"Dean Swift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Dean Swift, in a letter to Lord Bolingbroke, says that he does not "remember to have ever heard or seen one great genius who had long success in the ministry; and recollecting a great many in my memory and acquaintance, those who had the smoothest time were, at best, men ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... very ancient races. A remnant of the former is found in Wales, while the survivors of the latter are the Irish and Scotch Highlanders. Northern France and Wales have strong Celtic contingents. Byron, "Rare" Ben Jonson, Christopher North, Oliver Goldsmith, Dean Swift, Lawrence Sterne and Louis Stevenson were Celts by blood. Scott, Burns, Carlyle and Macaulay were Scots of Celtic extraction. Tom Moore, Brinsley Sheridan and Edmund Burke were Irishmen, as are Balfe and Sullivan, the musical composers. Disraeli was a Jew. The genealogy of Pope and Tennyson remain ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... rare natures, too, though they are sometimes very vicious—from their loathing of the excremental side of life. Swift was one of these. The "disgusting" in his writing is a pathological form, not at all unusual, of such a loathing. But Rabelais is no Dean Swift—nor is there the remotest resemblance between them. Rabelais may really save us from our loathing by the huge all-embracing friendliness of ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... scandal to the young, to see such men listened to as God's messengers, in spite of their utter want of any manhood or virtue, simply because they are "orthodox," each according to the shibboleths of his hearers, and possess that vulpine "discretion of dulness," whose miraculous might Dean Swift sets forth in his "Essay on the Fates of Clergymen." Such men do exist, and prosper; and as long as they are allowed to do so, Alton Lockes will meet them, and ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... Neely came to camp and told us he had been that day to Lulbegrud, and had killed two Brobdignags in their capital." Far from unlettered were pioneers who indulged together in such literary chat and gave to the near-by creek the name (after Dean Swift's Lorbrugrud) of Lulbegrud which name, first seen on Filson's map of Kentucky (1784), it bears to this day. From one of his long, solitary hunts Stewart never returned; and it was not until five years later, while cutting out the Transylvania Trail, that Boone and his companions ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... Suffragan to America; and, even then, the bishops of Scotland "were regarded as the channel through which that assistance could most readily be obtained." [Footnote: Anderson, iii. 36.] The project came to no result. If there is any truth in the tradition that, had it been carried out, Dean Swift would have been sent as Bishop of Virginia, we may be ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... Travels, by Dean Swift. (One modern edition, with introduction by W.D. Howells, and more than one hundred illustrations by Louis Rhead, is published by Harpers. Another edition, illustrated by Arthur ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... in London, and his conscience—happier, perhaps, in this than if he had enjoyed the ecclesiastical preferment which King William seemed so anxious to give him. Amongst the clergy, Dr. Burnet was, with the single exception of Dean Swift, the greatest Freethinker of whom we can boast, who held an influential position in the Church. This position is sometimes claimed for Bishop Berkeley, a man of vast talents, a sincere Christian, although an ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... beg you to accept my best thanks for the uncommon degree of entertainment which I have received from the most excellently jocose History of New York.... I have never read anything so closely resembling the style of Dean Swift as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. I have been employed these few evenings in reading them aloud to Mrs. Scott and two ladies who are our guests, and our sides have been absolutely sore with laughing. I ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... occupations and experiences. It sustains the same relation to biography that chronicles or annals do to history: it furnishes the materials out of which biography is made. When the diarist is a man of prominence, as in the case of Dean Swift, his journal throws an interesting light not only upon his own life but also upon the times in which he lives. It introduces us to men in the freedom and frankness of private life. When the diary is kept, not with a view to subsequent publication but merely ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... how I preach. You used occasionally to sermonize too; I wish you would, in charity, favour me with a sheet full in your own way. I admire the close of a letter Lord Bolingbroke writes to Dean Swift:—"Adieu dear Swift! with all thy faults I love thee entirely: make an effort to love me with all mine!" Humble servant, and all that trumpery, is now such a prostituted business, that honest friendship, in her sincere way, must have ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the term by which the ancient Greek or Roman used to distinguish hiss religion from the rival religions of other and heretical pagans. Just as Orthodoxy, according to DEAN SWIFT, means "my doxy," and Heterodoxy, the doxy of other people; so the pious Roman used to speak of "my thology" as the only genuine religion; the "thologies" of other men being cheap and worthless counterfeits ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... York and look at the twenty-storied, sky-scrapers built by the Adamses. They look like houses out of a story by Dean Swift. The wildest dreams of architecture. Yet they don't fall down; they serve their purpose, for the dreamers who built them were at ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... a very singular turn of humour, and though, without the abilities, bore some resemblance to the famous dean of St. Patrick's, and perhaps was not so subject to those capricious whims which produced so much uneasiness to all who attended upon dean Swift. It is said of Dr. Main, that his propension to innocent raillery was so great, that it kept him company even after death. Among other legacies, he bequeathed to an old servant an old trunk, and somewhat in it, as he said, that would make him drink: no sooner did the Dr. expire, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... Colonel Parnell, writing in the English Historical Review on "Dean Swift and the Memoirs of Captain Carleton," has spoken of the biography as "this most partial, verbose, and inaccurate account of the dean's life and writings." He says also that in editing Carleton's Memoirs Scott adopted, without investigation and in the face of