ABSTRACT
Swift had more music in him than he loved to let ‘fiddlers’ suppose; and throughout all his writings there may be observed a jealous sense of power, modifying the most familiar of his impulses. However, Swift’s verse, compared with Pope’s or with Butler’s, is but a kind of smart prose. It wants their pregnancy of expression. His greatest works are Gulliver’s Travels and the Tale of the Tub. For the qualities of sheer wit and humour, Swift had no superior, ancient or modern. He had not the poetry of Aristophanes, or the animal spirits of Rabelais; he was not so incessantly witty as Butler; nor did he possess the delicacy of Addison, or the good nature of Steele and Fielding, or the pathos and depth of Sterne; but his wit was perfect, as such; a sheer meeting of the extremes of difference and likeness; and his knowledge of character was unbounded.
