Frances
Harris' Petition."--His great prose satires, "The Tale of a Tub," and
"Gulliver's Travels," though planned, were reserved to a later time.--In
other forms of poetry he soon afterwards greatly excelled, and the title
of poet cannot be refused to the author of "Baucis and Philemon"; the
verses on "The Death of Dr. Swift"; the "Rhapsody on Poetry"; "Cadenus
and Vanessa"; "The Legion Club"; and most of the poems addressed to
Stella, all of which pieces exhibit harmony, invention, and imagination.
Swift has been unduly censured for the coarseness of his language upon
Certain topics; but very little of this appears in his earlier poems, and
what there is, was in accordance with the taste of the period, which
never hesitated to call a spade a spade, due in part to the reaction from
the Puritanism of the preceding age, and in part to the outspeaking
frankness which disdained hypocrisy. It is shown in Dryden, Pope, Prior,
of the last of whom Johnson said that no lady objected to have his poems
in her library; still more in the dramatists of that time, whom Charles
Lamb has so humorously defended, and in the plays of Mrs. Aphra Behn,
who, as Pope says, "fairly puts all characters to bed.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25