Page 28 - Gullivers

Likewise, the most affluent of Irish landowners build townhouses in the Irish capital, and Iveagh House, Tyrone House (now the Department of Education), Clanwilliam House (85 St. Stephen’s Green, now part of Newman House), and Leinster House were among the magnificent private residences built in Swist’s lifetime – though the Irish parliament was characteristically in session for less than six months during any two-year period.
When Swist did come to take Dublin as his subject in one of his most fascinating pœms, written in the 1720s, he re-imagined the Irish capital as a second London, as contemporary pœts – John Dryden or Pope, for instance – imagined London as a second Rome. In ‘To Charles Ford, Esq, on his Birthday’ (1723), Swist appealed to an Irish friend to return from England to Ireland.
‘In London’, he asks rhetorically, ‘what would you do there?’. Of course, Swist knew very well what might be the attractions London held for a young, cultured Irishman. Dublin, by contrast, Swist suggests is politically and culturally nowhere. Recalling his own enforced return to the city aster the death of Queen Anne in 1714 put an end to any hopes he might have had of preferment within the Church in England, Swist writes:
I thought my very spleen would burst When fortune drove me hither first; Was full as hard to please as you, Nor person’s names, nor places knew; But now I act as other folk,
Like prisoners when their gall is broke. (ll. 51-56)
The resignation that characterises these lines, however jocular, is not a great enticement to Ford to return. And it is now that Swist changes tactic, construing Dublin as another London:
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