The character of Swift seems to have been a curious medley of startling contrasts -- of goodness & badness, of worth & unworthiness, of greatness & littleness, of towering pride & cringing baseness, of feeble love & fickle hate, of imperial genius & grovelling vulgarity and obscenity.

Void of every tender grace, every kindly, humanizing element, what a bare, glittering iceberg is mere intellectual greatness, -- & such was Swift's.
- marginalia written in William Makepeace Thackeray's Thackeray's Lectures: The English Humorists. Transcribed in Coley Taylor's Mark Twain's Margins on Thackeray's "Swift" (1935).