from "A Key to the Lock"

"To sum up my whole Charge against this Author in a few Words: He has ridiculed both the present Ministry and the last; abused great Statesmen and great Generals; nay the Treaties of whole Nations have not escaped him, nor has the Royal Dignity itself been omitted in the Progress of his Satyr; and all this he has done just at the Meeting of a new Parliament. I hope a proper Authority may be made use of to bring him to condign Punishment: In the mean while I doubt not, if the Persons most concern'd would but order Mr. Bernard Lintott, the Printer and Publisher of this dangerous Piece, to be taken into Custody, and examin'd; many further Discoveries might be made both of this Poet's and his Abettor's secret Designs, which are doubtless of the utmost Importance to the Government."

- "Esdras Barnivelt, Apothecary"

(aka, Alexander Pope, reviewing his own work)

Sexy shit.

The "opposite" of the ossature is the intestines, which gets us close to Swift's disgust with the excretions of the body--a disgust, as a significant quotation from Swift in Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral makes clear, that was also linked with sex, because of the way in which the body has economized in localizing the channels of these two functions. This sense of a union between love and filth was the essence of his working credo, that "everything spiritual and valuable has a gross and revolting parody, very similar to it, with the same name." If the "life within" equals intestines, and the "life without" equals a deceptive projection of the skeleton, and the man's love of woman is secretly tied to both, maybe there is no way of making peace with the state of things. One is on the run, like Whitman, but without the "salute."

 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History

image: A Scene from 'Description of a City Shower' by Jonathan Swift.  

Edward Penny, 1764.  

The Lithedale Bromance

"He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul."

Herman Melville,

"Hawthorne and His Mosses"

That's pretty grave.

"This is the third of my novels, and it depends on two very uncertain contingencies, whether it will not be the last;--the one being the public opinion, and the other mine own humour. The first book was written, because I was told that I could not write a grave tale; so, to prove that the world did not know me, I wrote one that was so grave nobody would read it; wherein I think that I had much the best of the argument."

James Fenimore Cooper,

Preface to The Pioneers (1823)