GULLIVER'S TRAVELS by JONATHAN SWIFT

Sources: Biography

JONATHAN SWIFT was born in Dublin, on the 30th of March [sic - November], 1667. His father, who had died a few months before, was a younger son of a Herefordshire rector, who had done much and suffered much for the Royalist cause during the Civil War; who had married into the family from which the poet Dryden afterwards sprang, and who left thirteen or fourteen children, several of whom sought their fortunes in Ireland. Godwin, the eldest son, rose rapidly to considerable wealth and position, though unfortunate speculations, a large family, and failing faculties seriously crippled him towards the end of his life. Jonathan, the father of our author, was the seventh or eighth son. He worked for some years at the law courts in Dublin, and was elected Steward of the King's Inn, but only held this position for about fifteen months, dying at the early age of twenty-five. He had married a Leicestershire lady of good family, strong religious views, and bright and estimable character, but with no private means, and on the death of her husband she was left with an infant daughter, an unborn son, some debts, and little or nothing to live on, except an annuity of £20 a year.

The Swift family, however, was a very large one, and Godwin Swift undertook the education of the posthumous child. Jonathan Swift was on affectionate terms with many members of his family, but of his Uncle Godwin he always spoke with bitterness. He considered him hard, penurious, and grudging in his favours, and he even accused him of having given him the "education of a dog." What measure of truth there may be in this description, it is impossible to say, but it is certain that Swift received the best education Ireland could afford. He was sent when only six years old to Kilkenny Grammar School, which was then probably the most famous in Ireland, and which had the rare fortune of educating, within a few years, Swift, Congreve, and Berkeley. At fourteen he entered Dublin University, and he remained there for nearly seven years. The stories that were afterwards circulated about his systematic defiance of college discipline and college studies were probably exaggerated, though it is evident that in the latter part of his university life he was guilty of some acts of not very serious insubordination, and that in his studies he followed rather the bent of his own tastes than the course of the university. He tells us that he studied history and poetry, and he attained a fair proficiency in Greek, Latin, and French; but his college course was entirely without brilliancy or promise; in his last term examination he failed in two out of the three subjects, and he only obtained his degree by "special favour." He afterwards spoke of himself as having been at this time "so discouraged and sunk in his spirits, that he too much neglected his academic studies, for some parts of which he had no great relish by nature."

Some anecdotes are preserved showing that at this early age he already suffered from the morbid melancholy, the bitter discontent with life, and what life had given him, which pursued him to the end. His Uncle Godwin died insane, and his own circumstances were utterly precarious. He received some assistance from another uncle who lived in Dublin, and on one occasion, when absolutely penniless, he was helped by an unexpected gift from a cousin at Lisbon. There are no proofs that his great literary talents were as yet born. The anecdote that he had shown a rough copy of the "Tale of a Tub" to a college friend when he was only nineteen, has been decisively disproved. He mentions, however, in an early letter, a characteristic saying of "a person of great honour in Ireland," "that my mind was like a conjured spirit that would do mischief if I did not give it employment."

The outbreak of the Revolution produced an immediate exodus of Protestants from Ireland, and Swift retired to Leicestershire, where his mother had for many years been living. His attachment to her was deep and tender, and lasted during his whole life. It was necessary for him to seek some immediate means of livelihood, and in this critical period of his life he had the great good fortune of finding a home which placed him in close connection with one of the first diplomatists and most experienced statesmen of his age. The father of Sir William Temple, when Master of the Rolls in Ireland, had been on terms of intimacy with the Swift family, and there was some relationship or connection between Swift's mother and the wife of Sir William Temple. Relying on this claim, and acting on the advice of his mother, Swift applied to Temple, who at once received him into his house at Moor Park in Surrey, in the position of amanuensis or humble companion.

Sir William Temple was at this time sixty-one years of age, and completely withdrawn from active politics. He had a high and unblemished reputation, which was all the greater because he had long been outside the competitions of life. His experiences had been many and varied. He had represented the county of Carlow in the Irish parliament of 1660, had been brought into the diplomatic career by the favour of Arlington, and had won for himself an imperishable fame as the chief author of the triple alliance of England, Holland, and Sweden, which gave the first serious check to the ambition of Louis XIV., and forms the one bright page in the reign of Charles II. As ambassador at the Hague he enjoyed the confidence both of de Witt and of his great rival William of Orange, and the respect of all honest men, but when the Cabal made the treaty with France against Holland, Temple was dismissed, and retired without reward to his gardens and his books. The downfall of the Cabal and the great outburst of popular indignation against the French policy of Charles II. brought him again into prominence. He negotiated the peace with Holland, and refusing political office became again ambassador at the Hague, where he took a leading part in negotiating the marriage of William with Mary, and also the peace of Nimeguen. His reputation was now very great, and Charles II. several times offered him the post of Secretary of State, but Temple was well aware that his character, talents, and tastes were more suited for diplomacy than for the type of statesmanship that prevailed at the Restoration. He shrank alike from its passions, its corruption, its dangers, its humiliations, and its responsibilities, and though for a short time he was the confidential adviser of Charles, and consented to take part in one of his administrations, he gladly availed himself of the first opportunity to retire from public life, which he never again entered. At the Revolution his political ideas triumphed, and William, who had learned to appreciate him at the Hague, frequently consulted him, but he again refused the offer of a Secretaryship of State. His habits were now fully formed, and his ambition, which had never been keen, had wholly gone. His gardens and his books amply satisfied him. He wrote admirably pure, graceful, and melodious English, and dallied in a feeble way with literature, composing essays excellent in form, but for the most part very vapid in substance, on politics and gardens, on Chinese literature and the evil of extremes. In one of these essays he described "coolness of temper and blood and consequently of desires" as "the great principle of virtue," and his disposition almost realized his ideal. His bland, stately, patronizing manners, his refined and somewhat over-fastidious taste, his instinctive shrinking from turmoil, conflict, and controversy, denoted a man who was a little weak and a little vain, and more fitted to shine in a Court than in a Parliament. He had, however, real and solid talents, a rare experience both of men and affairs, a sound and moderate judgment in politics, a kindly and placid nature, and his life, if it had not been distinguished by splendid virtues, had, at least, been transparently pure in an age when political purity was very rare.

With such a character Swift had little natural affinity. For good or evil, intensity was always one of his leading characteristics. It was shown alike in his friendships and his enmities, in his ambitions and regrets. Few men were by nature less fitted for a dependent and semi-menial position, less regardful of the conventionalities of Society, less respectful to those "solemn plausibilities of life" which at Moor Park were greatly reverenced. He was, as he truly said, "a raw and inexperienced youth," probably shy, awkward, and ill at ease in his new position. "Don't you remember," he afterwards wrote, "how I used to be in pain when Sir W. Temple would look cold or out of humour for three or four days, and I used to suspect a hundred reasons? I have plucked up my spirits since then ; faith, he spoiled a fine gentleman! " He read to Temple, kept his accounts, discharged the duties of secretary, and was pronounced by his patron to be "very diligent and honest." By the interest of Temple he obtained an "ad eundem" degree at Oxford. Temple recommended him, though without success, to Sir Thomas Southwell, who was then, Secretary of State in Ireland, and he allowed him to make long pedestrian visits to his mother at Leicester. In these expeditions Swift mixed much with the poorest classes of the people, lived in the humblest inns, giving an extra sixpence for a clean sheet, and acquired a knowledge of men which he afterward said taught him more than his intercourse with statesmen, and also a taste for coarse or plebeian imagery which sometimes strengthens and often disfigures his writings. Probably no other English writer ever understood so well or reproduced so faithfully the thoughts, feelings, and dialect of servants; of the cook, the valet, the chambermaid, or the ostlers who hung about the smaller village inns. It was at this time also that he was first seized with those attacks of prolonged giddiness and deafness which pursued him through life. He attributed them to a fit of indigestion brought on by eating too many apples, but some modern authorities have seen in them the beginning of the brain disease which never wholly left him, and which threw a dark shadow over the closing years of his life.

We read little in connection with Swift of Temple's wife, the Dorothy Osborne whose charming letters are so well known. She died five years after Swift had entered into the house, and the establishment seems to have been managed by Temple's widowed sister, Lady Giffard, with whom at a later period Swift violently quarrelled. She had about her, sometimes in the house and sometimes in a neighbouring cottage, as companion or confidential servant, a Mrs. Johnson, widow of an old servant of Sir William Temple, and mother of two daughters. Esther Johnson, the elder of these daughters, was seven years old when Swift entered Moor Park. The young Irishman at once formed a deep attachment to this bright but delicate girl. He became her favourite playfellow. He taught her to write, guided her maturing mind, invented a charming child language for her use, and in after years under the name of Stella she became indissolubly twined with all that was tenderest in his life.

The position of Swift at Moor Park gradually improved, and Temple was quite perspicacious enough to give him his full confidence and employ him on matters of grave moment. On one occasion Temple sent him to the king on an unsuccessful mission to persuade William to give his assent to the Triennial Bill. William seems to have seen Swift on more than one occasion. He is said to have taught him how to cut and eat asparagus in the Dutch manner, and to have offered to make him captain in a regiment of cavalry, and some time after he promised him a prebend in case he entered the Church. The literary talents of the young secretary were beginning slowly to develope [sic] in the form of poetry, but Pindaric odes and poems in praise of Temple were certainly not the forms in which nature intended him to succeed, and his cousin Dryden administered a salutary though much-resented rebuke when he told Swift that he would never be a poet. In some forms of poetry, indeed, Swift afterwards eminently excelled. No one obtained a more complete mastery over the octosyllabic metre, or could condense into a few lines greater force of meaning, fiercer satire, or more graphic delineations of character. It is impossible to deny the name of poet to the writer of "The Lines on his own Death," of "The Lines written in Sickness," of "The Legion Club," of "Cadenus and Vanessa." and of some of the poems written to Stella. But conventional eulogy and compliment were very alien to his genius, and an intense and almost terrible sincerity was one of the chief elements of his power.

Swift continued with some considerable intervals at Moor Park till the summer of 1694. He believed, however, that Temple had not sufficiently pushed his interests, and being now in his twenty-seventh year he had grown impatient, and, greatly to Temple's indignation, he resolved to leave Moor Park, to go to Ireland, and to enter the Church. He refused a clerkship of £120 a year in the Irish Rolls which was offered to him by Temple, and he at one time thought of accepting the chaplaincy of an English factory at Lisbon with which his cousin was connected. The Church preferment which he had hoped from the king was not forthcoming, and on going to Ireland to be ordained he found to his great disappointment that a letter of recommendation from Temple was required by the bishop. He had parted from Temple in anger, and the letter which he wrote to Temple asking for this testimonial was in a strain of great humility. There was no real reason, however, why it should have been refused, nor does Temple appear to have made any difficulty or reproaches. Swift was ordained, and he obtained a small living of Kilroot, which was situated in a remote district, chiefly inhabited by Presbyterians, on the borders of Belfast Lough.

We know little authentic of his life there, except that it was broken by a brief and unsuccessful love affair with the sister of his old college friend Waring. The exile was not pleasing to him, and the Irish Presbyterians among whom he at this time chiefly lived afterwards became the objects of one of the most vehement of his many antipathies. Temple, on the other hand, appears greatly to have missed his old secretary and companion, and he wrote warmly asking him to return to Moor Park. Swift soon consented, and in 1696 he was again installed in the house of Temple. For a short time a clerical friend filled his place at Kilroot, but he resigned the living in 1698.

