CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 1924 096 224 849 DATE DUE ^jIMBU'" "^^ ^*?fF QAYLOnO PRimED M UAA. Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924096224849 In compliance with current copyright law, Cornell University Library produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1992 to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. 2003 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ENGLISH COLLECTION THE GIFT OF JAMES MORGAN HART PROFESSOR OK ENGLISH A.aSSlolS llfT/it^ THE LIFE JONATHAN SWIFT THE LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT DEAN OF ST. PATRICK'S, DUBLIN By henry CRAIK, M.A. WITH PORTRAIT LONDON : JOHN MUERAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1882. [_All Rights reserved.'] I: E-V. #^ %3*(#' /^: '■'_- A.-^ss^ LOXDOX : ERADBtJUy, AGKEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEKRIARS. TO EDMUND LAW LUSHINGTON, M.A., LL.D., ETC., LATE mOFESSOR OF GREEK IK THE TINIVEUSITY OF GLASGOW, £ I9et(tcate tl^t;^ 33oo&; NOT AS AN OFFERING WORTHY OP HIS ACCEPTANCE, BUT THAT I MAT PLACE ON RECORD MY GRATITUDE FOR HIS TEACHING, HIS INFLUENCE, AND HIS EXAMPLE PEEFACE Theee works bearing on the biography of Swift^ appeared within the decade that followed his death. The first of these was the Remarks of Lord Orrery, who had known Swift only in his later years, and whose book consists chiefly of stilted literary criticism supplemented by scattered biogxaphical details. The Remarks appeared in November, 1751 : and so great was the interest in the subject, that Lord Orrery has noted in his own copy of the book, that Avithin a month of its publication, 7,500 copies had been sold.* It was followed by the anonymous Observations of Dr. Delany in 1754 : and by Deane Swift's Essay in 1755. Each of these works has its own value. Lord Orrery gives us a faii-ly vivid pictiu-e of Swift's manner in old age. Delany speaks with the advantage of greater judgment, and longer personal intimacy: but his defence of Swift is somewhat cold and timid, and runs upon narrow and conventional Imes. Deane Swift, with all his eccentricity, yet gives us not a few personal reminiscences of interest, mixed with much that is absurd. Hawkesworth's Life followed in 1755; but although more complete as a biography than any of those already noticed. * MS. Note by Lord Orrery in a copy of the Remarks now in the possession of Lord Cork. Viu PREFACE. it did little more than suna up in nan'ative fonn, the current accounts of Swift. The first Life of Swift that took its place in literature was that of Johnson, published among the Lives of the Poets in 1778. But such new material as he possessed, Johnson had previously given to Hawkesworth : he did not afford either the tune or the labom- necessary to elucidate difficulties, or study character: and even the vigorous and trenchant criticism for which the Life is valuable, is marred by the inveterate grudge which, for whatever reason, Johnson bore to Swift. In 1784, the younger Sheridan wrote liis Life of Swift. As a boy, he had known Swift in decay: as a boy, also, he had received from his father, renoiniscences of their long friend- ship. In spite of the preternatm'al dulness, for which John- son's well-known phrase has made him celebrated, Sheridan always labours to be honest ; and even his distant recollection of what his father had told him, could not fail to give some interest to his story. But his Life brings us no nearer to the real Swift : gives lis little insight into his character : and scarcely attempts to enter into his moods, or to discern the motives that give a clue to much of the mystery that gathers round him. Scott, whose Life first appeared in 1814, was the first to deal in a broad and generous spii-it with the character of Swift. Eapid and cm'sory as the biography often is, Scott's genius did more for Swift than many a workman of greater care and elaboration could have achieved. He opened up for the first time the human interest that gathered about the story, so long the theme of petty and one-sided judgments, so long measured by the narrow rules of sects and parties that Swift abhorred. He made it plain that the defence of Swift was no forlorn hope PREFACE. IX of paradox, but was possible to one whose view of human nature was the most genial, whose grasp of character was the most catholic. But Scott had not time to do all that was required. He pro- fessed himself satisfied " to condense the information afforded by Mr. Sheridan, Lord Orrery, Dr. Delany, Deane Swift, Dr. Johnson, and others, into one distinct and comprehensible narrative." He has, indeed, done much more than this : but a book written on such a plan, could not, even in Scott's hands, supply all that was wanted in a biogi-aphy of Swift. From the earlier biographers there had grown up a traditional formality of manner in apology, in defence, and even in eulogy, adopted by timid advocates, to suit a timid pubHc. When, for instance. Dr. Delany asks us to admire Swift because he gained the First Fruits for the Irish Church : or because he suggested the building of fifty chiu-ches in London : or because he adminis- tered the revenues of his cathedral with economy, and paid much attention to the pronunciation of those who of&ciated there — we feel that, however estimable in their way, these are scarcely the acts that have contributed to keep alive a vivid in- terest in Swift, and that those with whom such pleas were likely to have much weight, were scarcely fit to judge of the wayward and often morbid genius of Swift. Yet Scott, perhaps uncon- sciously, perhaps from haste, has adopted much of this con- ventional manner in his biography. He claims admiration for Swift, " in spite of the antiquated and unpopular nature of his politics": "in spite of the misanthropical tone of some of his writings : " and, elsewhere, because of " his sincere and devout belief in the truths of Christianity." But before we begin to make allowances for Swift's politics, as antiquated and unpopular, we must be sure that we have found out the true X PEEFACE. kej' to their adoption by one very considerably in advance of the current opinion of his own or of any other time. If we look upon his misanthropy as only an occasional blemish which mars his genius, and which we must endeavour either to forgive or to forget, the chances are that, in our apology, we may miss an essential trait in Swift's character, whose origin we slioidd rather seek to explain, and whose influence in his work it is our business to trace. As to his acceptance of religious dogma, without denying or doubting its sinceritj^, may we not doubt whether we have described it rightly, in labelling it mth the mark of conventional and respectable orthodoxy? Scott has not thought it necessary to enter much more fully than previous biographers into questions like these. He has given us a clear, succmct, and graphic narrative : but on the difficult passages in Swift's life he has scarcely thrown fresh light. Of his new matter, some was derived from authorities scarcely deserving the regard which Scott was induced to give them. In his History of St. Patrick's, published in 1820, Mr. Monck Mason devoted a long chapter to the life of Swift : but it consists chiefly of tedious controversy on a few doubtful points, and neither attempts to gauge his character from any broad point of view, nor has appreciably affected the cui-rent judgment on his life. Scott's Life, while it revived the interest in Swift, produced at the same time a renewal of that adverse criticism which had never wanted its representatives. Jeffrey wrote a fierce diatribe in 1816, outdoing the usual narrowness of the clique to which he belonged, in the complacency with which he triumphs over the " cold, timid, and superficial genius " of the age of Swift, and Addison, and Pope : and in the bitterness with which he PEEFACE. XI attacks the honesty, the morals, and the humanity of Swift. All that was wayward and morbid in the genius of Swift : aU that bore hardly on him in the record of his life : all the melan- choly that overcast him, was dragged before the bar of an un- sympathetic criticism, by one whose political creed taught him, as its first article, the absolute rectitude of aU Swift's political opponents, the absolute turpitude of aU his friends. This view of Swift gained further prevalence by the help of a greater than Jeffrey. The genius of Macaulay cast a lurid gloom over the memory of Swift, even though it made the im- pression of Swift's power more vivid. Macaulay's picture has been a lasting one. The world has not lost sight of the tragic interest that gathers about Swift's life : but it has left un- noticed or forgotten how keenly sensitive was the heart buried under all that weight of misanthropy and cjniicism ; how much his pride was rooted in earnestness, his anger in hatred of oppression. It was the object of the late Mr. Forster to apply a clearer light and a more sympathetic criticism to the intricacies of Swift's career. His unstinted enthusiasm may, at times, have impaired his judgment in regard to Swift, but even its exag- geration was no bad quality in a biographer. Death arrested his task ; but not before Mr. Forster had accomphshed enough to lay any fresh biographer under a heavy debt. Not only did he gather much new material, but he entered so minutely into the earher part of Swift's career, as to leave but few points un- discussed, — we might even say, undecided. In taking up the task, thus fallen from more competent hands, it was necessary to reconsider the plan of the book. Mr. Forster intended his Life to be in three volumes : and it is clear that if told throughout with the copiousness of annota- XU PEEFACE. tion and illustration to be found in the first volume, tlie story of Swift could not have been completed in less space. But whether so long a biography is either wanted, or necessaiy to make the pictm-e clear and true, may well be doubted. It is impossible, in any consecutive narrative, to state, to discuss, to adopt, or to repudiate, each opposing view : or to refer in detail to the mass of miscellaneous trifles which have crowded about the name of Swift, and have been made to do duty in his biography. We are embarrassed with the mass of such material, and it becomes a first necessity, in order to bring the narrative within fair compass, and even to give to it clearness and consistency, to strip off much of the redundant matter, to lay aside much of the endless miscellaneous gossip, and to arrange, in their due proportions, the greater and the lesser actions of Swift's life. The present biography is therefore confined to one volume : and where possible, the controversial matter has been relegated to Appendices, so as to prevent the interruption of the narrative by argument too much detailed. However doubtful we may continue to be as to some points, it is as much for the advantage of biography as of the State, that there should be some " end of Htigation," and that we should, sooner or later, strike a balance between contending views, as fairly as we may. In my task I have had the advantage of access to all the im- portant material gathered by Mr. Forster, including what is now in South Kensington Museum, and the unpublished letters from Swift to Archdeacon Walls, belonging to Mr. Murray. The kindness of others has enabled me to add to this. In the first place, I have been entrusted by the Earl of Cork with the MSS. belonging to him, as left by Lord Orrery. These PEEFACE. XlU include not only several unpublished letters from Swift to Lord Orrery during the later years of his life, but also the common- place books of Lord Orrery containing his own memoranda on Swift, and careful transcripts of several letters ivoxo. Deane Swift relating to the closing years of the Dean. Mr. Frederick Locker has given me access to certain MSS. in his possession, which were in Scott's hands, hut the importance of one of which, at least, he overlooked. From Major Stopford, I have obtained letters from Swift to Dr. Stopford : and through Mr. Elwin, I have obtained transcripts of some letters now at Longleat. The Sundon and Suffolk MSS. in the British Museum have thrown some light on Swift's later life, and have enabled me to correct some mistakes arising from errors in the printed copies. To Mr. Eeynell I owe transcripts of certain letters from the Eecords at Armagh : and the Historical MSS. Commissioners have recently published some letters that help us to facts of Swift's life. I have to thank others for assistance of a different kind : and, first and chiefly, Mr. Elwin, whose learning, great as it is, is not greater than the generosity with which he comes to the help of others working in the same field. Not only has he placed at my disposal residts of his own research, but he has given me invaluable advice and aid in regard to some of the most serious difficulties of Swift's life. My thanks are also due to Dr. Ingram, Librarian of Trinity College, Dublin, and to others amongst the Fellows of that Society for assistance during my visits to their Library : to Dr. Norman Moore, for the help he has afforded me from a large knowledge at once of Irish affairs and of literature : to those in charge of the Forster and Dyce collection at South Kensington ; and to the officials of the Eoyal Irish Academy, for assistance in consulting the rich XiY PREFACE. collection of pamphlets, on Irish affairs, there stored. In the attempt to realize as far as possible the actual surroundings of Swift, I have visited most of the localities connected with his name. In Dublin, I had the advantage of the wide local lore of the Reverend Mr. CarroU, of S. Bride's, to whom so many- visitors to Dublin are indebted for a knowledge of its historic spots, and who has also supplied me with copies of some documents of interest. And at places so widely apart as Kilkenny, and MuUingar: Trim, Laracor, and St. Patrick's: Celbridge and Howth : Goodrich and Moor Park, I have had but one experience, that of ready and kindly help. H. C. London, Octoher. 18S2. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. SWIFT'S FAMILY AND EAKLY LIFE. New House Farm, Goodrich — The Swiftes at Eotherham — At Canterbury — The Kevereud Thomas Swift — His sufferings in the Eoyalist cause — His sons in Ireland — Godwin Swift's success — Jonathan, the Elder — His marriage — Death — Birth of Jonathan Swift — Childhood — At Kilkenny school — Stories of school life — The troubles of his early days — At Trinity College, Dublin — His bachelor's degree — The upeciali.t gratia — Its real meaning — Three years of close reading — Death of his uncle Godwin — Help from other kinsmen — An unexpected visitor — The break-up of 1688 — Swift in England — ^With his mother at Leicester — Character of Swift's mother — Life at Leicester — Goes to Sir William Temple at Moor Park — Swift's surroundings there — Character and position of Temple — Other inmates of the house — End of the first residence with Temple — Swift in Ireland — Eeturns to Temple — Obtains a master's degree at Oxford by Temple's help — His altered position in this second residence I CHAPTER II. SWIFT'S FIRST YEARS OF MANHOOD, AND THEIR LESSON. The second residence with Temple — The influence of Oxford on Swift — His first literary efforts — The Pindarics — Ode to ArcUisliop Sancroft — To Sir William Temple — Swift and the Athenian Society — John Dunton — Dryden's criticism of Swift's earlyattempts — Tlie AdclresstoWilUam III. — Swift as adviser of the king — What he learnt at Court — Swift's Ode to Coiigrcvc — On Sir W. Temple's Recovery — Desire for indepen- dence — His mental state and his experiences so far — His choice of a. career — Ordination — An awkward application— Prebendary of Kilroot — The Irish Church in 1694 — His life and companions at Kilroot — Varina — Growing irksomeness of his surroundings — Return to England, and what he brought with him 2D XVI CONTENTS. CHAPTER III. THE FIRST ACTS IN SWIFT'S LITEEARY AND POLITICAL CAREEK_ FAGS Swift's third residence at Moor Park — His occupations — Reading — His schemes of advancement — Lord Sunderland's patronage — Resignation of Kilroot — Esther Johnson — The early tic between her and Swift — Tlte Battle of the Boolts — The literary controversy to which it was a contribution — T&oi^le^s Aricient ajid 3Iode7'n Learning — Wotton's reply — Boyle and Bentley — Swift's place in the fray — The intention of the Battle oftlw Books — Swift learning his own powers — The death of Sir William Temple — A last effort for patronage — Enters the service of Lord Berkeley — His disappointments in Ireland — Residence at Dublin Castle — Early efforts in humour — ^Advancement in the Church — The last of Varina — The marriage of Swift's sister — Swift's return to Lon- don — The occasion of his first political essay— Dissensions at Atliem and Borne — The reception, by the Whigs, of Swift's pamphlet- Acknowledged Authorship — Another interview with the king — The strengthening of the tie to Stella 55 CHAPTEE IV. SWIFT AMID THE PARTY STRUGGLE OF THE FIRST YEARS OF QUEEN ANNE— "THE TALE OF A TUB." Swift's political conduct — His home at Laracor, and its surroundings — The death of William III. — Change in the Ministry — The Tories in power —Disaffection of the extreme Tories — Prospects of the Whigs — Diffi- culties of Swift's position — Bill against Occasional Conformity — The struggle in Convocation — Extreme Tories further estranged — Rochester dismissed — Ormoud's Irish government — The Test Act in Ireland — Ecclesiastical legislation by the Irish Parliament — Bill against Occa- sional Conformity revived in England^ Swift's view of it — His uneasy relations with the Whigs — The extreme Tories part from the Govern- ment — The Talc of a Ttib — Its aim and meaning — The arrangement of the book — Its view of humanity — Comparison with Iludihras — The plot of the Tale — Irreverence of its allusions — The meaning of Swift's irreverence — Sources of suggestion for the book — Its reception — Question of authorsliip— Stella and Dr. William TisdalL , . .91 CHAPTER V. YEARS OF WAITING AND SUSPENSE. Swift's position in literature and politics — The decadence of the Tories-. Successes of the Whigs— Blenheim — Tory factiousness — Dissolution of CONTENTS. xvii PAGE 1705 — The Irish Parliament— Swift's early efEorts for his Church — Correspondence with Archbishop King — Contrasts between the cha- racters of Swift and King — The Tories and the Church — Tlie Memorial of the Olmroh of England — Convocation — Hopelessness of the Tory cause — Swift's personal life — His associates in London — His place amongst them — His literary work during these years — Meditation on a Broom SticTi — Vanhrugh's House — Bands and, Philemon — Long stay in Ireland — Invitation to Moor Park — Continued suspense — Ministers leaning to the Whigs — Pembroke, Lord Lieutenant — Society at the Castle — The " Castilian " Language — Swift in London again — Hopes and disappointment— Harley's scheme — Its failure — Dismissal of the Tory remnant — Swift's labour to secure the First Fruits for his Church — His meeting with Godolphin — Wavering allegiance to his party — The death of Prince George — A new period opening for Swift . 120 CHAPTER VI. SWIFT'S VIEWS ON CHURCH AND STATE MATURED. Swift waiting for the issue of the struggle— Results of the death of Prince George — Changes in the Ministry — ^Wharton as Lord Lieutenant — A scandal refuted — Swift drawing further from ihe Whigs — The question of the Test in Ireland — The Letter on the Sacramental Test — The change in Swift's views — " In suspense " — Failure of his mission — Leaves London in disgust — Last visit to his mother — Back in Ireland — Other Literary work of the year — Argument against Abolishing Christianity — Its scope and meaning — Project for the Advancement of Religion — Its biographical importance — The Sentiments of a Church of England-Man — The principles it upholds — Swift on Despotism and Anarchy — His conception of Liberty — The humorous work of the year — Tlie Predictions for 1708 — The jokes on Partridge and their sequels — BickerstaS on his defence — Bickerstafi in the Tatler — The Apology , for the Tale of a Tub — Social incidents of his English visit — The circle pf his friends— His picture by Jervas, in his prime . . . .152 CHAPTER VII. THE FALL OF THE WHIGS. Swift at Laracor — Thoughts of promotion — The position of the Government — Pressure of the War — Sacheverell's sermon — His previous career — The offending topics — Godolphin as Volpone — Sacheverell's impeach- ment — Feelings of the nation — The trial — Unpopularity of the Govern- ment — Marlborough's demand to be made Captain-General for life — b XVlU CONTENTS. The Duchess of Marlborough and the Queen— The WTiiga losing ground —Swift at Laracor— The attack upon the Test— His tract against the Government, on the election of Irish Speaker — His mother's death — Correspondence with Tooke — Dismissal of Sunderland — The Whigs in despair — Godolphin's fall — Swift's return, to find a " new world," in September 182 CHAPTER VIII. SWIFT AND THE NEW MINISTKY. Swift's advent in the " new world " — His ovm records of his conduct — His mission for the Irish Clinrch — Breach with the Whigs deferred — The last of his Tatlers — Description of a city shoTver — Overtures from the Tories — Two Invitations for one day — Meeting with Harley — Takes service with the new Ministry — The election — Sid Hamet's Rod — ■ Swift's mission for the Irish Church more hopeful — Coldness of Whig friends — Addison and Steele— The Ilxami}ier — Weak points in the ministerial position — Marlborough — The monied class — The October Club — Swift's defence of the Ministry — Appeal to the people — Attacks on Marlborough and Wharton — Piece-meal toleration — Defence of the landed aristocracy against a monied class — Influence of the Examiner — Opening of Parliament and Convocation — A white-letter day for Tory and High Churchman — Position of the Ministry — The inner cabinet and SwiEt — His new circle of friends — Stumbling-blocks in the way — The attempt of Guiscard, and its results — A new lease of power tor Harley 196 CHAPTER IX. SWIFT, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE PEACE. The personal bond between Swift and Harley — The Ministry and the task before them — The favour of the Church secured — Death of Rochester — Harley created Earl of Oxford and Lord Treasurer — Swift's estimate of Oxford and of St. John— His intercourse with the Ministry — Other sides of his life— New intimates — His lodgings at Chelsea — Atterbury and Swift— The Club and its aims— Swift at Windsor— Visitors from Ireland — New enemies — The Duchess of Somerset, and the Windsor Prophecy — Old friends and new — Arbuthnot and Swift — A " bite " for the Maids of Honour — Life at Windsor — Sacheverell and his claims Lord Peterborough and SwiEt — The Vauhomrighs — Mrs. Anne Long — Swift's carelessness as to his own interest — Proposals for a Peace Fall of Bouohain— Dr. Hare's Sermon— The Vindication of tTie Duke — CONTENTS. XIX PAGE Negociations on foot — Prior and his Mission — Swift's account of it — The Whigs and Nottingham — The Dissenters and their schemes — Swift's reply to their appeal — The Hue ami Cry after Dismal — The Condvct of the Allies — Marlborough's return — A suspected plot — Parliamentary opposition — Prospects of failure — Swift's suspense — Marlborough's dis- missal — Twelve new peers — The Ministry saved 218 CHAPTER X. THE TORY TEIUMPH AND SWIFT'S BEWARD. Better prospects of Swift's friends — Misgivings after the fight — His discern- ment of the weak points of his friends — Delicacy of his position — His power of dispensing favours, and his use of it — King, Barber, Tooke, Mrs. Mauley, Diaper — Bitterness of Party — Prince Eugene's visit — The Peace drawing nearer — The fury and the feai-s of the Whigs — The Mo- hawks—" liannihal at our Gates '' — Symptoms of Disunion — Letter to tlie Octohcr Cluh — Hostilities stopped — Swift's loneliness amid society — His illness — The Preliminaries announced — St. John created Viscount Bolingbroke — The Paper Tax — The Last Fmvr Years of the Queen — The Bandbox plot — The Duke of Hamilton's death — Swift's sympathy for his widow — Lady Ashbumham's death — The end of Harrison — The Projjosalfor improi:inii the English Tongtte — Its literary aim — The ' Peace of Utrecht — Swift's reflections thereon — He claims his reward — Negociations with the Ministers — Swift gaEetted as Dean of St. Patrick's — His quarrel with Steele — Quits England for his new post — Installed as Dean 210 CHAPTER XI. DISSENSION AND ITS FRUITS. Letter of greeting from Archbishop King — Swift's resentment at its tone — Need of him in London — Difficulties of the Ministry — Opposition to the Treaty — Urgency for Swift's return — His hesitation — Vanessa and her passion — Swift's attempt to soothe it — His discontent with Ireland — Return to England — The Prolocutorship — Attack from all sides — Wal- pole's Short History of the Lnst Parliament — Swift to the rescue — Personal attacks — Discussion of the Treaty^Steelo and The Crisis — The PuUie Spirit oftheWhigs — The opening of Parliament — Fears of Jacobite Plots — Swift and the Lords — Steele's expulsion from the House — Dissensions in the Tory ranks — Amusements in the midst of danger — The Soriblerus Club — Swift retires to Letcombe — His life there — XX CONTENTS. Scrihlcrus and his prospects — Pope's ambassadorial visit — The struggle between Bolingbroke and Oxford — The Schism Bill — Oxford's Memorial to the Queen — His fall — The illness of the Queen — Confusion in the Ministry — Shrewsbury Lord Treasurer — The Queen's death — Kuin of the Tories — Note on the Wngstnffe Volume 2G5 CHAPTER XII. SWIFT IN BETIEEMENT. Effect of the quiet time at Letcombe — Disgust with politics — Libels that pursued Swift's retirement — The spurious Essays — His position in Dublin and at Laracor — Troubles as Vicar and as Dean — The completed triumph of the Whigs — Swift to Oxford, on his fall — The fellowship of slavery — Parties in Ireland — Swift suspected of Jacobitism — The " English Gan'ison " in Ireland — Toleration Act — Swift's view of it — Union against a common danger — His occupations — ^Literary schemes — Reviving interests — Vanessa — The relations between her and Swift — Cadcnns and Vanessa — Vanessa at Celbridgc — The letter to Stella — Vanessa's death — Her will, and Letters — Stella — The nature of her bond to Swift — Picstraints imposed on it — The Marriage — What it meant to each 298 CHAPTER Xin. SWIFT AS IRISH PATRIOT. Growth of an Irish party — Swift joins it from hatred to the Whigs — The ills of Ireland — Absentees or Out-liers — Neglect of former restrictive statutes — Degradation of resident landlords — ^Wretchedness of the tenants — Professional Beggars — Irish affairs between 1714 and 1720— Swift as Irish Patriot — The Universal Use of Irish Manvfactinrs — Prosecution of the Printer — Duke of Grafton stays proceedings — Swift's Apolo(jia to Pope— Swift against an Irish Bank — The Copper Coinage — Wood's Patent — Outcry against it — M. B. DrajyJer — The details of the patent — The Committee of Inquiry — The Second Letter — The TMrd Letter — Are the Irish slaves ? — The Fourth Letter — The Dra^yier's Protest — Proclamation against the Author — Carteret as Lord Lieutenant — Swift's letter to him — The Letter to Lord Midleton — The Bill of Indictment against the printer thrown out by the Grand Jury— The Drapier's Fame— The Fifth ief f »!•— Walpole's New Scheme for Ireland — Archbishop Boulter and his rule 334 CONTENTS. XXI CHAPTER XIV. SWIFT AGAIN AMONG THE "WITS: GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. PAGE Swift's attractions to England — Invitations from Bolingbroke, Gay, and Pope — The occupations of his friends — His visit in 1726 — Bolingbroke in later life — Arbuthnot — Pope — Gay — Atterbury and his banishment — Bathurst — Congreve— Peterborough — Swift and the Temple family — His reception by his friends — Dawley and Twickenham — Leicester House — Illness of Esther Johnson — Swift's anxiety — The recovery — Swift and Walpole — The Story of their dealings — Hopes of concilia- tion dispelled — Return to barbarism — SviTft's reception in Dublin — Gulliver's Travels — The Stratagem about the manuscript — Conditions under which the book was written — Its motives — Comparison of the difEerent parts — Swift back in England (1727) — Bathurst — Pulteney — Voltaire — Swift as ally of the Opposition — The death of George I. — Walpole's power maintained — Swift's anxieties for Esther Johnson — Her relapse — Back to his " lair ' — The Journal at Holyhead — Swift in solitude — His last sight of England 367 CHAPTER XV. THE LAST CHAPTER IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC WORK. Swift's autumn in Ireland — Stella's approaching end — Their relations in the last scene — Stella's wiU — Her death — The funeral — The blank in Swift's life — " Only a woman's hair"— Swift on Irish Politics — State- ment of Irish wrongs — The remedies proposed by others than Swift — Lord Molesworth — Thomas Prior — Arthur Dobbs — Swift's place in these discussions— ^1 «««•<;»' to a Memorial, sny on the Dean. Chap. I.] SWIFT'S FAMILY AND EAELY LIFE. 3 of the familj' was in Yorkshire, and Eotherham Churcli still con- tains a brass to the memory of Robert Swifte and his wife, who died there in the sixteenth century.