Read the excerpt from "A Modest Proposal."
A very worthy person, a true lover of his country, and whose virtues I highly esteem, was lately pleased, in discoursing on this matter, to offer a refinement upon my scheme. He said, that many gentlemen of this kingdom, having of late destroyed their deer, he conceived that the want of venison might be well supplied by the bodies of young lads and maidens.
The underlined portions of the excerpt are examples of verbal irony because

Anyone who is truly virtuous or patriotic would not suggest using children for food, so Swift means the opposite of what he says.

Explanation:

Verbal irony is the usage of words in saying something but meaning just the opposite of it. The spoken words are exactly opposite of what the speaker really wants to say.

In his satirical pamphlet "A Modest Proposal", Jonathan Swift uses verbal irony to point to the extreme condition of the kingdom of Ireland. He proposes a number of ideas so as to help in making the economical and societal condition of Ireland. The given passage contains verbal irony wen Swift mentions that a man who"a true lover of his country"o was  was pleased with his (Swift's) proposal of using children as sources of meat. This is ironical in the sense that a true lover of one's country will never support anything that will hurt his countrymen, let alone eat them. So, in his use of the verbal irony, Swift shows that he meant the opposite of what he is writing in his essay.