You know, people just don't talk that way anymore

"Swift's seems to me to be as good a name to point a moral or adorn a tale of ambition, as any hero's that ever lived and failed.  But we must remember that the morality was lax - that other gentlemen besides himself took the road in his day - that public society was in a strange disordered condition, and the State was ravaged by other condottieri.  The Boyne was being fought and won, and lost - the bells rung in William's victory, in the very same tone with which they would have pealed for James's.  Men were loose upon politics, and has to shift for themselves.  They, as well as old beliefs and institutions, had lost their moorings and gone adrift in the storm.  As in the South Sea Bubble, almost everybody gambled; as in the Railway mania - not many centuries ago - almost every one took his unlucky share:  a man of that time, of the vast talents and ambition of Swift, could scarce do otherwise than grasp at his prize, and make his spring at his opportunity.  His bitterness, his scorn, his rage, his subsequent misanthropy, are ascribed by some panegyrists to the deliberate conviction of mankind's unworthiness, and a desire to amend them by castigating.  His youth was bitter, as that of a great genius bound down by ignoble ties, and powerless in a mean dependence; his age was bitter, like that of a great genius that had fought the battle and nearly won it, and lost it, and thought of it afterwards writhing in a lonely exile.  A man may attribute to the gods, if he likes, what is caused by his own fury, or disappointment, or self-will.  What public man - what statesman projecting a coup - what king determined on an invasion of his neighbor - what satirist meditating an onslaught on society or an individual, can't give a pretext for his move?"


-William Makepeace Thackeray,
excerpted from his essay Jonathan Swift