Because they criticize the emergent political economy of capitalism and sometimes parody the experimental and descriptive procedures of natural science, the “Tory satirists” of the early eighteenth century are often considered as anti-materialist writers. If materialism means greed or denial of immortality, they are. If materialism means a belief that the questions most often worth writing about are, to use an important Swiftian word, “fundamental” problems of the relations of bodily beings to their environment, products, and each other, then they clearly are not anti-materialists. At this date it should not still have to be recalled that the point of Swift's “Celia, Celia, Celia shits” is not that Celia does but that Cassinus thought she didn't.