Jonathan, D.D., Dean of St Patrick's, the most original writer of his own, and perhaps the greatest satirist of any age, was born in Hoey's Court, Dublin, November 30, 1667. Like Pope's, his family was of Yorkshire origin; in the time of Charles I. the representative of one branch had obtained a peage which expired with him. The first of his own immediate ancestors known to us was a clergyman, rector of St Andrew's, Canterbury, from 1569 to 1592, whose son succeeded him in that living, and whose grandson was the Rev. Thomas Swift, vicar of Goodrich in Herefordshire, renowned for his eccentricity, his mechanical ingenuity, and above all for his stubborn devotion to Charles I., and the persecutions he underwent in consequence. Plundered thirty-six times, ultimately ejected from his living, he died in 1658, leaving his thirteen children a small and greatly impoverished landed estate, and the questionable advantage of a substantial claim on the gratitude of the restored sovereign. More fortunate than most who have kings for debtors, his eldest son Godwin soon obtained the Attorney-Generalship of the Palatinate of Tipperary. This piece of good fortune naturally attracted other members of the family across the channel,—among them Jonathan, one of the youngest of nine brothers, but already husband of Abigail Erick of Leicester, a lady of descent more ancient and means more limited than his own. A student of law, but never called to the bar, Jonathan appears to have subsisted for some years on windfalls and casual employments. At length (1665) he became steward of the King's Inns (answering to the inns of court in England), an office of small emolument. Two years afterwards he died suddenly, leaving an infant daughter, and a widow pregnant with the future Dean of St Patrick's. So embarrassed had his circumstances been, that although considerable debts were owing to the estate, Mrs Swift was for the moment unable to defray the expense of his interment. Thus Swift's first experience of life was that of a dependant on the charity of his uncles, more particularly of Godwin. It is easy to conceive the effect of perpetual indigence and mendicancy on a spirit like his, and the inevitable bitterness of the situation was aggravated by the grudging manner in which the Tipperary official seemed to dole out his parsimonious help. In fact, the apparently prosperous relative was the victim of unfortunate speculations, and preferred the reproach of avarice to the acknowledgment of the humiliating truth. A virulent resentment became ingrained into the youth's whole nature, and though ultimately acquainted with the real state of the case, he never mentioned his uncle with kindness or respect. Other relatives did more to merit his regard. Yet he took no pride in his Irish connections or nativity, and a singular adventure in his infancy seems to have afforded him a pretext for insinuating that he was really born in England. When he was but two years old, his nurse, a native of Whitehaven, was recalled to that town by an illness in her family. So attached had she become to her charge, as to clandestinely carry him away with her. Mrs Swift was induced to consent to his remaining with her for a time, and the child spent three years in Cumberland. By his return his education had made considerable progress, and in the next year he was sent to the grammar school at Kilkenny. There can be no question as to the author of Gulliver having been a remarkable child, but unfortunately only one anecdote of his school-days has been preserved. It is the story, graphically narrated by himself, of his having once invested the whole of his pocket-money in the purchase of an old horse condemned to the knacker's yard, his momentary triumph over his school-fellows, and his mortification on discovering the uselessness of his acquisition; an anecdote highly characteristic of his daring, pride, and ambition, and from which, instead of the moral he professed to discover, he might have derived an augury of the majestic failure of his life.

In his fifteenth year, and equipped, as is probable, with no more than the literary apparatus usually brought away from a country grammar-school, Swift was matriculated at Trinity College, Dublin. The history of his residence there is the history of many another youth of parts, fallen upon an unpropitious era in the annals of learning, and restrained, by the very mental superiority which would have triumphed in any worthy competition, from contending for a garland of dead leaves. At that period, the logic of the schoolmen was the beginning, the middle, and the end of Dublin university education. Swift subsequently became as finished a classical scholar as an irregular training would allow; his understanding proved fully capable of apprehending the principles and the utility of those mathematical studies to which his taste by no means naturally inclined; but his reasoning powers must have been less remarkable than was the case, had they allowed him to fancy them assisted by the study actually enforced upon him. He might undoubtedly have accommodated himself to this had he so willed; a stronger proof of his contempt and distaste, therefore, could not well be produced than the ignorance which, on standing for his bachelorship in February 1686, he displayed of the very definition of a syllogism. The degree for some time withheld was at length conferred specialis gratia, and the mortifying record stands against his name to this day in the college books. This disgrace never ascribed to incapacity by any reader of the Dean of St Patrick's, the college contemporaries of poor uncouth Jonathan Swift would have thought it absurd to attribute to any other cause. Swift doubtless incurred the contempt of the whole university; and it is in the ferocity of his wounded pride that we must seek the explanation of the irregularities which marked the latter part of his academical career. Within little more than two years after his humiliation, the future champion of establishments, civil and ecclesiastical, had undergone no fewer than twenty-two penalties for breaches of discipline, besides the degradation of a public apology to the junior dean, Dr Owen Lloyd. Barren as his residence was of university honours, it is by no means likely that his time elapsed in indolence, or that his freaks and irregularities absorbed the whole energy of his mind. His subsequent period of intense study will hardly account for the whole extent of desultory information evinced by his writings, and, if we can rely on a tradition referring the first draught of the Tale of a Tub to this epoch, it must be allowed that his mental powers were developed with a very unusual precocity.

In 1688 Swift quitted the university, and, after a brief residence with his mother at Leicester, entered the family of Sir William Temple as amanuensis, on a salary, it is said, of £20 per annum. A distant relationship between his mother and Lady Temple appears to have recommended him to this post, which his pride must have struggled to accept, and which it hardly suffered him to retain. The relations of patron and dependent are at best delicate and precarious; and if Swift was of all men the first to wince under any slight offered to his dignity, the precise and finical Temple was of all the last to condescend to any abatement of his own. As minister and diplomatist, Temple had rendered great and durable services; if he afterwards abstained from public affairs, it was chiefly from a doubt whether his ungrateful country deserved salvation at such illustrious hands. If he solaced his voluntary ostracism by a comparison with the elegant retirement and lettered ease of Cicero, it did not therefore occur to him to compare his obscure Irish secretary with the Roman orator's amanuensis Tiro, who had, at least, invented short-hand. We who know that in the patron's place the dependent would have governed the nation, need not be surprised at finding, full twenty years afterwards, the iron of servitude still rankling in the latter's haughty soul. He nevertheless made himself useful to his employer, who on one occasion rendered him the medium of a confidential communication to King William, who had consulted Temple on the bill for triennial parliaments, then sanctioned by both branches of the legislature. Swift did his best to enforce Temple's arguments in favour of the measure, and was in after life wont to refer to the failure of his rhetoric as the most useful lesson his vanity had ever received. Struck, it would seem, rather by the physical than the mental endowments of the robust young Irishman, William offered him a troop of horse, a proposal which appears to have been subsequently commuted into a promise of church preferment. Swift had already proceeded to the degree of M.A. at Oxford, and the execution of his design to embrace the ecclesiastical profession was hastened by a quarrel with Temple, occasioned by the latter's reluctance to contract any definite engagement to provide for him. Throwing up his employment, he passed (1694) over into Ireland, but found his views impeded by the refusal of all the bishops to ordain him without some certificate of the regularity of his deportment while in Temple's family. Five months passed ere he could bring himself to solicit this favour from his old patron, which he ultimately did in a letter submissive in appearance, but charged to the full with smothered rage and intense humiliation. Forgiveness was easy to one in Temple's place and of Temple's disposition, and he not only despatched the requisite testimonials, but added a recommendation which obtained for Swift the living of Kilroot, in the diocese of Down and Connor. His residence here was not fated to be of long duration. Temple, who knew his value and had not parted with him willingly, soon let him understand that a return was open to him, and Swift, whose resentment was cooled by time and soothed by the discovery of his indispensableness, lent an unwilling ear to the overture. He continued to reside with Sir William till the latter's death in 1698; nor does their intimacy appear to have been troubled by any further disagreement. A story representing his return from Ireland as a flight necessitated by a disgraceful action, has been fully exposed as a crazy calumny invented long after his death; another ascribing it to a generous relinquishment of his living in favour of a more needy clergyman, would seem, like more than one other tradition respecting him, to be less supported by any convincing testimony than by his Irish biographers' ideas of the abstract fitness of things.

