The mental and physical health of Dean Swift.

JONATHAN SWIFT is one of the greatest geniuses of English letters, and one whose stature increases with the years. In the last few years alone a vast amount of critical and biographical literature about him has been published. In spite of this he remains a most enigmatic personality. His public career abounds with contradictions and paradoxes, and his private life, particularly his relationships with women, is at first sight equally puzzling. Swift was indeed a most mysterious person, and the mystery surrounding him seems to be very largely of his own making. Most authors delight in recounting the experiences of their youth and adolescence, but Swift seldom does this, openly at least. He tells us very little of his origins and early upbringing, possibly because his knowledge was equally scanty. In the short Autobiographical Fragment, written in his later years, we get the feeling that he is telling us what he would like us to think and that what he is telling us may not necessarily be the truth. We are driven to the conclusion that he does not want the world to know too much about him. This is all the more striking because he was a very personal writer. He was also both introspective and a valetudinarian, and his medical history is in contrast fully documented, particularly in his letters. For his own reasons, which will be explained later, he could not disburden himself of the intimate matters of his tangled private life, but he could to some extent relieve his inner tensions by writing about his health. Nevertheless there is still a great deal of ignorance about Swift's medical