Cronin sees Beckett siding with Johnson's interpretation from his Life of Swift

254: The implication underlying Johnson's Life is that the famous sava indignatio the savage indignation of the epitaph in St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, was never very deeply grounded. Johnson portrays Swift as a rancorous and petulant man, disappointed of preferment, who reluctantly "turned Irishman for life' when he did not get the bishopric in England that he thought he deserved. The grounds of Swift's pessimism, he implies, are merely circumstantial; if his life, and the chances which influenced its turning points, had been different, Swift would have had a different outlook on things.

As it was, he became petulant, irritable, fretful about trifles, the sort of man who counted the faults of Lord Orrery's servants and despaired of human nature because it was not as he designed it to be. Marooned in Ireland, 'his asperity condemned him to solitude; and his resentment of solitude sharpened his asperity.'

Johnson, on the other hand, believed that human nature was inescabably flawed and the lives of human beings inevitably melancholy. True pessimism, he seems to say, is cooler and steadier than Swift's.