[[1]] In The Intelligencer, No. III (1728), Swift defends Gay's satire on the "Great Man," The Beggar's Opera (1728), and continues his offensive against Sir Robert Walpole. Here it may be mentioned that in his apology for the irony used by persecuted dissenters, Anthony Collins [A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony (1729)] remarks that "High-Church" overlooked Swift's "drolling upon Christianity," and was unwilling to punish him because of his "Drollery upon the Whigs, Dissenters, and the War with France." Collins interprets the effect of Swift's wit on his church career as follows: "And his Usefulness in Drollery and Ridicule was deem'd sufficient by the Pious Queen Anne, and her pious Ministry, to intitle him to a Church Preferment of several hundred Pounds per Ann. ... notwithstanding [the objections of] a fanatick High-Churchman, who weakly thought Seriousness in Religion of more use to High-Church than Drollery" (pp. 39-40).

[[2]] G. A. Aitken, The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot (Oxford, 1892), pp. 123-124; and H. Teerink-Arthur H. Scouten, A Bibliography of the Writings of Jonathan Swift (Philadelphia, 1963), No. 1216, consider it an uncomplimentary attack on Swift and his friends—but mistakenly, I believe. Lester M. Beattie, John Arbuthnot: Mathematician and Satirist (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), p. 311, unqualifiedly rejects Arbuthnot's authorship of this work. But a correspondent to Notes and Queries, Sixth Series, VII (1883), 451-452, argues convincingly for the attribution to Arbuthnot.

[[3]] Gulliver Decypher'd (London, 1726), pp. 29-30; reprinted in Arbuthnot's Miscellaneous Works (Glasgow, 1751), I, 100.

[[4]] Gulliver Decypher'd, pp. 26n, 35; Misc. Works, I, 97n, 104.

[[5]] Gulliver Decypher'd, p. 38; Misc. Works, I, 106.

[[6]] Gulliver Decypher'd, p. 25; Misc. Works, I, 97.

[[7]] John Oldmixon, another Whig writer, repeats some of these slanders against Swift, even using some of the same words like "Trifling and Grimace"—in his reactions to the Swift-Pope Miscellanies and Gulliver's Travels. He too finds the tales in the Travels frivolous because lacking a moral and the satire a debasing of "the Dignity of human Nature" (The Arts of Logick and Rhetorick [London, 1728], pp. 416-418).

[[8]] John Pinkerton, Walpoliana (London, n.d.), I, 126-127. For additional typical evidences of Horace Walpole's antipathy, see his angry assaults on Swift's insolence, arrogance, vanity, and hypocrisy (including sexuality), in his letters to Montagu, 20 June 1766 and to Horace Mann, 13 January 1780; and a remark in his Anecdotes of Painting, Works (London, 1798), III, 438.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

This facsimile of A Letter from a Clergyman (1726) is reproduced from a copy in the British Museum.