Trinity College, Dublin, and all through his early life
was dependent on the generosity of others. His college career was not
highly creditable, either from the point of view of manners, morals, or
learning. After leaving college, he travelled through England on foot,
and found employment with a relative of his mother's, Sir William
Temple, in whose house was a noble library; and for two years Swift made
up for some of his shortcomings by studying diligently therein. He went
to Oxford in 1692, took a degree and was ordained in 1694. He was given
a parish in Ireland, which he soon resigned, returning to the home of
Sir William Temple, where he remained until the death of the latter in
1699.

Temple left Swift a legacy, and confided to him the editing and
publishing of his works. This task completed, Swift went again to
Ireland to another parish, and threw himself into political
pamphleteering with great effect, one of the results of his exertions
being the securing of freedom from taxation for the Irish clergy. He
subsequently became Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin, and for a period
achieved great popularity owing to his powerful political writings.

While in what he called his "exile" he wrote _Gulliver's Travels_, which
was at first published anonymously, the secret of the authorship being
so closely guarded that the publisher did not know who was the author.
Dr. Johnson characterized it as "A production so new and strange that it
filled the reader with admiration and amazement. It was read by the high
and low, the learned and the illiterate." In this work, Jonathan Swift
appears as one of the greatest masters of English we have ever had; as
endowed with an imaginative genius inferior to few; as a keen and
pitiless critic of the world, and a bitter misanthropic accounter of
humanity at large. Dean Swift was indeed a misanthrope by theory,
however he may have made exception to private life. His hero, Gulliver,
discovers race after race of beings who typify the genera in his
classification of mankind. Extremely diverting are Gulliver's adventures
among the tiny Lilliputians; only less so are his more perilous
encounters with the giants of Brobdingnag.... By a singular dispensation
of Providence, we usually read the _Travels_ while we are children; we
are delighted with the marvellous story, we are not at all injured by
the poison. Poor Swift! he was conscious of insanity's approach; he
repeated annually Job's curse upon