Among the ballads, one will see the infamous "Verses, fix'd on the Cathedral Door, the Day of Dean Gulliver's Installment," which begins with the following delectable quatrain:
Today, this Temple gets a Dean,
Of Parts and Fame, uncommon;
Us'd, both to Pray, and to Prophane,
To serve both God and Mammon.
Then the poem proceeds with the usual diatribe of Swift's desertion of the Whigs, his atheism, high-church sympathies, and sacrilegious humor (pp. 77-79).
In almost every conceivable literary style Smedley takes exception to Swift's divinity and politics and attempts to blacken Swift's character. As we should expect, differences over politics and religion were determining causes. Thus Smedley adores the outstanding literary Whig Addison, contrasting the polish and beauty of Addison's style with Swift's failures, ugliness, ineptitude, vulgarity, intolerable filthiness. Likewise, following the author of the Letter, he writes favorably of Steele, castigating Swift for his treacherous betrayal of Steele's friendship. But his catalogue of Swift's vices is far more intriguing than that of our clergyman, his gossip far more detailed and malicious. Clearly, Swift could not possibly do anything to please some of his readers. If their hostile reactions have any meaning, they prove that Swift's political connections and high-church sympathies prevented many of his contemporaries from responding to the virtues of Gulliver's Travels; and that, on the contrary, his chief work was tapped for evidence of the author's suspected impiety and partisan politics.
That this hostility persisted far into the eighteenth century may be seen in the illuminating anecdote told in the 1780's by Horace Walpole, son of the "Great Man" so glowingly praised in the Letter from a Clergyman:
Swift was a good writer, but had a bad heart. Even to the last he was devoured by ambition, which he pretended to despise. Would you believe that, after finding his opposition to the ministry fruitless, and, what galled him still more, contemned, he summoned up resolution to wait on Sir Robert Walpole? Sir Robert seeing Swift look pale and ill, inquired the state of his health, with his usual old English good humour and urbanity. They were standing by a window that looked into the court-yard, where was an ancient ivy dropping towards the ground. "Sir," said Swift, with an emphatic look, "I am like that ivy; I want support." Sir Robert answered, "Why then, doctor, did you attach youself to a falling wall?" Swift took the hint, made his bow, and retired.[[8]]
Northern Illinois University