Wow Robin. Thank Goggle for google!
I wonder if Swift didn't find poetry too limiting. Menippean satire is just
too weird to be contained in verse. Pope's satire is well-suited to verse,
though (I think), insofar as P's satire is reformative; wehreas I think
Swift's was just anarchic -- and better suited, maybe therefore?, to prose?
(bakktin etc etc)...
The only biography of JS I've read was Glendinning's portrait, which was,
for all its breeziness, a nice fast and honest read -- and, yes, she too
mentions his trouble with servants toward the end (especially toward the
end, he had troubles with them all his life -- did he not sometimes beat
his maids?) and I seem to remember one of his last servants was a thief, a
drunkard, and a scoundrel (not John Wilkes) who stole and this rings a bell.
It's funny: swift suffered from dizzy spells and odd states all his life,
most likely from battling rickets I think, and he felt that the only two
things that kept the spells at bay were: teh avoidance of fruit and
vigorous exercise. Even when he was dotty and slobbering he used to run all
the stairs in his deanery for HOURS, up and down and up and down. Can you
imagine him incontinent, drooly and sweating, pounding teh stairs, this
violent old man. When he was a young man, he would often with no
explanation bolt out the back door and race up the hill behind his lodgings
even with company present. He'd have great springs round Twickenham.
>Johnson's "expires a driveller and a show" was a reference to Swift's final
>madness, when his servant (is this apochryphal?) used to rent out views of
>his master. The irony of the end of a great man.
>
> > A Satyre on Charles II
>
> > All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,
> > From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.
>
>All too apposite today.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Robin
>
>"Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly
>uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many
>will start: 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.' But
>let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love
>of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all
>ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest."
>
>............
>
>"I having mentioned that I had passed some time with Rousseau in his wild
>retreat, and having quoted some remark made by Mr. Wilkes, with whom I had
>spent many pleasant hours in Italy, Johnson said (sarcastically,) 'It seems,
>Sir, you have kept very good company abroad, Rousseau and Wilkes!' "
Gabriel Gudding
Department of English
Illinois State University
Normal, IL 61790
office 309.438.5284
home 309.828.8377
http://www.pitt.edu/~press/2002/gudding.html
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