As the years went on Swift found his position grow more and more irksome.
Swift was now his own master, but he found it dull.
It was now that Swift wrote the two little books which first made him famous.
The complexity of Swift's character and the great difference between the viewpoints of his age and of ours make it easy at the present time to judge him with too great harshness.
'Pray, madam, are you as proud and ill-natured to-day as when I saw you last?' It seems, indeed, that throughout his life Swift's mind was positively abnormal, and this may help to excuse the repulsive elements in his writings.
Swift's prose style has substantially the same qualities.
"Well, Tom, have you heard any more about your friend?" asked Ned, two days later, as he came to the Swift home with some papers needing the signature of the young inventor and his father.
I can find my way in to Tom Swift perfectly well by myself, and while I appreciate your courtesy I do not want to trouble you."
In the room in the house next door Kate Swift had not yet appeared.
On the January night, after he had come near dying with cold and after his mind had two or three times actually slipped away into an odd land of fan- tasy so that he had by an exercise of will power to force himself back into consciousness, Kate Swift appeared.
Why, pray, do you set your swift horses at us, men who are tried in labour and pain?
467-471) But the son of Alemena and glorious Iolaus stripped the fine armour off Cycnus' shoulders and went, and their swift horses carried them straight to the city of Trachis.