His last stay at Moor Park continued till the death of Temple in January, 1699. The relations of Swift to his patron appear now to have been very cordial, and Swift found his old pupil Esther Johnson rapidly developing into womanhood. She was not quite fifteen when Swift returned to Moor Park. "I knew her," Swift afterwards wrote, "from six years old, and had some share in her education by directing what books she should read, and perpetually instructing her in the principles of honour and virtue from which she never swerved in any one action or moment of her life. She was sickly from her childhood until about the age of fifteen, but then grew into perfect health, and was looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young women in London, only a little too fat. Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection. . . . Never was any of her sex born with better gifts of the mind, or who more improved them by reading and conversation."

It is remarkable that a writer who was destined to become the greatest of English humourists, and one of the greatest masters of English prose, should have wholly failed to discover his true talents before his twenty-ninth year. There is some reason to believe that the first sketch of "The Tale of a Tub" was written at Kilroot, but it was on his return to Moor Park in 1697 that this great work assumed its complete form, though it was not published till 1704. To the same period also belongs that exquisite piece of humour, "The Battle of the Books," the one lasting fruit of the silly controversy about the comparative merits of the ancient and modern writers which then greatly occupied writers both in France and England, and into which Temple, though totally destitute of classical scholarship, had foolishly flung himself. Of the merits of the controversy which such scholars as Bentley and Wotton waged with the Christ Church wits, the world has long since formed its opinion; but the fact that the burlesque was intended to ridicule the party who were incontestably in the right does not detract from its extraordinary literary merits. It appears to have been written to amuse or gratify Temple, and it was not published till 1704.

Temple left Esther Johnson a small landed property in Ireland, where she lived with Mrs. Dingley, a distant relative of Temple, who became her lifelong companion, and was herself the possessor of a small competence. Swift urged upon them that living was much cheaper, and the rate of interest higher in Ireland than in England, and it was by his advice that they went over to Ireland in 1708. To Swift, Temple left a small legacy, and the charge and profit of publishing a collected edition of his works, which he duly accomplished in five volumes. He dedicated them to the king, who, however, did nothing for him; but he became chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, who had been appointed one of the Lords Justices in Ireland, and he lived with him for some time at Dublin Castle. As was not unusual with Swift, he considered that he was much neglected, and he expressed his indignation in no measured terms. The post of secretary, which he thought should have gone with that of chaplain, was given to another, and he failed in his application for the rich deanery of Derry. He obtained, however, the small living of Laracor, near Trim, in the county of Meath, and two or three other pieces of almost sinecure Church patronage. The united income seems to have been about £230. The congregation at Laracor was not more than about fifteen, and when he endeavoured to introduce a weekly service he is said to have found himself alone with his clerk. After a certain time he followed the example which was then so common in the Irish Church of leaving the duties of Laracor to a curate, but it is remarkable that he enlarged the glebe from one acre to twenty acres, and endowed the church with tithes which he had himself bought, and it is still more remarkable that he made a provision in his will that the tithes should pass to the poor in the event of the disestablishment of the Church.

Swift was already moving familiarly in the best society connected with the government of Ireland. His dispute with Lord Berkeley led to no breach; he speaks with much respect and affection of Lady Berkeley, and with one of the daughters, Lady Betty Germaine, he formed one of those long, warm, and steady friendships which are among the most characteristic features of his life. He was chaplain to the Duke of Ormond, who became Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in 1703, and to the Earl of Pembroke, who succeeded him, and in many visits to London he soon became a familiar figure among the writers and politicians of the metropolis. The "Discourse on the Contests and Dissensions in Athens and Rome," which is his earliest political writing, was published anonymously in 1701. It was written when the two Houses of Parliament were in conflict about the proposed impeachment by the Tory party of Somers and three other Whig ministers who had taken part in the Partition treaty, and it was intended to support the House of Lords in resisting that impeachment. At the same time, though it was a Whig pamphlet, probably composed under the influence of Lord Berkeley, those who read it carefully will easily perceive that it is in no essential respects inconsistent with the later writings of the author when he was the great supporter of the Tory party. The Church questions which chiefly determined his later policy were not here at issue. The evils of party spirit, the necessity of preserving a balance of power in the State, the opposite dangers to be feared from the despotism of an individual and from the despotism of a majority, the wisdom of making great changes in government so gradually that the old forms may continue unbroken, and the new elements may be slowly and insensibly incorporated into them are all familiar topics in his later writings. In an age when reporting and newspaper criticism were still unborn, the political pamphlet exercised an enormous influence, and the pamphlet of Swift, though much less remarkable than several which he afterwards wrote, excited considerable attention, and was attributed to Bishop Burnet. The true authorship was soon known, and it strengthened his social position in London. He became intimate with Somers and several of the Whig leaders, and it is from this time that may be dated that friendship with Addison which, in spite of great differences of political opinion and still greater differences of character, was never wholly eclipsed. The copy of his Italian travels which Addison presented to Swift may still be seen bearing the well-known autograph inscription, "To Dr. Jonathan Swift -- the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age." Swift afterwards speaks of the many evenings he had spent alone with Addison, never wishing for a third. He described Addison as one who had "virtue enough to give reputation to an age." and he consented at the advice of Addison to cut out some eighty lines of his "Baucis and Philemon," and to alter many others.

"Whoever has a true value for Church and State," Swift wrote at a later period, "should avoid the extremes of Whig for the sake of the former and the extremes of Tory on account of the latter." In these words we have the true key to his politics. He was at no period of his life a Jacobite. He fully and cordially accepted the Revolution, and either never held the Tory doctrine of the divine right of kings, or at least accepted the king de facto as the rightful sovereign. As long as the question was mainly a question of dynasty he was frankly Whig, and it was natural that a young man who was formed in the school of Temple should have taken this side. On the other hand, Swift was beyond all things a Churchman, and was accustomed to subordinate every other consideration to the furtherance of Church interests. In each period of his life this intense ecclesiastical sentiment appears. Coarse and irreverent as are many passages in the "Tale of a Tub," which was published in 1704, the main purport of the book was to defend the Church of England, by pouring a torrent of ridicule and hatred on all its opponents, whether they be Papists, or Nonconformists, or Freethinkers. In his "Project for the Reformation of Manners," in his "Sentiments of a Church of England Man," in his "Argument against the Abolition of Christianity," in his " Letter to a Member of Parliament concerning the Sacramental Test," all of which were written when he was still ostensibly a Whig, the same decided Church feeling is more reverently expressed. It appeared not less clearly in his later Irish tracts, when it was his clear political interest to endeavour to unite all religions in Ireland in support of his Irish policy. The abolition of the Test Act, which excluded Nonconformists from office, was opposed by Swift at every period of his life. In the reign of Queen Anne, and especially in its later years, party politics grouped themselves mainly on ecclesiastical lines. It was on the cry of Church in danger that the Tory party rode into power in 1710, and the close alliance between the Whigs and the Nonconformists, and between the Tories and the Church, was the main fact governing the party divisions of the time. There could be no doubt to which side Swift would inevitably gravitate.

He was still, however, a nominal Whig when he went over to London in 1707, chiefly at the request of Archbishop King, to endeavour to obtain for the Irish clergy a remission of the firstfruits and tenths which had been already conceded to the English clergy, and he was very indignant at hearing that the Whig ministers were desirous of coupling this favour to the Irish clergy with the abolition of the Test against Nonconformists in Ireland. There was at this time some question of his obtaining high office in the Irish Church, for Somers had recommended him for the bishopric of Waterford. To Swift's great disappointment it was given to another, and this was but the first of several succeeding disappointments. The queen appears to have been inflexibly opposed to his promotion, and her feeling is said to have been largely due to a perusal of the "Tale of a Tub." Sharpe, the Archbishop of York, is reported to have brought this great work to her notice, and to have represented the author as a manifest Freethinker. Like most of Swift's works, the "Tale of a Tub" was published anonymously, but the authorship was soon known. Those who have read and have understood the pages describing the sect of the Æolists, and the manner in which Brother Peter maintained with many oaths and curses that his "brown loaf" was "by God true, good natural mutton as any in Leadenhall Market," will not greatly wonder at the scruples of the queen.

Swift had, however, other moods, and some of his ecclesiastical tracts are models of temperate, clearsighted, and decorous piety. His "Sentiments of a Church of England Man," which was written in 1708, describes with perfect truth and frankness the position of that large body of the clergy who accepted without scruple the settlement of the Revolution as saving the nation from the danger of Popery, but who were gradually alienated from the Whig party by its latitudinarian or Nonconformist tendencies. His "Proposal for the Advancement of Religion," which appeared in the following year, is one of the best descriptions of the moral evils of the time, and a passage in it is said to have been the origin of the measure which was afterwards taken for building fifty new churches in London. In another strain he wrote his famous argument against abolishing Christianity, in which he brought all the resources of the keenest wit to bear against the Freethinkers, and about the same period he published his tract on the proposed abolition of the sacramental test in Ireland, displaying his intense antipathy to the Scotch Presbyterianism in Ulster, which he considered the one great danger of the Irish establishment. The Papists he looked on as completely broken and powerless, "inconsiderable as the women and children." Swift complains bitterly that the Whig ministers were endeavouring to ingratiate themselves with their English Nonconformist supporters by sacrificing the interests of the Episcopalians in Ireland, and it is at this time that his open alienation from the Whig party occurred. As Mr. Leslie Stephen justly says, Swift "separated from the Whig party when at the height of their power, and separated because he thought them opposed to the Church principles which he advocated from first to last."

The power of the Whig party, however, though supported by the popularity of the great French war and the victories of Marlborough, proved very transient, and the explosion of Church feeling that followed the impeachment of Sacheverell at the end of 1709 was one of the chief causes of their downfall. Swift welcomed the change with delight, and one of its first results was the concession by Harley of that boon to the Irish clergy which Swift had been so long vainly seeking to extort from the Whigs. His old Whig friends made great efforts to retain him on their side, but his part was soon taken, and with the principles he had avowed no real blame can attach to him for having thrown in his lot with Harley, with whom he soon formed the closest friendship, both personal and political. In the eyes of historians Harley has commonly appeared only as a slow, dull, procrastinating man of good private morals and some talent both for business and for intrigue, but utterly without any real superiority of intellect or character, and he presents a strange contrast to St. John, his colleague in the ministry, one of the most brilliant, versatile, and seductive figures that have ever flashed across the stage of English politics. Yet it is remarkable how much more weight Harley carried in the country than St. John, and in spite of Swift's warm friendship with the latter, Harley always seems to have inspired him with the deepest affection and the fullest confidence.

With the Church policy of the Tory party under Queen Anne, indeed, Swift was in the fullest agreement. It showed itself in the concession of the firstfruits to the Irish clergy, in the Act of Toleration of 1712 relieving the Scotch Episcopalians, and in the project for erecting new churches in London, and not less clearly in the hostility to the Nonconformists which manifested itself in the temporary withdrawal of the Regium Donum from the Irish Presbyterians, and in the Occasional Conformity and the Schism Acts, which were justly regarded as among the most oppressive religious measures of the time. Swift, indeed, was no champion of religious liberty, and there can be little doubt that the sentiments which he put into the mouth of the King of Brobdingnag were his own: "He knew no reason why those who entertained opinions prejudicial to the public should be obliged to change, and should not be obliged to conceal them. And as it was tyranny in any government to require the first, so it was weakness not to enforce the second; for a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to send them about for cordials."