* From this north-countiy stock there came two branches, both of which had eventually som.e connection with Ireland. One branch gained some notoriety by producing a certain Barnam Swifte, in whom the vein of eccentricity that appears in all the ramifications of the family, made itself oddly felt. His pursuit of that somewhat cumbrous form of wit and humour that pleased under James the First, gained for him the sobriquet of Cavahero Swifte : and by Charles the First he was created, in 1627, an Irish Viscount under the title of Lord Carlingford. He left no son : but his daughters and co-heiresses were married, one to the Fielding who bore in society the name of " handsome Field- ing," t and the other to Lord Eglinton. The other branch, pursuing more humble and prosaic lives, passed from Yorkshire to Kent, and were established before the close of the sixteenth century at Canterbury. One Thomas Swift, whom we may take to be the son of Robert Swifte of Rotherham, became preacher at St. Andrews, Canterbury, about 1570 : and his son William Swift succeeded him, in 1592, J and married a Miss Philpot, an hekess and a * The, epitaph runs thus: — "Here day of August in the yere of o' lorde under this Tombe are placytl and God 1561 in the 84 yeare of his age buried the bodyes of Bobarte Swifte on whose sowlles with all Chrystyn Esquire and Anne his fyrste wyfe, who Sowlles Th omnipotent lorde have lyvyde manye yeares in this towne marcy Amen." of Eotherham in vertuus fame, grett + This was the Fielding who not wellthe and good woorship. They only squandered all that his first wife were pytyf ulle to the poore and relevyd brought him, but to whom the Duchess them lyberallye and to theyr firends of Cleveland afterwards trusted her- no les faythfulle then Bountyfulle. self and her illgotten gains, to find Trulye they fEearyd God who Plen- the last frittered away, and herself so tuuslye powryd his Blessings uppon cruelly treated as to require the prc- them. The sayd Anne dyed in the tection of the law. moneth of June in the yere of o' lord i In the British Museum there is a God 1539, in the 67 year of hur age funeral sermon preached by William and the sayd Eobarte Deptyd y" VIII Swift, in 1621, on " that painful and B 2 4 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1667—1692. shrew. He had one son : and with this son we come to the huilder of the strange house at Goodrich, and to the first member of the Dean's family in whom peculiarities like his own were strongly marked, and whose memory was so cherished by him that it seems not a little to have affected his life and opinions. This Thomas Swift, born in 1595, became a man of some mark amid stirring scenes. He was an only son : but unlike most only sons, was brought up under the severe discipline of a mother whose reputation as a termagant lived after her. Of her wealth he obtained but a small share, being disinherited, we are told, on account of some boyish peccadillo : and, left to his own resources, save for a small estate at Goodrich, he entered the Church, and early in the reign of Charles I, obtained the Jiving of Goodrich, with which locality his memoiy is linked. He married a Miss Elizabeth Dryden,* of that Huntingdonshire family soon to be made famous by the poet to whose genius, for reasons that will be seen here- after, his " cousin " Jonathan Swift was so obstinatelj' blind, and whose faults and prodigalities alone he remembered. During the early years of his incumbency, Thomas Swift was busied with the quiet performance of his duties, and with providing for the future of a rapidly growing family. He bought more land in his own parish, and in 1636, while the country was astir with discussions about ship-money, and faithful servant of Jesus Christ, Mr. * She was uiece to Sir Erasmus Thomas Wilson." The discourse has Dryden, the poet's grandfather. From no special interest, except that, from the Dryden family, the Swifts adop- its strong anti-Catholic views, we may ted not only Dryden as a, Christian suppose religious differences to have name, but also Jonathan— the name had something to do with sending this of the Dean's father and his o-\vn. The branch of the family from the an- passing criticism from Dryden to cestral home at Eotherham, where Swift, then in the sensitivity of bud- Itobert Swifte had been buried as a ding authorship — " Cousin Swift, you devout Roman Catholic, only nine will never be a poet " — may well have years before his son quitted that home laid the seeds of S^vift's inveterate for Canterbury. hostility to his kinsman's fame. Chap. I.] SWIFT'S FAMILY AND EAELT LIFE. 5 vague threatenings of struggles to come, he was building the house destined to stand many a siege. In 1640 was born, being the seventh or eighth in the series of sons, Jonathan, the father of our author : and while he was still an infant in arms, the EebeUion broke out. In spite of his profession, the vicar of Goodrich was of too fervent a spirit to hold aloof from the struggle. It had scarcely opened before he became known amongst the Parliamentarian ranlis for a delinquent. He had preached an ultra-royahst sermon in the neighbouring town of Eoss : he was suspected of intro- ducing arms on behalf of the Royalist cause into Monmouth- shire : and he -was known to be a man of mark in the district. He threw himself into the struggle heart and soul : and the combat was so hot about the banks of the Wye, that he soon felt the realities of civil war. The royal standard had been raised in Nottingham in August, 1642. In October of the same year, Thomas Swift's stout house and thriving homestead were visited b)' the Parliamentary marauders. Twelve times, so it was said, his flocks were driven off : fifty times his house was jplundered from roof-tree to cellar. The Earl of Stamford commanded for the Parliament at Hereford, and, close by, the castle of Goodrich was held by the same part}'. The Marquis of Worcester held the castle of Raglan, but his i^resence proved no defence to the vicarage of Goodrich, or to the New House Farm, as the parson's own property was called. Again and again the house was stript. The supplications of his wife, in the Vicar's absence, were disregarded, and the bread and bed-clothes snatched by Lord Stamford's troopers from his children, who were jjreserved from starvation only by the hazardous mercy which neighbours dared to show.* The * The account in the Dean's frag- Cork's papers, there are some notes, ment of autobiography is taken from written, as I presume, by Mr. Deane the " Mercurius llusticus, or Country's Swift, of which the following have Complaint," published in 1685. Scott some interest. The captain Kirle, has printed the passage (Vol. I. p. 504). who attacked the vicar's house, was, In a transcript preserved in Lord it appears, a kinsman of Kirle or b LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [16G7— 1692. wonder was that after all their hardships, anj'thing was left to the Swift familj' : and the indomitable recuperative power of the Vicar earned for him the name of the "conjuror," amongst the simple country folk. He could catch and hurl back bullets, he had struggled with the foul fiend, he was proof against any natural or supernatural foe. But whether his recovery from plunder so often repeated was due to the Devil, or to his capacious cellars, he still held out: and even in 1645, when all was lost in the battle of Naseby, he can-ied to Lord Worcester at Kaglan Castle, his waistcoat quilted with 300 broad pieces, as an offering to the King. His spirit never failed him throughout the struggle : his livings were seques- trated : * his farm was seized : he was reduced to utter poverty : but he still kept his loyalty as a servant of the Church mihtant in more senses than one. To him was ascribed the destruc- tion of two hundred out of a troop of three hundred rebels, who, in crossing a stream, dashed themselves and their horses on the spikes of a hidden machine which the Vicar had pre- viously contrived. Clearly the Committee of Hereford had some grounds for thinking that from their point of view this Vicar of Goodrich was a dangerous and scandalous dehnquent, whose livings were not only to be sequestrated, but his person secured. He was imprisoned, but the close of the war brought him liberty. Once more, he set himself, to " repair his rafts " of private propertj^ : but he died two years before the Restora- tion might have brought him more ample redress. This doughty vicar died in 1658, and was buried underneath Kyrle, Pope's Man of Koss. The other like manner were the Dean and hla note is one on the passage in which sister. It was supposed the disorder Mercurius Rusticus describes the was owing to tliis accident." This cruelties inflicted on the vicar's child- new origin for the Dean's malady is ren. "The Dean's father in particu- probablydueonly to Mr. Deane Swift's lar," says the note, " was swung against fertile imagination, the wall, and the violence of the blow * Goodrich and Bristow. That of laid him for dead upon the floor. He Goodrich was, in 1646, assigned to his was then two years old ; he was all his brother - in - law, the Eer. Jouathaa pfe Eubjeot to a giddiness, and so in Dryden. Chap. I.] SWIFT'S FAMILY AND EAELY LIFE, 7 the altar of the church of which he had been vicar, and near which stood his battered house.* Of the broken and impoverished family, five sons went to seek their fortunes in Ireland. For the eldest, Godwin, at least, the indomitable Vicar had managed to secure a regular legal training : and he, after qualifying at Gray's Inn, came over to find in Ireland, then only slowly settling down after a series of convulsions, a field where legal knowledge was scarce, and yet much in demand. t The law courts were overwhelmed with j)leas arising from the doubts in which repeated grants and revo- cations had involved all landed property. G-odwin Swift's success was rapid. He lost no means of rising. His first wife was a kinswoman of the Marchioness of Ormond : and though even before the Eestoration this wife was dead, the connection gained for her husband, already re-married, the office of Attorney- General of the Palatinate of Tipperary from the first Duke of Ormond. Of four wives, three brought him dowries : and one was drawn from a family so hostile to his traditional politics as that of Admiral Deane the regicide. His wealth increased, it is said, until at one time it reached as much as £3,000 a year. I Allowing a wide margin for the exagger- ation of report, there yet remains enough, considering the value of money then and now, to prove that Godwin Swift was amongst the wealthiest citizens of Dublin, and one whose poor relations would find in poverty an added sting by contrast. Other brothers § followed him to Ireland: and amongst * The only memorials of the family PASSHS est pko caeolo pbimo, bx now in the church are the entries of hoc calice Aegrotantibus peopi- the births of the vicar's sons and navit. Bunm calicem jonath : daughters, and the chalice once carried SwiFl S.T.D. dbcan. sakcti pa- by the vicar for the administration of teicii, Dublin. Thomae ex filio the Holy Communion to the sicl;:, and n-bpos, huic ECCLBSliE n? pbepetu- afterwards presented by the Dean to UM dbdicat. 1726." the parish church. The Latin inscrip- f Deane Swift's Essay, p. 16. tion runs thus: "Thomas Swift + The authority is the apocryphal HUJUS ECCLBSIAE EECTOR, NOTUS One of his grandson, Deane Swift. IN HISTOEIIS OB BA QUAE FECIT BT § The second son, Thomas Swift, 8 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [IC67— 1692. them that " seventh or eighth " son, Jonathan, whose career seems to have been as unlucky as the circumstances in which he first saw the light. He had come to Ireland, a lad of eighteen, on his father's death. He had lived on such casual employments about the courts as his brother's influence could get him. Before he had secured any sure income, and while he could settle on his wife no more than £20 a year, he did as penniless younger brothers will do, to the reasonable disgust of their more prudent and well-to-do elders, in marrying Abigail Erick, the dowerless daughter of an old Leicestershire house, claiming descent from that Eadric the Forester, who long defied the Norman rule. In 1665, Jonathan secm-ed the appointment of Steward of the King's Inns, DubHn : and perhaps the prospect for the young couple, when prosperity was rapidly swelling the elder brother's store, seemed, for the moment, fair enough. But first a daughter, of whose lot we shall hear more, was born : and then, in the spring of 1667, while another child was expected, Jonathan Swift sud- denly left his young wife a widow, to battle as best she might with the hardships that fall to a poor relation. Her time of early widowhood was occupied with petitioning the benchers to forgive her a debt of some twelve pomids due by her late husband, and to aid her in procm-ing arrears amounting to a hundred pounds,* due to her. She had full need of all that bUtheness of heart which we know to have been hers, dming these months that preceded the birth of her son, JONATHAN SWIFT, on the 30th of November, 1667. Swift's birth took place at a house inHoey's Com't, a narrow and now squalid entry close by the Castle grounds, and within a few minutes' walk of the Cathedral of which he was afterwards stayed in England, married Sir William Icinsman by laying claim to the author. Daveuant's daughter, and was father ship of the "Tale of a Tub." of the Thomas Hwif t, afterwards Beotor * 8cott has quoted these facts from of Puttenham in Surrey, who brought Duhigg's " History uf the King's Inns, on himself the sarcasm of liis greater Dublin.'' Chap. I.] SWIFT'S FAMILY AXD EAllLY LIFE. 9 Dean. The court is now dirty and mean-looking : but tlie situ- ation was then one of the best in Dublin, and the houses, though conveniently close to the principal street, were ap- proached only by sedan chairs, and thus relieved from the noise of the thoroughfare. The street close by (St. Werburg Street), was the busy street of Dublin, and had often seen, in the generation before Swift's birth, the mustering of trained bands, and the march of armed men. The houses in Hoey's Court, mean as they now are, yet retain some faint impression of their former fashion : and No. 7, in which Swift was born, which has been pulled down and the site enclosed in the Castle grounds, is still remembered by the older inliabitants as one of the largest in the court. In proportion to his reputed wealth, Godwin Swift may have ministered but grudgingly to his sister- in-law's wants ; but she was not then living in any humble or poverty-stricken quarter of the town. His own house, like those of most of the wealthier lawyers, was close by in Chan- cery Lane or Bride Street. Swift's mother was not too poor to have had in her service a nurse, whose relations, at least, were English, and with whom is connected the first strange story of Swift's life. As the story is told us by Swift himself, this nurse became so attached to her charge, that having occa- sion to visit a dying relation at Whitehaven, she carried with her secretly the infant of a year old, and kept him with her for more than three j'ears. The mother, pressed by poverty and ill at ease, may have been content, for a time, to rehnquish her child to one who had cared for it so well. But how- ever that may be, and unlikely as the story seems, no doubt has been thrown on it : and it was to this residence at Whitehaven that Swift's earliest recollections belonged. Faint enough they must have been, but they were cherished with an obstinacy that is characteristic of the man. 'We are told by one * who knew him in his later years, that lie retained his affection for Whitehaven to the last, with a partiality which must * MS. notes by Dr. Lyons to Hawkesworth's Life. 10 LIl'E Ojj' JONATHA]Sr S\YIFT. [1667—1092. have feci itself on imagination more than on memory ; even as late as 1739, when he was on the eve of that darkest passage that awaited him before death, he invited to dinner a merchant of Whitehaven, who with his son and daughter happened to XDass through Dublin. Before he returned to Ireland he had learned to sioell, and even to read any chapter of the Bible ; and upon these early years in England he afterwards dwelt with pleasure, as serving, along with his Enghsh descent, to redeem him from what he considered the disgrace of having to own any Irish nationahty. Swift was brought back to Ireland in his fourth year : but was left with his mother only for a short time. Their chief de- X>endence was on the charity of his uncle Godwin, and for that uncle Swift retained no very warm feeling. He was reckoned " a httle too dextrous in the subtle parts of the law," saj's Swift, in the autobiographj'. Besides this, Godwin Swift was begin- ning to lose by foolish speculations the money he had gained by his successful practice. Whether inability or avarice was the cause, Swift seems to have found that the charity of his luicle was grudgingly bestowed : and once the thought had suggested itself to him, he was scarcely of a mood to suffer it to rest either forgotten or forgiven. At the age of six he was sent by his uncle to the grammar school of KiUieiiny, then, as it is still, under the patronage of the Ormond family, and only a few miles from the family house of Swiftsheath. The teacher of the school, which held a high reputation at the time, was a Mr. Byder : and under his charge Swift remained till the age of fourteen. Long after his death there was to be seen in the old schoolroom, now replaced by a more modern building, his name cut iii the desk with his penknife.* Of the life of the schoolboy we know but httle, and that httle only from his own casual reminiscences. Here it was that the dog- Latin verses by which a knowledge of classical concords was acquired, suggested to him those jingling rhymes that in later * MS. notes by Dr. Lyons on Hawkesworth's Life. Chap. I.] SWIFT'S FAMILY AND EARLY LIFE. 11 3'earshe reproduced in liis Latin-English escapades with Sheri- dan and Delanj\ Here, too, was the scene of a boyish prank, I'ecalled by himself, in which he purchased for all he had in ■world, a " mangy" horse that was on its way to the knackers' yard, and rejoiced in the proud dignity of an owner until the poor brute presently fell dead at his feet.* Elilkenny itself, in the old cathedral of St. Canice, the remnants of the Black Abbey, and above aU the great castle of the Ormonds, Jiad much that must have vividly impressed the boy's mind. J3ut the strangest thing about the town was the double cor- jDoration with separate jurisdiction. Divided by the stream which runs through tlie centre, the Eoman Catholic and Pro- testant populations lived apart. The endless bickerings of the two have obtained a proverbial immortality in the fable of the J2.1kenny cats : and in those bickerings, familiar to his boy- Jiood, Swift was thus earlj^ inured to the baneful animosities that were eating into the life of the country. Of his school- fellows we know something. Amongst them was his cousin Thomas Swift, the son of that uncle who had gained a quiet settlement in England as a clergyman before the death of the sturdy Vicar of Goodrich; a youth named Stratford, who passed to the city of London, and of whose commercial vicissi- tudes we hear something in Swift's later journals; t and above all "William Congreve, whose genius he admii-ed, in whose fame lie took delight, and whose friendship he continued to enjoy, long after politics had done their best to separate the old schoolfellows. But a few casual glimpses are all we have of these years so critical for Swift's later career, while the j'oung K>rphan, cut off from the mother who was the one bright influence in his life, was fretting out his heart, and doubtless juagnifying his misfortunes, under the hated rule of an uncle * Sheridan's Life, p. i02. to pity him. He became bankrupt in f See the Jom'nal to Stella, passim. the spring of 1712, nearly involving .Swift at first rather envies Stratford's Swift's savings in his own ruin. .successes : but soon finds reason rather 12 LIFE OF JO^fATHAN SWIFT. [1667—1692. ■whom he knew to be grasping and woiidlj-, and fancied, reasonably or not, to be grudging in his charity. Swift was fourteen when he left KiUcenny school for Trinity College, where he was entered as a pensioner, along with that cousin just named, Thomas Swift of Oxfordshire. The memory of his uncle Godwin's charity, in connection with these college days, remained to Swift as an experience even more galling than that of the help given liim in his boyhood. To the gloom that it bred in him he ascribed, writing more than forty years afterwards, the poor use that he then made of his time. " By the ill-treatment of his nearest relations," he saj-s, " he was so discouraged and sunk in his si^irits, that he too much neglected his academic studies, for some parts of which he had no great rehsh by nature ; so that when the time came for taking his degree as Bachelor of Arts, although he lived I with great regularity and due observance of the statutes, he was stopped of his degree for duhiess and insufficiency ; and at last hardly admitted, in a manner little to his credit, which is called in that College, S2)eciali gratia." * ' This gives us a pictm'e, clear and simple enough, of the young student, anxious to make his way bj' regularity, industry, and effort, but cumbered by the gloom of his position, and still more by the burden of a genius that had not yet learnt to know, or to guide, itself. Had these words stood alone, no more need have been said ; but his own reminiscences have been surrounded by a cloud of exaggeration. In Swift's own words, it is plain, there is nothing either of extravagant self-depreciation, or of indignant censure of the system under which these student days were led. He neither slurs over the discredit, such as it was, nor makes it matter of undue regret. He explains it, as the result, partly of his own natural inclination, partly of the gloomy ckcumstances in which he was placed; but he is careful to accuse himself neither of arrogance nor of misconduct. That his reading was Aiitobicgrapliical Anecdotes. Chap. 1.] SWIFT'S FAMILY AND EARLY LIFE. 13 at this time desultory is only what we might have ourselves divined. Swift's was not a mind which would readily find con- tentment in the fixed studies of any ordained curriculum. The difficulties that occur in regard to his college career, however, arise from the glosses of later authorities. Delany, whose tes- timony is the hest of all, tells us that Swift was wont to speak of himself in his college days as a "dunce," who believed "'poetrjr, plays, and novels, to he the only polite accomplish- ments." This is clearly nothing hut the colloquial version, with humorous exaggeration, of what the autobiographj' states •with more reserve. But Lord Orrery adds some further detail of exaggeration to the account. Not only was Swift, according to him, rejected for insufficiency, and finallj' the recipient of a dishonourable degree ; but he spent his time in ridicule of the college studies, and, when admitted to the same degree at Oxford, allowed the authorities there to rest in the belief that the siJecialis gratia was a mark, not of discredit, but of special honour. Deane Swift, who had been Lord Orrery's authoritj',* maintains that Swift's failure was due, not to carelessness or misdirected reading, but to positive stupidity ; that he had worked, hut worked without success. Sheridan adds to the story a mass of circumstantial embellishments. " Scholars," saj's Sheridan, " thought him a dunce ; " but Swift, disgusted ■with the forms of the schools, persisted in arguing after his own manner, while the proctor sat by to put his arguments into scholastic form. Sheridan professes even to have been told by Swift the very questions dealt with, and the very argu- ments employed. + The story gained in bulk at every stage. Samuel Richard- son, in a published letter, started the novel idea that Swift * The story of the misrepresenta- may safely be rejected, tion, at Oxford, thus depending solely + It is on this whimsical story on Deane Swift's evidence, and con- that M. Taine has based the first tradicted by the absence of the words touches in his consistently lurid spcciali gratia from the testimonium picture of Swift, granted by Trinity College to Swift, 14 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1667—1692. was even expelled from the college on account of the licence of an attack -which he made upon the authorities in the character of terrae films ; and Dr. Barrett, of Trinitj^ College, in his Essay on Swift's Early Days, spent much lahour in the fruitless effort to complete the identification of Swift with the offending satirist. Setting aside this last story, as a baseless fancj', it is easy to see how the other exaggerations have arisen. It is not impossible that Swift niaj' have spoken at times with much bitterness of his early failure, and that he may have repelled the attempt bj' Deane Swift, or anyone else, to find in that failure a symptom of dawning genius. Men whose conscious- ness of power requires no accidental confirmation, are not generally inclined to accept flattering explanations of their own 3'outhful peculiarities. Swift may have met such attempts by asserting, even more positively than in the autobiography, that he was not idle, but unmistakably' dull.* It is fortunate, however, that Mr. Forster's care has preserved for us a document which, taken with Swift's own words, brings us back to the plain facts of the case. This is the cop}"- of a college roll of Easter Term, 1685, containing the results of the terminal examination which preceded the degree of February, 1684, ii^ which Swift's name appears. The subjects of examination are arranged in three heads, t and * Mr. Forster, who seems to set aside told him, I supposed he had been idle : the evidence of Lord On'ery and Deane but he affirmed to the contrary : Swift on this point, as well as in regard assuring me, he was really dull, which, to Swift's representation to the Oxford if true, is very surprising." — JUcnwirx authorities, has omitted to notice that of Mrs. PUldngton, Vol. I., p. 69. there is better authority for the story (Dublin, 1748.) than either. It is told also by Mrs. f Mr. Forster, as has been explained Pilkington who, worthless as she was, to me by the authorities of Trinity tells us much that is indubitably true College, has made a slight mistake in about Swift. '• When I heard the the interpretation of the College sym- Dean relate this ciroumstanco (that bols : Tli. standing not for Theoloffy, he had been stopped of his degree as as he supposed, but for the Tliema, or a dunce), for I set down nothing but Latin Essay, -which each student was ■what I had from his o^^'n mouth, I expected to produce. Chap. I.] SWIFT'S FAMILY AND EARLY LIFE. 15 are marked in the roll thus: Ph. (or Phj-sics), G. L. (or Greek and Latin), and Th. (or Thema).* In the first of these, Swift did "male" in the second he did "bene," and in the third, " neglig enter." This very fairly corresponds with his own account of the points of failure in . his college career. But it further explains the disputed words, speciali gratid.j- The degree was obtained, not hy examination, but bj'' a scholastic disputation : an essential preliminary to this disputation being that a candidate should have completed a certain number of terms, and passed the usual terminal examinations in each. On the result of the examination, as given in the Roll, where he was defective in two out of three siibjects. Swift could not have passed the terminal examination for Easter, 1685 : he would therefore lose one of the twelve terms necessary before he could be admitted to the disputation. Strictly, his graduation might have been post- poned for a j^ear : but in Swift's time, it was usual to grant a specialis gratia to meet such cases, for which a supplementa,! examination appears, shortly after Swift's time, to have been permitted.^ This disposes very simply of the lurid picture drawn by one biographer after another, of Swift's erratic and rebellious self-assertion ; and shows him only as a youth, chafing at his own position, seeking to discover his own bent, and yet regretting the loss of any chances of independence which his college career might have brought. That he was no idle and reckless rebel against authority is suf&ciently proved by * The facsimile of the roll is given one who confined his studies to eub- iu Mr. FoTster's "Life of Swift," p. jects which interested himself, neglect- 38. ing some parts of the prescribed ourri- ■f For this explanation, which did culnm. His shortcomings were not not occur to Mr. Forster, I am in- very great, and were treated with debted to a note in Dr. Salmon's every indulgence : and no doubt, if volume, Nnn-Miraoulous Ohristianity, he had been an idle man, it would p. 224 (1881). "ot '^^■'■^ ^'°-'^ ^'^ pride so much as it } Dr. Salmon adds : " The evidence, would seem it did, that any indul- then, would lead us to think of Swift gence should have been necessary." not as an idle undergraduate, but as 16 LIFE OF J03S^ATHAN SAVIFT. [1667—1692. his life-long friendship for Dr. S^. George Ashe, the tutor of the college under whose care he was placed.