The tone of Chaucer is soothing to the reader, because he is merely a calm observer. He doesn't come right out and say what he thinks, but Chaucer makes it obvious through his caricatures. The tone of Chaucer can be seen as common, light hearted, and humorous. Jonathan Swift, however, is not apprehensive in writing what he believes to be the horrendous conditions of eighteenth century society. Swifts tone is that of an extremist, "I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race or little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."" (379) Swift is not one to write calm and gentle literature, preferring a more radical and maybe even drastic approach. He discovers the faults in society and then he magnifies the problem so that its most minuscule imperfections are clear. In Gulliver's Travels, Swift takes his audience into a fantasy world by creating creatures just like us and contorting them to show us our faults. In A Modest Proposal Swift's tone becomes particularly cold because of the statistics he chooses to share with his audience, " of these I calculate there may be about two hundred thousand a couple whose wives are breeders; from which number I subtract thirty thousand couples who are able to maintain their own children - (384) Because Swift may not have wanted his own views to be directly represented because he may appear as biased, he uses a narrator to make the most outrageous of statements. .
Swift and Chaucer can be compared on the basis of the humor used in their satire. Because humor is probably a more effective way than grumbling on about atrocities, both used humor to make clear the immorality of seventeenth and eighteenth century England. The images that Chaucer draws of his characters is lighthearted. In "A Merchants Tale- he states, " One who had taken logic long ago/Was there; his horse was thinner than a rake,/ And he was not too fat, I undertake,/ But had a hollow look, a sober stare;/ The thread upon his overcoat was bare.