The Battle of the Books
Jonathan Swift worked for William Temple during the time of the controversy, and Swift's "A Tale of a Tub" (1703/1705) takes part in the debate. From its first publication, Swift added a short satire entitled "The Battle of the Books" to the "Tale of a Tub." In this piece, there is an epic battle fought in a library when various books come alive and attempt to settle the arguments between moderns and ancients. In Swift's satire, he skilfully manages to avoid saying which way victory fell. He portrays the manuscript as having been damaged in places, thus leaving the end of the battle up to the reader.
Artistic inspiration
The musical model was satirized, along with the "afflatus," and "fancy" models of inspiration, by Jonathan Swift in "A Tale of a Tub." Swift's narrator suggests that madness is contagious because it is a ringing note that strikes "chords" in the minds of followers and that the difference between an inmate of Bedlam and an emperor was what pitch the insane idea was. At the same time, he satirized "inspired" radical Protestant ministers who preached through "direct inspiration." In his prefatory materials, he describes the ideal dissenter's pulpit as a barrel with a tube running from the minister's posterior to a set of bellows at the bottom, whereby the minister could be inflated to such an extent that he could shout out his inspiration to the congregation. Furthermore, Swift saw fancy as an antirational, mad quality, where, "once a man's fancy gets astride his reason, common sense is kick't out of doors."