masterpiece, Jonathan Wild, is still condemned as an affront upon sound morality, George Meredith was asked to wait twenty years for readers, because he could not resist an ironic presentation. But it is Swift who has suffered most bitterly for the irony which was in his blood. All the sins and vices which he castigated have been visited by the unwary upon his innocent head. When he wrote in Mr Collins's Discourse, that "the Clergy who are so impudent to teach the people the doctrines of faith, are all either cunning knaves or mad fools," his enemies cried out upon him for an atheist. When in a second tract he declared that another "advantage proposed by the abolishing of Christianity, is the clear gain of one day in seven, which is now entirely lost, and consequently the kingdom one-seventh less considerable in trade, business and pleasure," he was denounced as a blasphemous hypocrite, who had gone into the Church with the base hope of gain. When, with his heart full of rage at the misery of Dublin, he wrote his Modest Proposal, he was charged with an
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