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Prose

Notes parsimony, prudence and temperance...learning to love our country...quitting our animosities and
factions...teaching landlords to have at least one degree of mercy towards their tenants....Therefore
I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, ‘till he hath at least some glympse
of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice.
Legacy
John Ruskin named him as one of the three people in history who were the most influential for
him. Swift crater, a crater on Mars’s moon Deimos, is named after Jonathan Swift, who predicted
the existence of the moons of Mars.

27.1 Textual Introduction

Having first appeared in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse of 1711, here numbered [1] to [46], Various
Thoughts was reprinted, with the addition of [47] to [97] and the variant title Thoughts on Various
Subjects, in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse: The First Volume in 1727. Swift had offered to send this
incremental installment to Pope in December 1726: “I have some few of those things I call thoughts
moral and diverting; if you please I will send the best I can pick from them, to add to the new
volume.”1 Pope’s response must have been encouraging, and the augmented Various Thoughts
duly appeared in the first volume of the Pope-Swift Miscellanies published on 24 June in the
following year.2 Both installments were reprinted in Faulkner’s Works of 1735. Finally, Further
Thoughts on Various Subjects were added in 1745. For the Historical Introduction, readers are
referred to Various Thoughts, Moral and Diverting.

27.2 Thoughts on Various Subjects

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. Reflect
on things past as wars, negotiations, factions, etc. We enter so little into those interests, that we
wonder how men could possibly be so busy and concerned for things so transitory; look on the
present times, we find the same humour, yet wonder not at all.
A wise man endeavours, by considering all circumstances, to make conjectures and form
conclusions; but the smallest accident intervening (and in the course of affairs it is impossible to
foresee all) does often produce such turns and changes, that at last he is just as much in doubt of
events as the most ignorant and inexperienced person.
Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and orators, because he that would obtrude his thoughts
and reasons upon a multitude, will convince others the more, as he appears convinced himself.
How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice, when they will not so much as take
warning?
I forget whether Advice be among the lost things which Aristo says are to be found in the moon;
that and Time ought to have been there. No preacher is listened to but Time, which gives us the
same train and turn of thought that older people have tried in vain to put into our heads before.
When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it;
when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones. In a glass-house the workmen often
fling in a small quantity of fresh coals, which seems to disturb the fire, but very much enlivens it.
This seems to allude to a gentle stirring of the passions, that the mind may not languish.
Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its
infancy. All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending
this year part of the next year’s revenue.
The latter part of a wise man’s life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions
he had contracted in the former.

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