With the other great object of the party -- the termination of the war -- Swift was equally in accord. The belief that the war had been unnecessarily prolonged for party purposes; that overtures which might have honourably terminated it had been more than once rejected; that England of all the allied powers had now the least interest in its issues, while she bore by far the largest share of its burdens, was growing steadily in the country, and was certainly by no means without foundation. It had always been a Tory doctrine that the Revolution of 1688 had unduly mixed England in Continental quarrels, and that from the days of William there had been a desire to use English resources for Continental objects. The present war was originally a Whig war, mainly supported by the Whig party, and conducted by a great Whig general, and the Emperor and the Dutch who gained most by it were violently hostile to the Tories, and had exerted their influence with the queen to dissuade her from giving her countenance to that party. It was also a favourite Tory doctrine, with which Swift most cordially sympathized, that the large loans necessitated by the war had given the moneyed classes, who were the chief supporters of the Whigs, a power which was lowering the position of the landed gentry, and even threatening the ruin of English liberty. "We have carried on wars," he wrote, "that we might fill the pockets of stockjobbers. . . . . . We are governed by upstarts who are unsettling the landmarks of our social system, and are displacing the influence of our landed gentry by that class of men who find their profit in our woes. . . . A change has now come which will awake the nation to a sense of its mistakes, will recover the rightful influence of the landed gentry, and will rid us of the pestilential swarm of stockjobbers who are confederate with the Whigs." For all these reasons the termination of the war was regarded by the Tory party as a supreme party [priority?], as well as a supreme national interest.

Swift, more than any other single man, contributed to impress this conviction on the mind of the nation. It is, however, creditable to his sagacity, that although he detested Marlborough, and although he devoted one of the most ingenious papers in the "Examiner" to a contrast between the rewards given to the English general and those which had been bestowed on conquerors in ancient Rome, he clearly warned his party of the dangers of the scurrilous attacks on Marlborough which were common in the Tory papers; he more than once, as he tells us, was the means of suppressing such attacks, and he did not approve of the dismissal of Marlborough from his command. In general Swift seldom scrupled to employ the most violent personal scurrility against his opponents. Nothing in political literature is more unmeasured in its invective than his attacks upon Wharton, and he did not even spare Somers, who had been both his friend and his patron, but of Marlborough he never failed to write in terms of moderation.

A few lines may be devoted to the other political opinions of Swift, as they mark the principles of the Tories in the early days of the Revolution settlement. "Law," he said, "in a free country is, or ought to be, the determination of the majority of those who have property in land." In that remarkable "Essay on Public Absurdities," which was published after his death, he deplored that persons without landed property could by means of the boroughs obtain an entrance into Parliament, and that the suffrage had been granted to any one who was not a member of the Established Church, and he condemned absolutely the system of standing armies which had recently grown up. On the other hand, on some questions of Parliamentary reform, he held very advanced views. Like most of his party he strenuously advocated annual Parliaments, believing them to be the only true foundation of liberty, and the only means of putting an end to corrupt traffic between ministers and members of Parliament. He blamed the custom of throwing the expense of an election upon a candidate; the custom of making forty-shilling freeholders in order to give votes to landlords, and the immunity of members and of their servants from civil suits. "It is likewise," he says, "absurd that boroughs decayed are not absolutely extinguished, because the returned members do in reality represent nobody at all; and that several large towns are not represented, though full of industrious townsmen."

The four years of the Harley administration form the most brilliant and probably the happiest period of his life. His genius had now reached its full maturity, and he found the sphere which beyond all others was most fitted for its exercise. In many of the qualities of effective political writing he has never been surpassed. Without the grace and delicacy of Addison, without the rich imaginative eloquence or the profound philosophic insight of Burke, he was a far greater master of that terse, homely, and nervous logic which appeals most powerfully to the English mind, and no writer has ever excelled him in the vivid force of his illustrations, in trenchant, original, and inventive wit, or in concentrated malignity of invective or satire. With all the intellectual and most of the moral qualities of the most terrible partisan he combined many of the gifts of a consummate statesman -- a marvellous power of captivating those with whom he came in contact, great skill in reading characters and managing men, a rapid, decisive judgment in emergencies, an eminently practical mind, seizing with a happy tact the commonsense view of every question he treated, and almost absolutely free from the usual defects of mere literary politicians. But for his profession he might have risen to the highest posts of English statesmanship, and in spite of his profession, and without any of the advantages of rank or office, he was for some time one of the most influential men in England. He stemmed the tide of political literature, which had been flowing strongly against his party, and the admirable force of his popular reasoning, as well as the fierce virulence of his attacks, placed him at once in the first position in the fray. The Tory party, assailed by almost overwhelming combinations from without, and distracted by the most serious divisions within, found in him its most powerful defender. Its leaders were divided by interest, by temperament, and, in some degree, even by policy; but Swift gained a great ascendency over their minds and a great influence in their councils, and his persuasions long averted the impending collision. Its extreme members had formed themselves into a separate body, and were clamouring for the expulsion of all Whigs from office; but Swift's "Letter of Advice to the 'October Club'" effected the dissolution of that body, and the threatened schism was prevented. The nation, dazzled by the genius of Marlborough, was for a time fiercely opposed to a party whose policy was peace, but Swift's "Examiners" gradually modified this opposition, and his "Conduct of the Allies" for a time completely quelled it. The success of this most masterly pamphlet has few parallels in history: 11,000 copies were sold in about two months. It for a time almost reversed the current of public opinion, and was one of the chief influences that enabled the ministers to conclude the Peace of Utrecht.

The social position of Swift at this time was equally brilliant. Notwithstanding his coarseness and capricious violence, and an occasional eccentricity of manner which indicated not obscurely the seeds of insanity, the brilliancy of his conversation made him the delight of every society, and his sayings became the proverbs of every coffee-house. He had friends of all parties, of all creeds, and of all characters. In the course of a few years he was intimate with Addison and Steele, with Halifax, Congreve, Prior, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Peterborough, with Harley and St. John, and most of the other leaders of the day. In spite of the gloomy misanthropy of his temperament, and the savage recklessness with which he too often employed his powers of sarcasm, he was capable of splendid generosity and of the truest and most constant friendship. Few men have obtained a deeper or more lasting affection, and we may well place the testimony of the illustrious men who knew him best in opposition to the literary judgments of posterity. "Dear friend," wrote Arbuthnot in after years, "the last sentence of your letter plunged a dagger in my heart. Never repeat those sad but tender words, that you will try to forget me. For my part, I can never forget you, at least till I discover, which is impossible, another friend whose conversation could procure me the pleasure I have found in yours." Addison, as we have already seen, spoke of him in language of unqualified affection. Pope, after a friendship of twenty-three years, wrote of him to Lord Orrery, "My sincere love of that valuable, indeed incomparable man, will accompany him through life, and pursue his memory were I to live a hundred lives, as many of his works will live which are absolutely original, unequalled, unexampled. His humanity, his charity, his condescension, his candour, are equal to his wit, and require as good and true a taste to be equally valued."

Undoubtedly, in the first instance, many of these friendships arose from gratitude. Literature had not yet arrived at the period when it could dispense with patrons, and one of the legitimate goals to which every literary man aspired was a place under the State. This naturally drew the chief writers around Swift, and the manner in which he at this time employed his influence is one of the most pleasing features of his career. There is scarcely a man of genius of the age who was not indebted to him. Even his political opponents, even men who had written violently against his party, obtained places by his influence. Berkeley was drawn by him from the retirement of college recommended more than once to the leading Tories, and placed upon the highway of promotion. Congreve was secured at his request in the place which the Whigs had given him. Parnell, Steele, Gay, and Rowe were among those who received places or other favours by his solicitation. He said himself; with a justifiable pride, that he had provided for more than fifty people, not one of whom was a relation. His influence in society as well as with the government was ceaselessly employed in favour of literature. He founded the "Scriblerus Club," in which many of the chief writers of the day joined; he exerted himself earnestly in bringing Pope forward, and obtaining subscriptions for his translation of Homer. He pressed upon the attention of the government a plan, though not a very wise one, for watching over the purity of the language, and he on every occasion insisted on marked deference being paid to literary men. He himself took an exceedingly high, and indeed arrogant, tone with Harley and St. John; and when the former sent him a sum of money as a compensation for his services, he was so offended that their friendship was wellnigh broken for ever. That this tone was not the mere vulgar insolence of an upstart, is sufficiently proved by the deep attachment manifested towards him by both Harley and St. John long after their political connection had terminated.

During all this time Swift kept up a continual correspondence with Stella, in the shape of a journal, recording with the utmost minuteness the events of every day. We have the clearest possible evidence that this journal was not intended for any other eyes than those of Stella and Mrs. Dingley. It is filled with terms of the most childish endearment, with execrable puns, with passages written with his eyes shut, with extempore verses and extempore proverbs, with the records of every passing caprice, of every hope, fear, and petty annoyance. In this strange and touching journal we can trace clearly the eminence to which he rose, and also the shadows that overcast his mind. One of the principal of these was the gradual decline of his friendship with Addison. Addison's habitual coldness had, at first, completely yielded to the charms of Swift's conversation, and, notwithstanding the great dissimilarity of their characters, they lived on the most intimate terms. But Swift was a strong Tory, and Addison was a strong Whig; and Addison was almost identified with Steele, who was still more violent in his politics, and who, though he had received favours from Swift, had made a violent and wholly unjust personal attack upon his benefactor,1 which elicited an equally violent reply; and these things tended to the dissolution of the friendship. There was never an open breach, but their intercourse lost its old cordiality. "I went to Mr. Addison's," wrote Swift in his journal, "and dined with him at his lodgings. I had not seen him these three weeks; we are grown common acquaintance, yet what have I not done for his friend Steele! Mr. Harley reproached me the last time I saw him, that, to please me, he would be reconciled to Steele, and had promised and appointed to see him, and that Steele never came. Harrison, whom Mr. Addison recommended to me, I have introduced to the Secretary of State, who has promised me to take care of him; and I have represented Addison himself so to the Ministry, that they think and talk in his favour, though they hated him before. Well, he is now in my debt -- there is an end; and I never had the least obligation to him -- and there is another end."

Another source of annoyance to Swift was the difficulty with which he obtained Church preferment. He knew that his political position was exceedingly transient; he had no resources except his living. He appears to have taken no pains to make profit from his writings. "I never got a farthing," he wrote in 1735, "by anything I wrote, except once about eight years ago, and that was by Mr. Pope's prudent management for me." By his influence at least one bishopric and many other places had been given away, and yet he was unable to obtain for himself any preferment that would place him above the vicissitudes of politics. The antipathy of the queen was unabated; the Duchess of Somerset, whose influence at Court was very great, and whom Swift had bitterly and coarsely satirized, employed herself with untiring hatred in opposing his promotion, and all the remonstrances of the ministers and all the entreaties of Lady Masham were unable to overcome the determination of the queen.

The charge of scepticism was one which Swift bitterly resented, and there is no class whom he more savagely assailed than the Deists of his time. At the same time no one can be surprised that such a charge should be brought against a writer who wrote as Swift had done in the "Tale of a Tub" about the Roman Catholic doctrine concerning the Sacrament and the Calvinistic doctrine concerning inspiration. And although the "Tale of a Tub" is an extreme example, the same spirit pervades many of his other performances, especially those wonderful lines about the Judgment of the World by Jupiter, which Chesterfield sent to Voltaire.2 His wit was perfectly unbridled. His unrivalled power of ludicrous combination seldom failed to get the better of his prudence, and he found it impossible to resist a jest. It must be added that no writer of the time indulged more habitually in coarse, revolting, and indecent imagery; that he delighted in a strain of ribald abuse peculiarly unbecoming in a clergyman; that he was the intimate friend of Bolingbroke and Pope, whose freethinking opinions were notorious, and that he frequently expressed a strong dislike for his profession. In one of his poems he describes himself as --

   "A clergyman of special note
   For shunning those of his own coat,
   Which made his brethren of the gown
   Take care betimes to run him down."

