Johnson disliked Swift but had an intense self-implicating interest in him, sharing much of his social, psychological and devotional outlook, and exhibiting a wide and life-long reading of his works. He found Swift's irony, and satire in general, unsympathetic, but wrote in a manner deeply shaped by Swift and other Augustan satirists. His relationship with Hester Thrale included a self-conscious and often conflicted awareness of Swift's friendship with Stella. His novel Rasselas shares with Swift's 'Digression on Madness' a strikingly similar diagnosis of humanity's mental constitution, but draws teasingly opposite and sometimes adversarial consequences from it. Johnson's antipathies coexist with a reluctant sense of likeness, a combination implicit in the forthrightly evasive and wayward judgments of the 'Life of Swift', from which the main examples are drawn. Their nevertheless compelling power (like that of F. R. Leavis's very different but equally
The first time Lob left his owner to see Sandy, Sandy's father returned him immediately. How does Lob show his devotion to Sandy as he continues to return to her throughout the story? “About a yard of his tongue was out, and he was licking every part of her that he could reach.