* To understand Swift's feeling, we must remember, on the one hand, that he belonged to a rich and well-to-do family, but that, on the other, he held the position therein, perhaps in great measure hidden from the world, and not on that account the less irksome, of a poor relation. Outwardly he had the same education as his cousins. But he felt that the educa- tion was grudgingly bestowed, and doubtless exaggerated to himself, as most men so placed would naturally do, the degradation of the position. Angry and discontented, he cared little to look into the future, to forecast his power of achieving independence, or even to set himself, with an}^ steadfastness of purpose, to achieve that independence by definite means. He had not learned to conquer difficulties by patient self-control, but brooded over them, varying the brooding, in these early days, by occasional outbursts of fierj' and spasmodic, rather than vigorous, self-assertion. After his bachelor's degree. Swift had set himself with much earnestness of purpose to systematic reading. Even thus earlj'' he had a good acquaintance with the classics, and already it would seem had begun the studj' of the new school of French literature. There is a story, which depends, how- ever, only on the evidence of Deane Swift, that the Tale of a Tub was seen in its original form during these College days by a fellow-student of the name of Waring. But the story carries its own contradiction, and is no doubt a mistake arising from the fact that Waring, after the year when we know the * There is a curious reminiscence of spoken of. '• He had an utter aversion Smft's college days by one who was to Dean Swift, because he was a tory, a,mongst his bitterest foes in later life, and used to say scornfully of him, that and who could find no very damning he was remarkable for notlung else, accusation to bring against these early while in the college, except for maldng years. It is to be found in Burdy's a good fire. He would not allow his "LifeofSkelton"(Works,I. xx.),where college-woman, he said, to do it, but Dr. Baldwin, the violent whig provost took that trouble on himself." of the college in Swift's old age, is Chap. I.] SWIFT'S FAMILY A.ND EAELT LIFE. 17 Talo was written (1696), had abundant opportunities of meet- ing Swift at Belfast, and may then have seen tlie book. There is no sign in Swift of precocity of genius ; and for the present, at twenty years of age, it was enough that he should acquire, without attempting to produce. But before his Master's degree was obtained, Swift's reading was abruptly stopped. The resources to which he had hitherto trusted, became less certain and finally altogether failed. Godwin Swift, wealthy as he had been, was now a poor, almost an insolvent, man. His sternness to his nephew, or what the nephew interpreted as sternness, had perhaps not a little to excuse it. As one enterprise after another failed, the store of money dwindled ; his nerves were shattered ; ultimately, what may, to some extent, have been a family scourge of insanity, fell on him, and his mind gave way. His death soon followed, in 1688. But Swift had other relations, for whom he retained a sincere attachment. To his uncle William, he afterwards recalls the early favours he received from him, whom he calls " the best of his relations."* His uncle Adam gave him prudent advice as to a love episode of his younger years, t To his cousins Willoughby and Deane Swift, I the sons of Godwin, who settled in Lisbon as merchants, he had, as it appears, the most friendly feelings. By their kindness, the lack of supplies did not operate very suddenly after his uncle Godwin's death. Swift, according to Deane Swift, § was once gazing from his window in the college quadrangle, brooding over his own straits, when he saw a master-mariner wandering about the * See Deane Swift's Essay, p. 56. J Letter to Deane Swift (the elder), The expression occurs in a letter from June 3rd, 169i. Swift at Moor Park, to his uncle, dated § Who tells it on the authority of Nov. 29, 1692. Mrs. Swanson, the daughter of Wil- t " My uncle Adam asked me one loughhy Swift, to whom a character- day in imvate, as by direction, what istio letter, the MS. of which is in my designs were in relation to you." Trinity College library, was written Swift to Miss Jane Waring, May i, long after by the Dean. 1700. c -77 18 LIFE OF JONATHAN SAYIFT. [1667—1692. court, and looking for some j)articular door. After some delaj', the sailor turned to Swift's own chamber: asked his name, and announced that his errand was then and there to hand over a sum of money sent by the cousin in Lisbon. Swift would fain have rewarded the man for the conscientious performance of his commission : but all reward was refused, and Swift valued the new gift too keenljr to repeat the offer. From that time dated, according to Swift himself, the rigid accuracy of his economy. The half - extravagant youth, grumbling at the source of his subsistence, but unwilling to restrict its cost, now learned a new lesson of thrift, and resolved that this gift, as it was the most welcome, should also be the last. Hence- forward he stood on his own feet. No one more earnestly desired to win for himself place and power than Swift now did ; no one had greater resources with which to win them ; yet few lacked more entii'ely that mental discipline which might guide, and regulate, and effectively apply, these resources. But if he hesitated, events soon came which forced him to break with Ireland. The Revolution gave the signal for anarch}^ to be again let loose in Ireland under Tyrconnel, only to end in a fierce civil war, setting ablaze all those hatreds of race and religion which had been smouldering since 1641. It was another of those disturbances of which the youthful University of Queen Elizabeth had, m its less than a century of life, seen so many. Money or no money. Swift was forced to seek his fortune elsewhere. Driven by stress of circumstances from Dublin, he went to England, and first sought his mother's home in Leicester. Tenderly as he loved her, their long parting, and the lack of her sympathy and care, had been the most bitter aggi-avation of all the discontent of these early years ; and now he could hardty come to her with much hope. He was ambitious, but he had no clear views as to his own future. He was unprepared to submit to the discipline of routine. His experience as a youth had been the worst a man can have — that of the poor relation subsisting Chap. I.] SWIFT'S FAMILY AND EARLY LIFE. 19 on the fortuitous alms of his richer kinsmen. The impression had humed itself in on his memory, and the seared spot re- mained. He had received from his uncle, as he said long after, " the education of a dog." To unsympathetic ears, there may stiU be something in the retort, " that with the ingrati- tude of a dog he repaid it." But, without sympathy, few passages of Swift's life are fairly to be judged. Such was Swift when, at the age of one-and-twenty, he again met his mother, whom he had seen only at rare intervals during more than fifteen years. We are not without means of judging what manner of woman this mother was. Slight, com- paratively, as is the place she holds in Swift's biography, hers was clearly a character likely to leave its impress on her son. From Deane Swift, we learn, perhaps on the authority of Swift's own reminiscences, some traits of her simple and orderly life, of her quiet tastes and of her unobtrusive cheer- fulness.* But she was not without something of her son's wayward humour, breaking out at times in a manner more characteristic than decorous. On one of her visits to Dublin she lodged in the house of Mrs. Brent in George's Lane.t Her landlady was scandalised one day by being asked "whether she could keep a secret ? " In utmost confidence she was then told that her lodger had a gallant in the town, who would presentty come to pay his addresses. But no one was to know the secret. The gallant soon came; was admitted with due mystery ; and in this character, so full of bewildering interest for poor Mrs. Brent, Swift continued for some tinae to visit his mother. | * " She was very exact in all the spiiit." Deane Smiffi Essay, p. 23. duties of religion * * * a very early f Dr. Lyons tells the story on Swift's riser, and always dressed for the whole own authority. day at about six o'clock in the morn- J Mrs. Brent's sufferings under these ing, in a mantua and petticoat, which vagaries were rewarded in later years according to the fashion of those times by her appointment as Swift's " Wal- she constantly wore. * * * Her chief pole," the title she bore as his house- amusements needlework and reading. keeper. Her daughter, Mrs. Eidge- * * A woman of an easy, contented way, succeeded her in office. c 2 20 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1667—1692. In later years we shall hear more of Mrs. Swift ; and as long as her life lasted Swift's affection for her never failed. His visits to Leicester were frequent ; and much as he disliked the meddlesome gossip of the provincial town,* he retained, for her sake, some attachment to the place. Thej' met now at a most critical period of his life, while his powers were still in fusion, while his mind was restlessly demanding employment, and when, as he tells us, " a person of great honour in Ireland (who was pleased to stoop so low as to look into my mind) used to tell me that my mind was like a conjured spirit, that would do mischief if I would not give it employment."! The mischief now consisted only of flirtations which made his mother uneasy, though they were no more than thoughtless pastimes for her son. But after those few months, the eager- ness to go further afield gxew stronger. His mother's slender resources could not suffice for two : and Swift was too wise to allow, in early manhood, the renewal of those ties of depend- ence on well-to-do relations, which had tried him so hardly even in youth. It was time for him to seek an opening into some wider career. The choice he made was one suggested bj' his mother. Being related to the wife of Sir William Temple, she had some claim upon his aid ; and Temple's family had some associations with the Swift family in Ireland. I Application was made to Temple for employment, and met with a ready response. Before the close of 1689, Swift had quitted Leicester to enter on an engagement with Sir William Temple, at Sheen. He had now before him a new experience ; that of dependence, half- * " The people is a lying sort of a Lord Berkeley, but on no grounds that beast (and I think in Leicester above are even plausible, all parts that ever I was in)." Swift J There seems to have been a con- to the Mev. John Kendall, Feb. 11, siderable intimacy between Godwin 169|. S-\vift and Sir John Temple, the father + This occurs in the letter to Mr. of Sir 'William, though not so close, Kendall (Feb. 11, 169f). The person probably, as Deane SAvift seeks to of honour has been identified with make out. Essay, p. 33 Chap. I.] SWIFT'S FAMILY AND EAELT LIFE. 21 inenial and half-confidential, on the bounty of a stranger, as hard, in its own way, to stomach, as dependence on the grudg- ing charity of a kinsman. About the terms, the duration, and the nature of this employment, much unnecessary controversy has arisen. Sir William Temple, on retiring from public life in 1680, had gone to hve at Sheen near Eichmond. After a time, anxious to secure still fm-ther quiet, he had bought an estate near Farnham, forty miles from town, amidst the furze and heather of a wide tract of Surrey common. Here he retired in November, 1686 : built a house, and occupied his time in the laying out of his garden and ground, after the fashion he had learned during his embassies ia Holland. When the troubles of 1688 broke out, Temple returned for a time to the house at Sheen, which he had abandoned to his son. Here he stayed for some eventful months. At first he forbore to give any active assistance to the Prince, long as he had been his friend. For a time he even refused to aUow his son to jom the invading army. But x^resently, either his scruples were overcome, or his doubts as to the success of the Prince were removed. His son joined the Prince, and under- took for him some very delicate negociations in Ireland. But the business miscarried, and despair led young Temple to take his own life in April, 1689. For a while longer Sir William Temple stayed at Sheen, where his presence was needed to arrange his son's affairs. But he was anxious to get away. He looked upon Sheen as a merely temporary abode ; and recent associations would not tend to reconcile him to it. Before the close of 1689 he had returned to his favourite retreat of Moor Park. The house at Moor Park still remains. It was a roomy, even a luxurious house, nestling, after the fashion and taste of the day, at the foot of tree-clad ridges, which rise abruptly from the sweep made by the drive in front of the entrance to the house. Over the door there still remains the Temple coat of 22 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1667—1692, arms, marking that dignity which the owner of the mansion never allowed himself to forget. Behind He the well-ordered gardens and the trim canal, still preserving something of the Dutch taste which guided Temple, recaUing as it did the scenes of his diplomatic triumphs, and at the same time apj)ealing to the sympathies of his king. Across the garden and the tiim canal with its fish-pond, at the foot, there opens the view of Crooksbury Hill and the heatheiy commons near it. Two centuries have not weakened the impression of trim and orderly dignity and prosperity which hangs about the house, placed amid scenes which had all the quiet, but none of the gloom, of the dreary tracts of green land that Swift had known about Kilkenny. Close by were the ruins of Waverley Abbey, beautiful even in decay. Two miles off in the opposite direc- tion, lay the thriving old town of Farnham, overhung by Farnham Castle, the piide of English episcopal residences, and of all things most Kkely to impress a stranger, young and fresh from Ireland, as an outward type of the dignity and calm of the English Chm'ch. A few minutes' wallc from the house is Mother Ludlam's cave, the scene of stories well known to Surrey traditions. Much as Temple's house might be the resort of visitors, a few minutes' walk in any du'ection could bury the student in the wildest and lonehest of woods and commons. To this scene it was that Swift came, with his new patron, from Sheen. He is not himself very clear us to this first residence with Temple, and we have now and then to balance some trifling discrepancies in the accounts. But they are no more serious or more important than would occur in the hurried reminiscences of any man, writing of the details of his youth when he had reached mature age. He teUs us in the autobiographical fragment, that Temple, before Swift joined him, had " retired to Moor Park." This is scarcely incon- sistent with the view that Swift came with Temple from Sheen to Moor Park, as he himself says he did only a few lines Chap. I,] SWIFT'S FAMILY AND EAELY LIFE. 23 below. Temple had already retired to Moor Park, iii the sense that he had already chosen it for his fixed abode : Swift joined him there, went with him to Sheen, and afterwards accompanied him there from Sheen, not on his first removal to the new abode, but on his return after the emergencies which had forced him back for a time to Sheen, were over. At Sheen, King William had frequently visited his friend Temple : and there Swift may first have seen him. But Swift's position at first in Temple's household was clearly a very humble one. He read to, and wrote for, his patron, kept the accounts, and made himself useful as a sort of superior valet. It is scarcely likely that while thus employed he came in any way under the notice of the king, as we know eventually that he did. During Temple's illness, when he could not move from the house, the king was accompanied by Swift in walks round Temple's garden. We may safely place the locality of the story at Moor Park ; and the king, as we know from Lady GiS'ard, Temple's widowed sister and bio- grapher, did visit Moor Park at least on one occasion as he drove from Winchester to town.* We need not then suppose that it was during Swift's earlier days with Sir William at Sheen, while he was still the awkward and unfledged student, uncertain of his own powers, impressed with his own inex- perience, and filling an irksome post halfway between a servant and a clerk, that the king chose to single him out for notice : but we may, quite as consistently with the evidence, and with far more probability, conceive that notice to have been bestowed in the later days of the Moor Park residence, when Temple * In the short Life which Lady at Moor Park, shews the arrival of the Giffard prefixed to her brother's works, king and his suite at the house : and she says, speaking clearly of the conflnns, if any confirmation is needed, period after his second retirement to the fact that it was here, and not, as Moor Park, "that he had the honour of has generally been assumed, at Sheen, a visit from the king on his way from that Swift's acquaintance with the Winchester, and used to wait upon him king began. Nor did Temple's illness at Eichmond and Windsor.'' An old confine him much to the house till painting, of which there is now a copy about 1693. ^ 24 LIFE OF JONATHAN SVIFT. [1667—1692. liad learned Swift's worth, when he leant upon his help, and when Swift had been able, as he could long afterwards boast, to prove himself not quite useless for higher duties.* Temple, into whose service Swift now entered, although no heroic character, was a good specimen of his time. He was honourable and of strict integrity, but with some lack of zeal ; with high and even romantic ideas of the past, but able to see with cold and unbiassed reason the advantages of the present, and unwilling to make many personal sacri- fices for any conviction : employed in important transac- tions, but playing in them the part rather of a shrewd adviser and an upright and diligent agent, than of a director or originator : no abettor of the worst schemes of ministers, but on friendly terms with those avowedly responsible for these schemes. He never forgot what was due to his own sense of honour. He was nice in his adherence to truth and delicate in avoiding any wrongful gains when these, apparently, were with- in his reach. Nor need we conceive of him as a man of cold exterior or repulsive austerity. On the contrary his temjper was warm, though kept well under restraint. He was self- indulgent by nature, and loved to give pleasure to those around him, from a certain ease and inclination of humour. He had no wish to force either himself or others to the observance of any very severe code of manners or of morals. His studies were those of the dilettante rather than of the student; but he had a ready interest in many things, if not a very absorbing interest in any. On the other hand, Sir William had about him some very petty traits. He was fitful and capricious in his humours, however philosophically he might write. He cared nothing for dishonest gains, but he seems to have looked very closely after those that were rightly his. Easy by nature, his overpowering self-conceit led him to adopt a pompous manner, and to talk perhaps as he has written, at undue length, on his own achievements. Some odd stories are told of his * Sivin to Lord Palmn-stKii, Jan. 29, 172°. Chap. L] SWIFT'S FAMILY AND EAIILY LIFE. 25 habitual conceit : and in the case of one, the fact that it is given on the authority of Arbuthnot, might suggest that it owed its first recital, it may be a mischievously-inclined recital, to Arbuthnot's friend, and Temple's former dependant. Swift. Vexed at finding each of the collections which he was showing to Temple thrown into the shade by some superior possession of his own, on whose merits Temple dwelt. Lord Bromicker, we are told, at length very gravely replied : " Sir "William, say 110 more of the matter: j^ou must at length yield to me, I having lately got something which it is impossible for you to obtain, for my Welsh steward has sent to me a fiock of geese : and these are what you can never have, since all j'our geese are swans." Of the other inmates of the house. Lady Temple, the story of whose early days as Dorothy Osborne has in it much of romance, would naturally feel some interest in the youth, hrought into her husband's emploji^ment as a poor Idnsman of her own. She lived for five years more, but her place, as mistress of Moor Park, was in a great measure usurped by Lady Giffard, Temple's widowed sister, who, to a dis- position as ardent as his, joined less of self-control : and, in spite of the ability that made her no contemptible defender of his fame, had faults of temper which finally caused an entire breach between her and Swift. But for us the chief interest of the circle lies elsewhere. It is in an adjunct of the household, formed of a Mrs. Johnson, widow of a confidential sei'vant of Su- WiUiam's, and her two Httle daughters. The elder of these daughters was Esther Johnson, now in her eighth year, whose name was to be Hnked, in one of the strangest and yet tenderest episodes in the often strange and often tender annals of literary history, with that of the student outwardly so humble, but whose genius opened itself perhaps more quickly to this child than to any others of the circle amidst which he now moved. The position of the Johnson family seems to have been a doubtful 26 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1667—1692. one, in the household : at times admitted by the leniency of Lady Giifard to be inmates of Moor Park, and at other times, as tradition has it, living in a little cottage on the confines of the property, which has transmitted to the modem lodge that has replaced it, the name of " Stella's Cottage." In a household so strangely formed, Swift had opportunities of ob- serving other sides of human nature than those to be seen in the visits of kmg or coui'tier, and in the discussion of momentous movements in a nation's history. The small vanities of great men : the httle local gossip : the notabilities of Farnham : the humours of the various inmates of the house — all these contributed to that which was even now his chief study, the knowledge of mankind. This first residence began, as we have seen, towards the close of 1689. He came to it "a raw and inexperienced youth." Swift himself,* speaking from memory, and not pro- bably desiring to dwell on details that might have been un- pleasant to recall, says loosely that he stayed about two years. The residence, in reahty, did not last even a year. Already his lifelong enemies, giddiness and deafness, had begun the attacks that were to continue with such persistency ; and the advice of physicians gave him an excuse for returning to Ire- land to recruit his health. It is clear enough, that this earlier residence, deep as was the mark it left on Swift's character, was not very pleasant on either side. Swift had as yet estabhshed little hold on Sir Wilham's patronage, and may, from very ignorance and inexperience, or from boyish pride, have attempted to claun a position in the household which neither his master, nor others in the cu'cle, were dis- posed to admit. Yet neither master nor dependant may have been willing to allow matters to go the length of an open breach, and the opportiuiity may readily have been seized of an excuse for the temporary retm-n of Swift to Ireland. But the parting had no outward signs of ill-will on either side. * Autobiographical Anecdotes. Chap. I.] SWIFT'S FAMILY AND EAELY LIFE. 27 In May, 1690, Swift went back to Ireland with, a letter from Temple to his friend Sir Eobert Southwell,* who had gone to Ireland as Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, in -which Temple recommends Swift as an amanuensis, or, if that were possible, as a fellow of Trinity College ; and speaks in favourable, if not in warm, terms, of Swift's services to himself. Swift's Idnsmen are named, if not with the respect that equals might claim, at least not with the contemptuous ignorance which patronage assumes. t Nothing came of this recommendation, and Swift's visit to Ireland had opened to him no means of livelihood. But from a statement in one of his letters we learn that he returned to England in the autumn of 1691 ; t that he lived for a time in the country (we may safely assume that it was again with his mother at Leicester) ; and that after this, he returned on a visit to his patron, and settled agaiu in Temple's house about the close of that year. The residence would therefore appear to have been interrupted for about a. year and a half; but when renewed, it was on a totally different footing. Each had repented of the breach, and had found the aid of the other more necessary than he supposed. Temple was too shrewd an observer of men, and had been trained in too astute a school, to remain quite ignorant of the powers that lay buried under the uncouth exterior of this "raw and inexperienced youth." Swift, on his side, had not relished the renewal of Irish life after the smooth and polished society of * The letter was fli-st printed in troduoes to Southwell this youth, Cunningham's edition of the "Lives whose name was to outlive those of of the Poets " (1854), vol. iii., p. 160. all the ex-ambassadors and secretaries f He "has good friends," says the of his day. letter, " though they have for the J Mr. Forster places the beginning present lost their fortunes." The of this second residence in August, phraseology is curious in other parts 1690. But I see no reason to set of the letter. "He has Latin and aside the statement in Swift's letter Greek, some French, and writes a to the Athenian Society, of Feb. li, very good current hand, is very honest -i 169f, in which he says he "returned and diligent." As he might recom- ' from Ireland about six months ago." mend a deserving clerk, Temple in- Scott, xv., p. 255. 1^ 28 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1667—1692, Moor Park, and had found no easy roadway to independence in the country of his education. Hardly had the second residence begun, before he found Temple ready to assist him by giving him the means of rising a step in the academic scale. His Dublin career had been cut short before he had attained the master's degree. But now he found means, with Temple's help, of becoming a graduate of Oxford. Of his residence there, and even how long it contmued, we know little ; but it cannot have been long. On the 23rd of May, 1692, he obtained the necessary certificate of his bachelor's degree from Trinity College : on the 14th of June, he was admitted on the same footing at Oxford : and on the 5th of July, he became a Master of Arts.* He was now no longer a waif and stray in the battle of life, but renewed his services to Temple with a position in the land of his choice which he prized more than any which could have been given him in the land of his birth and education. " He had been obliged," he saj's of his Oxford experiences, "in a few weeks to strangers more than in seven years to Dublin College." We have his own account of his new position in Sir William Temple's household in terms that are too clear to admit of dispute, or to be based on imperfect recollection : "growing into some confidence," as he distinctly tells us, "he was often trusted with affairs of great importance." * Swift belonged to Hart Hall, was dissolved in 1805, but the name which afterwards developed into Hart- has been revived for Magdalen Hall, ford, or Hertford, College. The College as now reconstituted. CHAPTER II. SWIFT'S FIRST TEAES OF MANHOOD, AND THEIE LESSONS. 1692—1696. JETAT. 2i— 28. The second residence with Temple — The influence of Oxford on Svrift — His first literary efforts — The Pindarics — Ode to ArchiixJiaj} Sancroft — To Sir William Tcmiple- — Swift and the Athenian Society — John Dunton — Dry- den's criticism of Swift's early attempts — Tlie Address to William III. — Swift as adviser of the king — What he learnt at Court — Swift's Ode to Congreve — On Sir W. Temiild's Kecovery — Desire for independence — His mental state and his exjjeriences so far — His choice of a career — Ordina- tion — An awkward application — Prebendaiy of Kilroot — The Irish Church in 1694 — His life and companions at Kilroot— Varina — Growing irksome- ness of his sun-onudiiigs — Eetnrn to England, and what he brought with him. With this second residence in Temple's house there opens for Swift a wider horizon. Step by step he is being drawn into that arena of busy life which now attracted and again repelled him, for which his impetuous spirit of command so far fitted him, at the same time that his intolerance of con- vention and disciphne jirevented his hoping for the success in it that smaller men might make sure of Coming as it did when his mind was still imsettled, this new and larger opportunity of watching the inner movements of great affairs, fascinated Swift's imagination. At the quiet house amidst the Surrey wastes of heather he saw the coming and going of the men who were making the history of Europe, could observe their moods, and could measure their capacity. From this early glimpse he may first have acquired what he retained through life, and what so much fed his cynical humour, the sense of the marvellous contrast between the smallness of the men and «/ 30 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1692—1696. the vastness of the stake that was in their hands. From the first we see two tendencies at work in him. On the one hand the fixed Imes of political opinion, the intricacies of political tactics, the abnegation of individual independence which a public life implied, repelled him : on the other, the prospect of power and influence, the excitement of stirring scenes, inspired him with a longing for the fray. The question must even thus early have occurred to him whether he would seek an entry into this arena, or strive by literature to obtain the social distinction which he confesses was what he desired to achieve. As yet he was all unsettled. Already, so he tells us, he had, during one period of enforced idleness, "writ and burnt and writ again, upon all manner of subjects, more than perhaps any man in England." * The struggles of early authorship frequentl}^ leave behind them an undue impres- sion of their magnitu.de : but we may well take it that Swift's ineffective mdustry in these early days was laborious enough. Short as it was, his stay at Oxford, coming earty in this second visit, was not without its permanent effect. The Oxford that had given refuge to Cowley, that had ex- pelled Locke, that had passed the famous Passive Obedience decree, was still imbued with the same spirit, and had not shifted her bearings amidst the storms of the revolution. With her political attitude Oxford had a special literary taste of her own, as well. The coterie of Christ Chui-ch was just then maintaining a somewhat unequal fight against the ponderous broadsides of Bentley, and already its leaning to the Tories was as clearly marked as that of its opponents to the Whigs. Its scholarship was not indeed profound, and was frequently worse than superficial ; but it might, with some reason, claim the merit of elegance. Neither the political nor the literary tone of Oxford could be without effect on Swift. Oxford had been gracious to him ; and the kindness shewn him there did much to arouse that underljdng sympathy for Tory politics * Sn-ift til the licv. John Kendall, Feb. 11, 1C93. Chap. II.] SWIFT'S FIRST TEARS OF MANHOOD. 