Sunday, May 22, 2016

 

The Royals

Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 66 (footnote omitted):
Spending time with the monarch gave Swift lasting immunity to hero worship, not that he was ever very susceptible to it. He once said in a sermon, "Princes are born with no more advantages of strength or wisdom than other men, and by an unhappy education are usually more defective in both than thousands of their subjects." According to Orrery, "his aversion to kings was invincible," and he was often heard to say that "he should be glad to see half a dozen kings dissected, that he might know what it was that stamped a greater value upon one prince than upon eleven millions of people."
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