" But whatever
coarseness there may be in some of Swift's poems, such as "The Lady's
Dressing Room," and a few other pieces, there is nothing licentious,
nothing which excites to lewdness; on the contrary, such pieces create
simply a feeling of repulsion. No one, after reading the "Beautiful young
Nymph going to bed," or "Strephon and Chloe," would desire any personal
acquaintance with the ladies, but there is a moral in these pieces, and
the latter poem concludes with excellent matrimonial advice. The
coarseness of some of his later writings must be ascribed to his
misanthropical hatred of the "animal called man," as expressed in his
famous letter to Pope of September 1725, aggravated as it was by his
exile from the friends he loved to a land he hated, and by the reception
he met with there, about which he speaks very freely in his notes to the
"Verses on his own Death."
On the morning of Swift's installation as Dean, the following scurrilous
lines by Smedley, Dean of Clogher, were affixed to the doors of St.
Patrick's Cathedral:
To-day this Temple gets a Dean
Of parts and fame uncommon,
Us'd both to pray and to prophane,
To serve both God and mammon.
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