Masters

Christopher Ricks

• Swift: The Man, His Works and the Age: Vol III. Dean Swift by Irvin Ehrenpreis
  Methuen, 1066 pp, 40.00, December 1983, ISBN 0 416 85400 1
• Swift’s Tory Politics by F.P. Lock
  Duckworth, 189 pp, £18.00, November 1983, ISBN 0 7156 1755 9
• Jonathan Swift: Political Writer by J.A. Downie
  Routledge, 391 pp, £25.00, March 1984, ISBN 0 7100 9645 3
• The Character of Swift’s Satire edited by Claude Rawson
  Associated University Presses, 343 pp, £22.50, April 1984, ISBN 0 87413 209 6

The life of Swift by Irvin Ehrenpreis is a great act of consonance. But one reviewer has deprecated the fact that Ehrenpreis does not write with Swift’s genius. So the first thing to say is that Ehrenpreis, though he has the great good sense never to emulate the supreme Swiftian manner, does nevertheless command the steely style which T.S. Eliot praised. Deploring the symptoms of decay in the wording of the preface to the Revised Prayer Book, Eliot concluded: ‘And there was once a Dean (of St Patrick’s) who formed the purest, the most supple, the most useful type of English prose style.’ (Eliot’s parenthesis is a tacit rebuke to metropolitan and national vanity.)