JONATHAN SWIFT (508 pp.) John Middleton MurryNoonday Press ($6).
Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of human kind pass by.
Thus Oliver Goldsmith saw the inhabitants of 18th century London. Their armies under Marlborough had defeated Europe's greatest power on its own soil; they had overthrown the old religion and prospered. The revolution of 1688, which guaranteed a Protestant monarch, seemed to have fixed everything. But the bloody slogans of church-state and King-Commons still echoed in English ears, and men who no longer wished to hear a bugle or a Mass would listen to Handel,...
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