Lord Macaulay has justly pointed out the familiarity with public affairs acquired by Swift at Moor Park as one main cause of his subsequent distinction as a politician, and here, too, he laid the foundation of his literary renown. Report asserts him to have read regularly for eight hours every day; and we have his own authority for his having, as early as 1691, "written and burned, and written again, more on all manner of subjects than perhaps any man in England." His fortitude was probably more commendable than his fecundity; at least the only relics of these early days belong to a species of composition in which he was little qualified to excel. Nature had denied him the poet's eye, the poet's ear, and the poet's soul; nor would he, probably, have sought the laurel from a generation less hopelessly unfeeling, un- imaginative, and unmusical. At a period, however, when the merit of the poet was rated by his intellectual vigour, Swift might climb without much fear of a fall. If his strains were no better poetry than the effusions of Pomfret and Stepney, they were at all events much better prose, and if tried simply by the standard of his other works, are frequently entitled to no inconsiderable praise. Some pieces, such as *Baucis and Philomen*, are models of easy familiar elegance; the conception of others is highly ingenious; another class, of which the *Petition to Harley* may be con- sidered as the type, blend the grace of idyl with the grace of comedy. Nothing can be more perfect in its kind than the *Description of a City Shower*, unless it be the *Grand Dispute respecting Hamilton's Baucis*; and Swift's satirical and epigrammatical powers could only gain point by sub- mitting to metrical restraint. Poetry worthy of the name he did not and could not write; and his only serious attempt in this direction—the luckless series of *Pindaric Odes*—is chiefly memorable for the severe and unforgiven remark it called forth from his kinsman Dryden—"Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet." Swift's first prose composition be- trayed his resentment. In the *Battle of the Books*, a sati- rical contribution to the controversy on the *Letters of Pha- laris*, written, or rather purloined from a French prototype, about 1697, his sarcasm for the first and last time receded upon himself. The satire against Dryden and Bentley wants, indeed, nothing but truth to be excellent; but the picture of the former in his monstrous helmet, and the latter in his patchwork mail, yield in ludicrousness to the idea of the author of the *Pindaric Odes* presuming to ridicule the author of *Absalom and Achitophel*, and the inglorious stu- dent of Trinity College, Dublin, entering the lists against the pride of Trinity College, Cambridge, on a question of classical scholarship. It is, however, to his credit that his learning was somewhat greater than that of any other writer on his side, and his pretensions incomparably less.

Swift's next literary labour, though accomplished with credit, proved less serviceable to his fortune than he had anticipated. This was his edition of Temple's posthumous works, a charge bequeathed to him as a valuable legacy. They appeared with a dedication to King William, which was to have made the editor a prebendary. A petition to this effect miscarried, as he always believed, through the negligence or ill-will of the nobleman who undertook to present it. He may have been mistaken, as William's esteem for Temple, notoriously not very great, still sur- passed his regard for Swift and complimentary dedications. Be this as it may, he had become too important to be over- looked, and soon obtained the post of secretary and chaplain to Earl Berkeley, one of the Lords Justices of Ireland. The better half of this appointment, however, escaped him on his arrival in that country, his secretaryship being transferred to a Mr Bushe, on the pretext of the incompatibility of such a post with clerical functions. Bushe, indeed, seems to have been much better qualified to realise the popular ideal of a dispenser of official patronage; for when Lord Berkeley had at length an opportunity of recompensing Swift's disappointment by the gift of the deanery of Derry, the secretary's influence was successfully exerted in favour of another clergyman, who had gained his interest by the judi- cious outlay of a thousand pounds. With bitter indigna- tion Swift threw up his chaplainship, but was ultimately re- conciled to his patron by the presentation to the rectory of Agher, in Meath, with the united vicarages of Laracor and Rathbeggin. For the first time in his life he might now call himself his own master, and had an opportunity of ex- hibiting, free from suspicion of external constraint, that stern regard to duty which constituted the noblest and not the least prominent feature of his character. In an age of general laxity—in a priest of an alien church, whose most energetic servants commonly succumbed to the mortifying conviction of their uselessness, and the detestation they excited among the people for whom they laboured—the parishioners of Laracor found a clergyman more censorious for the ostentatious discharge than the easy neglect of his duty, and heard, or might have heard, service three times a week. The energy, however, which probably gained the respect, certainly failed to influence the convictions of his Catholic flock. We have his own authority for reckoning his average congregation at "half a score;" and on one occasion his clerk Roger was his only auditor. In fact, his exertions in the pulpit were more meritorious than his achievements; he entirely lacked the fire, the self-oblivion, the expansive geniality of the orator. He himself charac- terised his discourses as "pamphlets;" and if meant to imply their arid and argumentative character, the criticism is indisputably just. It must be added that they are no models for pamphleteers even, and his resolution to ex- change theology for politics must appear fully justified on a comparison of these inconclusive essays with another per- formance of the same period. The *Discourse on the Dis- sessions in Athens and Rome*, written in the Whig interest, and intended as a dissuasive from the pending impeach- ment of Somers and three other noblemen, received the honour, extraordinary for the maiden attempt of a young politician, of being universally attributed to Somers himself, or to Burnet, the latter of whom found a public disavowal necessary. Three years later appeared a more remarkable work. Clearness, cogency, masculine simplicity of diction, are conspicuous in the pamphlet, but true creative power told the *Tale of a Tub*. "Good God! what a genius I had when I wrote that book!" was his own exclamation in his latter years. Johnson correctly signalises a distinction be- tween the style of this and of his other humorous writings; at the same time, the difference lies rather in accidentals than essentials. Its merits and faults are the merits and faults of youth—the youth of a Titan, who extravagates and luxu- rates in the wantonness of strength, and in careless magni- ficence showers away the energies which maturity would have circumscribed within a single channel, and directed to a definite end. Viewed simply with reference to its literary characteristics, the work may be called a prose *Don Juan*; and as in that marvellous hybrid between epic and satire, ostentatious planlessness, laxity of structure, and digression for digression's sake, become ultimately somewhat fatiguing. As the fascination of *Byron's* poem for the general reader is summed up in Julia and Haidée, so, of all the humorous ideas lavished in the *Tale of a Tub*, the three supernatural coats and Lord Peter's quintessential loaf have alone taken a firm hold of the popular imagination. Either, it is true, is sufficient for one man's fame. As to the charges of pro- fanity drawn down upon Swift by the reckless exuberance of his humour, it is easier to understand how they should have come to be made than why his biographers should have condescended to refute them.