    "A genius in a reverend gown
    Will always keep its owner down;
    `Tis an unnatural conjunction,
    And spoils the credit of the function.
    .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
    "And as, of old, mathematicians
    Were by the vulgar thought magicians,
    So academic dull ale-drinkers
    Pronounce all men of wit freethinkers."

It must be added that the coarseness for which Swift has been so often and so justly censured is not the coarseness of vice. He accumulates images of a kind that most men would have regarded as loathsome, but there is nothing sensual in his writings; he never awakens an impure curiosity, or invests guilt with a meretricious charm. Vice certainly never appears attractive in his pages, and it may be safely affirmed that no one has ever been allured to vicious courses by reading them. He is often very repulsive and very indecent, but his faults in this respect are rather those of taste than of morals.

It was not till the year 1713 that Swift's friends succeeded in obtaining for him the deanery of St. Patrick's. The appointment was regarded both by him and by them as being far below what he might have expected, for its pecuniary value was not great, and it implied separation from all his friends and residence in a country which was then considered a most unenviable abode for a man of genius. He immediately went over to Ireland in June, intending to remain there for some time, but was in a few days recalled by his political friends. He did not at first yield to the request, but it was again and again repeated, and in September he arrived in London. An open breach had broken out between the ministers, and the government seemed on the verge of dissolution.

It would be difficult, indeed, to conceive two men less capable of co-operating with cordiality than Harley and St. John, or, to give them the titles they had by this time acquired, than Oxford and Bolingbroke.

It is not necessary here to examine in detail the many causes of the division. Bolingbroke occupied a position subordinate to Oxford in the ministry; he had been only created a viscount when Oxford was created an earl. His ambition had been perpetually trammelled by Oxford's procrastination, and his consciousness of superior genius irritated by Oxford's haughtiness, and his dislike to his colleague at length deepened into hatred. It is no slight proof of Swift's force of character that he could influence two such men, or of the charm of his society that he could retain the affection of both. Personally, he seems to have been especially attached to Oxford; while politically he now agreed with Bolingbroke that a more energetic line of policy was the only means by which the Tory party could be saved.

In truth, the position of the government became every week more desperate. The storm of popular indignation, which had been lulled for a time by "The Conduct of the Allies," broke out afresh with tenfold vigour on the conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht. The long duration of the war, the numerous powers engaged in it, and the many complications that had arisen in its progress, rendered the task of the ministers so peculiarly difficult, that it would have been easy to have attacked any peace framed under such circumstances, however consummate the wisdom with which its provisions had been framed. The Peace of Utrecht left England incontestably the first power of Europe, arrested an expenditure which had been adding rapidly to the national debt, and began one of the most prosperous periods of English history. But, on the other hand, it was undoubtedly negotiated more through party than through national motives; it terminated a long series of splendid victories, and, while it saved France from almost complete destruction, it failed to obtain the object for which the war had been begun. The crown of Spain remained upon the head of Philip, and the Catalans, who had risen to arms relying upon English support, were left without any protection for their local liberties. Any peace which terminated a war of such continual and brilliant success would have been unpopular, and, although the Peace of Utrecht was certainly advantageous to the country, some of the objections to it were real and serious, while its free trade clauses raised a fierce storm of ignorant or selfish anger among the mercantile classes. Besides this, the Church enthusiasm which, after the persecution of Sacheverell, had borne the Tories to power, had begun to subside. The question of dynasty was still uncertain. The queen's health was visibly and rapidly breaking. The Elector of Hanover was openly hostile to the Tory party. The leading Tory ministers were justly suspected of intriguing with the Pretender. They were both, though on different grounds and with different classes, unpopular, and they were profoundly disunited at the very time when their union was most necessary.

Swift on his arrival from Ireland succeeded with some difficulty in bringing Oxford and Bolingbroke together, and he published two political pamphlets bitterly attacking Steele and Burnet and the Whig party. Party feeling on both sides now ran furiously. Steele was expelled from the House of Commons, ostensibly on the ground of his pamphlet called "The Crisis," while the House of Lords, in which the Whig party predominated, retaliated by offering a reward for the discovery of the author of Swift's "Public Spirit of the Whigs," on the ground of some reflections it had made on the Scotch. No real reconciliation had been established between Oxford and Bolingbroke, and no real steps were taken to arrest a catastrophe which was manifestly impending. "I never," wrote Swift, "led a life so thoroughly uneasy as I do at present. Our situation is so bad that our enemies could not without abundance of invention and ability have placed us so ill if we had left it entirely to their management. . . . . The queen is pretty well at present, but the least disorder she has puts us all in alarm, and when it is over we act as if she were immortal. Neither is it possible to persuade people to make any preparation against the evil day."

Swift did not know all that took place, for he appears to have had no knowledge of the overtures of the ministers to the Pretender. He was disgusted and hopeless at the state of affairs, and in May, 1714, he retired to the home of a friend in a quiet Berkshire parsonage. He wrote, however, at this time a remarkable pamphlet, in which he expressed with great force and sincerity his view of the situation. Though his personal sympathies were usually on the side of Oxford, he strongly blamed the indecision and procrastination of that statesman, and strenuously maintained that only the most drastic measures could save the party from ruin. The immense majority, he maintained, of the English nation had two wishes. The first was "that the Church of England should be preserved entire in all her rights, powers, and privileges; all doctrines relating to government discouraged which she condemned; all schisms, sects, and heresies discountenanced." The second was the maintenance of the Protestant succession in the House of Brunswick, "not from any partiality to that illustrious House, further than as it had the honour to mingle with the blood royal of England and is the nearest branch of our royal line reformed from Popery." Real Jacobitism he maintained was very rare in England except among the nonjurors, and the great bulk of the clergy and other adherents of the doctrine of passive obedience were perfectly ready to support the line which they found established by law without entering into any inquiries about the legitimacy of the Revolution, provided that this line supported the Church to which they were attached.3 But the evil of the situation was that the German heir to the throne had failed to give any such assurance to the nation; that he had, on the contrary, given all his confidence to the implacable enemies of the Church to which the overwhelming majority of the nation were attached -- to Whigs, Low Churchmen, and Dissenters. The only apparent remedy, Swift maintained, was to exclude all such persons absolutely from all civil and military offices; to place the whole government of the country in all its departments in the hands of the Tory party, so that it would be impossible to displace them. The Whigs must be absolutely excluded, because they had already proved very dangerous to the Constitution in Church and State because they were highly irritated at the loss of power, but "principally because they have prevailed by misrepresentations and other artifices to make the Successor look upon them as the only persons he can trust, upon which account they cannot be too soon or too much disabled; neither will England ever be safe from the attempts of this wicked confederacy until their strength and interests shall be so far reduced that for the future it shall not be in the power of the crown although in conjunction with any rich and factious body of men, to choose an ill majority in the House of Commons." The queen, he added, should at once peremptorily call upon the Elector to declare his approbation of the policy of her ministers and to disavow all connection with the Whigs.4

At the request of Bolingbroke the publication of this bold pamphlet was delayed, and before it appeared a great change had taken place in the ministry. Bolingbroke, by the assistance of Lady Masham, had effected the disgrace of Oxford, and had obtained the chief place. Swift received a letter from Lady Masham (who had always been his warm friend), couched in the most affectionate terms, imploring him to continue to uphold the ministry by his counsel and by his pen, and enclosing an order upon the Treasury for £1,000 for the necessary expenses of induction into his deanery, which Oxford had promised, but, with his usual procrastination, had delayed. He received at the same time a letter from Oxford, requesting his presence in the country, where, as the fallen statesman wrote with a touching pathos, he was going "alone." Swift did not hesitate for a moment between the claims of friendship and the allurements of ambition; he determined to accompany Oxford.

Events were now succeeding each other with startling rapidity. Bolingbroke had been only four days prime minister when the Tory party learned with consternation the death of the queen and the consequent downfall of their ascendency. A Whig ministry was constituted. Parliament was dissolved; the influence of the crown was exerted to the utmost in favour of the Whig party, and a great Whig majority was returned, which continued unbroken during two reigns. One of the first measures of the new government was to institute a series of prosecutions for treason against its predecessors. Bolingbroke fled from England, and was condemned while absent. Ormond was impeached. Oxford was thrown into the Tower, where he remained for nearly two years, but was at last tried and acquitted. Swift retired to Ireland. A few vague rumours prevailed of his having been concerned in Jacobite intrigues, but they never took any consistency, or seem to have deserved any attention. "Dean Swift," wrote Arbuthnot, "keeps up his noble spirit, and, though like a man knocked down, you may behold him still with a stern countenance, and aiming a blow at his adversaries." The path of ambition, however, was now for ever closed to him; the misfortunes of his friends, and especially the imprisonment of Oxford, profoundly affected him, and he even wrote to the fallen statesman, asking permission to accompany him to prison. No man was ever a truer friend than Swift, and there are few men in literary biography in whose lives friendship bore a larger part. He was at this time, more than once, openly insulted by some Whigs in Dublin, and he had at first serious difficulties with the minor clergy of his deanery.

But a far more serious blow was in store for him -- a blow that not only destroyed his peace for a season but left an indelible stigma on his character. It appears to have been in 1708 or 1709 that Swift during his residence in London, first made the acquaintance of a well-to-do widow named Vanhomrigh who was living with two sons and two daughters in Bury Street. In 1710 the acquaintance ripened into an intimacy. Swift dined very frequently at her house, played cards there in the evenings, lodged for a short time in the immediate vicinity, and formed a special friendship with the eldest daughter, Hester, the unfortunate Vanessa. Hester Vanhomrigh was at this time less than twenty, and Swift was more than double her age. Though not conspicuously beautiful, she was a bright, intelligent girl, keenly interested both in literature and politics. She wrote letters to Swift as early as 1710, and at her request he directed her reading, much as he had formerly done that of Stella. He asserts, and there is not the least reason to doubt his sincerity, that the possibility of his pupil falling in love with him had never for a moment flashed across his mind. Swift was very fond of the society of ladies, and he made many strong and lasting female friendships, but, as he has himself said, and as appears most abundantly, both from his writings and from his life, he was constitutionally unsusceptible to passion. He always considered himself prematurely old, and never suspected that he was capable of inspiring feelings which he had himself never felt and never really understood.

   "Gadenus, common forms apart,
   In every scene had kept his heart.
   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
   He now could praise, esteem, approve,
   But understood not what was love;
   His conduct might have made him styled
   A father, and the nymph his child.
   That innocent delight he took
   To see the Virgin mind her book,
   Was but a Master's secret joy
   In school to hear the finest boy."

     "Vanessa not in years a score, 
     Dreams of a gown of forty-four."

Changes in the Vanhomrigh family complicated the situation. One brother had died, the other was alienated from his sisters, and the mother died in 1714. There were some temporary money difficulties arising from debts left by Mrs. Vanhomrigh, and Vanessa consulted Swift, who gave advice and offered to stand security for a loan. More embarrassing still was the fact that Vanessa had inherited a small property in Ireland, and she resolved to go there when Swift returned to his deanery. Swift evidently disliked the idea. "If you are in Ireland," he wrote in 1714, "when I am there I shall see you very seldom. It is not a place for any freedom." "I say all this out of the perfect esteem and friendship I have for you."

