In an effort to educate myself, I am reading The Oxford Book of Essays, chosen and edited by John Gross. [copies for sale here] There’s 142 of the blighters, so it will take me all year. To make this “stick” I am going to blog each essay.
This essay is online
Who was the author:
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish[1] writer, essayist, satirist, and Anglican cleric. He was the author of the satirical prose novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and the creator of the fictional island of Lilliput. He is regarded by many as the greatest satirist of the Georgian era and one of the foremost prose authors in the history of English and world literature.[2][3][4]
What happened the year they were born (and the C02 ppm): 1667
The Big Events they were alive for: A lot! Battle of the Boyne, Glorious Revolution, Jacobites etc
What happened in the year they died (and the C02 ppm): 1745
My awareness of/appreciation of this author (if any): Well, I’ve read Gulliver’s Travels, albeit almost 40 years ago.
What’s the essay?
The essay is called “Good Manners and Good Breeding.” It’s 5 pages long. For me, the key take-aways were that Swift was smart?
Best line(s)
Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners: without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience; or of what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.
wise men are often more uneasy at the over civility of these refiners, than they could possibly be in the conversations of peasants or mechanics.
Pedantry is properly the overrating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to. And if that kind of knowledge be a trifle in itself, the pedantry is the greater.
Stuff I had to look up
Coxcomb archaic a vain and conceited man; a dandy.
Lipsius
Justus Lipsius (Joest Lips[1] or Joost Lips; October 18, 1547 – March 23, 1606) was a Flemish Catholic philologist, philosopher, and humanist. Lipsius wrote a series of works designed to revive ancient Stoicism in a form that would be compatible with Christianity. The most famous of these is De Constantia (On Constancy). His form of Stoicism influenced a number of contemporary thinkers, creating the intellectual movement of Neostoicism. He taught at the universities in Jena, Leiden, and Leuven.
Joseph Justus Scaliger (/ˈskælɪdʒər/; 5 August 1540 – 21 January 1609) was a Franco-Italian Calvinist religious leader and scholar, known for expanding the notion of classical history from Greek and Ancient Roman history to include Persian, Babylonian, Jewish and Ancient Egyptian history. He spent the last sixteen years of his life in the Netherlands.
Joseph Justus Scaliger – Wikipedia
Stuff worth thinking about.
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Stuff to look up
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Connects to (watch this space – if there are later essays that resonate with this one, I’ll come back and add a link to the post for that essay).
marchudson.net 
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