evidence, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... in his day was Haendel; and dared to cut that terrible Dean Swift, whose love affairs are perhaps the chief riddle of all amorous chronicle. Dean Swift is said to have said: "I admire Haendel principally because he conceals his petticoat peccadillos with such perfection." This statement ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... be a monotonous and ineffective picture; and thus the unlucky men of letters suffer posthumously for the stupidity of others as well as their faults or divergencies. When biographers have not facts, they are not unwilling to make use of fallacies: they set down "elephants for want of towns." Dean Swift is a case in point. Society has avenged itself by calumniating the man who spat upon its hypocrisies and rascalities; and to appease the wounded feelings of the world, he is attractively set down as a savage and a tyrant. Mr. Thackeray and others find such a verdict artistically suitable to their ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... of Egypt is all this scene. Her reverence, it is true, sits behind a curtain; but her virtue uses language which would shame the lowest European prostitute; and which is filthy almost as Dean Swift's. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... voice rings in this clear air! Do you know what Dean Swift says a sleigh-ride is like? 'Sitting in the draft of a door with your feet in a ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... a little while since I lay sick in Sydney, beating the fields about the navy and Dean Swift and Dryden's Latin hymns; judge if I love this reinvigorating climate, where I can already toil till my head swims and every string in the poor jumping Jack (as he now lies in bed) aches with a kind of yearning strain, difficult ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is doubtless recollected that Dean Swift, though a great favorite among the ladies, was (no doubt for good and substantial reasons) nevertheless a bachelor. His opinion of the married state seemed to be not very much exalted. On one occasion, he had been called upon to marry a couple, and after getting ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... arrangement" is nicely illustrated in the reappearance of history and the legendary heroes and in the disappearance of myths and fairy tales, for which there is, however, some compensation in the highly imaginative Gulliver's Travels, an extract from Dean Swift. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... tell a good jest, And please all the rest, Comes Dingley, and asks you, "What was it?" And before she can know, Away she will go To seek an old rag in the closet. Dean Swift. ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... much of the building material, so that most of the edifices have their exteriors disintegrated by the elements, particularly the churches—a peculiarity that may have probably partly justified Dean Swift's epigram, written when his bile was stirred because a rainstorm had prevented some of the Chester clergy ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... idea delights in miraculous instances of fidelity. What more charming to a young and ardent mind than the loves of Dante and Beatrix, of Eleonora and Tasso, of Petrarch and Laura, of Abelard and Heloise, or of Dean Swift and Stella? Young people do not reflect that most of these stories are apocryphal, and that the men who figure in them sought to add to their renown the prestige of originality; they put on a passion as ordinary mortals ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... rank next to that of Elizabeth (S393). There was indeed no great central luminary like Shakespeare, but a constellation of lesser ones,—such as Addison, Defoe, and Pope. They shone with a splendor of their own. The lurid brilliancy of the half-mad satirist Dean Swift was beginning to command attention; on the other hand, the calm, clear light of the philosopher John ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... would come a whiff of pure menagerie, only a little sourer, as from men instead of monkeys. I think we are human only in virtue of open windows. Without fresh air, you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable command of the Queen's English, to become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of leering, human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of offence. I do my best to keep my head the other way, and look for the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of the emigrant train. But one thing I must ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Dean Swift said that the man who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before serves well of his kind. Considering how much grass there is in the world and comparatively how little fun, we think that a still more deserving person is the man who ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... though he could reverence women, and admire them, and appreciate them also from the standpoint of the senses, they had no determining sway over his life or thought. If there be any man in English history whom such a summary of traits as this recalls, it is Dean Swift. Nevertheless Borrow's differences from him are far greater than the resemblances between them. Giant force was in both of them; both were enigmas; but the deeper we penetrate into Borrow, the more we like him; not so with the blue-eyed Dean. Borrow's depths are dark and tortuous, but ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... instead of authentic histories, we might have carried them anywhere else we chose: and we had a great mind to make Hayes philosophising with Bolingbroke, like a certain Devereux; and Mrs. Catherine maitresse en titre to Mr. Alexander Pope, Doctor Sacheverel, Sir John Reade the oculist, Dean Swift, or Marshal Tallard; as the very commonest romancer would under such circumstances. But alas and alas! truth must be spoken, whatever else is in the wind; and the excellent "Newgate Calendar," which contains the biographies and ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... foreshadowing of the discovery of the satellites of Mars will be familiar to readers of Gulliver's Travels. According to Dean Swift's hero, the astronomers on the Flying Island of Laputa had found two tiny satellites to Mars, one of which revolved around the planet in ten hours. The correctness of this guess is extraordinarily close, though at best it is, of course, ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... upper and middle classes as a whole, and it may be said that open immorality and gross intemperance have vanished. Four and six bottle men are as extinct as the dodo. Women of good repute do not gamble, and talk modelled upon Dean Swift's "Art of Polite Conversation" would be tolerated ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley |
