Was Swift a monster?
Denis Donoghue, 5 June 1986
Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed
by David Nokes.
Oxford, 427 pp., £14.95, October 1985,0 19 812834 7 Show More
by David Nokes.
Oxford, 427 pp., £14.95, October 1985,
“... a nature a little lower than that of angels and assumed by far higher than they,’ according to Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). In short, was Swift a monster, as Samuel Johnson nearly said: ‘The greatest difficulty that occurs, in analysing his character, is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took delight in ... ”