This certainly is not the ordinary temper of a youth on whom the world is just opening.  In a letter to Pope, written in 1725, he says, “I desire that you and all my friends will take a special care that my disaffection to the world may not be imputed to my age; for I have credible witnesses ready to depose that it hath never varied from the twenty-first to the fifty-eighth year of my age.”  His contempt for mankind would not be lessened by his knowledge of the lying subterfuges by which the greatest poet of his age sought at once to gratify and conceal his own vanity, nor by listening to the professions of its cleverest statesman that he liked planting cabbages better than being prime minister.  How he must have laughed at the unconscious parody when his old printer Barber wrote to him in the same strain of philosophic relief from the burthensome glories of lord-mayoralty!

Nay, he made another false start, and an irreparable one, in prose also with the “Tale of a Tub.”  Its levity, if it was not something worse, twice balked him of the mitre when it seemed just within his reach.  Justly or not, he had the reputation of scepticism.  Mr. Forster would have us believe him devout, but the evidence goes no further than to prove him ceremonially decorous.  Certain it is that his most intimate friends, except Arbuthnot, were free-thinkers, and wrote to him sometimes in a tone that was at least odd in addressing a clergyman.  Probably the feeling that he had made a mistake in choosing a profession which was incompatible with success in politics, and with perfect independence of mind, soured him even more than his disappointed hopes.  He saw Addison a secretary of state and Prior an ambassador, while he was bubbled (as he would have put it) with a shabby deanery among savages.  Perhaps it was not altogether his clerical character that stood in his way.  A man’s little faults are more often the cause of his greatest miscarriages than he is able to conceive, and in whatever respects his two friends might have been his inferiors, they certainly had the advantage of him in that savoir vivre which makes so large an element of worldly success.  In judging him, however, we must take into account that his first literary hit was made when he was already thirty-seven, with a confirmed bias towards moody suspicion of others and distrust of himself.

The reaction in Swift’s temper and ambition told with the happiest effect on his prose.  For its own purposes, as good working English, his style (if that may be called so whose chief success was that it had no style at all), has never been matched.  It has been more praised than studied, or its manifest shortcomings, its occasional clumsiness, its want of harmony and of feeling for the finer genialities of language, would be more often present in the consciousness of those who discourse about it from a superficial acquaintance.  With him language was a means and not an end.  If he was plain and even coarse, it was from choice rather than because he lacked delicacy of perception; for in badinage, the most ticklish use to which words can be put, he was a master.