The method of Swift’s satire was grave irony.  Among his minor writings in this kind are his Argument against Abolishing Christianity, his Modest Proposal for utilizing the surplus population of Ireland by eating the babies of the poor, and his Predictions of Isaac Bickerstaff.  In the last he predicted the death of one Partridge, an almanac maker, at a certain day and hour.  When the time set was past, he published a minute account of Partridge’s last moments; and when the subject of this excellent fooling printed an indignant denial of his own death, Swift answered very temperately, proving that he was dead and remonstrating with him on the violence of his language.  “To call a man a fool and villain, an impudent fellow, only for differing from him in a point merely speculative, is, in my humble opinion, a very improper style for a person of his education.”  Swift wrote verses as well as prose, but their motive was the reverse of poetical.  His gross and cynical humor vulgarized whatever it touched.  He leaves us no illusions, and not only strips his subject, but flays it and shows the raw muscles beneath the skin.  He delighted to dwell upon the lowest bodily functions of human nature.  “He saw blood-shot,” said Thackeray.

1.  History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1660-1780).  Edmund Gosse.  London:  Macmillan & Co., 1889.

2.  Macaulay’s Essay, The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration.

3.  The Poetical Works of John Dry den.  Macmillan & Co., 1873. (Globe Edition.)

4.  Thackeray’s English Humorists of the last Century.

5.  Sir Roger de Coverley.  New York:  Harpers, 1878.

6.  Swift’s Tale of a Tub, Gulliver’s Travels, Directions to Servants, Polite Conversation, The Great Question Debated, Verses on the Death of Dean Swift.

7.  The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope.  London:  Macmillan & Co., 1869. (Globe Edition.)

CHAPTER VI.

FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

1744-1789.

Pope’s example continued potent for fifty years after his death.  Especially was this so in satiric and didactic poetry.  Not only Dr. Johnson’s adaptations from Juvenal, London, 1738, and the Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, but Gifford’s Baviad, 1791, and Maeviad, 1795, and Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 1809, were in the verse and the manner of Pope.  In Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, 1781, Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets.  But long before this a revolution in literary taste had begun, a movement which is variously described as the Return to Nature or the Rise of the New Romantic School.