... No one conversant with can have failed to be struck by the extraordinary lawlessness that prevailed at sea. The coasts for the most part were wit… - John Forster

... It is the fact that teaches, and not any sermonizing drawn from it. Oliver Twist is the history of a child born in a and brought up by overseers, and there is nothing introduced that is out of keeping with the design.

, whose life and adventures should be known to all who know his writings, must be held to have succeeded in nothing that his friends would have had him succeed in. He was intended for a clergyman, and was rejected when he applied for orders; he practiced as a physician, and never made what would have paid for a degree; what he was not asked or expected to do, was to write, but he wrote and paid the penalty. His existence was a continued privation. The days were few, in which he had resources for the night, or dared to look forward to the morrow.

... If to owe nothing to other men is to be original, a more original man than Swift never lived; but, with the wonderful subtlety of thought so rarely joined to the same robustness of intellect which placed his wit and philosophy on the level of Rabelais, he had the same habit as the great Frenchman of turning things inside out, and putting away decencies as if they were shows or hypocrisies. In both it led to an insufferable coarseness.