A Tale of a Tub
Robert Hendrickson notes in his book "British Literary Anecdotes" that "Swift was always partial to his strikingly original "The Tale of a Tub" (1704). On reading the work again in later years, he exclaimed 'Good God! What a genius I had when I wrote that book!'"
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."