Before the publication of the *Tale of a Tub*, Swift had taken a step destined to exercise a most important influence on his life, by inviting two ladies to Laracor, Hester Johnson, a dependant of Sir William Temple's, whose ac- quaintance he had made in the latter's family, and whom he has immortalised as "Stella," came over with her chaperon, Mrs Dingley, and was soon permanently domiciled in his neighbourhood. The melancholy tale of Swift's attach- ments will be more conveniently narrated in another place, and is only alluded to here for the sake of chronology. Meanwhile the sphere of his intimacies was rapidly widen- ing. He was a frequent visitor to London, and counted Pope, Steele, and Addison among his friends. The suc- cess of his pamphlet gained him ready access to all Whig circles; but already his confidence in that party was shaken, and he was beginning to meditate that change of sides which has drawn down upon him so much but such wholly unjustifiable obloquy. The true state of the case may easily be collected from his next publications—The Sentiments of a Church of England Man, and On the Reasonableness of a Test. The vital differences among the friends of the Hanover succession were not political, but ecclesiastical. From this point of view, Swift's sympathies were entirely with the Tories. As a minister of the Church, he felt his duty and his interest equally concerned in the support of her cause; nor could he fail to discover the inevitable tendency of Whig doctrines, whatever caresses individual Whigs might bestow on individual clergymen, to abase the whole Establishment, by dispelling the last gleams of that aureole of mystic reverence so irrecoverably dimmed at the Reformation. Utterly incapable of either rising to an elevated conception of religion, or of regarding the interests of the Church from a cosmopolitan point of view, he considered her as a corporation, and advocated her cause in the spirit of an attorney. One of his pamphlets, written about this time, contains his recipe for the promotion of religion, and is of itself a sufficient testimony to the extreme materialism of his views. Censorships and penalties are among the means he recommends; and to him the city owes in great measure the fifty new churches of which it is now a problem how to get rid. His pen was exerted to better purpose in the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, a piece of irony most consummate and inimitable.

From February 1708 to April 1709 Swift was in London, urging the claims of the Irish clergy to an increased endowment upon the Godolphin administration. His having been selected for such a commission shows that he was not yet regarded as a deserter from the Whigs, although the ill success of his representations probably helped to make him one. By November 1710 he was again domiciled in London, and in the first pages of his remarkable Journal to Stella we find him depicting the decline of Whig credit, and complaining of the cold reception accorded him by Godolphin, whose penetration had doubtless detected the precariousness of his allegiance. Within a few weeks he had become the lampooner of the fallen treasurer, the bosom friend of Oxford and Bolingbroke, and the writer of the Examiner, a journal established as the exponent of Tory views. He was now a power in the state, the intimate friend and recognised equal of the first writers of the day, the associate of ministers on a footing of perfect cordiality and familiarity. By his own account, his credit had procured the fortune of more than forty deserving or undeserving clients; and the envious but graphic description of his demeanour preserved to us by Bishop Kennet, attests the real dignity of his position no less than the airs he thought fit to assume in consequence. The cheerful, almost jovial, tone of his letters to Stella evinces his full contentment; nor was he one to be moved to gratitude for small mercies. To understand this extraordinary influence, never since vouchsafed to a politician precluded by his profession from serving his party with his voice as well as his pen, two or three circumstances peculiar to the time must be taken into account. Since the age of Anne, the immense extension of the area of politics has necessitated a proportionate division of labour among political writers. No one pen could discuss, no single understanding embrace, the various subjects of which the press now takes cognisance. Every influential journal possesses a large staff of contributors, and must represent some nice shade or peculiarity of opinion. In Swift's time journalism was a more simple matter. Daily papers merely reported the news of the day; the higher class journals appeared weekly, and were then entirely occupied with a single essay, or, in our present parlance, leading article. The sole authorship of such a publication was consequently quite possible to a writer of moderate industry, and the enlistment of such a partisan in that day corresponded to the establishment of a new weekly organ in ours. Till Swift's accession to their cause, moreover, the preponderance of intellect had been decidedly against the Tories. To have found a writer capable of combating and even overthrowing Addison and Steele, was for the ministry of that day what the miraculous advent of a new Times, antipodal to the old in all but talent, would now be to an administration powerfully assailed by that journal. Given Swift's indispensableness to the ministers, he had it in his power to determine the nature of his social relations with them; and it will readily be inferred that he was not the man to rest contented with anything short of precise and almost ostentatious equality. Here, again, the circumstances of the time were in his favour. Like the France of Louis Philippe, the England of Anne was the paradise of political adventurers. Ancient names were erased or eclipsed, old notabilities ostracised, the leading men held positions to which they could not have aspired at a more settled period, and which fresh adventurers were preparing to occupy in their turn. This community of character, of history, and of destiny, engendered a frank and genial tone in political circles. Men were quick to discern and esteem in others the qualities which had wrought out greatness for themselves. As officers and privates became intimates on the field of battle, so servility and assumption were forgotten in the excitement of the time.

Great as was Swift's merit towards his party as conductor of the Examiner, it was surpassed by that belonging to him as author of the two famous pamphlets, The Conduct of the Allies, and The Barrier Treaty, devoured rather than read by the nation. Here, again, circumstances were highly favourable to him. For eight years the great captain of the age had fed the country with a succession of triumphs, till exultation had become satiety. One last poignant and exquisite relish remained—to be told that all these conquests had been made for ungrateful allies, and that England was the worst used as well as the most victorious nation upon earth. To have profited by Marlborough's genius was much; to have found a pretext for disowning obligation even more. The victor of Blenheim's private character was more assailable than his military conduct, and it was easy for Swift to extenuate the popular ingratitude which must soon have manifested itself, with a justification or without. The necessity of peace had, indeed, become as clear as the futility of expecting peace at the hands of Godolphin and Marlborough; so that Swift unquestionably rendered his country a service, while he wreaked his fury on the fallen statesmen with the sinister exultation of a morose and unbelieving nature, delighting in nothing more than the abasement of great achievements and great names.

Generous men like Oxford and Bolingbroke cannot have been unwilling to reward so serviceable a friend, especially when their own interest lay in keeping him in England. Notwithstanding, therefore, some dubious expressions in Swift's letters, natural to the deferred hope, we need not doubt their having actually used their best efforts to obtain for him the vacant see of Hereford. Swift, however, had formidable antagonists in the Archbishop of York, whom the Tale of a Tub had scandalized, and who had previously frustrated the instances of Godolphin for his promotion, and in the Duchess of Somerset, whom he had inconsiderately lampooned. Charles the Second had not been more amenable than Anne to the influence of female favourites, and it must be considered a proof of the strong interest made for Swift, that she was eventually persuaded to appoint him to the deanery of St Patrick's, Dublin, vacant by the

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1 Kennet particularly notices his zeal in procuring subscribers for the works of "one Mr Pope (a Papist)". Swift removal of Bishop Sterne to Dromore. In June 1713 he set out to take possession of his benefice, from which he was speedily recalled by the dissensions between the chiefs of his party. His exertions in behalf of the Irish clergy, it should be observed, had been fully successful with the Tory ministry, and his disgust was not small on finding the gratitude of his clients incommensurate with their obligations.

