strongest characteristic was his intense sincerity. He says of himself
that about that time he had writ and burnt and writ again upon all manner
of subjects more than perhaps any man in England; and it is certainly
remarkable that in so doing his true genius was not sooner developed, for
it was not till he became chaplain in Lord Berkeley's household that his
satirical humour was first displayed--at least in verse--in "Mrs. 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." 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