W.D. Clarke’s Reviews > Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel > Status Update

[Samuel] Johnson was often presumptuously haughty when writing of Swift; but his moments of subsequent dismissiveness may in fact indicate a nagging sense of inadequacy – of dissatisfaction with his early imitations of the Swiftian mode. His intellect and certainly his scholarship might have been the greater, and he was possibly the wiser man, but as a writer overall he trails far behind Swift...

On the same day Faulkner['s Hibernian Patriot reported the procession and street celebrations [for Swift's 59th birthday], the most eye-catching item in his Presbyterian rival’s [Journal] was ‘news from Guildford’: a woman there had apparently given birth to a rabbit. She was brought into town for examination by learned physicians.

1726 is in the bag, and Lemuel Gulliver's Travels into Sev’ral Remote Nations of the World. is published, and time for another pause for more back-filling, as well as to read Dexter Palmer's 1726-set Mary Toft (or, the Rabbit Queen)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...

[Swift on] "the ingredients of appropriate comedy.

Three Gifts for Conversation fit
Are Humor, Raillery and Witt:
The last, as boundless as the Wind,
Is well conceiv’d though not defin’d;
For, sure, by Wit is onely meant
Applying what we first invent.

Wit, that is, thought Swift, belonged to a faculty of judging and deploying the discoveries of intellect. It arguably belongs with the...

After venting all my Spite,
Tell me, what have I to write?
– ‘Epistle to a Lady’

What you'll write, I'll surely read,
Though you be white, male, and dead...

(Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, set in 1715, got me to go back to that year, and this fine feller, now, after Queen Anne's death and the Tory administration's demise, in permanent exile in Ireland)

The Queen is dead, boys,
And it's so lonely on a limb
—"The Queen Is Dead", The Smiths


With Annie gone,
whose eyes to compare
with the morning sun?

Not that Idid compare,
But I do compare
Now that she's gone
—"For Anne", Leonard Cohen

Um...

‘I borrowed coat, boots and horse,’ he explained to Esther and Mrs Dingley – noting precisely, and admiringly, that the borrowed coat was of ‘light camblet, faced with red velvet, and silver buttons’. He had been grumpy, having hurt his hand beating Patrick his servant, and somewhat apprehensive about his appearance.

T'was ever thus:

Whenever he moved, he would box up all the books he had acquired since arriving – except for a half-shelf of essential works – and send them off to Ireland. Thus he arrived at each new address ‘naked’ of clutter – until his love of bookshops led to volumes heaping up again.

I neither can nor will have patience any longer; and Swift you are a confounded son of a —. May your half acre turn to a Bog, and may your Willows perish; May the worms eat your Plato, and may Parvisol break your snuff-box.
—Sir Andrew Fontaine (Swift’s good friend), writing in June 1710

It is difficult merely imagining Swift, the Doctor and Dean, the terror of ministers and magnates, as a baby: the image is almost absurd. Picturing it means endowing him with a vulnerability, a physical and emotional need he cancelled altogether from his adult personality. But then, what should we expect? At an early stage in his career, Swift ridiculed the idea of understanding writers through biography...