"Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is an inexhaustibly intriguing figure in the literary and political history of England and Ireland. Best known as the author of Gulliver's Travels, he was an ordained clergyman whose enemies thought he did not believe in God. He became a legendary dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin whose ambition for church preferment in England was perpetually frustrated. For four short, intoxicating years he was the intimate of Queen Anne's chief ministers, as well as their publicist and propagandist - a "spin doctor" before the term was invented. His private life was intense and enigmatic. Two younger women, whom he called Stella and Vanessa, moved to Ireland to be close to him. He made both of them unhappy."--BOOK JACKET. "Poet, polemicist, pamphleteer, and wit, Swift is the master of shock. His furious satirical responses to the corruption and hypocrisy he saw around him in private and public life have every relevance for our own times. His black imagination, and

""I would like to think that there are things in my own life that might attract the interest of others-even if only to spark in them a recollection of similar escapades and experiences of their own." -Herbert O'Driscoll Beloved preacher and author, Herbert O'Driscoll, offers his life story in his own words. The first section includes memories from his childhood and student years lived mainly in the south of Ireland. The second section tells stories from his years of active ministry in Canada, the United States, and other parts of the world church. The last portion recalls experiences from his retirement years and his facilitation of pilgrimages to the Middle East, Ireland, and Great Britain. "One could say it has been a relatively unadventurous life, but it is one in which I have been given gifts of love and friendship, and opportunities to learn and grow, far beyond my counting or deserving . . . These pages allow me to revisit in memory the times when, and places where, I was given s

The purpose of this study is to put forward an interpretation of Swift's work based entirely on the writings themselves and on their relation to ideas, attitudes, and literary methods current in his own day. It arises from the belief that one cause of the frequent misunderstanding of the major satires is that they have been considered in isolation from the political tracts, the letters, the sermons, the sets of maxims, and even in isolation from one another. It is perfectly possible, I believe, to interpret Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of a Tub, and indeed all Swift's work, satisfactorily, by following his guidance as a responsible satirist in each individual work, and this is what the last two chapters of this study set out to do. Swift's characteristic ways of thinking and of writing are intimately related to the conditions of his time. His ideas are, for the most part, traditional, those of his Christian classical heritage, but his ways of reaching them, holding to them, and expressin