31 wMch Swift shewed long before he quitted openly the ranks of the Whigs, in which his early connexion with Temple had naturally placed him. It was at Oxford that Swift is said to have made his first literary effort, in a translation or paraphrase after the current fashion of the day, from one of Horace's odes.* It contains nothing beyond the ordinary trite moralities usual in a college •exercise : but it is worth noticing, perhaps, that, without its being required to represent anything in the original, he makes the poet speak of himself, with the sarcastic reference that such a phrase would naturally imply, as one " unskilled in sneaking arts." Other efforts accompanied, or followed shortly after this. Swift was caught by a current absurdity of taste. The popu- larity of Cowley, a popularity so great that even one so widely divergent from him as Milton, named him along with Spenser and Shakespeare as one of the three lights of English poetry, had not waned now after he had lain in his grave for more than twenty years. And strange to say, for the moment, it was not Cowley's more simple pieces which were remembered, but the more extravagant flights which he had attempted in his Pindarics. By a curious freak of judgment he had deemed that the most statelj' and dignified form of English poetry was a disjointed imitation of that style of Greek poetry, the merits of which are of all others the most difficult for a modern reader to appreciate. But Cowley and his contemporaries not only compelled themselves to appreciate, but trained them- selves to imitate. The result was only a travesty of Pindar, that failed to stir one chord of real poetry. But the fashion spread. As Dr. Johnson says, " all the boys and girls caught the pleasing fancy, and they who could do nothing else could write lilce Pindar." Swift was caught by the fashion, which * The 18th Ode of the 2nd Book : " Non ebur ueque aureum Mea renidet in domo laounav,'' &c. 32 LIFE OF JOKATHAN SWIFT. [1692—1696. was then so prevalent in Oxford, that even a Latin poem had been written in accordance with what was believed to be Pindar's chaotic contempt for scansion. Swift's attempt is said to have been suggested b.y Sii- William Temple and his wife : and his efforts in this kind, if they have little literar}' merit, at least show us something of his intellectual growth. His Pindarics include an address to Archbishop Bancroft, on his refusal of the oaths in 1689 : another to Sir William Temple ; and lastly one to the Athenian Society ; all of which give evidence of wide reading, introduced with an amplitude of allusion that makes their meaning often hard to decipher. But, for all that, they are not without interest. Their form is the pedantic one borrowed from Cowle3''s school: but, here and there, they have a force that implies rather a reminis- cence of Dryden's muse. The ode to Bancroft, addressed to him when he was founding that sect of the Non-jurors, which Swift's maturer wisdom condemned, shows us how high Swift placed that insistance on the Chm'ch's privileges which after- wards broke his own alliance with the Whigs. Bancroft's self- inflicted martyrdom might be condemned by the School of politicians amongst whom Swift now moved : it might, at a later day, seem even to him over-strained ; but it nevertheless commanded from him the tribute of admiration due to honest}' and principle. Obscure and disordered as it is, the Ode has an occasional literary interest from points of likeness or contrast to his later work. The conceit which represents Bancroft's virtue as brightening even the gloom of popular condemnation, as the evening rays of the sun shine through a cloud, has something strangely unlike Swift's later manner. " Why should the Sun, alas I be proud To lodge behind a golden cloud ? Though fringed ■with evening gold the cloud appears so gay, 'Tis but a low-born vapour kindled by a ray." But there is something, on the other hand, of his later touch in the simplicity of lines like these : — Chap. II.] SWIFT'S FIRST YEARS OF MANHOOD. 33 " Reformers and physicians differ but in name, One end in both, and the design the same : Cordials are in their talk, while all they mean Is but the patient's death, and — gain." There is still more, perhaps, of his spirit, in the hope that, through the " peevish knowledge " of the multitude, " Each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire." The Ode to Temple is interesting, not only as showing Swift's entire and genuine respect for his patron, hut for the ghmpses it gives us of his early thoughts. Even then, he had found food for satire in watching the conduct of great affairs. " The wily shafts of state, those juggler's tricks. Which we call deep designs and politics, (As in a theatre the ignorant fry. Because the cords escape their eye. Wonder to see the motions fly ;) Methinks, when you expose the scene, Down the ill-organ'd engines fall ; Ofi fly the vizards and discover all. How plain I see through the deceit 1 How shallow, and how gross, the cheat I " Already he professes to abhor the " lumber of the schools : " already he turns from what he deemed the useless labour of " digging in the leaden mines of philosophy." But a dislike of philosophy which did not at a later day interfere with his marvellous powers of making abstract thought luminous, does not now prevent him from indulging in laboured metaphysical efforts which take refuge in obscurity. The last of these Pindaric odes was written for the approval of the newly-started Athenian Society — a pedantic gathering, with exalted aims in social science, which experience taught Swift, like the rest of the world, to laugh at, but to which youthful enthusiasm and want of judgment led him, in 1692, to pay the current homage, John Dunton, with whom origi- nated this scheme of an Athenian Society for the encourage- 34 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1692—1696. ment of universal learning, was a clever, wayward, and half- mad- publisher, whose literary schemes or scribblings turn up at various corners from the Revolution to the close of the reign of George I. Bound apprentice to a bookseller, he first pushed himself into a little notoriety as a leader of the Whig apprentice boys at the close of the reign of Charles 'II. In 1684 he set up as a bookseller himself, and his connexion with the Dissenters gave a sanctimonious colouring to many of his later attempts. He strengthened this religious connexion by a marriage with the daughter of Dr. Samuel Annesley, the dissenting minister, — another of whose daughters became the mother of John and Charles Wesley. But the break-up of the Whiggish interest after Monmouth's expedition came to an abortive end, destroyed poor Dunton's credit : and, with his stock of Puritan books and pamphlets, he was forced to start for New England. After some further wandering, he returned to London and opened once more a booJiseUer's shop, on the very day that Wilham of Orange entered the city. Now began ten years of considerable activity, when a stream of worthless and ephemeral literature, distinguished and attracting only by oddity of title, poured from his press. He attained a little civic dignity : and the " world," as he tells us, " smiled upon him." The main principle of his business as of his life was, "to think or perform something out of the beaten road." One amongst six hundred other schemes which were hatched with feverish rapidity iii his addled brain, was this of the Athenian Society, started in 1689. Samuel Wesley, his brother-in-law, seems for a time to have helped bim : and to the wheels of such a crazy chariot was it that Swift bound his first literary venture. It is a proof partly of that nervous distrust of himself which Swift always felt: partly of that whimsical judgment as to others by which he was often misled.* * Dunton's venture closed in 1695 : with whom he quaxrelled, he left for and afterwards marrying a rich wife, Dublin to get quit of her : started a Chap. II.] SWIFT'S FIRST TEARS OF MANHOOD. 35 Swift's own contribution to the motley collection of the Society, hardly merits better company. It is inflated, dis- ordered, often impenetrably obscure, and it abundantly justifies the criticism of these early efforts of Swift which tradition ascribes to Dryden. To his great kinsman, then ihe dictator of literature, Swift had submitted these efforts, with what we may well believe, from his subsequent sensitive- ness, to have been more than usual diffidence. The youthful author of such poems might feel his powers, but in spite of himself, he must have been conscious of their misapplication. He was met by a rebuff, and what is hardest of all to bear, a prophetic rebuff. " Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet," said Dryden : * and, perhaps all the more because of the truth that there was in the prophecy, it was never forgotten or for- given. And if Swift was not a poet, he had in store another weapon fully as potent for revenge. But poor as the piece is, immature as are its thoughts, im- mersed as it is in that purely wordy metaphysic for which Swift afterwards conceived the most supreme contempt, still it is not without interest. Chiefly, and above all things, it bears in every line the impression of a mind ill at ease with itself and its surroundings, discontented with the anarchy of bookselling business there, and has Whig writers, and amusingly elevated left us (what again touches upon by a sentence of Swift's satire into a Swift's life), one of the most lively prominence that pleased him, and in- accounts of Dublin at the close of the suited the really powerful Whig pens. 17th century which we possess. He At a later date, we hear of him wrangled with Dublin booksellers, attempting to set up a lottery scheme, persecuted his wife and her mother in But his own kinsfolk would have no- print, and busied himself over an thing to say to it : and this poor, account of his " Life and Errors,'' crazy, but quick-witted, oddity sank which he wrote while hiding from his into obscurity, perhaps into absolute creditors. Coming back to London insanity : and died in 1733. about 1705 he betook himself to poll- * Johnson gives the story -svithout tical pamphleteering. In 1710 he stating his authority : Warton also published a crazy heroic poem on his gives it on the authority of Mr. Elijah Athenian projects, and at the close of Fenton. Anne's reign we find him one of the D 2 36 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [1G92— 1G95. public taste, and seeking some possible help from an Academy, even though its ruling spirit should be of texture so mundane as poor Dunton. There is a touch of genuine feeling and something of originality of thought in this outburst, where he describes the imsympathetic and impersonal reward which comes in the shape of posthumous renown : " Were I to form a regular thought of Fame, Which is, perhaps, as hard to imagine right As to paint Echo to the sight, I would not draw the idea from an empty name ; Because, alas ! when we all die. Careless of ignorant posterity, Although they praise the learning and the wit, And though the title seem? to show The name and man by whom the book was writ, Yet how shall they be brought to know, Whether that very name was lie, or yon, or I?"* The unsuccessful attempt so evident here, to force words to express a whim or fancy rather than a clear idea, is strildng in its verj'- contrast with that which is most characteristic of Swift's later writing, the power of representing even such a fancy without sacrificing absolute clearness, and without ad- mitting anything involved either in word or in thought. With these Pindarics we may join, as belonging to the same period, an address to "VVilham III. on his successes in Ireland, written, probably, to improve the occasion of some passing affabihty which the King had shown to Swift. It repeats only too faithfully in its involved and hollow panegj'ric, the style of the Court poet of the Eestoration : and shows little * There is something here, of con- stock is in the earth : or whether she trast as well as of likeness to the be a bird of prey, and is lured among passage in the Tale of a Tub, where he the rest to pursue after the scent of a describes Fame as "a blessing which carcase: or, whether she conceives her we mysterious writers can seldom trumpet sounds best and farthest when reach, till we have gotten into our she stands on a tomb, by the advan-- graves : whether it is that fame, being tage of a rising ground, and the echo- a fruit gi-afted upon the body, can of a hollow vault." hardlygrowandmuch lessripen till the Chap. II.] SWIFT'S FIRST YEARS OF MANHOOD. 37 more than that Swift was a sound adherent of the Eevolu- tion, and retained a vivid remembrance of the Irish ills which had required William's intervention. In 1692, the possessor of an Oxford degree, and the trusted confidant of Temple, Swift was beginning to take counsel as to his future. He was not to take orders, he says in. one of his letters at this time, till the king gave him a prebend : * but this very condition implies that his career was so far fixed. Ambition he had in plenty: but he knew, and had already said himself, that two things would thwart that ambition : the " cold temper " that was so apt to chill all his efforts, all his deepest emotions, into cynicism; and the "unconfined humour," that was to ride rough-shod over so many cherished prejudices. Already he had decided that no imprudent act should cause him to enter on the struggle hand-tied, and that no impetuousness of youth should entangle him into giving hostages to fortune, or cumbering himself with re- sponsibilities, which would curb independence. A certain appearance of mental callousness, and a certam severity of self-repression were to be achieved by him : and setting these before him, he chose to call the outside that he presented to the world "a cold temper." The interest of his mental growth lies in the very process by which he did achieve them : by which the writer of the half-plaintive conceit about the impersonality of posthumous fame, came to be the author, and that only in a very few years' time, of the grave piece of irony in which such posthumous fame is ridiculed either for its love of carrion, or because it loves to sound its trumpet over the echo of a hollow tomb ; in which the youth, straining after metaphysical disquisition, and involving him- self in hopeless obscuiity, comes to be the derider of phi- losophy, and the writer of the most rigidly simple prose in our language. AVith this process of self-discipline, to which Swift submitted • Srcift to Mr. William. Smift, Nov. 29, 1692. 38 LIFE OF JOl^ATHAN SWIFT. [1692—1696. himself, the discipline of life was also widening his experience. Already, as we have seen, he had come into contact with the king. If we may believe the gossip of Deane Swift, William offered him a captaincy of dragoons, and amused himself by teaching the obscure secretary the Dutch way of cutting aspa- ragus, as they wallied together in Temple's trim garden at Moor Park. Now Swift was to have a connexion with com-ts of a more serious sort. It was in the spring of 1693 that William was in grave doubt about the expediency of assenting to the Triennial Bill. Harassed by suspicion, thwarted in the scheme that lay nearest to his heart, William had come to doubt the motives of every suggestion that came from an English parha- ment and from English ministers. New to Enghsh rule, and unable to gauge the real meaning of the Eevolution, he clung to that power of veto which was already an anachronism. It was to Temple that the king turned in his dif&culty : pressed to pass the Bill, he sent his Dutch confidant. Lord Portland, to consult Temple on the point. Both the king and Portland, imperfectly acquainted with tLe events of the Rebellion, had conceived the idea that it was by assenting to a similar Bill that Charles I. had lost his throne and his head. Temple was shrewd enough to see the absolute necessity for the assent being given : and perhaps feared that, whatever the results of the Bill might be, delay was still more dangerous. He did his best with Portland : and doubtful whether such a messenger could represent faithfully views which he himself was too ill personally to lay before the king, he sent his secretarj"- to state his arguments in his stead. For the first time Swift found himself intrusted with an affair of supreme importance. The colUsion was threatening, and yet the king was blind to the danger. He had to be moved not by warnings, for these might only have stirred his pride, but by suggestions that the Bill was not really any limitation of the prerogative. Swift's historical studies were now called into play, to defend advice, good in itself, but which had to be made palatable to the king Chap. II.] SWIFT'S FIRST YEARS OF MANHOOD. 39 on what it is to be feared were false grounds. The mission failed, and the Bill was for the time postponed: but this contact with the Court was the first thing, Swift tells us, "that helped to cure him of vanity."* The expression is perhaps purposely ambiguous : but we may take it to mean such vanity as the self-centred broodings of the scholar might create, but the experience of large affairs was likely soon to dissipate. But apart from occasional contact with the busy world. Swift's chief occupation was still study, his chief ambition still to excel in literature. Leaving Pindarics, from which the stunning criticism of his cousin Dryden had perhaps dissuaded ~ him, Swift still held to serious poetry — still found in poetiy, whatever its nominal occasion, a channel for the release of that moodiness of spirit which tormented him. William Congreve, his old school-fellow at Kilkennj', and companion at Trinity, was now rising into the first rank in literature, and basking in the sunshine of aristocratic whig patronage. In spite of the brilliant success of his comedies, adverse criticism, prompted, or which friendly judgments might deem to be prompted, by envy and iU-wiU, had aheady assailed him: and Swift, still an unlcnown aspirant, addressed a poem to his old friend and schoolfellow, which though it shook off the form, yet preserved anuch of the style of thought, of the Pindarics. More striking than any of the previous pictures, is that which it gives of Swift's pent-up spirit, fretting at the confinement of Moor Park, gauging the vanities and vulgarities of the fopUngs that passed for wits, and scorning their empty artificiality : tracing the typical dunce from " Farnham School " to town, and back again to Farnham with his broken jargon of fashionable witti- cisms, where he " squandered his rising talents to the face " of the unknown duUai'd, Swift : and above all coming ever closer * The Autobiography is the source nnd-twenty. In fact, he was in his of the anecdote, at the date of which six-and-twentieth year, when the Tri- Swift speaks of himself as under one- ennial Bill was before the King. 40 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1692—1696, to a measui'e of his own capacities, and to a forecast of Ms own future, and of the terrible power he was to wield ; " My hate, whoBe lash just heaven has long decreed,' Shall on a day make sin and folly bleed." The praise is well turned and sincere in which he credits Con- greve with "a richer vein and cleaner ore" of poetic fancy: but it is also characteristic, that praise of the poet soon gives place to satire of the town and its follies. A month later, at the close of 1693, we come to the last of these early poems that we possess. It is an ode on Sir William Temple's recovery from illness, as pompous and insincere as such outbursts generally are. With the fulsome flatterj' that was common to the day, but sat so ill on Swift, it mingles symptoms of the gnawing discontent that breaks out at the thought of the dependent position in which, with all the possi- bilities that he felt within him, he was still placed, and stiLL likely to remain. To be Sir William Temple's trusted secre- tarj', was better than to be what he had been before, a sort of upper servant : but it was still torture to a mood and temper such as Swift's. He had akeadj', while in Temple's service, shaken off the awkwardness of the obscure and self-absorbed student, and, with some knowledge of tlie world, he might well wish to play a larger part therein.* But that he knew and could on occasion assert his own dignity only made Swift's position the more irksome at Moor Park. Smooth down the picture of the relation between the two as we maj', it yet remains certain, that between Temple and Swift comparatively little sympathy could exist. They might mutually respect one another : they might agree in certain opinions : they might * We have some proof of this in a and had been surrounded by an angry curious little anecdote recalled to him crowd, whose threatenings had been thirty years later by Lord Castledur- calmed only by the demeanour of row, who remembered how, in his boy- Swift producing in the crowd the hood, he and Swift had been abused pacifying effect of the "vir pietate by a drunken boatman about his fare, gravis " of Virgil. Chap. II.] SWIFT'S FIRST TEARS OF MANHOOD. 41 feel that each owed the other some gratitude, and on suitable occasions they might each take an opportunity, in well-balanced language, to express it. But after all it remains an unchange- able fact, that no two characters could be more unlike. All that made Swift's strength — his absolute intolerance of con- vention, of authority, of pedantry : his power of detecting what was unreal or pretentious : his morbid desire to probe sores, to spare no smiling surfaces, to cut into the quick — all these are the very opposite of what can have suited Temple, or have allowed peace to his serene self-complacency. In the house of his patron, Swift must not only have felt that his talents were lost, but that he could not freely express his own thoughts. With some men that suppression might have been well ; with Swift, ah'eady painfully straining at a process of self-torture, which a larger sphere of active work might have made less intense, it could only have been entirely ill. It is clear from these early poems, even through the mist of conventional eulogy under which he spoke, that Swift prized above all things his honesty and independence : that he saw how easily both might be lost : and that this dread inspired much of his dis- content. All this appears in the poem on Sir William Temple's recovery. Inspired or dictated by the concern which it was becoming that the dependant should show in his patron's illness, the poem proceeds for the most part in the strain of subtilized exaggeration in which the " metaphj'sical " poets had imitated or travestied intensity of feeUng. Ghastly fear had shaken each mind, as the Atheist's mind is shaken by the convulsions of natm'e ; grief had traced its waterj^ footsteps in Dorinda's * face, and had flung sables on each menial look : * Dorinda is the poet's name for was conventional enough in these Martha, Lady Giffard. Dorothea is eulogies : but his picture of Dorinda the name he gives to Dame Dorothy, is not quite so insincere as such flattery Sir "William's wife. It is she, and not would imply. He detested her, aad Lady Giffard, as Mr. Forster by a slip even the poem shows no affectation of of the pen asserts, that is described as regard, "peaceful, wise, and great." Swift 42 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1692—1696. the lackeys, in short, looked as grave as if the sun had gone out of heaven. Such are the stilted exaggerations which run through the piece. Then, by a strange device, his Muse appears to Swift, to listen to moralizings on the theme ; and it is in these moralizings that we come to the real interest of the poem : for it is here that Swift, with no great amount of relevancy, describes his own condition. Of set purpose he is involved and obscure : for it was his object to pretend that the passion he felt tearing at his heart was caused by intense grief at his patron's malady. But in spite of himself he breaks beyond his theme, and_ at last bursts into this passionate remonstrance with the force within him that he felt was driving him from all easy converse with his feUow-men. " To thee I owe that fatal bent of mind Still to unhappy restless thoughts inclined ; To thee, what oft I vainly strive to hide, That scorn of fools, by fools mistook for pride ; From thee whatever virtue takes its rise, Grows a misfortune, or becomes a vice ; Such were thy rules to be poetically great. ' Stoop not to infrest, flattery, or deceit ; Nor with hired thoughts be thy devotion paid ; Learn to disdain their mercenary aid ; Be this thy sure defence, thy brazen wall, Know no base action, at no guilt turn pale ; And since unhappy distance thus denies T' expose thy soul clad in this poor disguise ; Since thy few ill-presented graces seem To breed contempt where thou hast hoped esteem.' " It is, perhaps, worth noticing how httle some of the rhymes here correspond with the accuracy of Swift's later poetical efforts. But it is far more important to notice how every line is surcharged with personal reference, and how deep that misery that pursued Swift's later years had, even thus early, struck its roots. In the case of Swift, as with all men who begin the struggle of life by combating forces that, in the eyes of other men, are mere figments of a heated and disordered imagination, the question is sure to occui-, what justification Chap. II.] SWIFT'S FIEST YEAES OF MANHOOD. 43 was there for all this gloom and misanthropy ? Before our sympathy is asked, have we not a right to know on what real troubles we are to spend it ? On the answer to that question depends the feeling with which we shall pursue the life of Swift. If we cannot condone much to the child born and nurtured in dependence, taken ffom his mother's care before he could know its value ; educated under the eye of a stern and grudging uncle ; to one whose opening career was broken by the troubles of his countrj', and whose spirit, to the last degree passionate and impetuous, was harnessed to the methodical routine of a timid and somewhat pedantic master, unfit to take the measure of Swift's powers, but disposed to look upon their occasional assertion as the unwarranted although perhaps excusable eccentricities of an iU-trained youth : if to all this, and to the fact that the very strength and unruliness of his powers were a source of uneasiness and of foreboding to Swift, we are not prepared to excuse much, then the biography of Swift must bring to us not a strain of vivid human interest, but the perpetual irritation that powers, always great, but often restless, morbid, and undisciplined, must produce. There was indeed one other very real and very terrible excuse for Swift. Amongst all the stories of mental struggle of which our literary annals are fuU, there is none which is so full of mysterious interest, as that of Swift. Beyond all the troubles of fierce temper, violent emotions and over-strained self-inspection ; beyond all the ravages wrought upon a high- strung nature by years of dependence, poverty and repression ; beyond the loneliness that came from his scornful pride. Swift had another burden to bear. This was the foreboding of mental darkness. Though insanity, even at the end, scarcely seemed to release him from the pains of self-consciousness, yet the dread of it hiuig over him ceaselessly through life. It was no process of gradual decay. Until it dealt its final and decisive blow, it neither clouded nor impaired the clearness of 44 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1092—1696. his intellect. But ever-recurring para -warned him that the inevitable and unconquerable physical cause was there, and the struggle seemed only the more intense from the strength of the citadel that was at last to be overthrown. We shall have to retm-n to this more than once when the symptoms become more marked; but thus much it is well to lay down at the outset of Swift's life. To say what he had to say with abso- lute simplicity : to be clear as to his own position and his own aims : to be misled by no abstractions — these were main objects in Swift's life. But, for all that, it was a life darkened by constant struggle, foreseeing defeat at last, and made melancholy by the jjhysical inroads through which that defeat was finally accomplished. Of these mere physical causes it belongs rather to medical science than to hterary biography to speak. Their outward sj'mptoms were those two maladies of giddiness and deafness which from the age of twenty to his death never for any long period left him. What they meant, how they arose, what tended to their aggravation, it is hard to say."