To judge from most criticism of Swift's Tale of a Tub, the work is a skillful and powerful failure, because the faults Swift parodies have distilled into his own pen. For though the Tale is clearly meant to be an exposé of the literary sins of formless, ephemeral, and subjective writing, critics find that the brilliance of the book results from Swift's being guilty of just those sins. One critic finds in the Tale both confusion and the intrusion of Swift's “insane egotism” and his “sense of insecurity,” while other critics find order but at the expense of the other qualities. Mrs. Miriam K. Starkman examines the intellectual background of the book thoroughly and concludes that the confusion is the reader's rather than Swift's but that the Tale is a learned work of merely biographical and historical interest, a “meaningful and prodigiously skillful espousal of a lost cause.” Ricardo Quintana and Robert C. Elliott find that the Tale has unity but only because Swift's point of view, that man is essentially irrational, informs all sections of the book. Most of the critics, then, find Swift expressing his subjective attitudes and lacking a subject upon which he could comment with any objectivity and universality. “So diverse is this subject matter,” says Elliott, “that one can not possibly find in it alone a principle of organization.”