To build a house for fools and mad—
To show, by one sarcastic touch,
No nation needed one so much!”
No writer better knew how to enrage the English. He took a savage delight in tormenting them, wounding their vanity, and exposing their weaknesses. Neither did he spare the Irish; and, as for the Scotch, he rivaled Dr. Samuel Johnson in his dislike of that people. In our day, the average summer-up of merits and demerits would describe Jonathan Swift as “a gifted crank.”
Associated with him in the moral war against English interference in Ireland’s domestic concerns were such other shining lights of the period as Dr. Sheridan, ancestor of Richard Brinsley, and others of that brilliant “ilk”: Dr. Stopford, the able Bishop of Cloyne, and Doctors Jackson, Helsham, Delaney, and Walmsley, nearly all men of almost pure English descent. McGee also credits “the three reverend brothers Grattan”—a name subsequently destined to immortality—with good work in the same connection.
Whatever the private faults of Swift, Ireland must ever hold his memory in reverence, with those of many other Irish non-Catholic patriots, who, although they had little or no Celtic blood in their veins, and were brought up under English influences, nobly preferred the interests of their unfortunate native country to the smiles and favors of her oppressors. And so Ireland, considering these things, blesses
“—The men of patriot pen,
Swift, Molyneux, and Lucas,”
as fervently as if they belonged to the race of the Hy-Niall or Kinel-Conal.
Nor must it be supposed that the Patriot element, led by Swift, escaped persecution at the hands of the Protestant oligarchy, although they, too, were of the Established Church. Swift himself was discriminated against all his life, because of his advocacy of Irish manufactures, his discrediting of Wood’s “brass money,” and his defeat of the mischievous national bank project, which was germane to it. As diocese after diocese became vacant in Ireland, he saw dullards promoted to the sees, while he was deliberately overlooked, simply because he had advocated justice to Ireland! This injustice afterward passed into a proverb. Said an Irish orator, in after years, speaking of another great Irishman who had also suffered from English resentment: “The curse of Swift was upon him—to have been born an Irishman, to have been blessed with talents, and to have used those talents for the benefit of his country!”