^ Swift himself was fond of recurring to the theory of some trifling occasion, such as an early surfeit of fruit or an accidental cliill. On these, the first and last words have been spoken by Johnson ; " The original of diseases," he says, "is commonly obscure ; and almost every boy eats as much fruit as he can get, without any inconvenience." Swift no doubt felt in later years some injury to his health both from fruit and from chills. But with no undue confidence we maj' assert that the real source of the disease lay more deep ; and medical investigation, if it does not absolutely prove, is at least consonant with the belief that he suifered from structural malformation neai- the brain. What- ever its character might be, that malformation never till the end obscured the marvellous lucidity of his thought, but * In dealing with Swift's Latest that have been advanced in explana- years, we shall necessarily be brought tion of the facts which Swift's bio- more into contact with the theories graphy discloses. Chap. II.] SWIFT'S FIEST TEAES OF MANHOOD. 45 neither did it ever suffer him to forget the signs of disease that it produced. In Swift we have one whose clearness of in- tellectual vision never needs to ask for a lenient judgment, but whose moral depression calls from first to last for all the forbearance we can show. But whatever the underlying troubles that vexed Swift's spirit, and were forcing their way through his immature attempts in literature, the question that now forced itself on him, and with increasing urgency as his position became both more doubtful and more irksome, was, how a livelihood could be gained at once permanent and independent. So long as Temple lived, it was clear that Swift would be welcomed as an inmate of Moor Park. The residence with Temple had done much for him. To what he there learned, some of the peculiar force that marks off his political pamphlets irom all others, may perhaps be ascribed.* To the quiet and leisurely observation of men who had played large parts upon the world's stage, he had been able to join close attention to the moods and whims of the country bumpkins round Farn- ham. When opportunity offered, with his usual love of hard exercise, he used to make his waj' on foot to London, scanning then and on his many journeys to Leicester, the manners of the road, and learning much that he afterwards put to good account, t But much as he gained here, he gained it through a trying medium. Even the advantages, such as they were, might not all attend a longer residence : and meanwhile, the opportunity of gaining for himself a secure and independent position was rapidly passing. The previous course of his edu- * By Lord Macaulay, in a well- this theory those political tracts known passage in the Essay on Temple, which come nearest to his residence- the part which this residence had in with Temple are indubitably the developing the practical power of weakest. Swift as a political writer, is described t The story of his lodging at penny with something of rhetorical exaggera- hedge-inns, and paying sixpence for tion, which ignores the natural genius clean sheets, is well known. Lord of the man, and magnifies the force Orrery ascribes it to vulgarity : John' of circumstances. Unfortunately for son to curiosity or thrift. 46 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1692—1696. cation, the want of any technical training for another pro- fession, the opening for influence -which it naturally, and almost alone, presented, had turned his thoughts to the Church.* But, he tells vls, he had a scruple of entering the church merely for support. He was clearly in a difficult position. To Temple he had to represent his desire as that of securing an independence. Yet he hesitated to break with Temple and secure that independence in the onlj'^ way open to him, until . he found he could do it without the suspicion, to himself or to others, of a merely mercenary motive. Better than that might even be the acceptance of the king's offer of a captaincy of dragoons. It was needful to do what Swift hated, to press his patron for help : and thus it was that urged, perhaps, by his importunity, Sir Wilham made an offer of a post which he knew Swift would be little incUned to accept, that of clerk at £120 a year in his own sinecure office of the RoUs at Dublin. As Temple no doubt expected, Swift refused. To have held a petty and , subordinate post in the very law courts where some of his kuismen had been, and where others stiU. were, leading counsellors, would have wounded his pride to the quick. But Sir WUliam's offer had at least taken away the possibility of any reproach hereafter that he had entered the ranks of the Church merely for what it had to give. It was voluntarily, and not by compulsion, that he now accepted the career to which his connections, his education, his opportunities, possibly also his inclination, had turned his thoughts. In November, 1692, not long after his Oxford degree, as we have seen, he had this mtention pretty clearly in view. From the king, in some of his frequent colloquies, he had obtained some hopes of a prebend, should one conveniently fall vacant : and he may even then have cherished those dreams which remained with him long after, of a secure retreat at • (f ■ ' It is easier to provide for ten horough, 4 May, 1711. The same was men in the Church than one in a civil probably Swift's opinion now, in his employment." Srcift to Lord Peter- twenty-fifth year. Chap. II.] SWIFT'S FIEST TEARS OF MANHOOD. 47 Windsor, where the temptations to the fray would have been far removed from him, and where genial ease and dignity might have brought to him a content which he fancied would not pall/ But he complains of Temple as remiss in fulfilling his promises of aid : and the complaints ripened, till, at length, in May, 1694, he left Moor Park in pique. In telling of this break with the past,* he speaks of his intention of taking orders in September of that year. When he quitted Moor Park he went to his mother at Leicester, and finally to Ireland, soon after, in June, 1694, to be ordained. But he had still some difi&culties to overcome. He was forgotten at Trinity College. It was long since he had taken his degree; and even had it not been so, the manner of taking it was not much in his favour. Certifi^cates as to his conduct during these intervening years were absolutely necessarj^ Some of the Irish bishops were friends of his familj"-, but they could not set aside the rules of decorum. A humble and irksome letter had therefore to be written to Sir William Temple to beg for a certificate. t The task was the more difficult as they had parted on terms that were at least cold, if they did not amount to an actual rup- ture. It must have gone sorely against the grain with Swift, to approach one from whom he thought he had merited more, and who yet judged, as he was well aware, that Swift had acted with absolute ingratitude. He knows " how much he is fallen in his Honour's thoughts." But he must throw himself "upon his Honour's mercy:" he can scarcely ask his Honour to deign to stoop to a thought of his affairs, but liis faults have been follies or infirmities : and for these he would entreat leniency. I * '•■ I left Sir ■William Temple a, (the elder), June 3, 1694. month ago, just as I foretold it to you : f The letter is dated 6 October, 1694. and everything happened thereupon J The letter, which Mr. Temple just as I had guessed. He was ex- called Swift's " penitential letter," tremely angry I left him : and yet before printed from a transcript, has would not oblige himself any farther been printed from the original by Mr. than upon my good behaviour, nor Locker in his " Patchwork," p. 77. would promise anything firmly to me This shows the former version to have at all." Smift to Mr. Deane Swift contained no important variations ^ 48 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1692—1696. Some men might have ■written such a letter, and learned only the lessons of prudence that the task inculcated : with Swift no experience was gained, hut the boundless pride that was yet to make great men tremble, was wounded to the quick. To outward appearance the wound healed over. It says much, indeed, for the foundation of solid mutual respect that subsisted between Swift and Temple, that the humble letter had the effect of bringing the friends together. The certificate was promptly sent. Swift was ordained deacon on the 25th of October, 1694, by Dr. Moreton, Bishop of Kildare * : and priest on the 13th of January, 169^. His family influence, which, fallen though it was, was still considerable, stood him in good stead : before the close of the month he was presented by Lord Capel, then Lord Deputj', to the prebend of Kilroot, near Belfast. From that day Swift was his own master. The state of the Irish Church when Swift entered it was curious enough. At its head stood Michael Boyle, a Tory of the days of Charles II., now blind and incapable, but fitly representing in himself the tone which the Restoration had imparted to the Church of Ireland under the guidance of the later Stuart rule. The shock of the rebellion in 1641 had fallen upon what was in spirit as well as in fact to a great extent a missionary church. That shock had been met in a few cases with the pure missionary wisdom of men like Bishop Bedell, the "ultimus anglorum," whom even foes lamented.! But for the most part the Church bowed beneath the storm : and when the dawn of better things had come with the Eesto- f rom the original. I cannot agree dare, and not of Derry, as Mr. Forster with Mr. Forster in thinking the letter supposed. Proceedings of the Royal to he couched in no more than the Irkh Academy, Not., 1S79. conTentional language of respect. f Bishop Bedell died during the * The autobiography gives the name Irish Eebellion of 1641 : and so uni- rightly, and Mr. Forster was in error versal was the respect in which he in his correction of it. His mistake was held, that even the rebels turned arose from a misreading of the signa- out to fire a volley over his grave, ture to the orders of ordination. calling out the words, '■ Eequiescat in " Gril. Darcnsis " is William of Kil- pace ultimus anglorum." Chap. II.] SWIFT'S PIEST TEARS OF MANHOOD. 49 ration, it had found the Church ready to enjoy to the full the ease and comfort of to-day with little thought of the morrow. Such was the spirit typified in Boyle, now Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of the Church. A second shock came in 1688, to terrify and well-nigh annihilate the Church: and when this new struggle was over, it found itself restored to safety, but restored with very new conditions. "When the Eevolution settlment came, it formed a new type of leaders, such as Narcissus Marsh, successively Archbishop of Cashel, of Dublin, and of Armagh: and William King, afterwards, as Archbishop of Dublin, the friend and correspondent of Swift, but now Bishop of Derry. In some respects all seemed to go well with the restored Church: and when Swift was ordained, she was rising on the full tide of penal legislation against the Roman CathoHcs. The priests of that faith were to be driven from the shores of Ireland. To shelter them was to be high treason. To hold propertj"^, to pursue any money-yielding pro- fession, was to be made difficult, and in some cases impossible, for a Roman Catholic. To seek an education in any of the Catholic seminaries abroad was forbidden to the Roman Catholic families. If a Protestant heiress married a Roman Catholic, her property was forfeited. All these laws had not yet been written in the statute-book : but the lines of the work which was meant to stamp out the proscribed religion, and to make the Protestant Church the symbol of conquest, were already laid : the programme of the campaign was already drawn up. But, on the other hand, if the Church felt any triumph in the abasement of her rival, there were flaws in her own prosperity'. Much of her wealth had already fallen into the hands of laymen. Of her clergy many were starved. Of her benefices many were vacant. Congregations were scat- tered for want of room to house them. Her poor were unedu- cated. A Bill to provide more churches was set aside in 1698. Another for the erection of free schools, which might have helped to secure her influence and given her the hold on the 50 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1692—1696, yotmg which the Eoman Catholic priest, in spite of persecu- tion, was gaining, shared the same fate. The Church was to he taught that the dejection of her rival might secure her own safety, but would not swell her triumph : that should she be content to run in the political liaes marked out for her, she might trust to protection, but could hope neither for enlarged dominion nor for spiritual freedom. It is little wonder if some of the leaders of the Church were murmuring at the part which they were forced to play, and finding how hollow was the triumph which they had seemed to attain when Eoman Catholic pretensions fell. The political governors of the kingdom held in their hands the powerful instruments which the penal statutes gave to them : but these were most useful when kept chiefly in reserve, and the political leaders were careful not to use them so as to make the Protestant Church too strong, "If one should measure our temper by our laws," says Bishop King in a letter to Bishop Burnet, t " I think we are little short of the Inquisition : but if by the execution of them, I doubt we shall seem as indifferent in matters of religion as our neigh- bours in Holland : whereas soft laws and strict execution are what wisdom and interest would recommend to us." The words were used when the temper of the nation, and of the leading churchmen, was being tried to the utmost, two years after Swift's ordination, by a bill which was to suspend the laws, for the sake of securing the king's person against danger- Enough of repressive power, it was felt, had been placed in the hands of the government. The liberties of the countiy were threatened by a hundred instruments which were lying in terrorem. To add to these was not to secure the safety of protestantism, but to seal the doom of freedom : and so first by the Lords, through the Bishops' influence, and then by the Commons, when it was revived in an amended shape, this obnoxious bill was rejected. Such was the state of the Irish + ManCs History of the Church in Ireland, Vol. II. p. 80. Chap. II.] SWIFT'S FIEST YEARS OF MANHOOD. 51 Church during the three or four years before and after 1694. The resistance in which the Church had appeared as the champion of national independence, was not, as we shall find, forgotten by the English government as a lesson for the future. It was in a period so critical to the Irish establishment, that Swift joined her ranks. We find him settled at Elroot early in 1695, with a living worth about dElOO a year, of which his predecessor, the Eeverend William Miln, had been deprived by a long-suffering church, for immorality.* Kilroot was a country district, with some small aggregate of houses, washed by the waters of Belfast Lough. The churchmen were woefully few when Swift went there : and tradition in the neighbourhood stiU tells how "the mad clergyman" vainly endeavoured to procure a congregation, by going to the shore, and gathering a crowd to see him " skip stones " into the sea.t Before very long Swift found friends in the neigh- bourhood. One was a Mr. Winder, a fellow-student at Oxford, now settled in the north of Ireland with a wife and family. Another was Waring, his friend at Trinity, of a rich Belfast family,! to whose sister, an heiress of some preten- sions. Swift began, in want of other occupation, to show some attention. It was a weakness to which, as we saw in his short stay at Leicester in 1688, he had before been prone : against which he had been warned : but a "kind of foUy," as he says, * It is perhaps only fair to Miln, behalf. — MS. letter in Records of to say that a letter in the Armagh Armagh (traascribed for me by Mr, Library, from the Bishop of Down to Eeynell). the Bishop of Meath, seems to show f The tradition, like others of its that the sentence had been one of sus- type, would scarcely be worth repeat- pension only, and not of deprivation. ing did it not serve, like them, to But the incumbent himself, and others show the picture of Swift that has with him, had taken the worse view : lingered in the minds of the people and before it was corrected, Swift had amongst whom he lived, been appointed to the cure, without J They have given their name to protest from Miln. Only three years Waring Stieet ; and their descendants afterwards, the Bishop of Down makes afterwards moved to Waringstown in application, unsuccessfully, on his County Down. E 2 52 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1692—1696. which he had thought himself able " to throw off at the porch " whenever he might choose to enter the church. The tendency, however, to attract, to advise, to become a guide and an influence, to women, was one not, in Swift's case, to be checked so easily as he had once imagined : and this time it led in the sequel to what was at least an unpleasant incident. When this new fit was still upon him, he wrote a letter to Miss Waring, under the title of Varina, half fantastic, half passionate, and showing the flimsy and exaggerated emotions which were to be fairly expected in such a case. When the letter was written,* he evidently was tired of his duties, or no duties, at Kih'oot. Independence was much : but the banishment to a remote and Presbj'terian localitj'' was more than enough to balance even independence. To Swift, now as ever after, regret for what seemed to have passed from him was a stronger feeling than the determination to make the best of what was present. To add to his restlessness. Sir Wm. Temple, knowing his value, was now inviting him back to Moor Park, where a position was open to him, sure to be very different from that which, even during the second residence, had been his. Was he to continue, then, at Kilroot, out of the bustle and noise of the world, courting none of the great, and interfering in the struggles of his fellows, if at all, only by his pen : varying his abundant leisure, by fantastic lovemaking, and by inviting the sister of an old college companion, to settle along with him into a dull and colourless obscurity ? Or was he, on the other hand, to yield to that impulse that called him in amongst the crowd of men, to take a part in stirring scenes ? Was he to form of his clerical duties a different, and perhaps a more secular, idea than that which he had cherished in the first flush of self-exacting ardour, when these duties were still in the distance ? On the eve of what, so far as we can gather, was meant only to be a short visit from Kik-oot to his old patron, he wrote the letter to Miss Waring, offering his love in the * It is dated 29th April, 1696. Chap. II.] SWIFT'S FIESX YEARS OF MAXHOOD. 53 usual language of over-wrought hyperbole, and asking hers in return with something, of a peremptory tone, although he re- nounces all wish to touch her fortune. He was to start for England in a fortnight. If he could win her love, she might make of him what she would : he would spare no paias to push his advancement. When he wrote these words, they would suggest to the imagination of Miss Waring, not that kind of advancement that was ultimately his, but that which would gaia the fancy of a woman bred to the every-day comforts of a Belfast citizen's home, and prepared by her dower to add some well-being to the Kilroot parsonage. If he could not win that love before he leaves Ireland, Ireland would see him no more, even were the king to send him back as deputy. What the lady's first answer was, we can only guess : but clearly it contained the conventional amount of temporising : and at least it served to convince Swift that he was not fitted to bear with the caprices of a silly woman, whose conduct seems to have brought first into play that side of Swift's character over which a biographer would gladly pass. For the present tills love episode rested. The fortnight jDassed, and he was still free from any ties : and he left Kilroot, as he had announced, for his projected visit to England.* The prebend was entrusted to the care of his friend Winder, whose " fasten- ings to the world " made even the temporary incumbency a boon : and as a fact, Swift never visited Kilroot again as its prebendary. What he brought from thence, for his mental equipment, so slowly acquiring completeness, we may perhax^s guess with some accuracy. Amongst the soHtudes of the sea-washed parish, he had learned how unfit he was to cultivate that quiet which he. had fancied would suit him. Amongst the Presby- terians, who left his church empty, he conceived that violent prejudice to their sect which made of him their inveterate, and finally, their most dreaded, foe. From the Belfast magnates, * He left in May, 1696. 64 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT, [1692— 1C96. he had perhaps acquired the rooted dislike to provincial society that gives rise to many a sarcastic touch in his journal. From his experience as a parish priest, he learned how ill the clerical life suited him, how hard would be the discipline that could fix him to its routine duties. With some added zest, he renewed his residence with Temple, this time bringing with" him the first instalment of the work that was to constitute his earliest title to enduring -fame. CHAPTER III. THE FIEST ACTS IN SWIFT'S LITEEAKY AND POLITICAL CAEEEK. 1696—1701. JETAT. 28—33. Swift's third residence at Moor Park — ^His occupations — Eeading — His schemes of advancement — Lord Sunderland's patronage — Eesignatiou of Kilroot — Esther Johnson — The early tie between her and Swift — Tlie Battle of tlie JBooJts — The literary controversy to which it was a contribution — Temple's Ancient and Modern Learning — Wotton's reply — Boyle and Bentley — Swift's place in the fray — Tlie intention of the Battle of the Boohs — Swift learning his own powers — The death of Sir William Temple — A last effort for patronage — Enters the service of Lord Berlceley — His disappoint- ments in Ireland — Eesidence at Dublin Castle — Early efforts in humour — Advancement in the Church — The last of Varina — The marriage of Swift's sister — Swift's return to London^ — The occasion of his first political essay — Dissengions at Athejis and Home — The reception, by the Whigs, of Swift's pamphlet — Acknowledged Authorship — Another interview with the king — The strengthening of the tie to Stella. Swift now came back to England flushed -with that new desire for active life that followed as a reaction from the hope- less dulness of KUroot, He came to settle at Moor Park, no longer as a servant, or even as a paid companion, raised, as caprice directed, into unwonted favour and prominence, or again disturbed by cold and distant looks, the memory of which lived long with him : but as the friend and intimate, who might render services of great value to his patron, but who had the advantage of his own house and income to retire to, if that patron's treatment should again become irksome. Retirement had taught him not only his powers, but also the sort of life for which he was most fit. Henceforth there is a new decision about his actions : whatever errors he commits 56 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1696—1701- are due to tlie prejudices or the faults of manhood, not to the doubts, the irresolution, and the immaturity of j'outh. But Swift brought with him from his retirement more than a formed character, and a matured experience. He had now not only conceived, but in great part had executed, the Tale of a Tuh.* His poetical essays had received a bitter rebuff: but the writer of the Tale required no critic to assure him that there was a line of authorship which he could make all his own. While this new phase of his career was opening and whUe his book was lying beside him, and gradually taking its final shape. Swift was going through a wide range of reading.! Its " Deane Swift's story that Waring had seen the Tale, must refer, not to the college days, to which Deane Swift assigns it, hut to the days at Belfast. This is ooniirmed by Swift's own story in the preface, as to the date when it was written, which he ha<;l no reason to misrepresent. + According to a memorandum of his own, entered by Dr. Lyons amongst his MS. notes on Hawkesworth's Life, his reading at this time was as follows : — From Jantiary Lord Herbert's Harry VIH. , fol. Sleidan's Comment., abstracted, fol. Council of Trent, abstracted, fol. Virgil, bis. Horace, 9 vols. Sir William Temple's Memoirs. Introduction. Camden's Elizabeth. Prince Arthur. Histoire de Chypre. Voyage de Syam. Voiture. Memoirs de Maurier. Lucius Florus, ter. Collier's Essays, 2 vols. Count Gabalis. Sir John Daries, Of the Soul. 7, 1G9J. Confonnite de Religion, &c. Dialogues des Morts, 2 vols. Lucretius, ter. Histoire de M. Constance. Histoire d'.31thiopie, Histoire de Cdtes, &c. Diodorus Siculus, abstr. fol. Cyprian and Irenasus, abstr. fol. Voyage de Maroc, &c. JEUan, 1st vol. Homer, lUaJ and Odyss. Cicero's Epistles. Bemier's Grand Mogul, 2 vols. Burnet's Hist, of Reform., fol. Petronius Arbiter. CEuvres Melees, 5 vols. From January 7, W^. Thucydides, by Hobbes, fol. abs. I Theophrasti Characteres. Vossiiis de Sibyllinis. | Sleidan's book is his Commentary on it, is no doubt Paolo Sarpi's History theEefoimation : that which follows (the translation of which was John» Chap. III.] FIEST ACTS IiY SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAEEER. 57 details indicate a reader voracious, rather than systematic. There are six or seven volumes dealing with events of late political or ecclesiastical history : two of the early fathers, and a crowd of travels of the order popular in Swift's daj"^, and of romances of the type of " Prince Arthui-." Of the few English authors whom he has noted in his memorandum, only one is a son's earliest literary scheme). The Memoirs, by Maurier, are those of the Princes of Orange, written by Aubery de Maurier in 16S2, and translated into English by Thomas Brown in 1692. Sir John Davies's poem, A'oscc- teipmm, or' The Immortality of the Soul, was what gained him the patro- nage of James I., and possibly the fact that he was connected with Ire- land as attorney-general, in James's reign, may have given Swift an inte- rest in a book whose graceful conceits would seem otherwise little to his taste. The Count of Gabalis, written in French by the Abb6 de Montfau- ton de Villars, and translated into English in 1692, was the book on the Eosiorucian Mysteries, which sugges- ted to Pope the machinery of the Rape of the Lock. From Irenseus, Swift took the cabalistic motto prefixed to the Tale of a, Tuh. Bernier was a French doctor who had spent some time in the Court of Aurengzebe, and who wrote an account of India, which not only gives a graphic picture of what he saw himself, but also an epitome of the Indian dynasties and their history. Where the possible models are so numerous, it would be rash to attempt to define the sources of Swift's descriptions : but it may be that some of Bernier's accounts of battles that he saw with his own eyes, may have helped Swift in the imagery of the Battle of the Boolis. Vossius de Sibyllinis is the volume by the younger (Isaac) Vossius, who had died Canon of Windsor, not many years before. It is an erudite discussion on the origin of the pseudo-Sibylline pro- phecies, which claimed to be those of the old Cumsean Sibyl, but which Vossius holds to have been forged by Jews, in order to enhance the import- ance of their nation, by those expec- tations of a Savioui' of humanity, which are reproduced by Virgil in the 4th eclogue. I can trace nothing in Vossius's book likely to have sugges- ted any feature in the Tale of a Tui : and Swift can have had no reason for reading it, save interest in the his- torical ei^isode of which it treats. It is easy to guess the interest that Theophrastus would have for Swift : but it seems strange that, if the ob- scurity of the Greek was there no hin- drance to Swift, and if he was indus- trious enough to make an abstract of the bulky historic library of Diodorus, from the original, he should have been content to take Thucydides only through the medium of Hobbes. -(Elian and Diodorus indeed, as well as Floras and Petronius Arbiter, might have been read by Swift only to gather from them a store of anecdote and illustration : but that the Epitome of Floras was actually road thrice, would seem to show that, in reading these authors, he was completing, in this year, a previous course of Eomau historj' founded on the worthier autho- rity of Livy and Tacitus, with whom he might wish to compare their more feeble fellow-historians. AvU T 4"v S8 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1693—1701. poet, and he almost the last we might have fancied likely to suit the taste of Swift. Of the leading classical authors, on the other hand, every one is a poet, except Thucydides, who is read only in Hobbes' translation, and Cicero, who is read only in his epistles. Lucretius he had read three times. Swift could condone scepticism, when it was two thousand years old, and when it attacked no systems that he himself cherished. Whatever his views of epicurean philosophy, the cynical melancholy of Lucretius, could not fail to touch a chord of sympathy in Swift. According to the story of Deane Swift, whose authority may very probably be some reminiscence of Swift's own old age, he was reading at this period about sixteen hours a day. In the midst of this reading, he took that regular and violent exercise which almost to the end of his life he found to be an absolute necessity : exercise of that fierce and excited kind which rather served as an escape from too violent emotions than as an aid to his phj'sical health. At Moor Park, as, curiously enough, at many another spot where Swift lived, tradition names a small hill close to the house, up and down which Swift is said to have run, when the strain of mental excitement made a break of a few minutes necessary. Swift had retm'ued to Moor Park in Maj', 1696. In the studies just described he soon forgot the passion for Varina (as his letter had termed Miss Waring), and passed to far other interests than those that had possessed him in the midst of the alien surroundings of Kilroot. He was now the guest of his former patron, treated with consideration that con- trasted with his old position : and one short letter written in 1696 helps to give us an idea of his new footing. The address is wanting, but it has been presumed to have been written to his sister or to Esther Johnson.