a neurotic taste for
sexuality, it includes no attack on Swift as it explores at length
some topics to which Gulliver in his memoirs only tangentially
alludes. The second abortive effort, an animal satire of exotic
talking fowl, also resembles Swift's satire as it touches on several
similar topics--the hypocrisy of the people, the scepticism of their
nobility, the love of luxury of the higher clergy--but again because
it includes no comment on Swift's personal or public character, it is
not relevant to a discussion of the angry _Letter from a Clergyman_.
We can therefore pass quickly from these two works to perhaps the
best, in the sense of the most stinging and most comprehensive,
assault on Swift at the time of the publication of his _Travels_, that
entitled _Gulliveriana_ (1728), by the Irish Dean of Clogher, Jonathan
Smedley.

"That rascall Smedley," about whom Swift once wrote in vexation (to
Archdeacon Walls, 19 December 1716), is the very same hack who carried
on the subsidized _Baker's News; or the Whitehall Journal_ (1722-23)
on behalf of Sir Robert Walpole's government. He is also immortalized
in Pope's _Dunciad_ (1728) as "a person dipp'd in scandal, and deeply
immers'd in dirty work" (_Dunciad_ A, II, 279ff; B, II, 291ff). His
_Gulliveriana_ (including the satires on Pope, the _Alexandriana_), a
scurrilous anthology of abuse in the form of jingles, ballads,
parodies in prose, and other satirical essays, was inspired by the
recent publication of the Pope-Swift _Miscellany_. In his preface
Smedley indicts Swift for an almost endless series of misdemeanors--for
shifting his allegiance from the Whigs to the Tories; for restricting
his verse to the burlesque style and its groveling doggerel manner;
for failing in eloquence and oratory, theology and mathematics; and
for being a pedant, poetaster, hack-politician, jockey, gardener,
punster, and skilful swearer. In short Smedley insists that Swift is
accomplished in the art of sinking according to the prescription which
he and Pope wrote in the _Peri Bathos_, the first part of the
_Miscellany_ that aroused Smedley's ire. Swift is, to sum up,
"_ludicrous, dull, and profane_; and ... an Instance of _that Decay of
Delicacy and Refinement_ which he mentions" (p. xxvii). As for the
recently published _Gulliver's Travels_, Smedley shows it no mercy:

An abominable Piece! by being _quite out of Life_! The _Fable_ is
entirely ridiculous; the _Moral_ but ludicro