I do not, therefore, agree with the estimate of Swift’s moral or intellectual character, given by an eminent critic, who does not seem to have forgotten the party politics of Swift.  I do not carry my political resentments so far back:  I can at this time of day forgive Swift for having been a Tory.  I feel little disturbance (whatever I might think of them) at his political sentiments, which died with him, considering how much else he has left behind him of a more solid and imperishable nature!  If he had, indeed, (like some others) merely left behind him the lasting infamy of a destroyer of his country, or the shining example of an apostate from liberty, I might have thought the case altered.

The determination with which Swift persisted in a preconcerted theory, savoured of the morbid affection of which he died.  There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable.  Swift was not a Frenchman.  In this respect he differed from Rabelais and Voltaire.  They have been accounted the three greatest wits in modern times; but their wit was of a peculiar kind in each.  They are little beholden to each other; there is some resemblance between Lord Peter in the Tale of a Tub, and Rabelais’ Friar John; but in general they are all three authors of a substantive character in themselves.  Swift’s wit (particularly in his chief prose works) was serious, saturnine, and practical; Rabelais’ was fantastical and joyous; Voltaire’s was light, sportive, and verbal.  Swift’s wit was the wit of sense; Rabelais’, the wit of nonsense; Voltaire’s, of indifference to both.  The ludicrous in Swift arises out of his keen sense of impropriety, his soreness and impatience of the least absurdity.  He separates, with a severe and caustic air, truth from falsehood, folly from wisdom, “shews vice her own image, scorn her own feature”; and it is the force, the precision, and the honest abruptness with which the separation is made, that excites our surprise, our admiration, and laughter.  He sets a mark of reprobation on that which offends good sense and good manners, which cannot be mistaken, and which holds it up to our ridicule and contempt ever after.  His occasional disposition to trifling (already noticed) was a relaxation from the excessive earnestness of his mind. Indignatio facit versus.  His better genius was his spleen.  It was the biting acrimony of his temper that sharpened his other faculties.  The truth of his perceptions produced the pointed coruscations of his wit; his playful irony was the result of inward bitterness of thought; his imagination was the product of the literal, dry, incorrigible tenaciousness of his understanding.  He endeavoured to escape from the persecution of realities into the regions of fancy, and invented his Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, Yahoos, and Houynhyms,