* " I desire your absence heartily," * Or, as Mr. Forster with good became Mrs. Mose, on her marriage to reason thought, to Stella's mother, Sir WiUiam Temple's steward. Swift's Mrs. Bridget Johnson, who afterwards sister, Jane Swift, although she after- Cha III.] PIEST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAREEE. 59 he says, (Esther Johnson and her mother were in London ■with Sir William Temple and his family,) "for now I Hve in great state, and the cook comes in to know what I please to have for dinner : I ask very gravely what is in the house, and accordingly give orders for a dish of pigeons, or, &c." "It is a vast condescension," he saj'^s jocularly, that those at Moor Park should " be remembered at all by you in your greatness." His direct and personal interest in politics now became stronger, even while his literary schemes were widening ; and •during the year and a half when he was administering his charge at Kilroot through a substitute, he became more and more drawn into the struggles of the time. At length in the autumn of 1697, he determined to resign the post to which he no longer felt incHned to return, and to throw himself into a new field of activity. The country was on the eve of an election, and debates ran high on the question of keeping up a standing army. Robert Harley, Swift's friend of later yeai-s, had just carried a resolution, far from palatable to the king, for the material reduction of the forces. Lord Sunderland, feared by some as the adviser of an enlarged army, feared by others as one who treacherously advised that enlargement as a means of lessening the popularity of the Protestant succes- sion, was then Lord Chamberlain : and much as his tricks and turnings had alienated others, he still appeared to possess the ■confidence of the king. He knew, however, the slackness of . his own tenure of power : and perhaps this consciousness prompted some patronage which he now shewed to Swift, who had met him at Moor Park, and whose abilities he may there have discerned. Be that as it may, Swift certainly began the series of his ill-starred political connexions by attaching him- self to Sunderland.t Some scheme was on foot : Swift was to wards had some relations with the would make it likely that the letter Temple family, and died in Mrs. was addressed to her. Mose's house, had not at this time any f Smft to Mr. Winder, 1st April, position in the Moor Park family which 1698. First printed by Mr. Forster. 60 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [169G— 1701. be employed in some means by which the veteran plotter was hoping to secure and perpetuate his power. In December, 1697, Swift had arranged to resign his living for this new employment : he managed to secure the nomination for his friend Winder : but before December was ended or the resig- nation was actually completed, Sunderland had been dismissed. "Lord Sunderland fell," says Swift three months later, "and I fell with him." But his pohtical activity was not checked even by that fall. "Since then," he goes on, "there have been other courses, which if they succeed I shall be proud to own the methods, or if otherwise very much ashamed." * Meanwhile, he assures his successor, Mr. Winder, to whom he writes, that he in no way regrets the decision. He knows how the tongues of gossips will be set in motion by his resignation. He foresees how that gossip will find additional matter for discussion in the supposed desire to rid liimseK of an entangle- ment with the once adored Varina. But he is sure of the wisdom of his act, though he has "no way of convincing people in the clouds." He has been assured by one or two anonymous correspondents of the iU designs by which his old friend had supplanted him ; but these are matters "too tedious to trouble you or myself with." All he has now to do is to give miaute directions as to the packing of his books : to plead for indulgence for the tenants who lately were his, and now are Winder's : and with assurances of his lasting friendship to bid good-bye to Kilroot for ever.f * In the same letter. This is an early not, indeed, disprove itself) as scarcely one of the many expressions which to need mention, Swift's resignation Swift turns so as to suggest an in- was due to a charge of rape brought terpretation adverse to himself. Its against him. Another veiy different probable meaning is, that though he story represents him as resigning, on is sure of the honesty of his means, he an impulse of benevolence, in order to will still be ashamed of having tried provide for a poorer clergyman. Both at all, if these means do not end sue- the slander and the praise must be cessfully. rejected. Scott accepts the second + According to one scandal, long story, which the facts now adduced ago so completely disproved (did it from Swift's own letter disprove : and Chap. III.] FIRST ACTS IX SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAEEEE. 61 But it was not only public and literary occupation that gave, in Swift's eyes, new attractions to residence at Moor Park, The inmates there were the same as before, but his relation to at least one of them had changed. Temple was feebler in health, drawing near to his end, and more dependent on Swift's help. Lady Giffard was still there, and still the chief authority in the house ; perhaps increasing in the mind of Swift that antipathy that became afterwards so marked. But there was another whose presence attracted Swift and helped to drive from his heart all thoughts of Variua ; one who was gradually asserting over him an influence, perhaps as yet un-. known to either, but destined to prove so fateful for the future of both. Esther Johnson was now, at the period of his renewed resii dence with Temple, fifteen years of age. When he had begun his former residence she had been a child of scarcely eight years old. Even then her early education had fallen to his charge : and the despised and obscure student had found in his little pupil the one heart in the house at Moor Park that bent entirely to his own. When he returned, the attraction was strengthened. To her, if to none other in the house, this return meant the change from dreary and formal routine to the ever-stirring contact of a mind that even thus early was to her the centre of all intellectual light. To her the genius was clear that had not yet dawned for others. To the insight of her love, the hopes, the fears, the misgivings, that were hidden from others, must, if we are to guess from her later relation to Swift, have been partly, at least, laid bare. For her, if for no other, his presence was the brightest gleam of sunshine. Her sympathies were open to every mood that vs^as his : and it he attributes it to Swift's " exalted duty, -which urged him to counteract beneTolenoe.'' The phrase is really a parsimonious inclination by giving, not applicable to Swift. He was Wayward as it is, there is something benevolent : but his benevolence arose attractive about Swift's benevolence : often from a whim, or an impulse, but we cannot call it " exalted." often from a sudden constraint of 62 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1696—1701. is in these three years of later residence with Temple that the foundations of that close and yet most mysterious bond which grew up between them, were laid. Irksome as was much about his position in Moor Park, it was the love for Stella that made its memory sweet, that made the galling dependence of its earlier years lose its bitterness in recollection, and that made its associations dear to him in later life. For Swift, during these early years, the young mind looking to his, and his onty, for guidance, was enough to make him feel his life not quite lonely, dreary as its course had as yet been ; enough to give him a background of restful fidehty, amid the misgivings of early efforts. The feeling was quickly ripening into something more : but we may watch its growth, without assuming it to have been, thus early, what it afterwards became. Stella was now, as Swift recalled long after when the last chapter of the romance had been closed,* passing from the constant sickliness of childhood into the more robust health of early womanhood. She was looked upon "as one of the most beautiful, gi-aceful, and agreeable young women in London : " but her beauty was not so much that of form and feature, as of striking and attractive piquancy. Her hair was of raven black : her eyes sparkling : and her mien one of thrilling animation. The animation would not be least kindled, the piquancy not least attractive, for him whose coming was Hke stmlight to the maiden in the dull routine of Moor Park, whose genius was as yet a mine undiscovered by others but her. But the beauty, the sparlding wit, and the liveliness of Esther Johnson, made her position still less that of a menial, and furnished her with opportunities of mixing with the fashionable world. She went with the family on their periodical visits to London. She was known in society. The last description applicable to her is that of the inmate of the servants' hall, scarcely noticed by the master of the house. Nothing but love of striking effect could have suggested to Macaulay that the bond between Swift * " On the death of Mistress Johnson." See Appendix, No. XI. Chap. III.] FIEST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAREEE. 63 and her was that of the needy curate finding his advantage in courting the waiting maid, hecause no other ambition could be his. Neither Swift nor Stella as yet, consciously, thought of love making : but if they had, the courtship would have been addressed by a man of so far assured position, to a maiden whose choice of suitors might have been large enough. "While the inner romance of Swift's life was thus gradually taking shape, amidst his reading, his schemes of political advancement, and his revision of the Tale of a Tub, another work came to occupy some of this year 1697. The earliest of his more notable books was now launched upon the limited circle for whom alone it was at first intended, although not printed for some years ; and it is to this jjart of Swift's life that the consideration of the Battle of the Books belongs. It was written to defend the position in which Swift's patron had been placed in a fashionable but evanescent literary contro- versy, suggested by the example of contemporary French litera- ture, and fomented in England by angry personal disputes. Amongst the various theories bred by the complacent humour of France under the Grand Monarch, there was one which claimed superiority for the products of that age and nation over all that had preceded. A few foreigners might indeed be permitted to share in the superiority : but only so far as they had approached the models of propriety which the Academy of France produced. For the rest, the great names of the remote past enjoyed, it was affirmed, a reputation which was the effect only of the glamour of antiquity, and of the blind- ness of monkish pedants. It was their privilege to have con- tributed, possibly, some stones which went to raise the proud monument of French taste and genius : but their claim to equality, much more that to superiority, was based only on a degrading superstition. The paradox was one very likely to be advanced in an age so complacent as that of Louis XIV. : but much more certain was it to be quickly shattered in an age which recognised so well what it owed to antiquity, and 64 LIFE OF JOHATHAjS" SWIFT. [1696—1701. whose literary chiefs, if somewhat stiff and exactuig in their canons, were yet secure enough in the permanence and catho- licity of their genius, not to be blind to the inimitable grace of earlier models. The paradox had been broached by Fonte- nelle : and was repeated by Perrault in a poem read before the Academy in 1687, with the title of Le Siecle de Louis le Grand. It was not long before the author of the paradox had to regret its enunciation. The struggle became a fierce one ; and Per- rault found himself overwhelmed with ridicule. Hardest of all, those whom he had praised too lavishly resented eulogies paid at the expense of those whom their literary genius taught them to recognise as masters. Boileau laughed to scorn the criticism which placed him above Horace. The struggle was so one-sided that the rash adherents of the moderns were obliged to make their surrender. Such was the position of the controversy when Temple, whose interest in French literature was large, introduced the topic to English readers. In a treatise on Ancient and Modem Learning, written in his most chaste and dignified jDrose, he supported the cause of the Ancients. Avowedly the essay is rather literary than critical : and here and there remarks are introduced which give a graceful turn to the paragraphs, but could hardly be gravely employed as arguments in the contro- versy. Legendary resources are drawn upon so as to embellish with something of biographical detail what are little more than names in ancient literature. In many passages Temple has doubtless laid himself open to the ridicule which has been thrown upon him with much sldll, but little measure, bj^ Lord Macaulay. But the intention of the essay has been purposely distorted by Macaulay. Appeals made by Temple to the general impressions which are to be drawn from classical legends or literature, are twisted by Macaulay into positive assertions falsely claiming historical basis. Temple does not for instance seek to prove, as Macaulay pretends, the excellence of ancient music by saying that Orpheus made trees dance with his lute. Chap. III.] PIEST ACTS IN SWIFT'S. PUBLIC CAEEES. 65 or that Arion escaped drowning by charming the dolphins : but only seems to hint, harmlessly enough,that these legends prove the power of music to have been not unknown or un- appreciated by the ancients. He does not lament, as Macaulay avers, the loss of conjuring ; but regrets that superstitious fancies now supply the place of that deftness and skill by which he supposes the ancients to have attained the same ends. The treatise is of little value save for its gracefulness of language and tone, but it served very well to give to English readers an introduction to a topic in the literature of their more polite and facile neighbours. Wliat it wants in criticism, it here and there supplies by a humour which Macaulay leaves out of sight. An eloquent passage on the shortcomings and the miseries and weaknesses of humanity, is closed by the remark, which gives the reader a glimpse of something wider than literary criticism, that, " God be thanked, man has this one felicity to comfort and support him, that, in all ages, in all things, every man is always in the right." He gives, in a manner not unlike that of Swift, a description of pedantry as an epidemic that attacks the weaker members of the commonwealth of learning first : that spreads by degrees to the vigorous and strong: and lastly, makes all the neighbours shun the place as tainted with the plague. " This dislike or apprehension turned, like all fear, to hatred, and hatred to scorn. The rest of the neighbours began first to rail at pedants, then to ridicule them. The learned began to fear the same fate, and that the pigeons should be taken for daws, because they were all in a flock : and because the poorest and meanest of the company were proud, the best and the richest began to be ashamed." Thus begun by one whose name, illustrious in politics, brought dignity to the dispute, the controversy became at once much canvassed in England. The first who entered the lists against Temple was William "Wotton, then a young man about Swift's own age. His name raises associations suf&ciently odd and characteristic not to be passed over without reference. 66 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1696-^1701. Born in 1666, lie had roused the curiosity and anticipations of all the learned world by the time that he was six years old. His father, the Reverend Henry Wotton, then wrote a pam- phlet which he dedicated to Charles H., and in which he cited the testimony of a whole crowd of learned men, who, astonished at the prodigy of infantile learning, hastened to pay their in- cense at the shrine of one who was to prove that the world was not old or eifete, and who was to shine as the miracle of the coming age. The child at six knew Latin, Hebrew and Greek, as familiarly as his mother tongue, and year by year he seemed to add to his marvellous acquisitions. At ten years of age he entered Catherine Hall at Cambridge : at thirteen he had ob- tained his degree. It is scarcely necessary to say that this miracle of memory had few other intellectual gifts: and that after entering the lists against Temple, and striving to main- tain them against Swift, he faded into a maturity of eccentric and licentious nonentity. To Temple he had repHed in his Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning, published in 1694. It was a fair and judicial summary of the chief points in dispute, which dealt with Temple moderately, as his rank and dignity demanded, but decisively, as became the student and the scholar argumg against the diplomatist and man of the world. In the argument he distinctly came off the best of the two. The struggle was now transplanted to EngUsh soil. In France it had been a battle of styles : in England it was some- thing more. Here, an affectation of classical knowledge was modish : the reaction against the eccentricities of the Royal Societjr was strong. To write graceful Latin verses, to affect a general acquaintance with the classics, was the mark of a cultured gentleman : to be interested in the achievements of the new sciences, to find entertainment in the futilities of the "Men of Gresham," was the mark of a pedant and a dullard. The Christ Church wits chose the former part, and in their ridicule of scientific pedantry they included even Sir Isaac Chap. Ill] FIRST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAREER. 67 Newton. Against them they had at once the solid acquire- ments of rising physicists, and the accurate learning and tren- chant style of Bentley. It became a struggle in England, of what always claimed to he, and often was, mother wit, against what was stigmatized, and sometimes justly, as pedantry. But the dispute now took a new and accidental direction. In a casual paragraph of his Essay, Temple had undertaken to prove the careless paradox that the further back we went the better were the authors. Following the imaginary chronicle that some bookseller's hack might have supplied, he finds the earUest in order of time to have been Phalaris and .lEsop, whose names were attached to certain pieces, the spuriousness of which was already a mere commonplace of criticism. Temple, whose opinion on the matter was utterly worthless, set aside the view, already an ordinary one, that these pieces were spurious : and in a literary freak took up the cudgels in their favour, praising especially the so-called Epistles of Phalaris, and finding them " to have more grace, more spirit, more force of wit and genius, than any others I have ever seen, either ancient or modem." Such praise is in itself a proof that the j)aragraph was little else than thoughtless phrasmg: but it was an unlucky slip. It suggested to the fashionable, but unsound scholars of the Christ Church clique, a new edition of these Epistles, which had earned the praise of so polite a disputant as Temple. The editing of the spurious epistles was entrusted to Charles Boyle, afterwards Earl of Orrery, a scion of a house that was in more than one of its branches to have some connexion with Swift. While adopting Temple's suggestion, however, Boyle did not fall into his error as to the genuineness of the Epistles, but expressly sets it aside.* But another circumstance involved him, * Boyle, in his Latin preface, deals certain facts given by Diodorus Siculns with the difEerent views that had hecn are true, " actum est de Phalaridis maintained as to the authorship, and titulo." He sees the unlikelihood of guards himself against attributing the their having obtained no record in Epistles to Phalaris. If, he admits, any ancient author, if really written. E 2 68 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1696—1701. along with Temple, in an attack from Bentley. In the course of his work, young Boyle borrowed from the Eoyal Library at St. James's a manuscript of the spurious Letters : but the loan was summarily recalled by Bentley, as librarian, before its collation was complete. The motive was assumed to be jealousy against the Oxford clique : and stung bj' resentment, for it, Boyle referred in his Latin preface to the churlish act of Bentley, as in keeping with his usual courtesy — pro solitd humanitate sua. Bentley's ire was roused, and it involved both the offending Boyle, and Temple, whose unlucky preference- had brought Phalaris on the scene. "Wotton was preparing a new edition of his Reflections, and now Bentley added to it, as an appendix, a dissertation upon the pretended Epistles, ia which Temple and his dignified patronage of the Ancients- were made to appear ridiculous enough. The controversy had now passed far away from the lines suggested by Perrault and Fontenelle. It was a controversjr no longer about a theory of hterary criticism, but between two widely diverse Hterary cliques. Its object was not to maintain an opinion, but through that opinion to wound an opponent. In France men had taken different views according to the tendency of their tastes ; in England they took opposite sides according to the force of their personal animosities. For Bentley to overturn the absurdity involved in Temple's eulogy was a matter of ease. In the first edition of the Dis- sertation, he maintained the spuriousness of the Epistles : in the second, two years later, he proves his thesis with greater elaboration. "With a scholarship that absolutely dwarfs that of his contemporaries, he throws one argument after another with the lavish extravagance of a man who feels his store in- exhaustible. He writes in a spirit of rollicking triumph, and by one so well kiio\m as the tyrant : scholarship not by the discovery that and he sees the objection to the the Epistles trere spuiious, but in the dialect. DifEering again from Temide, arguments and illustrations by which he even finds that his author is " inter- he maintained and proved them to dum frigidior." Bentley showed his be so. Chap. Ill] FIEST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAEEEE. 69 proves that if the epistles so belauded were true, Phalaris had borrowed money from men who lived 300 years after his death, had destroyed towns that were not founded, and conquered nations that had no names : that he had overturned the chrono- logy of Thucydides and Herodotus and proved their histories mere fables : that he had transposed the events of his own day with those that happened long after he was dead : and finally that he had written in an Attic dialect which no man used during his lifetime, and which bore no resemblance to that which he, a Dorian, could have used. Temple's unguarded eulogy was not only overturned, it was scattered into thin au', by this learned sarcasm. While the answer to Bentley's first attack was still in pre- jparation by Boyle and his more able friends, and while, at Christ Church, Atterbury and Smalridge were preparing for him that armour in which, as a gift from all the gods,* Boyle arraj's himself in the Battle of the Books before he goes to attack Bentley, Swift stepped upon the scene. He took the side which, as well by personal connection, as by the tendency of his genius, was his, that of the brilliant coterie of wits, against the rej)uted pedantry of natural science. Nothing could have been devised for the help of his patron with better skill or with greater tact, than was Swift's contribution to the fray. Temple had begun the controversy with what was little more than a rhetorical prolusion, embellished here and there with a few striking thoughts. But he had been dragged down from this graceful dilettantism, and now found himself in a position galling to his dignity, attacked by a mere .scholar on a very definite point of scholarship. He had begun, but wisely forbore to complete, a reply. He could not enter into minute details with his opponent : to do so would have been beneath the calm dignity of of&cial retirement — nay more. Temple probably had the sense to see that it would * This was the reply, "i3n Bentley's Dissertation JUxaminei," pubHshed in 1696. /'. 70 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1696—1701. have been extremely dangerous. But now the dependant, whose talents had only slowly forced themselves on Temple's notice, was to do what neither Temple nor all the phalanx of Christ Church wits could manage. He was to force the con- troversy off the lines of detail, to bring it back to generals, to draw it into a larger arena of human interest, where his own weapons of finer temper, and his own arm of wider sweep, could tell upon the issue. The contest still raged for a time between champions so acute as Atterbuiy, and so learned as Bentley. But their contributions are remembered onlj' by name, and are read only by the curious. Swift's one effort remains as the single enduring fragment cast up by this very passing volcano of controversy : and the further progress of that controversy has no place in his biography. In the reply which Wotton afterwards published, he attempted, amongst other devices for turning the force of Swift's ridicule, to fix upon him the charge of plagiarism. " I have been assured," he said, with the affectation common to weakness, of disdaining personal knowledge, " I have been assured that the Battle in St. James's Library is, viutat'is mutandis, taken out of a French book, entitled Combat des Livres, if I mis-remember not." The charge was repudiated years later by Swift with a warmth of indignation which he rarely expended on anj' point appertaining to his literary fame ; * but it was notwithstanding repeated by Dr. Johnson and others down to Scott, without the precaution of verifying the charge. The real title of the work, to which Scott attaches the name of Coutray, was not Comhat dcs Livres, but Histoire poetique de la guerre nouvellement declaree entre les Anciens et les Modernes; so that it had not, at least, the merit of suggesting to Swift the name of his book. It was not, as Scott calls it, a poem, as of its twelve books only the first is in verse. It was published in 1688, and the author was Fran9ois de Callieres. * In the Author's Apology prefixed to the edition of 1710, and written in June, 1709. Chap. III.] FIRST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAREER. 71 The author himseh" describes it as " a sort of poem in prose of a newly-invented style." * Swift very vigorously pro- tests his absolute ignorance of the book: and while there is no ground for supposing that the disavowal was insincere, yet the trifling points of coincidence are quite sufficient to make it probable that the book had passed under Swift's notice in Temple's house, along with a crowd of forgotten authorities on the current topic of discussion. Some of the incidents must have attached themselves to his memory although the book and its author had passed from his mind. Starting from Perrault's poem, Le Siecle cle Louis le Grand, which is read before the assembled judges and becomes the sub- ject of dispute, de CaUieres' book proceeds with the stock machinery of the double peaks of Parnassus, the mai-shall- ing of the opposing forces, the watering of steeds at Hip- pocrene, the intervention of La Renommee, much as Swift introduces Fame. The ancients have the greater unanimity as to their commander, which Swift, like their other de- fenders, claimed for them ; and, like de Callieres, Swift uses the simile of auxiliary forces for the modern cham- pions of antiquity. But when we have said this we have ex- hausted all possible points of comparison. The piece was not only unborrowed : it was diametrically opposed to de CaUieres' * The accounts of the book which ever lived. Even Mr. Forster, who have been accepted and passed current, prided himself on having a unique curiously illustrate the ease with which copy of the book, also accepted, with error is repeated. Wotton began implicit faith, the author's name. But with a wrong title : Johnson repeated the copy in his library at South Ken- the mistake : and Nichols first cor- sington gives no such name : and from rected this. Scott first asserted the it we can only trace the author, from author to be Goutray, whose name a printer's advertisement at the end, must have been suggested by some as a Monsieur C* * *. But Montieur curious freak of memory. From him C * * *, is not Coutray, but Frangois it has been accepted without dis- deCalliferes, the diplomatist and Acade- pute : and one writer after another mician ; and under his name, the very .has spoken of this French author with book which had eluded Mr. Forster's an air of famiharity, without having search appears in the British Museum ascertained whether such a person catalogue. 