The rage, which, as he said himself, tore his heart out, carried him to strange excesses.

There is something ironical (he would himself have appreciated it) in the popularity of _Gulliver's Travels_ as a children's book--that ascending wave of savagery and satire which overwhelms policy and learning to break against the ultimate citadel of humanity itself.

In none of his contemporaries (except perhaps in the sentimentalities of Steele) can one detect the traces of emotion; to read Swift is to be conscious of intense feeling on almost every page.

The surface of his style may be smooth and equable but the central fires of passion are never far beneath, and through cracks and fissures come intermittent bursts of flame.

Defoe's irony is so measured and studiously commonplace that perhaps those who imprisoned him because they believed him to be serious are hardly to be blamed; Swift's quivers and reddens with anger in every line.
But his pen seldom slips from the strong grasp of his controlling art.
The extraordinary skill and closeness of his allegorical writings--unmatched in their kind--is witness to the care and sustained labour which went to their making.