Vanessa, however, persisted in her intention. Her letters reveal her violent passion, and they also show that while Swift abstained from putting an end to the intimacy he was trying to discourage it. "You once had a maxim," she wrote to him in this year, "which was to act what was right and not mind what the world would say. I wish you would keep to it now. Pray what can be wrong in seeing and advising an unhappy woman? I cannot imagine. You cannot but know that your frowns make my life insupportable. You have taught me to distinguish, and then you leave me miserable." "I am sure I could have bore the rack much better than those killing, killing words of yours. Sometimes I have resolved to die without seeing you more, but these resolves, to your misfortune, did not last long. . . . See me and speak kindly to me, for I am sure you would not condemn anyone to suffer what I have done could you but know it. . . . When I begin to complain then you are angry, and there is something in your looks so awful, that it strikes me dumb."

During all this time the intimate friendship -- for it was at this time evidently nothing more -- between Swift and Stella continued. There is no real evidence that she resented her position -- to which she had been habituated from childhood -- and while Swift lived in Dublin she lived with Mrs. Dingley in a separate house, except occasionally during illnesses of Swift. They appear rarely or never to have seen each other alone; every precaution was taken to avoid scandal, nor does any scandal appear to have been in fact aroused, but Stella presided at the table of Swift when he received company. She was the recognized centre of his circle, and their relations were acknowledged to be of the most perfect confidence and affection. His annual poems to her on her birthday began in 1719, but they always strike the chord of friendship and never that of love.

   "Thou, Stella, wast no longer young
   When first for thee my harp I strung.
   Without one word of Cupid's darts,
   Of killing eyes and bleeding hearts,
   With friendship and esteem possessed,
   I ne'er admitted Love a guest."

   "But, Stella, say what evil tongue
    Reports that you're no longer young;
    That Time sits with his scythe to mow
    Where erst sat Cupid with his bow;
    That half your locks are turned to grey.
    I'll ne'er believe a word they say!
    `Tis true -- but let it not be known --
    My eyes are somewhat dimmish grown;
    For Nature, always in the right,
    To your defects adapts my sight;
    And wrinkles undistinguished pass,
    For I'm ashamed to use a glass;
    And till I see them with these eyes,
    Whoever says you have them, lies.
    No length of time can make you quit
    Honour, virtue, sense and wit;
    Thus you may still be young to me,
    While I can better hear than see.
    Oh, ne'er may Fortune show her spite
    To make me deaf and mend my sight!"

The mystery of the story can never be fully unravelled. Swift's extreme dislike of marriage appears continually in his writings. It is probable, as Scott conjectured, that a physical cause contributed to it, and the continually recurring fits of dizziness, with indications of brain disease, of which he was painfully sensible, may have also strengthened it. The passion of Vanessa, however, continued unabated, and some of her letters, written in 1720, show that it had risen almost to the point of madness, and that she believed that Swift was more and more turning away from her. "It is now ten long weeks since I saw you, and in all that time I have never received but one letter from you and a little note of excuse. Oh! have you forgot me? . . . I cannot comfort you, but here declare that it is not in the power of art, time, or accident to lessen the inexpressible passion which I have for ----- . . . Nor is the love I bear you only seated in my soul; for there is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended with it. Therefore do not flatter yourself that separation will ever change my sentiments. . . . For Heaven's sake tell me what has caused this prodigious change in you, which I have found of late." "I was born with violent passions which terminate all in one, that inexpressible passion I have for you. Consider the killing emotions which I feel from your neglect of me, and show some tenderness for me, or I shall lose my senses. . . . I firmly believe if I could know your thoughts (which no human creature is capable of guessing at, because never any one living thought like you), I should find you had often in a rage wished me religious, hoping that I should have paid my devotions to Heaven; but that would not spare you, for were I an enthusiast still you would be the deity I should worship. . . . Your dear image is always before my eyes. Sometimes you strike me with that prodigious awe I tremble with fear -- at others a divine compassion shines through your countenance."

Such a strain could have but one meaning. The fragmentary correspondence which was published by Hawkesworth, and more fully by Scott, only throws a casual light on this melancholy story. It is easy to see that Swift was perplexed, anxious, and irresolute. He pays Vanessa compliments on her letters and her conversation; assures her of his unabated esteem and love; of his "respect and kindness;" promises to visit her, but says that it must be seldom, lest uncivil tongues should speak about them. He implores her not to yield to unhappy imaginations, to ride, to see company, to read cheerful books; above all, to be on her guard against "the spleen" getting the better of her, "than which there is no more foolish and troublesome disease," and he would gladly see her return to England. "Settle your affairs," he writes in 1721, "and quit this scoundrel island, and things will be as you desire." He tells her that she has no real reason for her melancholy, "if all the advantages of life can be any defence against it." He tries by a somewhat cynical, but not unkindly banter to bring her down to more prosaic levels. "Remember that riches are nine parts in ten of all that is good in life, and health is the tenth; drinking coffee comes long after, and yet it is the eleventh; but without the two former you cannot drink it right." "The worst thing in you and me is that we are too hard to please; and whether we have not made ourselves so is the question. . . . . One thing that I differ from you in is that I do not quarrel with my best friends. . . . We differ prodigiously in one point. I fly from the spleen to the world's end; you run out of your way to meet it. . . . I wish you would get yourself a horse, and have always two servants to attend you, and visit your neighbours -- the worse the better: there is a pleasure in being reverenced, and that is always in your power by your superiority of sense and an easy fortune. . . . I long to see you in figure and equipage. Pray do not lose that taste." "The best maxim I know in this life is to drink your coffee when you can, and when you cannot to be easy without it. While you continue to be splenetick count upon it I will always preach. . . . Without health and good humour I had rather be a dog." "What a foolish thing is time, and how foolish is man, who would be as angry if time stopped as if it passed. . . . But I am thinking myself fast into the spleen, which is the only thing I would not compliment you by imitating."

But such language was of no avail, and the sequel, as it is told by Sheridan, is well known. Vanessa in the spring of 1723 wrote to Stella asking whether she was indeed the wife of Swift, and Stella placed the letter in the hands of the dean. In a paroxysm of rage he rode to Celbridge, where Vanessa was then living, entered her room, and darting at her a look of concentrated anger, flung down the letter at her feet, and departed without uttering a word. She saw at once that her fate was sealed. She languished away, and in a few weeks died. Before her death she revoked the will she had made in favour of Swift, and ordered the publication of "Cadenus and Vanessa," the poem in which he had immortalized her love. Swift fled to the country, and remained for two months buried in absolute seclusion.

There can be little doubt that this tragedy added greatly to the constitutional gloom which was fast settling on Swift. Ireland was never a congenial country to him. Though he lived there so much both in youth and in old age, he always described his life there as an exile. He never called himself an Irishman; he declared that he had been born, or, as he elsewhere expressed it, "dropped" in Ireland by "a perfect accident," and thus, as he said, "I am a Teague or an Irishman, or what people please." In Ireland, however, as elsewhere, he made some warm and intimate friends. The chief appears to have been Dr. Delany, an accomplished and amiable Fellow of Trinity College, the husband of a very charming English lady, whose correspondence furnishes some of the best pictures of Irish life in the first half of the eighteenth century, and also some passing glimpses of Swift both in the days when he was an honoured and popular centre of Dublin society, and also in the last sad years of old age and decrepitude. Delany himself has left an account of Swift's Irish life which is undoubtedly authentic, and which brings into clear relief sides of the character of Swift which those who judged him only by his writings would scarcely have suspected. Another very close friend was Thomas Sheridan, who was for some years probably the most successful schoolmaster in Ireland. He was the father of the biographer of Swift -- the grandfather of Richard Brinsley Sheridan -- the head of a family which has continued for more than a century prolific in genius beyond almost any in English history. He was in some respects a perfect type of certain sides of the Irish character; recklessly improvident, with boundless good-nature and the most boisterous spirits; full of wit and fire, and with a rare talent for versification. He ruined his prospects of promotion by preaching from pure forgetfulness from the text, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof;" on the anniversary of the accession of the House of Hanover; and through most of his life he greatly mismanaged his interests and talents. He carried on a continual warfare with Swift in the shape of puns, charades, satirical poems, and practical jokes; and there is something very winning in the boyish and careless delight with which Swift threw himself into these contests. We owe to them many of his best comic poems, and many of the most amusing anecdotes of his life. Swift was sincerely attached to him. A room at the deanery was specially reserved for him; he spent many of his holidays there, and on more than one occasion Swift used all his influence to help him in his career.

It was not to be expected, however, that Swift could withdraw his attention from political affairs, and he soon entered upon that political career which has given him his place in the history of Ireland.

It would be difficult, indeed, to conceive a more deplorable and humiliating condition than that of Ireland in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The Battle of the Boyne and the events that followed it had completely prostrated the Irish Roman Catholics. Nearly all the men of energy and talent among them had emigrated to foreign lands, while penal laws of atrocious severity crushed the Catholics who remained. The Protestants, on the other hand, were regarded as an English colony; any feeling of independence that appeared among them was sedulously repressed, and their interests were habitually sacrificed to those of England. The Irish Parliament was little more than a court for registering English decrees, for it had no power of passing, or even discussing, any Bill which had not been previously approved and certified under the Great Seal of England. Irishmen were systematically excluded from the most lucrative places. The viceroys were usually absent for three-fourths of their terms of office. About a third of the rents of the country was expended in England, and an abject poverty prevailed.

This poverty was largely due to a commercial legislation which was deliberately intended to crush the chief sources of Irish wealth. Until the reign of Charles II. the Irish shared the commercial privileges of the English; but as the island had not been really conquered till the reign of Elizabeth, and as its people were till then scarcely removed from barbarism, the progress was necessarily slow. In the early Stuart reigns, however, comparative repose and good government were followed by a sudden rush of prosperity. The land was chiefly pasture, for which it was admirably adapted; the export of live cattle to England was carried on upon a large scale, and it became a chief source of Irish wealth. The English landowners, however, took the alarm. They complained that Irish rivalry in the cattle market was reducing English rents; and accordingly, by an Act which was first passed in 1663, and was made perpetual in 1666, the importation of cattle to England was forbidden.

The effect of a measure of this kind, levelled at the principal article of the commerce of the nation, was necessarily most disastrous. The profound modification which it introduced into the course of Irish industry is sufficiently shown by the estimate of Sir W. Petty, who declares that before this statute three-fourths of the trade of Ireland was with England, but not one-fourth of it since that time. In the very year when this Bill was passed another measure was taken not less fatal to the interests of the country. In the first Navigation Act, Ireland was placed on the same terms as England; but in the Act as amended in 1663 she was omitted, and was thus deprived of the whole colonial trade. With the exception of a very few specified articles, no European merchandise could be imported into the British colonies except directly from England, in ships built in England, and manned chiefly by English sailors. No articles, with a few exceptions, could be brought from the colonies to Europe without being first unladen in England. In 1670 this exclusion of Ireland was confirmed, and in 1696 it was rendered more stringent, for it was enacted that no goods of any sort could be imported directly from the colonies to Ireland. It will be remembered that at this time the chief British colonies were those of America, and that Ireland, by her geographical position, was naturally of all countries most fitted for the American trade.