He found affairs in a desperate condition on his return. The Queen's demise was evidently at hand, and the same instinctive good sense which had ranged the nation on the side of the Tories, when Tories alone could terminate a fatiguing war, rendered it Whig when Tories manifestly could not be trusted to maintain the Protestant succession. In any event the occupants of office could merely have had the choice of risking their heads in an attempt to exclude the Elector of Hanover, or of waiting patiently till he should come and eject them from their posts; yet they might have remained formidable, could they have remained united. To the indignation with which he regarded Oxford's refusal to advance him in the peerage, the active secretary added an old disgust at the treasurer's pedantic and dilatory formalism, as well as his evident propensity, while leaving his colleague the fatigues, to arrogate for himself the chief credit of their administration. Their schemes of policy diverged as widely as their characters; Bolingbroke's brain teemed with the wildest plans, which Oxford might have more effectually discomfited had he been prepared with anything in their place. Swift's endeavours after an accommodation were as fruitless as unremitting. There is no necessity so evident, no community of interest so radical, no entreaty so powerful, as to reconcile an able man to one whom he despises, or a proud man to one by whom he feels himself despised. Swift's mortification was little likely to temper the habitual virulence of his pen, which rarely produced anything more acrimonious than the attacks he at this period directed against Burnet and his former friend, Steele. One of his pamphlets against the latter (The Public Spirit of the Whigs) was near involving him in a prosecution; some invectives against the Scotch having proved so exasperating to the peers of that nation, that they repaired in a body to the Queen to demand the punishment of the author, of whose identity there could be no doubt, although, like all Swift's writings, except the Proposal for the Extension of Religion, the pamphlet had been published anonymously. The immediate withdrawal of the offensive passage, and a sham prosecution instituted against the printer, extricated Swift from his danger.

Meanwhile the crisis had arrived, and the discord of Oxford and Bolingbroke had become patent to all the nation. Foreseeing, as is probable, the impending fall of the former, Swift retired to Upper Letcombe, in Berkshire, and there spent some weeks in the strictest seclusion. This leisure was occupied in the composition of his remarkable pamphlet, Free Thoughts on the State of Public Affairs, which indicates his complete conversion to the bold policy of Bolingbroke. The utter exclusion of Whigs as well as Dissenters from office, the remodelling of the army, the imposition of the most rigid restraints on the heir to the throne,—such were the measures which, by recommending, Swift tacitly admitted to be necessary to the triumph of his party. If he were serious, it can only be said that the desperation of his circumstances had momentarily troubled the lucidity of his understanding; if the pamphlet were merely intended as a feeler after public opinion, it is surprising that he did not perceive how irrevocably he was ruining his friends in the eyes of all moderate men. Bolingbroke's daring spirit, however, recoiled from no extreme, and, fortunately for Swift, he added so much of his own to the latter's MS., that the author was obliged to recall a production which might not improbably have cost him his liberty and his benefice. This incident but just anticipated the revolution which, after Bolingbroke had enjoyed a three days' triumph over Oxford, drove him into exile and prostrated his party, but enabled Swift to perform the noblest action of his life. Almost the first acts of Bolingbroke's ephemeral premiership were to order him a thousand pounds from the exchequer, and despatch him the most flattering invitations. The same post brought a letter from Oxford, soliciting Swift's company in his retirement; and, to the latter's immortal honour, he hesitated not an instant in preferring the solace of his friend to the offers of St John. When, a few days afterwards, Oxford was in prison and in danger of his life, Swift begged to share his captivity; and it was only on the offer being declined that he finally directed his steps towards Ireland, where he was very ill received. The draught on the Exchequer was intercepted by the Queen's death.

Oxford was not the only friend for whom Swift proved capable of entertaining a fraternal regard; his intimacy with Pope and Arbuthnot was creditable to all three. At the epoch of the fall of Marlborough they had joined in writing The History of John Bull, of which, however, by far the largest share belongs to Arbuthnot, whose broad, genial humour, better adapted to conciliate the reader's sympathy than to overawe him by a display of intellectual power, is as unlike as possible to Swift's scathing thunderbolts, and deluges of gall and vitriol. On one chapter, indeed, that recommending the education of all blue-eyed children in depravity for the public good, it is impossible to avoid the verdict, Aut Decanus aut Diabolus. Some time before the fall of the Tory administration, the three friends were again united in writing Martinus Scriblerus, a satire whose pleasing geniality again betrays Arbuthnot's principal share in its composition. Swift may have contributed one of the digressions, and two passages in ridicule of his old enemies the mediæval logicians. In the masterly Treatise on the Bathos, the finical but intense touch of Pope is very observable. Swift's literary partialities occasioned several other satirical pamphlets, such as the cruel attack on John Dennis: he is more agreeable, though not more amusing, when following the bent of his own humour in ridiculing the impostures of the almanac-makers and the eccentricities of Whiston, and otherwise treading with no unequal pace in the track of "Eupolis atque Cratinus, Aristophanesque poetæ." Many of his best poems belong to this period; a more laboured work, his Memorial to Harley, recommending the regulation of the English language by an academy, is chiefly remarkable as evincing the deference paid to French taste by the most original English writer of his day. To sum up the incidents of this eventful section of his life, it was during it that he lost his mother and sister; the first, always most tenderly beloved and dutifully honoured, by death; the second by an imprudent marriage, which, though making her a liberal allowance, he never forgave.

