denationalized people. Beneath the lean and starved ribs of death Swift
planted a soul; it is for this that Irishmen will ever revere his
memory.

In the composition of the "Letters" Swift had set himself a task
peculiarly fitting to his genius. Those qualities of mind which enabled
him to enter into the habits of the lives of footmen, servants, and
lackeys found an even more congenial freedom of play here. His knowledge
of human nature was so profound that he instinctively touched the right
keys, playing on the passions of the common people with a deftness far
surpassing in effect the acquired skill of the mere master of oratory.
He ordered his arguments and framed their language, so that his readers
responded with almost passionate enthusiasm to the call he made upon
them. Allied to his gift of intellectual sympathy with his kind was a
consummate ability in expression, into which he imparted the fullest
value of the intended meaning. His thought lost nothing in its
statement. Writing as he did from the point of view of a tradesman, to
the shopkeepers, farmers, and common people of Ireland, his business was
to speak with them as if he were one of them. He had already laid bare
their grievances caused by the selfish legislation of the English
Parliament, which had ruined Irish manufactures; he had written grimly
of the iniquitous laws which had destroyed the woollen trade of the
country; he had not forgotten the condition of the people as he saw it
on his journeys from Dublin to Cork--a condition which he was later to
reveal in the most terrible of his satirical tracts--and he realized
with almost personal anguish the degradation of the people brought about
by the rapacity and selfishness of a class which governed with no
thought of ultimate consequences, and with no apparent understanding of
what justice implied. It was left for him to precipitate his private
opinion and public spirit in such form as would arouse the nation to a