CHAPTER THREE

MARSH AND BROWNE: ASS AND RIDER

For, towards the Operation already mentioned, many peculiar Properties are required, both in the Rider and the Ass; which I shall endeavour to set in as clear a Light as I can. Mechanical Operation of the Spirit 265

The furor in Britain over John Toland and his priest-baiting book precipitated a more intense controversy in Dublin. The irrepressible Toland arrived there in March 1697 with confident expectations of serving as Secretary to the new Lord Chancellor John Methuen.1 After a twelve-year hegira, he believed he was returning triumphantly to his native country to introduce a radical new religious and political system as essential to the Irish as it was to the British and other Europeans. Like a modem revolutionary, Toland was poised to spread his universal hermeneutics throughout the land; and on arrival he launched a vigorous campaign among Irish intellectuals, in their homes and in coffee houses, to publicize his startling positions. What ensued illustrated for Swift how surely the lapsing of the Licensing Act would encourage ambitious modems to engage in vicious dialectical combat that promoted civil unrest. The young man's natural enemies, bishops in the Church of Ireland, immediately initiated a brutal campaign against him. In particular, he aroused the implacable enmity of Narcissus Marsh, the Archbishop of Dublin, and his disciple Peter Browne. Browne had been Swift's classmate while Marsh was their Provost at Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1680s when Marsh's antipathy to Swift and cosseting of Browne began—attitudes that would continue well beyond publication of the Tale in 1704. Within a month of Toland's arrival, Archbishop Marsh, outraged at the heretic's infiltration of his See, dispatched Toland's book to Browne with a clear imperative: "It is no neglect in a shepherd to leave his feeding of the lambs and go aside for a while to beat off anything that comes to devour or

1 Alan D. Francis 358; Robert E. Sullivan 8-9; David Berman 121. 40 MARSH AND BROWNE: ASS AND RIDER infect them."2 Browne's own purposes and temper coincided with Marsh's, since throughout the decade he had been ambitious for preferment at Trinity College and in the Church of Ireland. He now seized the occasion to adapt the Archbishop's earlier writings on logic and sense analogies to Anglican rational apologetics; and in joining the fray against Toland, he also was eager to enter the dialectic with Locke on reason and Christianity. Browne's hasty A Letter in Answer to a Book entitled Christianity Not Mysterious, to be referred to as Answer, accordingly appeared in May 1697 under Marsh's imprimatur? His preferment was assured—while the career-impoverished and infuriate Swift was forced to languish at Moor Park. Thus in 1697 the Dublin Controversy pitted the heretical freethinker Toland against the Anglican sensationalist Browne—and ultimately the classical satirist Swift ridiculed both of them. Swift used what he observed in the clash of his contemporaries to condemn the rising modern consciousness, its antecedents, and its predictable consequences. Because he knew its three principals all too well, the Dublin theosophical donnybrook not only gener• ated and nourished the Tale but provided three major satiric victims. The preceding chapter detailed Swift's satire of Toland in the even-numbered sections of the Tale; and the exasperating pomposity of Marsh and Browne provoked him to satirize and parody them as ass and rider in the Mechanical Operation, appended to the Tale. Swift had both epistemological and personal reasons for attacking each man—and suddenly the unparalleled occasion to mock all three simultaneously for symbolizing the modern invasion of Ireland by Continental ideas. Swift's assertion—in the Apology preceding the 1710 edition of the Tale— that "the greatest part" of the book had been finished in 1696 is not accurate. Though the work indeed germinated from extensive reading and active reflection over a long period and includes satire based on Swift's experience as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin in the early 1680s, two controversies energized the shaping of the book but required time to be fit into its developing thought structure. The Temple-Bentley-Wotton and the Toland- Marsh-Browne affairs, in 1696 and 1697, provide bookends for the Tale: The Battle of the BooL· and the Mechanical Operation. Had the Tale appeared in 1698, just after the controversies reached climaxes the year before, the Dublin Controversy over Toland might have been counterbalanced by the Ancients- Moderns Controversy over Sir William Temple,4 Swift's Church of Ireland

2 Quoted by Arthur Robert Winnett 11. 3 For useful biographies of Marsh, see Muriel McCarthy and George T. Stokes; for a sound biography of Browne, see Winnett. 4 For the Swift-Temple relationship see below, pp. 109-35 and 137-57.