Swift's misfortunes had hitherto been no other than may well befall whoever embarks on the tempestuous ocean of politics, but the real tragedy of his life was now at hand. We have already mentioned his invitation of Hester Johnson and Mrs Dingley to Ireland. Both before and after his elevation to the deanery of St Patrick's, these ladies continued to reside in his vicinity, and superintend his household during his absences in London. Such an intimacy could not but originate unfavourable surmises, nor would the most charitable easily conjecture why, with his evident delight in the society of Stella (a dark-haired and symmetrical beauty, endowed with excellent sense and charming temper, and not more brilliant of eye than wit, albeit a grievous offender against all rules of orthography), he did not at once secure it to himself by the simple expedient of matrimony. It may, perhaps, appear in the sequel that his conduct was not incapable of explanation; but it proved none the less the fatal embitterment of his life, and Stella's, and yet another's. During his long residence in London, he had involuntarily kindled a consuming passion in the breast of Esther Vanhomrigh, the Vanessa of his poetry and correspondence, daughter of a deceased commissioner of stores, and then residing in Bury Street, with her mother and sister. The relation lie in the first instance assumed towards this young lady was, without doubt, that of an instructor and literary mentor. Instinct might suggest, were experience silent, the facility with which the teacher's interest and the pupil's affection may glide into emotions of a warmer cast. In this instance, the lovers were matched like coin and die. Of genuine love, at least of the pure essence of the passion, disengaged from all alloy of duty or personal advantage, Swift was constitutionally incapable. The finest and most exquisite emotions were dead in him, or had never lived. His breast never admitted, or rather never needed to exclude, any feeling incapable of expression in precise language, or of vindicating itself at the bar of reason. To him a wife would have been nothing more than a friend in a peculiar relation, for which, after all, he could see no necessity, and he probably found Stella and Vanessa's cravings for a closer bond both puzzling and vexations. So remarkable a deficiency in one portion of the mental organisation supposes an excessive development in some other. In Swift, the atrophy of the affections was compensated by the excrecence of intellectual pride. The surest way to his heart was to suffer him to domineer, and, like most of her sex, Vanessa was a born idolatress. Her character, sufficiently unfolded in the letters first published by Sir Walter Scott, is that of being all compact of enthusiasm and imagination. These were the genii that had first reared her a splendid image of masculine perfection, and then filled up the abyss between her ideal and Swift. If no submission could disarm his tyranny, neither could any severity satiate her passion for martyrdom. If his arrogance rejected the idea of sacrifice for another's sake as humiliation, her fervour would have cooled before a shrine that required no victim. She speaks of his frowns with rapture, and reserves her agonies for his indifference. Such intensity of passion may well have captivated a mind formed to appreciate impetuous strength; such self-abandonment may have momentarily eclipsed the quiet self-devotion of the absent Stella. In the earlier part of his journal, addressed to the latter, Swift lays bare his feelings with an impassioned unrestraint which renders it the best authority for his character in our possession. The concluding portions are comparatively frigid; Vanessa's advances were clearly not discouraged as they should have been. Yet his regard for Stella was not extinct, nor his ties such as he could break without infamy. For fourteen years Stella had cheered, comforted, amused him. For fourteen years she had lived on patiently in the hope of one day becoming his wife, careless of the slur her equivocal position was casting on her reputation. That nothing might be wanting to his obligations, he had already (in 1706) been the means of her declining an advantageous offer of marriage; his understanding would not allow him to overlook his duty, or his conscience to acquiesce in its non-performance. If, while a mysterious obstacle prevented his marriage, his weakness allowed him to become irremediably entangled with Vanessa, the misery of his victims cannot have surpassed his own. He probably hoped that his return to Ireland would enable him to break off the connection, but he hoped in vain. Vanessa's mother died, and she followed him. Thus was he involved in the most miserable embarrassment; still for a time he continued to temporise. At length, unable to bear any more Stella's mute reproach, and his own consciousness of wrong, he gave a reluctant consent to a private marriage, which was accordingly performed in the Deanery garden by the Bishop of Clogher. This was in 1716. At the same time, he insisted on their union being kept a strict secret, justifying a demand really dictated by tenderness for Vanessa, and probably by another reason which he did not explain, on the most futile and frivolous pretexts. Never more than a nominal wife, the unfortunate Stella commonly passed for his mistress till the day of her death, bearing her doom with uncomplaining resignation, and consoled by unquestionable proofs of the permanence of his affection, if his strange feeling for her deserves the name. Meanwhile, his efforts were directed to soothe Miss Vanhomrigh, to whom he addressed Cadmus and Vanessa, the best of his poems, and for whom he sought to provide honourably in marriage, without either succeeding in his immediate aim or in thereby opening her eyes to the hopelessness of her passion. In 1717, probably at his instance, she retired from Dublin to Marley Abbey, her seat at Celbridge. For three years she and Swift remained apart, but in 1720, on what occasion is uncertain, he began to pay her regular visits. Sir Walter Scott found the Abbey garden still full of laurels, several of which she was accustomed to plant whenever she expected Swift, and the table at which they had been used to sit was still shown. But the catastrophe of her tragedy was at hand. Worn out with his evasions, she at last (1722) took the desperate step of writing to Stella, demanding to know the nature of her connection with him, and this terminated the melancholy history as with a clap of thunder. Stella replied by the avowal of her marriage, sent her rival's letter to Swift, and retired to a friend's house. Swift rode down to Marley Abbey with a terrible countenance, petrified Vanessa by his frown, and departed without a word, flinging down a packet which only contained her own letter to Stella. Vanessa died within a few weeks.

Five years afterwards (January 1727) Stella followed her to the grave. Two months of intense agony, spent by Swift in seclusion in the south of Ireland, had procured his forgiveness; and the anguish which the gradual decay of her health evidently occasioned him is sufficient proof of the sincerity of his attachment, as he understood it. It is a just remark of Mr Thackeray's, that he everywhere half-consciously recognises her as his better angel, and dwells on her wit and her tenderness with a fondness he never exhibits for any other topic. Yet he could never overcome his repugnance to acknowledge their union till she lay on her deathbed, when he was heard by Mrs Whiteway (his cousin, a lady of fortune and talent, who, though not residing with him, superintended his household during his latter years) to say, Well, my dear, if you wish it, it shall be owned. She answered, It is too late. A lock of her hair is preserved, with the inscription in Swift's handwriting, most affecting in its apparent cynicism, Only a woman's hair!

Though the subject is delicate and invidious to the last degree, it would be a cruel offence against Swift's memory to refrain from adverting to the strong probability of the mysterious impediment to his union with Stella having been of a physical and, therefore, an insuperable description. External evidence of this is necessarily wanting, but the internal seems almost to amount to a moral certainty. Without recourse to such a hypothesis, his conduct appears inexplicable. The obstacles he alleged are palpable evasions; his attachment to Vanessa will neither account for his reluctance to contract a marriage with Stella before his acquaintance with her rival, nor for his refusal to acknowledge it after the latter's death. On the supposition alluded to (powerfully corroborated by the entire absence of erotic sentiment from his writings) the grounds of his conduct are sufficiently obvious, and it can only be said that he preferred the ruin of Stella's happiness to an avowal which nothing short of absolute compulsion has ever extorted from any man. It should also be remembered that his natural insensibility to the refinements of passion must have rendered it very difficult for him to realise the misery he was occasioning. His conduct to Vanessa certainly remains unaffected by these considerations, and if there be any to whom the voluntary and enthusiastic homage of beauty is without allurement, these have undoubtedly earned the right to pronounce a severe condemnation. Yet even they should reflect that human actions are properly estimated by their intrinsic character, not by their consequences. Thousands have committed similar errors, unexpiated by similar remorse; but the pangs of their Vanessa's have proved amenable to time and reason, and their biographers (if any) have taken no cognisance of the matter. The fervour of Vanessa's passion was a terrible misfortune for Swift; let it not be made his crime. Without actually mitigating his culpability, a happier denouement would have disarmed the austerity of his censors. It is obvious that on our theory (which is also Sir Walter Scott's), the supposition of a criminal intercourse between Swift and either Stella and Vanessa falls to the ground of itself. On any theory, it is unsupported by evidence, and inconsistent with his character.

During the interval between the deaths of Vanessa and Stella, Swift made three excursions to England, from the list of which he was recalled by the tidings of Stella's illness. The same period witnessed the two greatest literary successes of his life.

