‘Miscellanies’

One must always discount Swift’s reports, especially to his English friends, of living in bleak isolation. But his mood of discontent with Irish affairs was genuine enough. To a new friend—come over from England—who said he was pleased with his rectory, Swift wrote,

I heartily envy you, for I never yet saw in Ireland a spot of earth two feet wide, that had not in it something to displease. I think I once was in your county of Tipperary, which is like the rest of the whole kingdom, a bare face of nature, without houses or plantations; filthy cabins, miserable, tattered, half-starved creatures, scarce in human shape; one insolent ignorant oppressive squire to be found in twenty miles riding; a parish church to be found only in a summer day’s journey, in comparison of which, an English farmer’s barn is a cathedral; a bog of fifteen miles round; every meadow a slough, and every hill a mixture of rock, heath, and marsh; and every male and female, from the farmer, inclusive to the day-labourer, infallibly a thief, and consequently a beggar, which in this island are terms convertible. ¹