INTRODUCTION     

       Dr. Johnson, in his "Life of Swift," after citing with approval Delany's character of him, as he describes him to Lord Orrery, proceeds to say: "In the poetical works there is not much upon which the critic can exercise his powers. They are often humorous, almost always light, and have the qualities which recommend such compositions, easiness and gaiety. They are, for the most part, what their author intended. The diction is correct, the numbers are smooth, and the rhymes exact. There seldom occurs a hard laboured expression or a redundant epithet; all his verses       exemplify his own definition of a good style—they consist of 'proper words in proper places.'"     

       Of his earliest poems it is needless to say more than that if nothing better had been written by him than those Pindaric Pieces, after the manner of Cowley—then so much in vogue—the remark of Dryden,       "Cousin Swift, you will never be a Poet," would have been fully justified. But conventional praise and compliments were foreign to his nature, for his 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 

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