The Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age in literary history, always calls for an eminent name as a convenient label: the Age of Dryden, of Johnson. A writer who gives the period he lived in his name must have been an acknowledged authority in his own time, a conspicuous leader in his style and opinions—which cuts out Dante, or Shakespeare. But what name can be attached to the period 1700-1740? Pope and Swift are the first names that come to mind. In retrospect it was just as much the age of Defoe, but he was despised in his time as a hack pamphleteer. And Congreve, as brilliantly gifted as any of the three, gave up with the appearance of The Way of the World and retired into a thirty-year silence.

Pope and Swift were in many ways temperamental opposites. Swift was a hypochondriac, naturally endowed with health and vigor, but with a morbid hatred and disgust for the fleshly functions: a man too who lived in daily terror of smallpox. Invited once to stay at a country house with a group of friends, he was made the victim of a hoax to play up his terrors. One of the group, on some pretext or other, went ahead of the party, to meet them on their arrival at the gates of the great house with solemn news: there was a case of smallpox in the household. Nothing would induce Swift to enter it. There were small buildings of