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Today's Featured Biography
Jonathan Swift
 Jonathan Swift's father died before the boy was born, and the care of his education was kindly undertaken by Mr. Godwin Swift, his uncle, a very eminent attorney at Dublin, who likewise took his mother and his sister under his protection, and thus became a guardian to the family. When his nephew was six years of age he sent him to school at Kilkenny, and about eight years afterward he entered him a student of Trinity College in Dublin, where Swift lived in perfect regularity and in an entire obedience to the statutes; but the moroseness of his temper often rendered him unacceptable to his companions, so that he was little regarded and less beloved; nor were the academical exercises agreeable to his genius.
He held logic and metaphysics in the utmost contempt, and he scarcely attended at all to mathematics and natural philosophy, unless to turn them into ridicule. The studies which he chiefly followed were history and poetry, in which he made great progress; but to other branches of science he had given so very little application, that when he appeared as a candidate for the degree of bachelor of arts, after having studied four years, he was set aside on account of insufficiency, and at last obtained his admission speciali gratia, a phrase which in that university carries with it the utmost marks of reproach. Swift was fired with indignation at the treatment he had received in Ireland, and therefore resolved to pursue his studies at Oxford. However, that he might be admitte...
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