Literature: Am Examination of Gulliver’s Travels, 1946:

We are right to think of Swift as a rebel and iconoclast, but except in certain secondary matters, such as his insistence that women should receive the same education as men, he cannot be labeled ‘Left’. He is a Tory anarchist, despising authority while disbelieving in liberty, and preserving the aristocratic outlook while seeing clearly that the existing aristocracy is degenerate and contemptible. When Swift utters one of his characteristic diatribes against the rich and powerful, one must probably, as I said earlier, write off something for the fact that he himself belonged to the less successful party, and was personally disappointed. The ‘outs’, for obvious reasons, are always more radical than the ‘ins’.

Edgell Rickword:

A poetry of negative emotions, of those arising from disgust with the object. Swift is a great master of this kind of poetry. His verse has no pleasure-value beyond that of its symmetry and concision, but it is the most intricate labyrinth of personality that any poet has built around himself, not excepting Donne.

Michael Schmidt

In the more ambitious pieces Swift challenges the reader … There is a unique irony at work, not normative, like Dryden’s, but radical: thematic rather than stylistic. This is why his poems, even the most topical, retain force today.

George Orwell, Funny, But Not Vulgar, 1945:

Swift jeers at the very conception of human dignity.

Doctor Johnson, The Life of Swift:

There is not much upon which the critic can exercise his powers. They are often humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and gaiety… Perhaps no writer can be found who borrowed so little, or that in all his excellences and all his defects has so well maintained his claim to be considered as original.

George Orwell, Politics vs. Literature: Am Examination of Gulliver’s Travels, 1946:

From what I have written it may have seemed that I am against Swift, and that my object is to refute him and even to belittle him. Yet curiously enough he is one of the writers I admire with the least reserve, and Gulliver’s Travels, in particular, is a book which it seems impossible for to grow tired of…If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them.

Jonathan Swift on satire:

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it. But, if it should happen otherwise, the danger is not great; and I have learned from long experience never to apprehend mischief from those understandings I have been able to provoke: for anger and fury, though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind, and to render all its efforts feeble and impotent. …. Wit without knowledge being a sort of cream, which gathers in a night to the top, and by a skilful hand may be soon whipped into froth; but once scummed away, what appears underneath will be fit for nothing but to be thrown to the hogs.

From Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte:

I put both plate and tart away. Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word book acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver’s Travels from the library. This book I had again and again perused with delight. I considered it a narrative of facts, and discovered in it a vein of interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales: for as to the elves, having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves and bells, under mushrooms and beneath the ground-ivy mantling old wallnooks, I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth, that they were all gone out of England to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker, and the population more scant; whereas Lilliput and Brobdingnag being, in my creed, solid parts of the earth’s surface, I doubted not that I might one day, by taking a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little fields, houses, and trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep, and birds of the one realm; and the cornfields forest-high, the mighty mastiffs, the monster cats, the tower-like men and women of the other. Yet, when this cherished volume was now placed in my hands – when I turned over its leaves, and sought in its marvellous pictures the charm I had, till now, never failed to find – all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions. I closed the book, which I dared no longer peruse, and put it on the table beside the untasted tart.

H.L. Mencken, “The Artist”:

Swift, having finished the Irish and then the English, proceeded to finish the whole human race.

 
 
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