72 LIFE OF JONATHAN!' SVIFT. [1696—1701. poor contribution to the stock dispute, which begins as it ends, with the commonplaces of critical compromise.* The Battle of the Books strikes an entirely different chord. Its object is satu'e, not criticism. "Where it touches on the points in dispute, it is in such broad and far-reaching meta- plior as that by which he illustrates the " sweetness and light" of the ancients through the fable of the Spider and the Bee, which has supplied a telling phraseology to a phase of latter-day criticism. Like aU the satire that Swift ever wrote, it goes directly to the point, by its personal reference. For Swift the main issue is one between Temple and Bentley, between the Christchurch wits and Wotton, not between the arguments of the critics. His preference for the ancients was thorough and smcere : but it went deeper than literary criticism. He preferred them because of their opposition to all the ' undiscipline of incompetent assumption, because of their freedom from all that moved his satire in ages nearer to his own. His abhorrence of that self-assertion which piques itself on originality because it knows no rule, lay at the very root of Swift's hterary, as it did of his religious and moral, judgment. But accidental as is Swift's real connexion with the Bentley and Boyle dispute, we cannot pass over the Battle of the Books without noticing the period it marks in Swift's literary advance. From this point the Pindarics and their kind were forsworn ; and French literature, with which the controversy, probably through Temple's intervention, familiarized him, begins to have still more influence on his style. It would be difficult, indeed, to trace anj' connection between the fierce and unruly genius of Swift, and the polished propriety of the French model : but in his careful rhymes ; in his scrupulous lucidity ; in his perfect »■ The contempt with which de as the Swedes, they are permitted to Calliferes treats the barbarians of use the Latin tongue, as having England is amusing. Along with neither literature nor polite language some of the more obscure races, Buch of their own. Chap. III.] PIEST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAEEEE. 73 subordination of a subject before be seeks to give it form and expression ; in tbe strict limitation and definiteness of bis aim, we have abundant proofs that this influence was not lost upon him. Of the two qualities whose union marks Swift's genius, intensity and lucidity, one at least was largely aided by the models wliich accident now made the subject of his studies for a time. Much as there still was within himself to develope gloom, yet in great part, the early bm'den of dependence, of poverty, of uncertain and misapplied powers, was now removed. It would scarcely be true to say of Swift, now or ever, that he found fully congenial work and threw himself into it with unreserved energies. There was always a cj'nical doubt about his own achievement, and a critical eye for its weaknesses and its perversity of aim. But the epoch of Pindaric Odes, and of ^trained addresses to patrons, had now passed away. If he still resented Drj'-den's sneering judgment, he nevertheless unconsciously acted upon the truth that it contained. The almost passionate eagerness to find an utterance for his own strained feelings, all unmastered and unmeasured as they were, which had appeared so strongly in his early work : the over- wrought metaphysical jargon which had expressed the tur- bulence of a mind not yet in possession of a meet organ of utterance : the following of false and unfit literary models — all these were now over for Swift. He had found at once the aneasure of men, and had acquired a consummate mastery over language. The time was coming when he was to post- pone all other passions to that overmastering one of hatred and contempt, which, grievous as it might be to others, rent his own heart most of all. His poetry now acquired its new cha- ;racter. It was to be simply attired, to carry only the poHshed shaft of sarcasm or the deadly thrust of cynical irony, varied occasionally by trifles deftly handled. His power was to be shown there by the skill and lucidity of the expression : by the easy and contemptuous range, by tbe rigorous insight, by tbe 74 LIFE OF JONATHAN S"WIFT. [1696—1701. concentrated strength and keenness of passion, but not by any- pathetic appeals to the feehngs. But the quiet Ufa at Moor Park, during which Swift's genius was growing and broadening amidst fauiy healthful and peaceful surroundings, was now nearing its end. It was on the 27th of January, 16f2., that Temple died : and the home at Moor Park was broken up. For six months before, we are told,* Swift had kept, partly, it would seem, in French, a journal of Temple's illness, which, for some years, remained in his handwriting, with the title " Journal d'E Stat de Mr. Temple devant sa mort." The last entry in that journal ran thus : " He died at one o'clock this morning, the 27th of January, 16f§-, and with him aU that was good and amiable among men." There was no insincerity in the words. Their relations had not always been cordial : but it may well be that the earlier irksomeness of dependence, the complacency which had been often captious, and the abun- dant vanity of his patron, were wiped out, when the grave closed over him, by the memory of the duties and enjoyments of these later years. It was at Moor Park that the one chief affection of Swift's hfe, the love that clung to him till death, had begun to take shape. It was there he had first found ease ; and there that after various trials he had at last found fit expression for the stern and devouring genius that must have an outlet or destroy its possessor. To Swift, the will of Temple left httle bej'ondf the doubt- ful privilege of editing his works. The provision was small and the duty was specially kksome. For some years Temple had been arranging, pruning, and correcting his works, as if they were monuments which posterity would never suffer to die. In this labour Swift had been associated, and perhaps had learned thereby that, however respectable as a diplomatist, * Lyon's manuscript notes in says the amount of his legacy was Hawkesworth's Life. £100 ; but the figure is afterwards t One version of the autobiography ' scored through. Chap. III.] FIEST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAEEEE. 75 Temple was not likelj' to be immortal as a writer. For our own day, Temple's works have an interest, if only for the chaste quaintness of their style, and for the picture of a cultured gentleman of the period which they give. Here and there they have even a deeper interest as showing the view of Temple on important questions of policy : but however much these qualities may attract a student of the political ideas of the time, they are not sufficient to obtain a permanent fame. The works, however, which were issued in iive volumes, at intervals of some years, seem to have been well received. The whole profit derived from the five volumes by Swift is reckoned by Mr. Forster at about six hundred pounds of present value.* If this was so it was more than Swift obtained for all his own works, scarcely one of which ever brought a profit to the author. But the editing of Temple's works lasted for nearly ten years. There were Memoirs, and Essays, and Miscellanies, and Letters, to be collated, and arranged, and brought out in separate, and fitly timed volumes. Finally Swift's duties as editor brought him into violent and public collision with Lady Gifiard, who assumed the part of defender of her brother's, reputation against the neglect of Swift. The death of his patron left Swift to make his way in the world absolute^ alone. t At first he had some hopes from the promises of the king : but these hopes were doomed to disappointment. Swift entrusted his application to the care of one from whom many had suffered as Swift did, — to the Earl of Romney. "With a right to notice as the brother of Algernon Sidney, Edward Sidney had been taken into the * The calculation of Mr. Forster is, pounds sterling, in full for the original however, of doubtful accuracy. He copy of the third part of Sir William supposes the profit to have been £40 Temple's Memoirs. I say, received by a volume. But the only authority for me. Jon. Swift." this is the following memorandum, t It was at this period that the fol- printed by Nichols from the original : lowing memorandum of resolutions, " Ajaril 14, 1709. — Then received of which fell into Mrs. Whiteway's hands Mr. Benjamin Tooke the sum of forty on Swift's death, was written. It is 76 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1696—1701. employment of the Prince of Orange, and by his tact and skill, if not by his abilities, had made himself one of the main movers in the Eevolution. But his chances were lost, and he was now a broken-down and purposeless profligate, who for years had never spent a sober day. Such was the man in whom Swift placed trust, and whose betrayal of that trust he never forgave. In the autobiography Romney is described as a "vicious, illiterate old rake :" and in the notes by Swift on JVIacky's Remarks,* which chance has preserved, he is denied even honour and honesty ; " he has not," says Swift, " a wheel to turn a mouse." The disappointment embittered Swift : Ihe meddlesome officiousness, and the superficial courtliness, of the drunken favourite, exasperated him still more. He had interesting as showing how the self- discipline which Swift was now at- tempting, descended sometimes even When I oojie to Not to marry a young woman. Not to keep young company, unless they really desire it. Not to be peevish, or morose, or suspicious. Not to scorn present ■ws.fs, or wits, or fashions, or men, or war, &c. Not to be fond of children, or let thcni come near me hardly,^ Not to tell the same story over and over to the same people. Not to be covetous. Not to neglect decency or clean- liness, for fear of falling into nasti- ness. Not to be over severe with young 1 The words "or let them come near me hardly " are erased, but they can easily be deciphered. Mr. Forster has given a facsimile of Swift's manuscript. * The Memarhs on the Characters at the Court of Queen Anne, published under the name of Maclcy, of whom we ishall hear again in the days of Swift's to trifles in its self-analysis. The reader must interpret the memo- landnm in his own way. BE OLD. 1699. people, but give allowance for their youthful follies and weaknesses. Not to be influenced by, or give ear to, knavish tattling servants, or others. Not to be too free of advice, nor trouble any but those that desire it. To conjure (altered to ' desire ') some good friends to inform me which of these resolutions 1 break or neglect, and wherein ; and reform accordingly. Not to talk much, nor of myself. Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favour with ladies, &o. Not to hearken to flatteries, nor conceive I can be beloved by a young woman ; ct cos qui hocreditatem cap- tant odisse ac vitare. Not to be positive or opinionative. Not to set up for observing all these rules, for fear I should observe none. political importance, were written by- Davis, an oflicer in the Customs. Swift made some written notes on the volume, and these have been preserved. Chap. III.] ■ riEST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAREER. 77 nothing for it but to return to the country which he least wished ever to see again : and on the eve of his departure he pre- pared the first volume of Temple's Eemains with a dedication to the King. But the reminder, when pubhshed in 1700, was in vain ; and Swift had already returned to Ireland, the har- bour to which so often and yet so unwillingly he was to come back in his greatest straits. Swift went to Ireland in the summer of 1699, finding no better opening than that which now offered itself, to go as chaplain and secretary to Lord Berkeley, who, with Lord Galway and the Duke of Bolton, had been appointed one of the Lord-Justices. At first all went smoothly. Swift accepted the post of chap- lain, because that of secretary was joined to it : and the secretary dispensed favours and patronage. During the progress from Waterford to Dublin, Swift acted in that capacity, but when he got to Dublin, he found himself undermined. A man of the name of Bush had persuaded Lord Berkeley that a chaplain ought not to be secretary, and Swift was set aside. Berkeley made what amends he could. " He had felt himself bound to yield to the representations : but church preferment would faU in soon, and Swift would have his choice." Swift was to learn, however, not for the first or last time, to put no trust in princes. The Deanery of Derry, one of the wealthiest in Ireland, did fall vacant. But Swift found another preferred on the ground of his own age being insufficient. Dr. Theo- philus Bolton,* whom years after he speaks of in altogether new circumstances, as " born to be his tormentor," was appointed, and Swift was insulted when he remonstrated, hj a suggestion that if he would stoop to simony and pay Bush a * Dr. Bolton was afterwards Chan- spective step that he would exchange cellor of St. Patrick's. He ultimately his time-serving for patriotism when became Archbishop of Cashel ; and the full measure of his ambition was the story of the dignitary who faith- satisfied, has sometimes been referred f uUy promised Swift before each pro- to him. 78 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1696—1701. thousand guineas, the preferment might still be his. He turned upon the underling Bush in an outburst of anger : cursed both patron and agent for a couple of scoundrels,* and turned to his own weapons of revenge. Lord Berkeley was satirized in a few stinging verses, where he and Bush were coupled together as " two whispering kings of Brentford." The chaplain had weapons in his hands that made him formidable, and so before six months were over, Swift had received, in February, ] ^gS ? the livings of Laracor, Agher, and Eathheggan in Meath, worth in all a little over £200 a year, t He did not yet enter on possession ; but his anger being somewhat appeased, he con- tinued to live in the castle, where, if we believe the story of Deane Swift, he once had a narrow escape from burning himself and the household, by reading in bed, and letting the candle set the bed clothes on fire, an accident which he had to keep from the knowledge of his hosts by disbursing some guineas of hush money. For the first time during this year of residence at the Castle, the brighter side of Swift's humour shone out at its best. All galling restraints were now left behind him. In playful verse, the manners of the house- keeper's room were painted in "Mrs. Francis Harris's Petition on the loss of her Purse." The observation that has caught the slighter traits which make the picture so real, is the same which, with added bitterness, gave us long after the Directions to Servants. No contrast could be greater than that between the strained and stilted style of the Pindarics and the skill with which Swift, by his literary instinct, fastens our interest * The stoiy depends on the testi- that " the income of the said benefices mony of Sheridan, who must have will be but a comfortable support for spoken from distant hearsay. It leaves, your petitioner, and encourage his therefore, some impression of esaijgera- residence, and due performance of tion. his duty." The petition was referred t In the Records at Armagh, there to the Bishop of Meath on 5th of is a petition from Swift to the Primate March, reported on favourably on the for a dispensation to hold Rathbeggan 6th, and the faculty granted for a with Laracor and Agher, on the ground composition of £20 on the 9th. Chap. III.] FIRST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAREEE. 79 on a subject trivial in itself. But the right note once struck, Swift preserves it to the end in all his lighter poems. Above the servants' haU, the drawing-room too was depicted: the earl dealing round the cards and overdoing, in his fussy nervous- ness, the part of a careworn politician : her ladyship holding the stakes, and dropping to sleep over her cards and her snuff: poor Biddy Floyd, the companion, wisely cautious of her pence, and indulging in the mildest gambling with much timidity. ■"Parson Swift " was the chartered satirist of the company: his ribaldry condoned, perhaps because it could not be resisted. Amongst the ladies of the family his influence was supreme : from poor Lady Berkeley, whose pious love of sermons he de- luded with his Meditation on a Broomstick, to Lady Mary and Lady Betty, the latter of whom* was his soundest and most wholesome and straightforward correspondent thirty years further on ; and poor little Penelope, who died in the Castle, and whose memory was fresh enough with Swift, more than a generation later, to make him bestir himself to write an epitaph for her tomb in one of the Dublin churches. Swift's licence of tongue and pen, as yet for the most part jocular, was certainly never resented here. Still living at the Castle, he gained, in the autumn of 1700, a small addition to his income, in the Prebend of Dunlaven, in St. Patrick's, which was given him by Narcissus Marsh, then Archbishop of Dublin. In February, 1701, he took his Doctor's degree in Dublin University. Thus when Lord Berkeley's short period of ofiice came to a close in April, 1701, and when Swift accom- panied him back to England, he had secured for himself, not indeed valuable preferment, but yet something which gave at least independence and position. Before he returned, however, he found it needful to put a period to an almost forgotten love- passage. His rising prospects had apparently created a new interest in his former mistress : she wrote to ask about his preferments : probably to expostulate with what seemed to be * Afterwards Lady Betty Germain of Drayton, 80 LIFE OP JONATHAK SWIFT. [1696-1701. fickleness on Hs part. In reply he wrote to her, from Dublin Castle, a letter such as few men would have written even if they could : such as scarcely any other could .have written, even if they would. It is hopeless for any biographical leniency to defend its tone : it is equally impossible to deny that it is characteristic. But we need not take it as a studied sar- casm, intended to announce to the lady that if she came un- valued, unhonoured, and on sufferance, she might share the lot of Swift. It is simpler, and agrees better with what we know of Swift, to take it as an unsparing and literal version of the relation that he felt must subsist between them. For much he had valued, had respected, had even borne an affection for her; but she had wounded what was most susceptible about him, his intense and self-centred pride. He had striven to break her from her surroundings : she had not yielded to his persuasion. Where he had expostulated she had argued. He had for a time taken her manner " only as a thing put on as necessary before a lover : " but he had at last found it to be based on a severe indifference. The air of opposition which she had assumed would, he knew well, end only in misery to them both : better be quit of the whole affair at once. As to their material prospects, his own experience had been too severe to allow him to gloze over what he knew to be important : he doubts her abihty to be a poor man's wife, to check her fancies, to mould herself to his moods, to be content with a quiet life : to iind, in short, " the place wherever her husband was thrown, to be more welcome than courts and cities without him." But if she can fairly look all this in the face, and accept the lot he has to offer her, he is content to take her " without regarding whether her j)erson be beautiful, or her fortune large." Barely, indeed, has such a letter been written to any woman : never, perhaps, except by Swift, without a refinement of sarcastic insult that would be simply brutal. But with him, it is the natural outcome of a temperament and an intellectual €HAr. III.] FIRST ACTS IX SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAREER. 81 faculty equally strange. He had at once a singular insight •and a singular blindness. He was keen, even to morbidness, in foreseeing and laying bare the motives of action : the same passionate intensity that gave strength to his satire, gave force and clearness to an analysis, pitiless alike to himself and to his mistress. He simply expresses with an unsparing truthfulness, what he believes to be the case between the two : tind there he leaves it. On the other hand, he shows here, what he showed throughout, that blindness to the ordinary feelings that stir human nature, which makes him unable beforehand to gauge the effect of his words. Morbid in his ■analysis of motives, he is equally morbid in his imperviousness to sympathy with feelings. Once stirred he can love deeply, faithfully, permanently: but till the stirring comes, he is dead to the thrills that pass over others. He can lay bare and probe the nerves as they are . seen in the dissecting-room : he can feel, too, the living thrill as it passes through himself: but of the feeling that passes in another, and that his own words may stir, he is, not pur]posely careless, but absolutely xmconscious. The letter written to Miss Waring could have but one result : if she had any spai-k of pride its iiasults would repel her : if all pride was so wanting, as to make her stoop to its terms, she would still have been terrified by the prospect it opened to her. The chapter in Swift's life, thus closed, was not without its futm'e effect. The warnings he gave to the lady he doubtless took also to himself : and they kept fresh in his own mind the danger of an imprudent marriage, from which lie had saved liimself and her. The folly and the recklessness of such a marriage, with its probabilities of slatternly and degrading ■dependence, were the more impressed on his mind by the marriage into which his only sister, Jane Swift, now entered. He and she stood alone amongst the kinship, and Swift had suffered dependence too long to let him forget how easily it might again come over them, how readily they might fall mto 82 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1C9C-1701. the degrading position of poor relations. With a nervous dread he foresaw these possible evils, and he had no sympathy with the moral commonplaces by which many men of less real fortitude might comfort themselves for circumstances of infe- riority and contempt. His sister manried a man named Fen- tbn, a currier in Bride Street. The locahty in itself proves- hini to have tesn moving in respectable circles in Dublin. He had been a student at Trinitj' College:* and had then, it would seem, entered upon a well-to-do business already founded. But something in the man himself roused Swift's suspicions. He violently opposed the match, foreseeing from it nothing good :■ and his fears were realized. His sister was lost to him, and Swift refused to allow himself ever to resume ties which he- had once deliberately broken. Her husband died a bankrupt^ and left his widow to poverty : and till her death, seven years, before Swift's own, she was supported by his bounty. He did. not shu'k the duty : but, with his usual self-torture, he refused' himself the boon of personal affection for the one really close- relation that he possessed. On his return to England with Lord Berkelej', in Aprils 1701, Swift found awaiting him a scene stirring enough. The year 1700 had been fiUed with events most critical for the- future both of English independence, and of the English Con- stitution. At its beginning had been an-anged the second Treatjf of Partition, bj' which it was hoped some Hmit might be placed on the encroachments of France. These encroach- ments were dreaded not by one party only, but by the prudent men of all parties. But stronger even than dread, was the excited virulence of party feeling. In Api-il, a session of almost unexampled bitterness came to a conclusion. The Tory- party was in the ascendant : but it was a party swelled by the- Jacobite, the political adventurer, and the hireling of France. The zeal of this motley party had been excited by the Report, * For this fact I am ijidebted to ■whose topographical infonnation I Mr. Carrol], of St. Bride's, Dublin, to haTC already expressed my obligation.. Chap. III.] FIEST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAREEE. 83 of tlie Commissioners on the forfeited Irish estates. The Report showed that grants, lavish in amount and dangerous in principle, had been granted to William's Dutch favourites. The resumption of these grants was pressed with the most virulent eagerness. From being a party struggle, this soon became a fight between the two Houses : the House of Lords did not reflect the furious Toryism that was now rampant in the Commons, and maintained their own privileges to the very verge of a collision which could have ended only in civil war. The Resumption Bill was carried : WUliam was insulted in the sorest point : and he parted with the Commons in a mood that rendered it only too likely that disputes still more violent would break out during the next winter. During the summer, tensity was added to the already strained public feeling by the death of the young Duke of Gloucester, the only sur- viving son of the Princess Anne, which brought the crown of England one step nearer to the succession of a foreign line. Whatever prudent men might feel, the prospects of maintaining the Revolution settlement stood very low with the mass of the nation. William, unwilhng as he was to make terms with a party whose ruHng passion he knew to be detestation for himself and his rule, was forced to yield to the popular prejudice. Early in spring, Somers, the member of the Whig party whose talents were most commanding and whose character stood highest, had been dismissed from the post of Lord Chancellor. In December, Swift's patron, Lord Berkelej', was superseded, along with his brother Lord-Justices, by the Earl of Rochester, who only waited till he had arranged a Tory ministry before coming over to assume the government of Ireland as Lord Lieutenant in the spring of 1701. During the winter, while the ministry was being recast, the popular feehng had not be- come more moderate : and in February, 170-0^, an election had resulted in a new parliament more distinctively Tory than ever. Robert Harley, the chief of that party, was elected Speaker :: o 2 84 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Ifi96— 1701. and it is a curious point in Swift's biography that the political events in opposition to which he made his first important appearance as an author, were directed by one who afterwards became his chief patron, and who commanded his most devoted attachment. The new parliament, even before Swift accompanied Lord Berkeley back to England in April, 1701, had entered with full vigour on its work of vengeance. Not content with the re- sumption of the Irish estates, with the dismissal of Somers, with the reconstitution of the ministrj', and the reduction of the army, the Tory party were still pressing for more. The Partition Treaty was unpopular : no scandal was uttered about the late mmisters, that was not readily caught up : and it was resolved to proceed by way of impeachment against Lord Somers, William's wisest adviser, against the Earl of Portland, his oldest and most trusted friend, against the Earl of Orford, the most stubborn and unmanageable of Whigs : and against the newly created Lord Halifax, who as Charles Montagu, had been the literary friend and coadjutor of Matthew Prior, and who now, as a peer, was the rising hope of the Whig party. The House of Lords resented the impeachments : the struggle between the Houses broke out again : each strained its privileges to the utmost : and a new collision was prevented only by a sudden prorogation, which left the two parties ready, as soon as the occasion offered, to spring at one another's throats. Such was the state of matters which led to Swift's first political tract. On the Dissensions at Athens and Rome, which stands alone as marking his formal connexion with the Whigs. Alreadj', in Ireland, Swift had talked with Lord Berkeley of the violent outburst of party rage, which had shown itself across the channel. It was at Berkeley's suggestion that he undertook the pamphlet, the main object of which is to draw a lesson for his own day from the violent outbursts by which Athens and Rome made shipwreck of their liberties. He Chai-. III.] FIRST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAEEEit. 