SATIRES AND PERSONAL WRITINGS

By Jonathan Swift. Edited with Introduction and Notes by William Alfred Eddy, Assistant Professor of English in Dartmouth College. Oxford University Press. 1932. xxxii -plus 499 pp.

A few years ago, the Oxford Press reprinted Swift's Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of a Tub, and The Battle of the Books in one volume of the Oxford Standard Authors series. The present volume was designed as a supplement to the earlier one, and the two together form the most satisfactory selection from Swift's writings which is now on the market. In the Satires and Personal Writings, Professor Eddy has given us the best of Swift's brief essays, verses, and letters, and has wisely preferred to reprint the light and witty satires rather than the argumentative political tracts. As far as possible, the original editions are reproduced integrally, and the text is unmutilated. The editorial notes and introduction are excellent. Eighteenthcentury specialists will admire the thorough scholarship and skillful compression in Professor Eddy's work, and the general reader will enjoy a book which triumphantly illustrates the gayety, variety, and spontaneity rather than the morose bitterness of Swift. By previous biographers and anthologists, the author of Gulliver has been more or less consistently misrepresented as a pathological pessimist, a lunatic, a highwayman, a tiger, a glorified gorilla, or (in somewhat fresher metaphor) as a huge relentless battleship mounting an armament 'of nothing smaller than twelve-inch guns. The Swift revealed by Professor Eddy's volume is a mixed fleet of battleships, destroyers, submarines, airplanes, and pleasure-craft,—a fleet engaged in hilarious and genial regattamaneuvers as often as in deadly warfare. And it is a very entertaining spectacle.