As far, then, as the colonial trade was concerned, Ireland at this time gained nothing whatever by her connection with England. To other countries, however, her ports were still open, and in time of peace her foreign commerce was unrestricted. When forbidden to export their cattle to England, the Irish turned their land chiefly into sheep-walks, and proceeded energetically to manufacture the wool. Some faint traces of this manufacture may be detected from an early period, and Lord Strafford, when governing Ireland, had mentioned it with a characteristic comment. Speaking of the Irish he says, "There was little or no manufactures amongst them, but some small beginnings towards a clothing trade, which I had, and so should still discourage all I could, unless otherwise directed by his Majesty and their Lordships. . . . It might be feared they would beat us out of the trade itself by underselling us, which they were well able to do." With the exception, however, of an abortive effort by this governor, the Irish wool manufacture was in no degree impeded, and was indeed mentioned with special favour in some Acts of Parliament; and it was in a great degree on the faith of this long-continued legislative sanction that it so greatly expanded. The poverty of Ireland, the low state of the civilization of a large proportion of its inhabitants, the effects of the civil wars which had so recently convulsed it, and the exclusion of its products from the English colonies, were doubtless great obstacles to manufacturing enterprise; but, on the other hand, Irish wool was very good, living was cheaper and taxes were lighter than in England, a spirit of real industrial energy began to pervade the country, and a considerable number of English manufacturers came over to colonize it. There appeared for a time every probability that the Irish would become an industrial nation, and had manufactures arisen, their whole social, political, and economical condition would have been changed. But commercial jealousy again interposed. By an Act of crushing and unprecedented severity, which was carried in 1699, the export of the Irish woollen manufactures, not only to England, but also to all other countries, was absolutely forbidden.

The effects of this measure were terrible almost beyond conception. The main industry of the country was at a blow completely and irretrievably annihilated. A vast population was thrown into a condition of utter destitution. Thousands of manufacturers left the country, and carried their skill and enterprise to Germany, France, and Spain. The western and southern districts of Ireland are said to have been nearly depopulated. Emigration to America began on a large scale, and the blow was so severe that long after, a kind of chronic famine prevailed. In 1707 the Irish government was unable to pay its military establishments, and the national resources were so small that a debt of less than £100,000 caused the gravest anxiety. Fortunately for the country, it was found impossible to guard the ports, and a vast smuggling export of wool to France was carried on, in which all classes participated, and which somewhat alleviated the distress, but contributed powerfully, with other influences, to educate the people in a contempt for law. Industrial enterprise and confidence were utterly destroyed. By a simple act of authority the English Parliament had suppressed the chief form of Irish commerce, solely and avowedly because it had so succeeded as to appear a formidable competitor; and there was no reason why a similar step should not be taken whenever any other Irish manufacture began to flourish. It is true that some small encouragement was given to the linen manufacture, but that manufacture was then very insignificant, and the encouragement was utterly precarious. "I am sorry to find," wrote an author in 1729, "so universal a despondency amongst us in respect to trade. Men of all degrees give up the thought of improving our commerce, and conclude that the restrictions under which we are laid are so insurmountable that any attempt on that head would be vain and fruitless."5 Molyneux was impelled, chiefly by these restrictions, to raise the banner of Irish legislative independence. "Ireland," wrote Swift, "is the only kingdom I ever heard or read of; either in ancient or modern story, which was denied the liberty of exporting their native commodities and manufactures wherever they pleased, except to countries at war with their own prince or state. Yet this privilege, by the superiority of mere power, is refused us in the most momentous parts of commerce; besides an Act of Navigation, to which we never assented, pressed down upon us, and rigorously executed." "The conveniency of ports and harbours which nature bestowed so liberally on this kingdom is of no more use than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon."

The spirit in which Irish affairs were administered can hardly be better illustrated than by the letters of Archbishop Boulter, who occupied the see of Armagh from 1724 to 1738, and exercised during all that time a dominating influence. Boulter was an honest but narrow man, charitable to the poor, and liberal to the extent of warmly advocating the endowment of the Presbyterian clergy; but he was a strenuous supporter of the penal code, and the main object of his policy was to prevent the rise of an Irish party. His letters are chiefly on questions of money and patronage, and it is curious to observe how entirely all religious motives appear to have been absent from his mind in his innumerable recommendations for Church dignities. Personal claims, and above all the fitness of the candidate to carry out the English policy, were in these cases the only elements considered. His uniform policy was to divide the Irish Catholics and the Irish Protestants, to crush the former by disabling laws, to destroy the independence of the latter by conferring the most lucrative and influential posts upon Englishmen, and thus to make all Irish interests strictly subservient to those of England. The continual burden of his letters is the necessity of sending over Englishmen to fill all important Irish posts. "The only way to keep things quiet here," he writes, "and make them easy to the ministry, is by filling the great places with natives of England." He complains bitterly that only nine of the twenty-two Irish bishops were Englishmen, and urges the ministers "gradually to get as many English on the bench here as can decently be sent hither." On the death of the Chancellor, writing to the Duke of Newcastle, he speaks of "the uneasiness we are under at the report that a native of this place is like to be made Lord Chancellor." "I must request of your grace," he adds, "that you would use your influence to have none but Englishmen put into the great places here for the future." When a vacancy in the see of Dublin was likely to occur, he writes: "I am entirely of opinion that the new archbishop ought to be an Englishman either already on the bench here, or in England. As for a native of this country, I can hardly doubt that, whatever his behaviour has been and his promises may be, when he is once in that station he will put himself at the head of the Irish interest in the Church at least, and he will naturally carry with him the college and most of the clergy here."

It is not surprising that a policy of this kind should have been resented by the Irish Protestants, and many traces of their dissatisfaction may be found in the letters of Primate Boulter. The Protestants, however, were too few, too divided, and too dependent upon English support to be really formidable, and measures of the grossest tyranny were carried without resistance, and almost without protest.

There had been, however, one remarkable exception. In 1698, when the measure for destroying the Irish wool trade was under deliberation, Molyneux -- one of the members of Trinity College, an eminent man of science, and the "ingenious friend" mentioned by Locke in his essay -- had published his famous "Case of Ireland," in which he asserted the full and sole competence of the Irish Parliament to legislate for Ireland. He maintained that the Parliament of Ireland had naturally and anciently all the prerogatives in Ireland which the English Parliament possessed in England, and that the subservience to which it had been reduced was merely due to acts of usurpation. His arguments were chiefly historical, and were those which were afterwards maintained by Flood and Grattan, and which eventually triumphed in 1782. The position and ability of the writer, and the extreme malevolence with which, in commercial matters, English authority was at this time employed, attracted to the work a large measure of attention, and it was written in the most moderate, decorous, and respectful language. The government, however, took the alarm; the book was speedily brought before the English House of Commons and formally condemned.

Such was the condition of Irish politics and Irish opinion when Swift came over to his deanery. It is not difficult to understand how intolerable it must have been to a man of his character and antecedents. Accustomed during several years to exercise a commanding influence upon the policy of the empire, endowed beyond all living men with that kind of literary talent which is most fitted to arouse and direct a great popular movement, and at the same time embittered by disappointment and defeat, it would have been strange if he had remained a passive spectator of the scandalous and yet petty tyranny about him. He had every personal and party motive to stimulate him; he was capable of a very real patriotism, and a burning hatred of injustice and oppression was the form which his virtue most naturally assumed.

To this hatred, however, there was one melancholy exception. He was always an ecclesiastic and a High Churchman, imbued with the intolerance of his order. For the Catholics, as such, he did simply nothing. Neither in England when he was guiding the ministry, nor in Ireland when he was leading the nation, did he make any effort to prevent the infraction of the Treaty of Limerick. One of his arguments in defence of the Test Act, which excluded the Dissenters from office, was, that if it were repealed, even the Catholics, by parity of reasoning, might claim to be enfranchised. The very existence of the Catholic worship in Ireland he hoped would some day be destroyed by law. His language on this subject is explicit and emphatic. "The Popish priests are all registered, and without permission (which I hope will not be granted) they can have no successors, so that the Protestant clergy will find it perhaps no difficult matter to bring great numbers over to the Church."

He first turned his attention to the state of Irish manufactures. He published anonymously, in 1720, an admirable pamphlet on the subject, in which he urged the people to meet the restrictions which had been imposed on their trade by abstaining from importation, using exclusively Irish products, and burning everything that came from England -- "except the coal." He described the recent English policy in an ingenious passage under the guise of the fable of "Pallas and Arachne." "The goddess had heard of one Arachne, a young virgin very famous for spinning and weaving. They both met upon a trial of skill; and Pallas, finding herself almost equalled in her own art, stung with rage and envy, knocked her rival down, turned her into a spider, enjoining her to spin and weave for ever out of her own bowels, and in a very narrow compass." He concluded with an earnest appeal to the landlords to lighten the rents, which were crushing so many of their tenants, and with a powerful but probably not exaggerated picture of the "poverty and desolation that prevailed." "Whoever," he said, "travels in this country and observes the face of nature or the faces and habits and dwellings of the natives, will hardly think himself in a land where either law, religion, or common humanity is professed." The pamphlet attracted great attention, but was immediately prosecuted, and Chief Justice Whiteshed displayed gross partisanship in endeavouring to intimidate the jury into giving a verdict against it, but the printer ultimately remained unpunished, and a shower of lampoons assailed the judge.

The next productions of Swift were his famous "Drapier's Letters." Ireland had been for some time suffering from the want of a sufficiently large copper coinage. Walpole determined to remedy this want but the manner in which this was done was very justly described as a scandalous job. The frequent issue of base coinage in Ireland had been an old grievance and the English government had been again and again petitioned to establish a mint in Ireland, and to provide that in Ireland as in other civilized countries the coinage should be undertaken by government officials. These petitions, however, had been rejected, and on the present occasion neither the Lord Lieutenant, nor the Irish Privy Council, nor the Irish Parliament were consulted about the step that was taken. The patent for issuing the new coinage was granted to the Duchess of Kendal the mistress of the king, who sold it for £10,000 to an English iron merchant, named Wood.

In order to raise the profits it was determined that no less than £108,000 should be coined. According to the best authorities in Ireland, £10,000 or £15,000 would amply meet the wants of the country. In England the copper coinage seldom exceeded a hundredth part of the whole currency, and, serving only for the convenience of change, its intrinsic value was of no importance. In Ireland, the whole current coin was estimated at not more than £400,000, and it was proposed to coin in copper more than a fourth part of that sum. It was contended in Ireland that a proportion which was so utterly extravagant made the question of intrinsic value of supreme importance; that copper would enter largely into all considerable payments; that the precious metals would be displaced, and would go for the most part to England in the shape of rent; that comers would find it for their advantage to coin a great additional amount of debased copper, and that Ireland being mainly reduced to such a coinage would be placed at a ruinous disadvantage in commerce with other countries.

The clamour against Wood's halfpence was not originated by Swift. Before he took up his pen the new coinage had been vehemently denounced in the House of Commons, and both of the Irish Houses of Parliament as well as the Irish Privy Council had presented addresses against the project. Their complaints, however, were disregarded, and, in spite of the remonstrances of all the organs of public opinion in Ireland, the government determined to persevere.

There is no real reason to believe that the new coins were inferior to the very bad copper coinage which already existed in Ireland, though they appear to have been by no means uniform, and though no less than four varieties were struck. That their intrinsic value was greatly below their nominal value was true, but if they had only been coined in a moderate amount, and had only served the purpose of tokens or small change, this would have signified little or nothing. Taking, however, all the circumstances of the case, there can be no doubt that a real and gross job had been perpetrated, and that the dignity and independence of the country had been grossly outraged. It would, however, have been hopeless to raise an opposition simply on constitutional grounds. The Catholics were utterly crushed. A large proportion of the Protestants were far too ignorant to care for any mere constitutional question. Public opinion was faint, dispirited, and divided, and the habit of servitude had passed into all classes. The English party, occupying the most important posts, disposing of nearly all the great emoluments, and controlling the courts of justice, were anxious to suppress every symptom of opposition. The fate of the treatise of Molyneux, and of Swift's own tract on Irish manufactures, was a sufficient warning, and it was plain that the contemplated measure could only be resisted by a strong national enthusiasm.