While yet hoping to gain an establishment in England, Swift had paid little attention to Irish affairs. His residence at Dublin familiarised him with misery and misgovernment, and having begun by hating and despising the Irish, he finished by identifying himself with their cause. In the pamphlet entitled A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures (1720) he expressed himself with a boldness that occasioned the prosecution of his printer. The iniquitous conduct of the chief-justice secured a conviction; but public feeling rose to a height that intimidated the government, and no sentence was passed. This proved but the prelude to more momentous incidents. In 1723, a bribe to George the First's mistress obtained for a person named Wood the privilege of coining L.108,000 in halpence and farthings, and circulating the same throughout Ireland. The Irish Parliament and executive not having been consulted at all, the patent proved as exasperating to the Protestant governing class as to the oppressed Catholics.

It was then that Swift sent forth the seven famous letters subscribed M. B. Drapier. These culminating productions of his pamphleteering genius must not be judged with reference to the abstract merits of the question they discussed. Wood was not a villain, or his coinage spurious, or his patent ruinous or even pernicious to the country. Ireland was assailed, not in her pocket, but in her independence, which would have been no less affronted had Wood proposed to distribute his coins at half-price. Under cover of an attack on him, Swift denounced the whole system of government, and first of Irishmen raised the cry, Ireland for the Irish! It elicited a burst of feeling comparable to that which Charles the First had excited in England by levying ship-money, or James the Second by imprisoning the seven bishops. Soon Swift took a wider range, and denounced abuses without disguise. The public enthusiasm accompanied him, and Walpole was told that it would take 10,000 men to effect his arrest. His printer was an easier victim. Swift visited his prison in disguise, and listened unmoved to the solicitations of the honest tradesman's friends that he would deliver himself by revealing his employer. The might of public opinion soon brought more effectual and honourable relief. Ere long the captive was liberated, the patent withdrawn; and if Ireland suffered more than ever from a want of small currency, she had, at all events, the satisfaction of a victory over the Saxon. The Drapier was toasted at every table; his head was made a sign, medals were struck, and clubs instituted in his honour, and the affection of his countrymen, for once wisely as well as warmly bestowed, never forsook him till his death.

It was in 1726 that Gulliver rendered Swift immortal. This, with Robinson Crusoe and Pilgrim's Progress, belongs to the class of books whose very diffusion resists against their celebrity. The inimitable simplicity of these works at once brings them into the hands of every child, kindles the rapture with which every child peruses them, and occasions the indifference with which he in after-life confounds them with the other amusements of his infancy. Let the adult reader recur to them, and he will find that, like the miraculous coats in the Tale of a Tub, the companion of his boyhood has grown up with his own intellectual stature, and proves as adapted to his maturity as to his nonage. What seemed in Gulliver the capricious freak of fancy now appears as the most terrible of satires; the Genie emancipated from the vase. Other satirists have branded human vices; Swift makes war on humanity itself. In Lilliput or in Brobdingnag, in his laughter or his rage, human deformity is still his theme; man the object trampled upon in his passion, or dissected by his more deliberate virulence. The four parts of Gulliver are related as strophe and antistrophe, the second and fourth overwhelming with undisguised invective the vices which the first and third had exhibited indirectly, as by a parable. None of them could have been the work of one endowed with any elevation of mind, any perception of the lovely, or any insight into the methods and purposes of Providence; still less of one destitute of a glowing love of rectitude and hatred of evil. It is needless to dilate on the literary merits of a work unrivalled at once for the charm of invention and the deception of reality, whose gaiety can even procure oblivion of the furious sarcasm that lacerates as with a lash of wires. Lucian is left behind, and Voltaire surpassed by anticipation. Yet something of a mechanical character always marks the pro-

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1 Draper. 2 The following text was popularly applied when Swift appeared in danger of prosecution:—"And the people said unto Saul, Shall Jonathan die, who hath wrought this great salvation in Israel? God forbid: as the Lord liveth, there shall not one hair of his head fall to the ground, for he hath wrought with God this day. So the people rescued Jonathan, that he died not." (1 Sam. xiv. 45.) A confidential servant, entrusted with the secret of the Drapier's identity, once remained so long out on a frolic as to cause serious apprehensions of his having gone to betray his master. On his return, the Dean turned him out of his house, declaring that he would not be intimidated into submitting to insolence from any of his domestics. The man's fidelity was proof against temptation and resentment, and when the danger was over, Swift received him again into his service, and treated him with marked kindness ever after. ductions of ungenial minds. Gravity in absurdity is the great peculiarity of Swift's humour, and the power of his imagination is less conspicuous in the multiplicity of his ideas than in the inexhaustible variety he contrives to elicit from a single thought.

