udicrous 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, as a diversion
to the more painful knowledge of the world around him: _they_ only made
him laugh, while men and women made him angry. His feverish impatience
made him view the infirmities of that great baby the world, with the
same scrutinizing glance and jealous irritability that a parent regards
the failings of its offspring; but, as Rousseau has well observed,
parents have not on this account been supposed to have more affection
for other people's children than their own. In other respects, and
except from the sparkling effervescence of his gall, Swift's brain was
as "dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage." He hated absurdity--
Rabelais loved it, exaggerated it with supreme satisfaction, luxuriated
in its endless varieties, rioted in nonsense, "reigned there and
revelled." He dwelt on the absurd and ludicrous for the pleasure they
gave him, not for the pain. He lived upon laughter, and died laughing.
He indulged his vein, and took his full swing of folly. He did not baulk
his fancy or his readers. His wit was to him "as riches fineless"; he
saw no end of his wealth in that way, and set no limits to his
extravagance: he was communicative, prodigal, boundless, and
inexhaustible. His were t