A report that the coins were below their nominal value had spread through the country, and was adopted by Parliament and embodied in the resolutions of both Houses. Of this report Swift availed himself. Writing in the character of a tradesman, and adopting with consummate skill a style of popular argument consonant to his assumed character, he commenced a series of letters in which he asserted with the utmost assurance that all who took the new coin would lose nearly elevenpence in a shilling, or, as he afterwards maintained with a great parade of accuracy, that thirty-six of them would purchase a quart of twopenny ale. He appealed alternately to every section of the community, pointing out how their special interests would be affected by its introduction, concluding with the beggars, who were assured that the coin selected for adulteration had been halfpence, in order that they too might be ruined. Tampering with the coinage, he justly said, "is the tenderest point of government, affecting every individual in the highest degree. When the value of money is arbitrary or unsettled, no man can well be said to have any property at all; nor is any wound so suddenly felt, so hardly cured, or that leaveth such deep and lasting scars behind it." A great panic was soon created. The ministry endeavoured to allay it by reducing the amount to be coined to £40,000, by a formal examination of some of the later halfpence at the Mint, and by a report attesting their good quality issued by Sir I. Newton; but the time for such measures had passed. Swift combated the report in an exceedingly ingenious letter, and the distrust of the people was far too deep to be assuaged.

By this means the needful agitation was produced, and it remained only to turn it into the national channel. This was done by the famous Fourth Letter. Swift began by deploring the general weakness and subserviency of the people. "Having," he said, "already written three letters upon so disagreeable a subject as Mr. Wood and his halfpence, I conceived my task was at an end. But I find that cordials must be frequently applied to weak constitutions, political as well as natural. A people long used to hardships lose by degrees the very notions of liberty; they look upon themselves as creatures of mercy, and that all impositions laid on them by a strong hand are, in the phrase of the report, legal and obligatory." He defined clearly and boldly the limits of the prerogative of the Crown, maintaining that while the sovereign had an undoubted right to issue coin, he could not compel the people to receive it and he proceeded to assert the independence of Ireland, and the essential nullity of those measures which had not received the sanction of the Irish legislature. He avowed his entire adherence to the doctrine of Molyneux; he declared his allegiance to the king, not as King of England, but as King of Ireland, and he asserted that Ireland was rightfully a free nation, which implied that it had the power of self-legislation; for "government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery."

This letter was sustained by other pamphlets and by ballads which were sung through the streets, and it brought the agitation to the highest pitch. All parties combined in resistance to the obnoxious patent and in a determination to support the constitutional doctrine. The Chancellor Middleton denounced the coin; the Lords Justices refused to issue an order for its circulation; both Houses of Parliament were opposed to it; the grand jury of Dublin and the country gentry at most of the quarter sessions condemned it. "I find," wrote Primate Boulter, "by my own and others' inquiry, that the people of every religion, country, and party here are alike set against Wood's halfpence, and that their agreement in this has had a very unhappy influence on the state of this nation, by bringing on intimacies between Papists and Jacobites and the Whigs." Government was exceedingly alarmed. Walpole had already recalled the Duke of Grafton, whom he described as "a fair-weather pilot, that did not know how to act when the first storm arose;" but Lord Carteret, who succeeded him as Lord Lieutenant, was equally unable to quell the agitation. A reward of £300 was offered in vain for the discovery of the author of the Fourth Letter. The authorship was notorious, and scarcely concealed by Swift, but no legal evidence was forthcoming. A prosecution was instituted against the printer; but the grand jury refused to find the bill, and persisted in their refusal, notwithstanding the violent and indecorous conduct of Chief Justice Whiteshed. The popular feeling grew daily stronger, and at last Walpole thought it prudent to yield, and withdrew the patent. Wood was awarded no less than £3,000 a year for eight years, as compensation for its loss.

Such were the circumstances of this memorable contest -- a contest which has been deservedly placed in the foremost ranks in the annals of Ireland. There is no more momentous epoch in the history of a nation than that in which the voice of the people has first spoken, and spoken with success. It marks the transition from an age of semi-barbarism to an age of civilization -- from the government of force to the government of opinion.

Swift was admirably calculated to be the leader of public opinion in Ireland, from his complete freedom from the characteristic defects of the Irish temperament. His writings exhibit no tendency to rhetoric or bombast, no fallacious images or far-fetched analogies, no tumid phrases in which the expression hangs loosely and inaccurately around the meaning. His style is always clear, keen, nervous, and exact. He delights in the most homely Saxon, in the simplest and most unadorned sentences. His arguments are so plain that the weakest mind can grasp them, yet so logical that it is seldom possible to evade their force. Even his fictions exhibit everywhere his antipathy to vagueness and mystery. As Emerson observes, "He describes his characters as if for the police-court." It has been often remarked that his very wit is a species of argument. He starts from one ludicrous conception, such as the existence of minute men, or the suitability of children for food, and he proceeds to examine that conception in every aspect, to follow it out to all its consequences, and to derive from it, systematically and consistently, a train of the most grotesque incidents. He seeks to reduce everything to its most practical form, and to its simplest expression, and sometimes affects not even to understand inflated language. It is curious to observe an Irishman, when addressing the Irish people, laying hold of a careless expression attributed to Walpole -- that he would pour the coin down the throats of the nation -- and arguing gravely that the difficulties of such a course would be insuperable. This shrewd, practical, unimpassioned tone was especially needed in Ireland. To employ Swift's own image, it was a medicine well suited to correct the weakness of the national character.

After the "Drapier's Letters," Swift published several minor pieces on Irish affairs, but most of them are very inconsiderable. The principal are his "Maxims controlled in Ireland," in which he showed how many of the ordinary maxims of English policy are inapplicable to Ireland, and his "Short View of the State of Ireland," published in 1727, in which he enumerated fourteen causes of a nation's prosperity, and showed in how many of these Ireland was deficient. He brought forward the condition of the country indirectly, in that ghastly piece of sustained irony, his proposal for employing Irish children for food ["A Modest Proposal"], and also in an admirable allegory, "The Story of an Injured Lady." His influence with the people after the "Drapier's Letters" was unbounded. Walpole once spoke of having him arrested, and was asked whether he had ten thousand men to spare, for they would be needed for the enterprise. When Serjeant Bettesworth, an eminent lawyer whom Swift had fiercely satirized, threatened him with personal violence, the people voluntarily formed a guard for his protection. When Primate Boulter accused him of exciting the people, he retorted, with scarcely an exaggeration, `If I were only to lift my finger, you would be torn to pieces." We have a curious proof of the extent of his reputation in a letter written by Voltaire, then a very young man, requesting him to procure subscriptions in Ireland for the "Henriade" -- a request with which Swift complied, though he had always refused to publish his own works by subscription.

In more than one private letter Swift denies that in his Irish writings he was animated by any special love for Ireland. "What I did for this country," he said,"was from profound hatred of tyranny and oppression. I believe the people of Lapland or the Hottentots cannot be so miserable a people as we." Nor did he ever seek like a common demagogue to flatter those for whom he wrote by attributing all their calamities to others than themselves. In his analysis of the causes of Irish depression he dwelt with unsparing force upon those which grew out of vices that were purely Irish. He speaks of the excessive rents; the depopulation of vast districts by the great graziers; the scandalous absenteeism and neglect of duty of the upper classes, their passion for London silks and calicoes and for every English fashion in preference to native manufacture; the reckless extravagance that was leading to the ruin of so many country seats and the destruction of so much noble timber in order to meet the expenses of spendthrift owners in London or at Bath. He deplores the absence of any serious effort to raise and civilize a population who in many parts of Ireland were sunk in a squalor, ignorance, poverty, and extreme idleness hardly equalled in Europe, and he gives striking examples of the utter ignorance or utter improvidence displayed in Irish agriculture. Great tracts of land were ruined because it was the practice of Irish farmers to cut turf without any providence or regularity; to flay off the green surface even of shallow soils in order to cover with it their cabins and make up ditches; to wear out the ground by excessive ploughing, without taking any proper care to manure it or giving any part of the land time to recover itself; to plough up the meadows and let farms go to utter ruin when the end of a lease was approaching. No pains were taken to enclose lands; there was so much ignorance or so much carelessness in the management of woods that not one hedge in a hundred came to maturity; trees were habitually suffered to ruin each other for want of the most elementary trimming, or were cut down long before they had come to their proper size. In no other country in Europe, he said, had so much excellent timber been of late cut down in so short a time, and with so little advantage to the country either in shipping or building.

But although Swift never flattered, no one can mistake the accent of genuine compassion and genuine indignation in his writings, and his countrymen fully recognized the services he had rendered them. Few things in the Irish history of the last century are more touching than the constancy with which the people clung to their old leader, even at a time when his faculties had wholly decayed; and, notwithstanding his creed, his profession, and his intolerance, the name of Swift was for many generations the most universally popular in Ireland. He first taught the Irish people to rely upon themselves. He led them to victory at a time when long oppression and the expatriation of all the energy of the country had deprived them of every hope. He gave a voice to their mute sufferings, and traced the lines of their future progress. The cause of free trade and the cause of legislative independence never again passed out of the minds of Irishmen, and the non-importation agreement of 1779 and the legislative emancipation of 1782 were the development of his policy. The street ballads which he delighted in writing, the homely, transparent nature of all his pamphlets, and the peculiar vein of rich humour which pervaded them, extended his influence to the very lowest class. His birthdays were kept with public rejoicings. On his return from England in 1726 bonfires were lit and church bells rung. It is related of him that on one occasion, being disturbed by a crowd who gathered at the deanery door to watch an eclipse, he sent out his servant with a bell to proclaim that by order of the Dean of St. Patrick's the eclipse was postponed, and the laughing crowd at once dispersed. On another occasion he gave a guinea to a maidservant to buy a new gown, with the characteristic injunction that it should be of Irish stuff. When he afterwards reproached her with not having complied with his injunction, she brought him his own volumes, which she had purchased, saying they were the best "Irish stuff" she knew.

