Charles Whibley (1859-1930) was an English literary journalist, author and essayist. Educated at Bristol Grammar School and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he took a first in classics in 1883, he became the Paris correspondent for the <i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, moving in symbolist circles with St&eacute;phane Mallarm&eacute;, Marcel Schwob, and Paul Val&eacute;ry.<br />It was an open secret that Whibley contributed anonymously, to the <i>Blackwood&#39;s Magazine</i>, his <i>Musings without Methods</i> for over twenty-five years. Thomas Stearns Eliot described them as &laquo;the best sustained piece of literary journalism that I know of in recent times&raquo;. Whibley was friends with William Ernest Henley and contributed to the <i>Scots Observer</i> and also to the <i>National Observer</i> under Henley&#39;s editorship.<br /><i>Jonathan Swift</i>, the short essay that we propose to our readers today, is a lecture delivered by Charles Whibley to the University of Cambridge on May 26 1917. It is dedicated to the great Anglo-Irish satirist, author, poet, essayist, and political pamphleteer, remembered for works such as <i>A Tale of a Tub</i> (1704), <i>An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity</i> (1712), <i>Gulliver&#39;s Travels</i> (1726), and <i>A Modest Proposal</i> (1729).