The Drapier had shaken Ireland, but Gulliver amazed all who could read English. Though the publication had been anonymous, the authorship could not remain a secret, and Swift began to hope that he might yet again play a part on the theatre of politics. The journeys to England, already mentioned, had been undertaken with this end in view, the influence on which he principally relied being that of Mrs Howard, the accomplished mistress of George the Second. She seems to have been really desirous of assisting him, but to have wanted the power. It is no disgrace to Swift's penetration that he should have failed to appreciate the tacit understanding established between the royal pair, by which Caroline had, so to speak, bartered her consort's hand for his head, the control over his affections for the management of his affairs. This grand mistake of relying on the mistress instead of the wife, would of itself have proved ruinous to his negotiation, even without the underhand opposition of Sir Robert Walpole, who gave him fair words, but secretly resolved to take good care how he promoted one who might be so formidable. At last his good understanding with the court was destroyed by the audacious forgery of some one who addressed insolent letters to the queen in his name, insisting on the claims of a certain Mrs Barber to her patronage. Full of mortification, he resigned himself to be the frondeur of the Irish, instead of the confidant of the English administration. In one viceroy, Lord Carteret, he found a congenial spirit, who frequently attended to his applications in favour of deserving persons, and received and returned his sarcasms with good humour. "You will not put me on such a board, my lord, because you know that I would neither job, nor bribe, nor be bribed, nor waste the public money, nor suffer other people to do any of these things." "What you say," replied Carteret, "is perfectly true, and therefore you must excuse me." At other times his pleasantry was exercised at the expense of the ecclesiastical authorities, whom he hated with all the fury of one who thought he ought to be in their place, and whose attempts to aggrandise themselves at the expense of the inferior clergy he resisted with the ferocity of a tiger and the stubbornness of a mule. "It is quite a mistake," he would say, "to blame the English government for sending us bad bishops; it is invariably careful to select men of the purest morals and most fervent piety." The misfortune is, that as these exemplary prelates cross Hounslow Heath on their way to their dioceses, they are invariably stopped and murdered by the highwaymen, which unprincipled persons assume their robes and their patents, and come over here in their place, to the injury and scandal of true religion among us!" He was also long active as a pamphleteer; one of his productions of this period, the mock proposal to fatten the children of poor persons for the market, being perhaps the most masterly piece of irony he ever produced. He likewise commenced a periodical in conjunction with Sheridan, of which but few numbers were published, and set on foot a scheme for relieving the distresses of the poorer orders by means of small loans, which does not appear to have been unsuccessful, and occasioned many most amusing adventures, which will be found detailed in Sir Walter Scott's Biography. His last public appearance was on a financial question, in opposition to a scheme for regulating the gold currency proposed by the real ruler of Ireland, Archbishop Boulter. On the day the measure took effect the cathedral-bells were rung backwards, and a black flag waved from the tower. For a time it was necessary to guard the primate's house, but when no evil effects from his policy were discoverable, the agitation died away. Swift had all his life been subject to violent attacks of giddiness and deafness, occasioned probably by water on the brain, but as he fancied, by a surfeit of fruit at Moor Park. This year (1736) as he was writing the most virulent of his pieces, the satire against the Irish Parliament entitled the Legion Club, the fit seized him so fearfully that on his recovery he determined to lay aside the pen for ever. Nearly all the remainder of his existence was destined to be passed in pain, aggravated by the perceptible decay of his faculties, the consciousness of defeat in the great conflict of his life, a growing distaste for society, and an incapacity for intellectual recreation from the failure of his sight and his obstinate resolution not to wear glasses. It was the peculiar misery of his bodily suffering to engender mental torture, which re-acted on the body in its turn. Sources of consolation open to the weak and humble were closed against his haughty spirit; his austerity rejected the sympathy which his affliction would have commanded; his pride disdained the literary greatness which, in the eyes of most, richly recompensed the disappointments of his life. He permitted, however, the publication of an imperfect edition of his works, and in 1738 sent another anonymous pamphlet into the world, the Polite Conversation, written several years previously. It is a satire on the insipidity of commonplace social intercourse, a collection, one would think, of all the vapid trivialities and vulgar proverbs he had ever heard in his life, thrown into a dramatic form with wonderful ingenuity, and garnished with a contemptuous preface. His memory and observation are equally displayed in another work designed for publication at this time, but withheld till after his death, the ironical Directions to Servants. The imperturbable gravity of this performance is worthy of Gulliver, and the amazement with which we must view the immense accumulation of minute particulars is increased on discovering that it is, after all, only a fragment. During the last days of Anne he had written the history of the Peace of Utrecht, subsequently continued to the queen's death, and this he now intended to publish, but was dissuaded by his friends, who dreaded the effect of his revelations, and the uncompromising ferocity of his attacks on the living and the dead. It appeared ten years after his decease, without creating much sensation. The correspondence of his declining years is very interesting, especially his own letters and papers; the latter portion painfully affecting from the evidence of constantly increasing infirmity it contains. Johnson has commented severely on his and his friends' self-satisfaction and contempt for the rest of the world; but this is the universal failing of literary cliques. The poems he wrote between the death of Stella and the interruption of the Legion Club are not all calculated to do honour to his memory. Many are trivial, others coarse and extravagantly indecent. A kind of cynicism grew upon him in his latter years, and was increased by the gradual deterioration of his society. As his faculties and political importance declined, he found his equals in station less and less disposed to submit to his despotism, and was driven to tyrannize over parasites, for whose amusement he sometimes produced that of which it would be charity to suppose him afterwards ashamed. Yet the Yahoo had been an imagination of better days, and quite in keeping with the utter want of refinement which, in strange contrast with the scrupulous attention he paid to his person and apparel, marked both his moral and intellectual character. Some of his best friends, as the witty blunderer Sheridan, he drove from him in his perverseness; others he was near alienating by his freaks, as when he cut down a favourite tree of Sir Arthur Acheson's, and had to purchase his pardon by an elegant apology in verse. Still, and long after he could do no more for Irish liberty by voice or pen, the popular veneration was as strong as ever. His birthday was celebrated by illuminations, and when he was menaced by the bully Bettesworth, all Dublin seemed to rise as one man in his defence. In Mrs Whiteway he had a most sincere and judicious friend, whose affection he returned, and of whose value, though he sometimes tried her patience, he was fully conscious. Nothing in Lear surpasses the pathos of the last letter he addressed to her.

"I have been very miserable all night, and to-day extremely deaf and full of pain. I am so stupid and confounded, that I cannot express the mortification I am in both of body and mind. All I can say is, that I am not in torture, but that I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know how your health is, and your family. I hardly understand one word I write. I am sure my days will be very few—few and miserable they must be—I am, for those few days, yours entirely,

J. SWIFT.

"If I do not blunder, this is Saturday, July 26, 1746."

Early in 1741 it became necessary to place him under restraint, and appoint guardians for his person and property. Much of 1742 was passed in furious madness, aggravated by intense bodily suffering from boils and tumours. Release from pain brought a momentary interval of lucidity. The causes of his insanity were rather physical than mental. After his death his brain was found loaded with water, and an operation, if it had not killed him, would probably have restored his reason. Nothing was attempted, and he quickly sank into a lethargy, which, with a few occasional gleams of consciousness, continued to his death. It is a melancholy comfort to peruse the few affecting anecdotes which go to prove that his faculties were rather suspended than destroyed.

"After the Dean had continued silent a whole year in this helpless state of idiocy, his housekeeper went into his room on the 30th of November in the morning, telling him that it was his birthday, and that bonfires and illuminations were preparing to celebrate it as usual; when he immediately replied, 'It is all folly, they had better let it alone.'"

"Upon his housekeeper removing a knife, as he was going to catch at it, he shrugged up his shoulders and said, 'I am what I am,' and in about six minutes repeated the same word two or three times.

"In the year 1744, he now and then called his servant by his name, and once attempted to speak to him; but not being able to express his meaning, he showed signs of much uneasiness, and at last said, 'I am a fool.' When the same servant was breaking a hard, large coal, he said, 'That is a stone, you blockhead.'

"From this time he was perfectly silent till October 19, 1745, and then died, without the least pang or convulsion, in the seventy-eighth year of his age."

He was interred in his cathedral, with this epitaph, written by himself—"Hic depositum est corpus Jonathan Swift, S.T.P., bujus ecclesiae cathedralis decani: ubi seva indig- natio ulterius cor lacere nequit. Abi, viator, et imitare, si poteris, strenuum pro virili libertatis vindicem." With a presentiment of his fate, he had bequeathed his fortune to found an hospital for idiots and lunatics.