In spite of all this popularity, Ireland never ceased to be a land of exile to him. "It is time for me," he wrote to Bolingbroke in 1729, "to have done with the world; and so I would if I could get into a better world before I was called into the best; and not die here in a rage like a poisoned rat in a hole." He more than once tried to obtain some English preferment instead of his deanery. With this object, on the death of George I., he made an assiduous court to Mrs. Howard, the mistress of the new sovereign, but soon found that she possessed no real power. The presence of Pope and Bolingbroke, whom he truly loved, as well as the wider sphere which it furnished, drew his affections to England, and a number of causes made Ireland peculiarly painful to him. The nonpayment of some of his church revenues and some litigation connected with the rights of his deanery gave him much anxiety. He was engaged towards the close of his life in ecclesiastical disputes, into the details of which it is not necessary to enter. He strenuously opposed Bills for commuting the tithes of flax and hemp, for preventing the settlement of landed property on the Church or on public charities, for enlarging the power of the bishops in granting leases, and for relieving pasture land from the payment of tithes; and the first three Bills were ultimately rejected. The conduct of the Irish House of Commons in carrying a resolution in favour of the last measure threw him into a paroxysm of fury. Nothing he ever wrote, nothing indeed in English literature, is more savage than the "Legion Club," in which he described the Irish Parliament as a devil-worshipping "den of thieves --

    "Scarce a bowshot from the college,
    Half the globe from sense and knowledge,
     .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 
    Roaring till their lungs are spent
    Privilege of Parliament -- "

In the management of his deanery he was in all essentials irreproachable, though his wayward, imperious, eccentric nature was often shown. He was indefatigable in maintaining its rights, most regular in discharging its duties, exceedingly munificent in his charities. He devoted a large sum out of his very moderate income to loans to industrious tradesmen; he organized a system for giving badges to beggars, in order to distinguish genuine from assumed poverty, and he had a crowd of poor persons, usually old and infirm, whom he was accustomed habitually to assist. Few men can have given a larger proportion of their incomes in charity, and Delany tells us that he "never saw poor so carefully and conscientiously attended to as those of his cathedral." Mrs. Pilkington describes him, as she saw him after service, "at the church door surrounded by a crowd of poor, to all of whom he gave charity, except to one old woman who held out a very dirty hand to him; he told her gravely that `though she was a beggar, water was not so scarce but she might have washed her hands.'" In Dublin also, as in London, he was always ready to help struggling talent, and many acts of kindness to obscure and sometimes undeserving persons are recorded of him. "My notion," he wrote to Knightly Chetwode, "is that if a man cannot mend the public, he should mend old shoes if he can do no better, and therefore I endeavour in the little sphere I am placed in to do all the good it is capable of." He had some Church patronage, and he administered it with scrupulous care, and many anecdotes are preserved showing the persistence with which he discouraged the idleness, the extravagance, the intemperance, the love of display which prevailed in all ranks of Irish life. Whatever might be thought of his influence on public affairs, no one can doubt that in all these ways his influence was most beneficent.

In 1726 he paid a visit to England after an absence of twelve years. He was introduced to Walpole, who received him with civility, and whom he endeavoured to interest, both directly and through the medium of Peterborough, in Irish affairs. He also revisited his old friends Pope and Bolingbroke, but was soon recalled by the news that Stella was dying. "I have been long weary," he wrote, "of the world, and shall, for my small remainder of years, be weary of life, having for ever lost that conversation which could alone make it tolerable." Stella, however, lingered till 1728. The close of her life was in keeping with the rest, involved in circumstances of mystery and obscurity; and an anecdote is related concerning it which, if it be accepted, would leave a deep stain on the memory of Swift. The younger Sheridan states, on the authority of his father, that a few days before her death, Stella, in the presence of Sheridan, adjured Swift to acknowledge the marriage that had previously taken place between them, to save her reputation from posthumous slander, and to grant her the consolation of dying his admitted wife. He adds that Swift made no reply, but walked silently out of the room, and never saw her again during the few days that she lived; that she was thrown by his behaviour into unspeakable agonies of disappointment, inveighed bitterly against his cruelty, and then sent for a lawyer and bequeathed her property, in the presence of Sheridan, to charitable purposes. But high as is the authority for this anecdote, it is certainly inaccurate. The book in which it appeared was only published fifty years after the time, and its author was a boy when his father died. It appears from the extant will that it was drawn up, not a "few days," but a full month before the death of the testator, and at a time when she was so far from regarding herself as on the point of death that she described herself as in "tolerable health of body," left a legacy to one of her servants if he should be alive and in her service at the time of her death, and another to the poor of the parish in which she may happen to die. It is certain that the disposition of her property was no sudden resolution, and it is equally certain that it was not made contrary to the wishes of Swift, for a letter by him exists which was written a year earlier, in which he expresses a strong desire that she could be induced to make her will, and states her intentions about her property in the exact words which she subsequently employed. On money matters Swift was very disinterested, and it is not surprising that he who had refused to marry Vanessa notwithstanding her large fortune, should have advised Stella to bequeath her property in charity. The terms of agonizing sorrow and intense affection in which he at this time wrote about her, and the entire absence of any known reason why he should not have avowed the marriage had she desired it, make the alleged act of harshness very improbable; and it may be added that the will contains a bequest to Swift of a box of papers, and of a bond for thirty pounds. The bulk of her property she bequeathed, as Swift had before intimated, to Steevens Hospital, after the death of her mother and sister, to revert to her nearest relative in case of the disestablishment of the Protestant Church in Ireland. As we have already seen, Swift had himself provided for the same contingency in the case of some tithes which he purchased when at Laracor, and left to his descendants. Her body, in accordance with the desire expressed in her will, was buried in St. Patrick's Cathedral. On her monument, as in her will, she is described simply as Esther Johnson.

In addition to the anecdote I have mentioned, there is another related about the last hours of Stella which is not very consistent with the former one. Mrs. Whiteway, the niece of Swift, is said to have informed one of his relations that Stella was carried shortly before her death to the deanery, and being very feeble was laid upon a bed, while Swift sat by the side, holding her hand and addressing her in the most affectionate terms. Mrs. Whiteway, out of delicacy, and being unwilling to overhear their conversation, withdrew into another room, but she could not help hearing two broken sentences. Swift said in an audible tone, "Well, my dear, if you wish it, it shall be owned;" to which Stella answered, with a sigh, "It is too late!" and it is assumed that these words referred to the marriage. There is, however, no decisive evidence that Stella ever complained of her relations with Swift, nor does Swift ever appear during her lifetime to have been accused of harshness to her. At the time of her death she was forty-seven and Swift was sixty-one.

But whatever may have been the relation subsisting between Stella and Swift, it is plain that when she died the death-knell of his happiness had struck. "For my part," he wrote to one of his friends shortly before the event took place, "as I value life very little, so the poor casual remains of it, after such a loss, would be a burden that I must heartily beg God Almighty to enable me to bear; and I think there is not a greater folly than that of entering into too strict and particular a friendship, with the loss of which a man must be absolutely miserable, but especially at an age when it is too late to engage in a new friendship." That morbid melancholy to which he had ever been subject assumed a darker hue and a more unremitting sway as the shadows began to lengthen upon his path. It had appeared very vividly in "Gulliver's Travels," which was published in 1726. Like nearly all Swift's works this great book was published anonymously, and like nearly all of them it met with a great and immediate success. It is, indeed, one of the most original as well as one of the most enduring books of the eighteenth century. Few things might have seemed more impossible than to combine in a single work the charm of an eminently popular children's story, a savage satire on human nature, and a large amount of shrewd and practical political speculation. Yet all this will be found in "Gulliver." Of all Swift's works it probably exhibits most frequently his idiosyncrasies and his sentiments. We find his old hatred of mathematics displayed in the history of Laputa; his devotion to his disgraced friends in the attempt to cast ridicule on the evidence on which Atterbury was condemned; his antipathy to Sir Isaac Newton, whose habitual absence of mind is said to have suggested the flappers; as well as allusions to Sir R. Walpole, to the doubtful policy of the Prince of Wales, and to the antipathy Queen Anne had conceived against him on account of the indecorous manner in which he had defended the Church. We find, above all, his profound disenchantment with human life and his deep-seated contempt for mankind in his picture of the Yahoos. Embittered by disappointment and ill-health, and separated by death or by his position from all he most deeply loved, he had learnt to look with contempt upon the contests in which so much of his life had been expended, and his naturally stern, gloomy, and foreboding nature darkened into an intense misanthropy. "I love only individuals," he once wrote. He "hated and detested that animal called man," and he declared that he wrote "Gulliver" "to vex the world rather than to divert it." It was his deliberate opinion that man is hopelessly corrupt, that the evil preponderates over the good, and that life itself is a curse. No one who really understands Swift will question the reality and the intensity of this misanthropy. It was one of his strange habits to celebrate his birthday by reading the third chapter of the Book of Job, in which the patriarch cursed bitterly the day of his birth. "I hate life," he once wrote on learning the early death of a dear friend, "when I think it is exposed to such accidents, and to see so many thousand wretches burdening the earth while such as her die makes me think God did never intend life for a blessing." "Life," he wrote to Pope, "is not a farce; it is a ridiculous tragedy, which is the worst kind of composition."

The melancholy of Swift was doubtless essentially constitutional, and mainly due to a physical malady which had long acted upon his brain. His nature was a profoundly unhappy one, but it is not true that his life was on the whole unprosperous. Very few penniless men of genius have had the advantages which he obtained at an early age by his connection with Sir William Temple. He tasted in ample measure all the sweets of literary success, and although his political career was chequered by grave disappointments he obtained both in England and in Ireland some brilliant triumphs. A deanery in an important provincial capital, where he was adored by the populace, and where he had warm friends among the gentry, may not have been all to which he aspired, but it was no very deplorable fate, and although the income attached to it was moderate and at one time greatly diminished, it was sufficient for his small wants and frugal habits. Above all, few men have received from those who knew them best a larger measure of affection and friendship. But happiness and misery come mainly from within, and to Swift life had lost all its charm. After "Gulliver," his literary activity sensibly abated, but in 1731 he wrote one of the most powerful, but also the saddest of his poems, the poem on his own death.

Age had begun to press heavily upon him, and age he had ever regarded as the greatest of human ills. In his picture of the "Immortals" he had painted its attendant evils as they had never been painted before. He had ridiculed the reverence paid to the old, as resembling that which the vulgar pay to comets, for their beards and their pretensions to foretell the future. He had predicted that, like the blasted tree, he would himself die first at the top. Those whom he had valued the most had almost all preceded him to the tomb. Oxford, Arbuthnot, Peterborough, Gay, Lady Masham, and Rowe, had one by one dropped off. Of all that brilliant company who had surrounded him in the days of his power, Pope and Bolingbroke alone remained, and Pope was sinking under continued illness, and Bolingbroke was drawing his last breath in the more congenial atmosphere of France. A cloud had passed over his friendship with Sheridan, whom he sincerely loved, but whose boisterous spirits had become too much for the old and misanthropic man, and Sheridan had now gone with broken fortunes to a school at Cavan. Stella had left no successor. His niece, Mrs. Whiteway, watched over him with unwearied kindness, but she could not supply the place of those who had gone.

He looked forward to death without terror, but his mind quailed at the prospect of the dotage and the decrepitude that precedes it. He had seen the greatest general and the greatest lawyer of the day sink into second childhood, and he felt that the fate of Marlborough and of Somers would at last be his own. A large mirror once fell to the ground in the room where he was standing. A friend observed how nearly it had killed him. "Would to God," he exclaimed, "that it had!" His later letters -- especially his letters to his friend Knightly Chetwode -- are full of complaints of attacks of deafness and dizziness, of failure of memory, of confusion of mind. He was conscious of failing powers, and grew morbidly restless and irritable. His flashes of wit became fewer and fewer. Avarice, the common vice of the old, came upon him, and he was himself quite aware of the fact. He shrank from all hospitality, from all luxuries. Yet even at this time his large charities were unabated, and he refused a considerable sum which was offered him to renew a lease on terms that would be disadvantageous to his successors.

After 1736 the failure of his faculties grew very evident, and in 1742 it became necessary to place him under restraint.

At length the evil day arrived. A tumour, accompanied by excruciating pain, arose over one of his eyes. For a month he never gained a moment of repose. For a week he was with difficulty restrained by force from tearing out his eye. The agony was too great for human endurance. It subsided at last, but his mind had wholly ebbed away. It was not madness; it was absolute idiocy that ensued. He remained passive in the hands of his attendants without speaking, or moving, or betraying the slightest emotion. Once, indeed, when someone spoke of the illuminations by which the people were celebrating the anniversary of his birthday, he muttered, "It is all folly; they had better leave it alone." Occasionally he endeavoured to rouse himself from his torpor, but could not find words to form a sentence, and with a deep sigh he relapsed