'For Gulliver divinely shews, / That Humankind are all Yahoos'
A Panegyric on the Reverend D--n S----t. In Answer to the Libel on Dr. D--y, and a Certain Great L--d.
[Dublin]: [s.n.], 1729-30.
Price: $5,000.00
About the item
First edition. Woodcut headpiece. 8 pp. 12mo. 'For Gulliver divinely shews, / That Humankind are all Yahoos'. Disbound. ESTC T497; Foxon P36; Rogers 810; Rothschild 2121; Teerink 691; Williams II, p. 491.
Item #308184
Rare copy of an anti-Swift satire variously attributed to the minor Irish poet James Arbuckle and Swift himself. The poem, which paints Swift's misanthropy as a form of self-regard, was one of a series of "libels" in response to a poetical address to Lord Carteret by Swift's friend, Patrick Delany. The poem was attributed to Swift by Ball in his edition of the correspondence on evidence gleaned from the letters; in an October 1730 letter to Lord Bathurst, Swift referred to "all the libels that have been writ against me … and among the rest a very scrub one in verses lately written by myself." Faulkner's 1768 edition of Swift's works attributed the poem to Arbuckle. The case for Arbuckle's authorship has been more recently made by James Woolley ("Arbuckle's 'Panegyric' and Swift's Scrub Libel: The Documentary Evidence," in Contemporary Studies of Swift's Poetry, University of Delaware Press, 1981, pp. 191-209), who gathers evidence from a bound collection of Arbuckle's printed and manuscript poems — including a corrected copy of the 1730 London edition of "A Panegyric" — in the National Library of Wales: "In effect, this volume stands as his tacit claim to have written the poem, a claim the more persuasive because it is unlikely to have been made to deceive" (p. 201).
