Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. (London 1651). It is now six years since these papers came first to my hand, which seems to have been about a twelvemonth after they were written; for the author tells us in his preface to the first treatise, that he has calculated it for the year 1697, and in several passages of that discourse, as well as the second, it appears they were written about that time.

masters. There is also the spelling-school, a very spacious building: the school of looking-glasses: the school of swearing: the school of critics: the school of salivation: the school of hobby-horses: the school of poetry: the school of tops: the school of spleen: the school of gaming: with many others too tedious to recount. No person to be admitted member into any of these schools without an attestation under two sufficient persons' hands, certifying him to be a wit. A Tale of a Tub is an enormous parody with a number of smaller parodies within it. Many critics have followed Swift's biographer Irvin Ehrenpreis in arguing that there is no single, consistent narrator in the work. [9] One difficulty with this position, however, is that if there is no single character posing as the author, then it is at least clear that nearly all of the "personae" employed by Swift for the parodies are so much alike that they function as a single identity. In general, whether a modern reader would view the book as consisting of dozens of impersonations or a single one, Swift writes the Tale through the pose of a Modern or New Man. See the abridged discussion of the "Ancients and Moderns", below, for more on the nature of the "modern man" in Swift's day. [10] which he once lent a gentleman, who had designed a discourse of somewhat the same subject; he never thought of it afterwards; and it was a sufficient surprise to see it pieced up together, wholly out of the method and scheme he had intended; for it was the groundwork of a much larger discourse, and he was sorry to observe the materials so foolishly employed. John Eachard, The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion Enquired into. (1670).Another: Sir, It is merely in obedience to your commands that I venture into the public; for who upon a less consideration would be of a party with such a rabble of scribblers, &c. David George Boyce; Robert Eccleshall; Vincent Geoghegan (eds.), Political discourse in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland. (Basingstoke and New York 2001). If, by altering the title, I could make the same materials serve for another dedication, (as my betters have done,) it would help to make up my loss; but I have made several persons dip here and there in those papers, and before they read three lines, they have all assured me plainly, that they cannot possibly be applied to an persons besides your lordship.

There is a strange paradox here: Swift wanted to disavow his connection with the work, yet at the same time he wanted the genius evident in the satire to be recognised as his. Horace, Sat. I. 1, 30 Fortune being indebted to them this part of retaliation, that, as formerly they have long talked whilst others slept, so now they may sleep as long whilst others talk. For one description of the structure of A Tale of a Tub, see Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, his Works, and the Age: Mr Swift and his Contemporaries, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1962): 185–203. Montag, Warren (1994). The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man. Verso Books. p.113. ISBN 978-1-85984-000-9. Quoting William Wotton:Richard Bentley, A dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris. [Published as an appendix to Wotton's 2nd edition of 'Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning' 1697.]

The other answer is from a person of a graver character, and is made up of half invective, and half annotation; in the latter of which he has generally succeeded well enough. 14 And the Works mentioned in text or notes• Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. 1604. So that if ever any design was unfortunately executed, it must be that of this answerer, who, when he would have it observed that the author's wit is not his own, is able to produce but three instances, two of them mere trifles, and all three manifestly false. If this be the way these gentlemen deal with the world in those criticisms, where we have not leisure to defeat them, their readers had need be cautious how they rely upon their credit; and whether this proceeding can be reconciled to humanity or truth, let those who think it worth their while determine.For a short history of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714, New York: Penguin (1996). In the case of the satire on writing and scholarship, as we have seen in the first half of this lecture, texts like Dryden's Virgil and scholarship of Bentley that are being undermined. They are works whose claim to authority is spurious, and whose authors fail to pay homage to the only true originals of classical civilisation. containing additional letters, tracts, and poems, not hitherto published. With notes, and a life of the author. 19 vols. (Edinburgh: printed for Archibald Constable and Co.; White, Cochrane, and Co., and Gale, Curtis, and Fenner, London; and John Cumming, Dublin 1814). He thinks it no fair proceeding, that any person should offer determinately to fix a name upon the author of this discourse, who has all along concealed himself from most of his nearest friends: yet several have gone a farther step, and pronounced another book 9 to have been the work of the same hand with this; which the author directly affirms to be a thorough mistake, he having yet never so much as read that discourse: a plain instance how little truth there often is in general surmises, or in conjectures drawn from a similitude of style, or way of thinking.