d gnashing imprecations
against mankind--tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of
manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging,
obscene.

And dreadful it is to think that Swift knew the tendency of his
creed--the fatal rocks towards which his logic desperately drifted. That
last part of "Gulliver" is only a consequence of what has gone before;
and the worthlessness of all mankind, the pettiness, cruelty, pride,
imbecility, the general vanity, the foolish pretension, the mock
greatness, the pompous dulness, the mean aims, the base successes--all
these were present to him; it was with the din of these curses of the
world, blasphemies against heaven, shrieking in his ears, that he began
to write his dreadful allegory--of which the meaning is that man is
utterly wicked, desperate and imbecile, and his passions are so
monstrous, and his boasted powers so mean, that he is and deserves to be
the slave of brutes, and ignorance is better than his vaunted reason.
What had this man done? what secret remorse was rankling at his heart?
what fever was boiling in him, that he should see all the world
blood-shot? We view the world with our own eyes, each of us; and we make
from within us the world we see. A weary heart gets no gladness out of
sunshine; a selfish man is sceptical about friendship, as a man with no
ear doesn't care for music. A frightful self-consciousness it must have
been, which looked on mankind so darkly through those keen eyes of Swift.

A remarkable story is told by Scott, of Delany, who interrupted
Archbishop King and Swift in a conversation which left the prelate in
tears, and from which Swift rushed away with marks of strong terror and
agitation in his countenance, upon which the Archbishop said to Delany,
"You have just met the most unhappy man on earth; but on the subject of
his wretchedness you must never ask a question."

The most unhappy man on earth;--Miserrimus--what a character of him! And
at this time all the great wits of England had been at his feet. All
Ireland had shouted after him, and worshipped him as a liberator, a
saviour, the greatest Irish patriot and citizen. Dean Drapier
Bickerstaff Gulliver--the most famous statesmen, and the greatest poets
of his day, had applauded him, and done him homage; and at this time,
writing over to Bolingbroke from Ireland, he says, "It is time for me to
have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into