As with all authors of genuine merit, Swift's character as a writer is the counterpart of his character as a man. It may be summed up in a phrase—strength without elevation. Nature intended him for the prince of satirists and pamphleteers, and her wisdom was not more conspicuous in what she gave than in what she denied. Satirists and politicians must not see too far. It is not their business to search out principles, but to lash the ephemeral follies, or criticise the no less ephemeral transactions of their own day. Swift has done nothing for the science of politics. The force of his political essays is of genius, but their substance mere shrewdness and common sense. In all his political writings there is hardly anything like a theory, an abstract principle, or a speculation. His suggestions are mere expedients; his expedients coarse and material. Of abstract right, as distinguished from personal integrity, he seems to have had no conception. Disabilities on dissenters seem to him as much in place as saddles on horses. Liberal in his estimate of human action, his views of human opinion are prejudices below the dignity of superstitions. He habitually postpones mankind to his country, his country to his party, and his party to himself. This narrowness of thinking intensified his powers. Like a river in a rapid, his mighty intellect foamed with irresistible force through its contracted channel. To considerations of an elevated nature he is inaccessible, and the antagonist who descends to his own ground is swept away. He overthrows, tramples, breaks in pieces, and tears to tatters. Miserably shorn of some of the highest prerogatives of the human mind, the genius he still possesses cannot be contemplated without awe and admiration. It is like the interrupted pile of Babel—the foundation of a structure that should have reached to heaven. In audacity of demeanour and majesty of port he yields to none of the giants of mind. Milton in his singing robes does not offer a grander image of intellectual force than Swift be-spattering ex-ministers, and ringing the changes on bad halfpence. It was as though some sublime spirit, a second Faust, had parted with his better soul for thirty years of uncontrolled dominion. What seems his weakness to us was his strength among his contemporaries. He walked with his age, and did not outrun it. His lip breathed ever in the popular ear; he did not, advanced out of sight, halloo feebly from a distance. Even with us, his narrowness of view redeems his one grand and classical production from disgust. The misanthropy of Gulliver would be detestable, were it not so intensely real. Could the book possibly be the production of one of large views or elevated soul, it would be the production of one who had sinned against light, and deliberately sat down to libel and blacken his species. Swift is terribly in earnest, and writes as much in sorrow as in anger. His style is the image of his mind. In conciseness, directness, in plain sense and nervous vigour, it is worthy of the great writers of the preceding generation. But he has not their high thoughts to dress up in appropriate majesty, and disdains to trick out his own petty ones. He writes level to the capacities of his readers, spurning impassioned appeal and metaphor. After Barrow or Taylor, a paragraph of his is like a cathedral after the Reformation—the gorgeous windows shattered, the imposing ritual discarded, the arches blocked up with very comfortable pews. The homeliness of his predilections corresponded to the homeliness of his language; in all his volumes there is not one allusion to Shakspeare. On the other hand, his Pindaric Odes are the sole instance he has given of absurdity or affectation. Efforts after sublimity or picturesqueness have sometimes made other writers verbose, meretricious, nonsensical. Swift lay under no temptation to such dulcia vitia. Whatever he says is, for him, absolutely and literally, not merely figuratively or transcendentally, true; and so great is the power of earnestness, that his invectives against obscure scoundrels, or diatribes on the passing interests of the day, may even now be read with more pleasure than many a work of genuine imagination. In what may be called his mental build, he is startlingly original; but, strictly examined, his imagination will appear more distinguished for energy than fecundity. The original ideas he does possess are very striking, and he usually makes the most of them, and that with the careless

1 His last composition was an epigram on a building shown to him when he was taken out for an airing:

"Behold a proof of Irish sense, Here Irish wit is seen, When nothing's left that's worth defense, They build a magazine!" profusion of a fountain sending forth its waters, not like a gold-beater, covering the amplest possible space with the thinnest possible leaf. Yet he is a master of permutation and combination; he rarely lets an idea go till he has drained it to the very marrow. A thought which with another might have flashed for a moment in an epigram, may with him be heard detonating and exploding throughout a whole pamphlet, and each report adds something to the general effect. Still there is nothing strained or far-fetched about his wit or his argument; he is never ingenious for ingenuity's sake. He is as clear-headed and prompt as copious; each of his numberless strokes falls at the right moment, and in the right place; by the time he has done his adversary (for all his writings are directly or indirectly polemical) is a mangled mass of bruises and blood.

As the characteristic of his writings is vigour without loftiness, so the definition of his moral nature is rectitude without amiability. His virtues were many and great, but coarse, rude, and exaggerated, like well-formed letters blotted by a hasty writer. He possessed the noblest independence of character, but knew not how to assert it without rage against his superiors, and arrogance towards his inferiors and equals. In truth, he had so little faith in excellence, that he hardly believed in his own superiority, unless demonstrated by the envy or the servility of others. The most punctual of men in the fulfilment of all his obligations, he discharged them so harshly and ungraciously that no one, probably, has ever been influenced by his example. Excessively charitable, though frugal and acquisitive, he rarely gave without affronting the recipient. He was one capable of warm attachments, who spoke uncivilly of his friend to his face, and unkindly behind his back; the benefactor of his domestics, and their tyrant; the lover of two women, whose hearts he broke. He possessed not the least delicacy or refinement of sentiment; and his behaviour to others, especially to females, showed that he expected none from them. His virtues were unattractive, his failings repulsive; yet he was capable on occasion of generous deed or magnanimous forbearance. If he sometimes acted as a selfish or cold-hearted man might have done, the reason consisted partly in the overweening self-esteem that blinded him to his own faults, but more in the sluggish imagination that disqualified him from realising the feelings of others. If his frowns and his bitterness brought misery among his intimates, in his writings they were usually employed for the public good. No writer has scourged so many villains, scoffed at so many blockheads, exposed so many impostures, or assailed so many abuses. He was marvellously obtuse on many points of morality and policy; but where he did see evil, he hated it like one who had crossed his ambition. There is something wonderfully massive and sterling in his character; he was above taking pains with his virtues, and allowed himself no affectation but that of some faults he did not possess. His fierceness and austerity of disposition are unspeakably imposing. Others have undergone more romantic vicissitudes of fortune, but few careers are illumined with so wild and tempestuous a splendour. His prosperity is dazzling; his misery appalling. He is not to be thought of without wonder, and reverence, and repugnance, and pity most of all. He is a volcano—fearful in the long suppression of its smouldering fires; amazing in its sudden blaze and gigantic illumination; most awful of all in its silence and ashes, and stupendous, solitary gloom.

Swift's religious sentiments have furnished occasion for much dispute. The prayers found in his handwriting, indeed, sufficiently establish his piety, and the exceptions taken to the levities of his satiric writings can only have originated in a profound ignorance of the nature of humour and humourists. It is impossible, however, to get rid of an indefinable impression of a certain uncomfortableness in his relations towards the established religion. There is no reason to suppose him unconvinced by the external evidences of Christianity, which in his day had hardly been impugned. But no Christian minister has displayed less of the meek spirit of his creed; and the consciousness of a secret disharmony with what he was forced to inculcate and outwardly revere, will probably account for his uneasiness without imputing to him any definite opinion at variance with his station in the church.

In person Swift was tall and commanding, with aquiline features, a swarthy complexion, but an eye "as azure as the heavens." The expression of his countenance was stern in his gayest mood, and when angered his scowl was awful.

Swift was not the man to encourage a Boswell, and his own correspondence is the best authority for his life. Of his contemporaries, we are principally indebted to his indiscriminating panegyrists, Delany and his own nephew Deane, and his detractor, Lord Orrery, whose malevolence is said to be owing to the discovery of the slight value the Dean set on his acquaintance. Hawkesworth compiled the particulars of his life, and published what was the standard edition of his works till the appearance of Sir Walter Scott's in 1814. This edition can hardly be rendered more complete, and is not likely to be soon superseded. The biography prefixed is based on Hawkesworth, but far more copiously and elegantly written. At the same time, it displays more diligence than vigour or penetration, and the author's good-nature has certainly made him too indulgent to his hero. Dr Johnson's biography in the Lives of the Poets is the opposite of Sir Walter Scott's in all respects; a condensation of Hawkesworth instead of an expansion; pregnant with acute observations on Swift's private and literary character, but darkened throughout by an antipathy that greatly impairs its value. In our own day, Mr Thackeray has made Swift the subject of an essay, most keen in its criticism, most brilliant in its composition, and full of that geniality and compassion which Swift alone wanted to have been as admirable as formidable, and as happy as famous. (R.G.)