...Macmillan. more pungently, enumerating the brilliant thinkers who would "in this our undistinguished age incur manifest danger of Phlebotomy, and Whips, and Chains, and Dark Chambers, and Straw." Even Wordsworth, seemingly the most sober of men, was driven to write: We poets in our youth begin...

...quire common, Swift's Hack observes in A Tale of a Tub (11(^4). "For, what Man in the natural Srare, or Course of Thinking, did ever conceive it in his Power, to reduce the Notions of Mankind, exacrly to the same Length, and Breadth, and Heighth of his own?" asks the Hack in his digression...

...Apollonius, Lucretius, Paracelsus, Des Cartes, and others' — would, 'if they were now in the World . . . incur manifest Danger of Phlebotomy, and Whips and Chains, and dark Chambers, and Straw1 ?• Timing, in fact, is everything. What is seen as mad at one time and treated in accordance...

...who, if they were now in the World, tied fast, and separate from their Followers, would in this our undistinguishing Age, incur manifest Danger of Phlebotomy,...and Whips, and Chains, and dark Chambers, and Straw. (89) Further, Swift sarcastically lays out Epicurus's and Descartes's systems as 'Conceptions, for...