The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D.,
Volume IX; Contributions to The Tatler, The Examiner, The Spectator, and The Intelligencer, by Jonathan Swift

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Title: The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX;
Contributions to The Tatler, The Examiner, The Spectator,
and The Intelligencer

Author: Jonathan Swift

Release Date: August 13, 2004 [EBook #13169]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE PROSE WORKS OF JONATHAN SWIFT

VOL. IX

GEORGE BELL & SONS
LONDON: YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN
CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL & CO.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.

[Illustration: _Jonathan Swift from the picture by Charles Jervas in the
Bodlean Library Oxford_]

THE PROSE WORKS OF JONATHAN SWIFT, D.D.

EDITED BY TEMPLE SCOTT

VOL IX

CONTRIBUTIONS TO "THE TATLER," "THE EXAMINER," "THE SPECTATOR," AND
"THE INTELLIGENCER"

LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS 1902

CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

INTRODUCTION

Swift has been styled the Prince of Journalists. Like most titles whose
aim is to express in modern words the character and achievements of a man
of a past age, this phrase is not of the happiest. Applied to so
extraordinary a man as Jonathan Swift, it is both misleading and
inadequate. At best it embodies but a half-truth. It belongs to that
class of phrases which, in emphasizing a particular side of the
character, sacrifices truth to a superficial cleverness, and so does
injustice to the character as a whole. The vogue such phrases obtain is
thus the measure of the misunderstanding that is current; so that it
often becomes necessary to receive them with caution and to test them
with care.

A prince in his art Swift certainly was, but his art was not the art of
the journalist. Swift was a master of literary expression, and of all
forms of that expression which aim at embodying in language the common
life and common facts of men and their common nat