James Arbuckle and Dean Swift: cultural politics in the Irish confessional state

James Arbuckle, born a Presbyterian in Belfast, educated at Glasgow University, moved to Dublin under the patronage of the radical Whig Viscount Molesworth. He arrived at the time of Swift's triumph as ‘The Drapier’. Writing under the name ‘Hibernicus’, he produced a series of essays in the style of Addison's Spectator (1725–26). They can be read as a ‘polite’ Whig critique of Swift's Irish writing, particularly on confessional division. Arbuckle was clearly identified as a political opponent of Swift in a series of lampoons from Swift's circle. He wrote more incisively against the confessional state in his 1729 work The Tribune, lost to historians because of a mistaken attribution to Swift's friend Delany. This article will study Arbuckle's critique of Swift, aiming to give an insight into cultural conflict, both Whig/Tory and Anglican/Presbyterian in a period when both Whig and Presbyterian views have generally been overlooked.     

Spatial Search for the Lowest Price

Search for low prices often requires that individuals make decisions not only about the optimal amount of search, but also about the optimal route to be taken through a set of known locations. In this paper, the fixed sample size strategy used in economic models of search is extended to account for the travel costs that are incurred as alternatives are examined. Analytical results for the optimal amount of search are given, and alternative routing algorithms for a modified version of the traveling-salesman problem are evaluated.