85 came over in April, with the plan of the pamphlet in his head : stayed, as usual, with his mother at Leicester, on his way to London : and remained in London from May till September, leaving just after he had lamiched this first venture, anony- mously, on the world. The pamphlet, interesting though it is, as Swift's first political work, need not delay us long. The circumstances imder which it was written, as well as the associations of the writer, mark it for an effort on the Whig side. The personal allusions convey, under a very transparent veil, references to the peers who were attacked by the Commons' impeachments. They are pictured imder prominent names in Athenian history, of men who fell victims to popular rage, and the ill-usage of whom recoiled upon the heads of those who wrought it. The tract was a blow struck for Somers and his companions ; as such it was intended by Swift, and as such it was received by them. But, though written on the Whig side, it fixed him to no distinctively Whiggish principles. Of opinions on Church affairs it contains absolutely nothing ; and yet his opinions on Church affairs eventually fixed, far more than anything else, Swift's place in politics. What the author of the tract dreads most, is what he calls dominatio plehis. Of possible evils what he dreads least, is the tyranny of one. What he maintains to be most necessary to safe government, is a balance between the different parts of the nation : and this theory of political balance all political parties and most political writers in that day advocated. On one point he is perfectly distinct, and absolutely consistent with the opinions which he expressed from the beginning to the end of his career. He winds up his argument by a protest against party government : and that protest was one he never missed an opportunity of making, as long as he lived. " Because Clodiiis and Curio happen to agree with me in a few singular notions, must I therefore blindly follow them in all ? * * * Is it not possible that upon some occasion Clodius may be bold and insolent, borne 86 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [1C9C— 1701. away by his passion, maliuious and revengeful ? That Cuiio may be corrupt, and expose to sale his tongue and his pen? I conceive it far below the dignity of human nature and human reason, to be engaged in any party, the most plausible soever, \ipon such servile conditions." Careful as the pamphlet is, it wants, in all but one or two isolated passages, the force and the humour which reconcile us in almost everj' other controversial writing that Swift has left, to the dry bones of a forgotten dispute. It is the work of a hand new to that art in which he was eventually to distance all competitors. The elaborate theorising with which the pamphlet begins, is strangely unlike Swift : and the classical parallels are paraded -with something of pedantry. Eut the current taste of the day has to be considered. Abstract political theories were so popular that less than a dozen years before, the Convention Parliament had consummated a Revo- lution by voting that the Original Contract, a figment of which it pleased political theorists to talk much, had been violated. Fanciful as Swift's classical parallels appear, we must remember also that classical allusions were much prized by the literary cliques of the daj-, and that these literary cHques had a good deal to do with moulding political controversj'. But from whatever cause, the tract produced a strong and immediate effect. Its coolness and calmness of tone came in striking contrast to the excitement of the party struggle. The disguised allusions, and the far-off parallels, allowed all the more freedom of treatment ; yet the turns of expression were not lost, nor was it hard for contemporaries to apply them to current affairs. The pamphlet was much handed about. Men so prominent as Somers, and Burnet — Swift's inveterate foe of later days, — were spoken of as its authors. Its claim to popularity was enhanced by events. On the l7th of Septem- ber, when Swift had gone back to Ireland, the whole political atmosphere changed. On that day James II. died at St. Germain : and Louis XIV. was infatuated enough to rouse the people of England into a frenzy of excitement by recog- Chap. III.] FIEST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAREEE. 87 nising the Pretender. Instead of being in hazard of his throne, Wilham found himself again received as the one pos- sible Saviour of the nation. From being a triumphant and patriotic partj'-, the Tories found themselves a discredited faction, tainted with treason. It was to this that their " Dis- sensions " had led : so nearly had our Athens come to be the slave of a modern Xerxes. Swift foundhimself in the pleasantest of all positions, that of a successful prophet. A month more made the same views triumphant at the polling booths in November, 1701. The story of the -authorship soon crept out. According to one, and that apparently Swift's own, account, the avowal took place in Ireland. In a companj'^ where Swift was present, Bishop Sheridan of Kilmore,* the only non-jming bishop whom Ireland produced, was ascribing the pamphlet, according to current report, to the Bishop of Sarum. It is scarcely liliely that under such a name, it could have proved very palatable to Dr. Sheridan : but the reference was at least sufficiently respectful to tempt Swift first to doubt Bui-net's ■authorship, and finally when challenged as " a positive j^oung man " for his doubts, to announce his own responsibihty for the paper. The avowal of authorship, however made, procured for Swift the countenance and friendship of Somers, of Burnet, and of other leaders of the Whigs, t As for his own opinions, it was now, he says,+ that for the first time he began * The degree of relationship between kindness * * * They were very liberal "tihis bishop and Swift's later friend, in promising me the greatest prefer- the father of his biographer, and the ments I could hope for, if ever it ;grandfather of the more famous dra- came in their power * * I grew do- anatist, is uncertain. The Bishop was mestio with Lord Halifax, and was as the son of the Shei-idau of Kilmore, often with Lord Somers as the for- who was a converted Eoman Catholic mality of his nature (the only uncon- priest, and in whose house Bishop versable fault he had) made it agree- Bedell died in 1C41. able to me." Memu'irs Delating to the 1" " My Lords Somers and Halifax, Change in the Queens Ministry in as well as the bishop (of Salisbury), 1710. desired my acquaintance with great J Memoirs Itclating to the Change marks of esteem and professions of in the Qiieeii's Ministry. 88 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1C9C— 170U to trouble himself with Whig or Tory; and if he j)rofessecl his adherence to the former, it was with much misgiving as. to their views in regard to the Church. But the visit to England from April to September in 1701, was eventful to Swift for other reasons than the appearance of this tract. During that visit, he completed a further instal- ment of his task in editing Sir William Temple's Eemains : and, perhaps through the occasion which their appearance offered, he had a new interview with William III. The Idng was now- fast failing in health, and nearing the end of that tangled task which had been his in English politics. With Swift, whose pre- sence was associated with the wise advice of Temple, William seems to have taken counsel in the midst of that rancorous faction which assailed him, and the real bearings of which he was never able to fathom. Swift could only comfort him by showing that politics in Ireland were of a milder description i " When I was last in England," he says, " I told the king that the highest Tories we had with us in Ireland, would make tolerable Whigs in England."* The reason was not far to- seek : in Ireland the memory of Tyrconnel and his wild Irish- men was in 1701 too recent to allow of any tampering with principles that might end in Jacobitism. But the same visit of 1701 was marked by another event of still closer biographical interest. Since the death of Temple, Esther Johnson had lingered with her mother and sister at Farnham, where the household at Moor Park and its offshoots were under the somewhat Draconian dominion of Lady Giffard. Stella had been left a small legacy by Temple : and part at least of that legacy consisted of a farm in Ireland. Her fortune was not more than about ^1500 : and to live with indepen- dence on such resources it was needful to seek for the best interest for her money, as well as the cheapest place of living. * Letter Cunocj'ninrj tiie Sacrame?f more than once since the king's death,, tal Tent. This was written in 1708 : the expression must refer to his last and as Swift had then visited England •\isit during the life of the king. Chap. III.] MEST ACTS IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC CAKEER. 89 Ireland seemed to offer what was wanted. It was this that gave some colour and ground for the determination now formed to reside there : but Swift's persuasion, by which it was brought about, clearly rested on grounds that were more decisive of the future lot of both. Swift and Stella had before been drawn to one another by reverence and admiration on one side : on the other by the feeling of protection and guidance, sought and given. Absence had only confirmed the impression : and now Swift gladlj' seized any excuse to bring Stella near him. He avows that the change, reasonable as it was, " was also very much for my own satisfaction." Swift knew that if he was to keep her all his own, he must place her where he might watch over and protect her. For the futm-e, under whatever painful and mysterious condition, then- lots were to be joined. "With Stella came Mistress Rebecca Dinglej', who had lived with her in England, and who re- mained mth her tiU Stella's death. She had no real hold on the society which gathered round Stella's home, but was treated nevertheless, both by Swift and others, with a studied civility that helped to avoid any of the scandals which the busy gossips of Dublin would be sure to invent. To check such scandals, the ladies came over before Swift : they settled in Ireland while he still remained in London : and from the first they practised that caution in regard to appearances that would seem overstrained, did we not remember that pride which made Swift resolve to secure both himself and Stella against the slightest breath of scandal.* Such censure as did arise soon wore off, helped in its passage by that ever watchful prudence which, at Swift's suggestion, she was careful to main- tain. The relation between the two was from the first, so far as the world was concerned, free from aU doubt or ambiguitj'. Stella shared in all Swift's interests, remained his constant * We may suppose that it was about been Temple's steward. The marriage this time that Esther John.son's mother would increase Stella's desire to have became the wife of Mr. Mose, who had a home of her own. 90 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [169C— 1701. companion, and by degrees became the centre of his circle. But they never met alone : they never lived in the same house : and though all his thoughts and cares were shared by her, the bond was never in reality a closer one. And these strict limits of their friendship were so carefully maintained, that slander never ventured to assert otherwise, except in some vulgar out- bursts which forgot even appropriateness of attack. Strange and abnormal as were its conditions, fettered and cramped as it was by Swift's pride and waywardness, or by the mysteries of disease, the romance of that mutual devotion still forms one of the threads of deepest interest running through Swift's dark and sombre life." CHAPTER IV. SWIFT AMID THE PARTY STRUGGLE OF THE FIEST YEARS OF QUEEN ANNE. "THE TALE OF A TUB." 1701—1704. ^TAT. ;u — 37. Swift's political conduct — His home at Laracor, and its surroundings — The death of "William III. — Change in the Ministry — The Tories in power — Disaffection of Ihe extreme Tories — Prospects of the Whigs — Diffi- culties of Swift's position — Bill against Occasional Conformity — The struggle in Convocation — Extreme Tories farther estranged — Rochester dismissed — Ormond's Irish government — The Test Act in Ii-eland — Eccle- siastical legislation by the Irish Parliament — Bill against Occasional Con- formity revived in England — Swift's view of it — His uneasy relations with the Wliigs — The extreme Tories part from the Government — Tlie Talc of a Tub — Its aim and- meaning — The arrangement of the book — Its view of humanity — Comparison with Iludibrax — The plot of the Talc — Irreverence of its allusions — The meaning of Swift's irreverence — Sources of suggestion for the book — Its reception — Question of authorship — Stella and Dr. Wil- liam Tisdall. It is the business of this chapter to trace the growth of Swift's opinions at a very critical period in his career : to follow his movements between England and Ireland during these years when his early fame was establishing itself: to watch how current events were affecting him : and how, step by step, he was being drawn into the vortex of partj^ struggle raging on both sides of the Channel. No accusation has been more per- tinaciously brought against Swift than that of political incon- sistency, and no higher motive than that of self-interest has been assigned for it. Before we admit the truth of the charge, it is at least fair to inquire what was the course of the party struggle. We may leave the facts to prove his honesty : and 92 LIFE OF JONATHAN S'WIFT. [1701—1704. in the present chapter it is the earlier phase of the struggle into which Swift was eventually drawn so deeply, that opens itself to our view. As a converse to this, we must turn to the quiet life at Laracor. Swift followed Esther Johnson back to Ireland in September, 1701 : and now entered on the duties of a charge which was scarcely in itself an inviting one. The church which formed the centre of his somewhat scat- tered parish, is about a mile and a half from the town of Trim, in Meath. Then, as now, it was surrounded by the houses of some gentlemen of property : but so slight was the hold of the Church upon the bulk of the population that Swift seldom ministered to a congregation of more than half a score in all; as he says, "most gentle and all simple."* Trim itself, in its Castle, its fifteenth century chm'ch, the " Yellow- Steeple " of its ruined Abbey, had memorials of its early importance : and now it was the centre of a busy and important Protestant population, situated amidst a surrounding sea of Roman Catholicism. When Swift came to Laracor it was to find not onlj^ a decayed flock, but a ruined parsonage and a dilapidated church.t The aspect of the place remains much as it must have been when, according to the popular tradition, lie walked down to his new charge and astonished the curate and his wife by the assumed harshness of his manner, which was presently to change, when he had sufficiently tried the humility of the man, into an easy consideration. I Running southwards from Trim, * See Letter to Archbishop King, J The story may be trae or not, and C Jan., 170g : and another to Dean undoubtedly it bears some resemblance Sterne, 17 April, 1710. to those by which tradition has rather f The income he derived from Lara- illustrated the impression of Swift's Cor and the associated charges of manner than helped us to the facts of Agher, Dunlavan, and Eathbeggan, his life. Scott accepts it : Mr. For- amonnted to about £21i a year. From ster doubts its authenticity ; and its. his account book for 1708, we may authority is no better than the gossipy gather so much of the particulars of volumes of S7viftlana which Wilson that year's income. compiled about the beginning of this Chap. IV.] SWIFT IN THE FIRST YEARS OF QUEEN ANNE. 93 the road passes through a flat countr}', until, after a mile and a half, it comes to a slight rising where it crosses the Boj'ne and reaches the site of Swift's parsonage and of the little church. Of the church as it stood in Swift's time not a vestige remains. But it was thrown down only about a quarter of a century ago, and its entire simplicity is fresh in the memory of many. Through a small vestry on the north side, one passed at once into the pulpit, below which was the reading-desk of Roger, the clerk.* Pulpit and desk stood midway between the east and west ends of the church, and the rude communion-table, of cresceiit shape, is still shown to visitors at St. Patrick's in Dublin, as " Swift's writing-table." On the other side of the road and at some distance from the church stands a little farm homestead occupying the site of the parsonage that Swift built for himself. Of the house there stands only a considerable fragment of strong masonrjr, in the shape of a wall built for shelter against the northern winds. Enough remains only to show that Swift built his house of a solidity that might have been expected to prevent for some generations dilapidations such as he had found. Round the house stood the garden (now a potato field) of which Swift was so proud. It now stands on higher ground than the surrounding fields, and it might seem hard to account for the fears that Swift expresses in his Journal to Stella, lest a sudden rising of the river might flood it. But not long ago the present occupant, in digging some depth below the surface, came upon a garden wall, whose foundation was ■seven or eight feet below the present surface of the ground. century. The lines which Scott quotes route which Swift could possibly have in connexion with his journey to Lara- taken to Laracor. ■00,. * Of whom Lord Orrery tells the story, (which Scott thinks is more - Dublin for ^ city, Dunshaughlin for a j ^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^ g^^^ ^j^^^ ^^ j^^^^ plough, Navan tor a marlcet, Arbracken for a cow : been invented by Orrery,) that when Kells for an old town, Virginia poor, tjjg solitary member of the congrega- Cavan for dirt," &c.,- ^j^^^^ j^^ ^^^^^ himself addressed, clearly refer to some journey north- " Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture ivards, and are inapplicable to any moveth you and me." 94 LIFE OF JOXATHAN SWIFT. [1701—1704. This would seem to have been a fruit wall built by Swift to catch the southern sun, and stretching from the gable of his house to the garden hedge.* At the end of the garden one can still trace the carefullj'- built sides of his fishpond, of which he speaks to SteUa. In a field just beyond, the willows that he cherished grew till a few years ago, by the bank of the river Knightsbrooke, and almost within a stone's throw of the house. More close to the house and under a tree that almost over- hangs the road, there is a well, which the country folk still calf by the name of "the Dean's Cellar." This was now Swift's home in Ireland : and he occupied it dining these years more than at any later time. There was a stiU. stronger tie to it. In this neighbourhood Stella had fixed her home. Twice only, once for a few months in 1705> and again in the winter of 1707-8, she returned to England : but came back to end her life in Ireland. When Swift was absent from the vicarage, it was occupied by Stella and her companion, Eebecca Dingley : when he was at home, she retired to the house of Dr. Raymond of Trim, or to a lodging that is still pointed out, with traditionary reverence, if not with accuracj^ in that town. "We Imow nothing of the incidents of Swift's residence at Laracor in 1702, from which he was probably glad to escape to Loudon to reap the growing favour which his j)amphlet had procured for him. He returned to England in April, 1702; There he found a changed atmosphere. The election of November had completely overtm-ned the Tories. But the triumph of the Whigs was a short one. On the 8th of March, the king had died : and his death had been the signal for a revival of Tory hopes under new conditions. During the three months that followed the king's death, the * He hnd a fancy for such walls : den at St. Patrick's, and of the care and Mrs. Pilkington tells us a story of he spent to secure the soMity of its one he had built in the Deanery gar- construction. Chap. IV.] SWIFT IN THE FIRST TEAES OF QUEEX ANNE. 95 Ministry-was reconstituted in a way to correspond with the Imown feelings of Queen Anne. Lord Godolphin was named Lord Treasurer : and as yet Godolphin was to he classed as a Tory. Lord Nottingham, the solemn adherent of the most sombre of ecclesiastical parties, was made Secretary of State : and the Marquis of Normanby * was now created Duke of Bucking- ham, and named Lord Privy Seal. The Earl of Pembroke, whose moderation roused the antipathy of no party, and whose character gained him the respect of all, was made Lord President. Sir Simon Harcourt was Attorney-General, and even Jack Howe, the notorious member for Gloucestershire, whose Jacobitism had carried him to the verge of treason, gained a subordinate post. In a Government so constituted there might seem to be almost every element of Toryism re- presented. But it had one point of contact with the Whigs, opposed to them as in the main it was. To Marlborough, the dominating spirit in the Government, before whom all its other elements bent, the war was more than all other political principles put together : and ere long he was sure to find that he could rely on most support for a war policy from the Whigs. The fact, then, that his friends the Whigs were for the moment worsted, did not put an end to Swift's hopes. The germ of the Revolution- settlement was Whig : and sooner or later the working out of the Eevolution must bring the Whigs to power. But other causes came to break the security of his attachment to that party, and with this came the real difficulty of the part he had to play. Strive as he might, it was for Swift impossible to accept his opinions entirely from the current maxims of either party : and there was one point which seemed to show itself in the programme of the Whigs, to which he could not bring himself to bend. As soon as his * This was John ShefiSeld, who as Poetry, and whose latitudinarian epi- Earl of Mulgrave had written the taph in Westminster Abbey is so well poetical essays on Satire and on known. 96 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1701—1704. suspicions of AVliig sincerity to the Church were aroused, his allegiance to the Whig party was gone : and these suspicions ■were already being stirred. He had hesitated to take orders : but having become a clergyman, he considered himself bound in honour to fight for the privileges of the Church. To these privileges, rightly or wrongly, he attached great value as en- suring the independence, and the calmness of judgment neces-^ sary for the dignity of the Church, and as securing her against all appeals to popular prejudice — appeals which, in any sphere, but above all in that of religion, were what Swift's nature most abhorred. He was, indeed, no advocate of priestly assumption. But in all the range of human foUy, he most despised and hated the hypocrisy of the fanatic on the one hand, and the complacent sprightliness of the sceptic on the other: and both, he believed, might best be avoided by a strict maintenance of the political charter of the Church. But this was precisely the point where Swift diverged not only from the practical tenets, but from the whole tone of thought, of the Whigs : and it was precisely the point which was most insisted upon by the Whigs, as they gradually recovered power. The steps of the divergence we have now to see. Swift spent six months in England, and in October, 1702, returned to Ireland, where he remained till November, 1703. During this year the questions between the two parties were rapidly developing. In the autumn of 1702 a new election resulted in a Tory majority. The Ministry found themselves compelled to take up the BiU against Occasional Conformity,* which sought to close to Dissenters that loophole of escape from civil disabilities, afforded to consciences not too sensitive to bow the knee now and then in the Temple of Eimmon. The Bill was pressed forward by a new champion of the Church. This was young Henry St. John, who had suffered in youth * Occasional Conformity provided civil posts, by taking the Communion a strange salve for tender consciences according to the Church of England, by allowing Dissenters to qualify for on rare or single occasions. Chap. IV.] SWIFT m THE FIEST TEAES OF QUEEN ANNE. 97 from the burdensome education of a Dissenting home,* and who now avenged himself on the tormentors of his boyhood by giving such time as he could spare from debaucherj^, to the hunting down of the Dissenters. The Bill was passed with much enthusiasm by the Commons. But in the Lords the support of Marlborough and Godolphin was forced and un- willing, and there the Bill was delayed and finally stopped for the Session. In another arena, more exclusively ecclesiastical, the same sort of wranghng was going on. The Upper and Lower Houses of Convocation so far corresponded in their shades of political feeling to the secular Houses of Parliament. The bishops appointed since the Eevolution were Low Churchmen ; the clergy of the Lower House were imbued with the current High Church notions. There was one amongst them who took the lead for virulence, activity, and controversial skill. Francis Atterbury, who became at a later day the friend and intimate of Swift, vastly different as was the range of feeling in the two men, was now rising quickly in popularity. As Preacher at St. Bride's he had acquired the leading place amongst the pulpit orators of the day, and now appeared in Convocation as Arch- deacon of Totnes and the leader of the High Churchmen. He was known as the author of a Vindication of the Rights of Convocation, of which rights he was afterwards the main cham- pion. With Swift he must ah-eady have come into some con- tact as the chief author of the reply of Boyle to Bentley, one item in the controversy of which the Battle of the Boohs is the most enduring monument. There is no Churchman of the day whose virtues as weU as faults stand out in lineaments so clearly marked as those of Atterbury. From his college days we find him restless, ambitious, even turbulent.! When he * BoHngbroke's complaint of his your uneasiness," says his father to toyhood's task of reading from Dr. him. " It shews unlike a Christian, Manton's folio of 119 sermons on the and savours neither of temper nor 119th Psalm, is well known. consideration. I am troubled tn re- t " I know not what to think of member it is habitual. * * You make 98 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1701—1704. makes his way, impatient of college life, to London, it is to appear in all the attractive glitter of a popular preacher, bustling and energetic, vain even in the fashion of his out- ward man : hut nevertheless with a redeeming backgi'ound of strongly-kindled enthusiasm, that spreads its rays over his whole life. Other scenes wiU bring him into closer contact with Swift, some of whose opinions he travesties by exaggeration : now we see him only at the outset of a struggle in which, bating his exaggeration, he must have commanded not a little sympathy from Swift. In Ireland the Ministry equally failed to conciliate either party. Early in 1703, the Duke of Ormond was appointed Lord- Lieutenant in place of Eochester. In September Parlia- ment met, but its session only aggravated party feeling. The Whigs pressed a new Bill for Preventing the Growth of Popery, but the Tories managed to pass it in the form of a Test Act, which bore heavUy on the Protestant Dissenters. The session left Tory and Whig, Churchman and Dissenter, more opposed than ever. When Swift came back to England in November, 1703, the strength of parties was being tested hj the renewed effort to push on the Bill against Occasional Conformity, the failure of which in the previous session we have seen. The speech from the throne, in words which conveyed no covert allusion to the Bm, had urged that unanimity might as far as possible be allowed to prevail, in view of the dangers that threatened the kingdom abroad. It was more than guessed that this warn- ing proceeded from the disHke which Marlborough and Godol- phin both entertained to the Bill, nominally introduced under their sanction, as hkely to promote disunion and so hinder their paramount object. But their influence was not strong enough your friends and yourself uneasy : 1690. The words are strangely pro- cannot trust Providence. Do your phetic of the bishop's subsequent duty and serve God in your station." career of ardent combat, and of baffled Zervis Atteriury to his son, Nov. 1, conspiracy. Chap. IV.] SWIFT IN THE FIEST YEARS OF QUEEN ANNE. 99 to prevent the Bill being pressed rapidly through the House of Commons. It was sent to the Lords and there fiercely debated. A small majority again threw it out: and by a strange hypocrisy Marlborough and Godolphin joined in the protest against the rejection of a Bill which they heartily disliked, which they ■voted for only because they saw no means of refusing, and which their colleagues pressed for contrary to their entreaties and advice. We know what the tendency of Swift's mind was on this subject. His dislike to the Dissenters, as fanatics, was con- sistent in its intensity throughout his life, though it varied from the bitterness of contempt to that of open hostility. "We know from the Tale of a Tub, now receiving its latest touches, that the Occasional Conformity of the Dissenters was the object of his contempt and ridicule.* We know that even if he was ready at this time to tolerate the device, it could only be from his opinion that conspicuous hypocrisy weakened the cause of its professors, and that Occasional Conformity would soon make Dissent ridiculous. At a later time his dislil^e grew so bitter that he would tolerate no half measures, even though they might promise results like these. But at present he is against the Bill for preventing Occasional Conformity. He is disgusted with the whole struggle, which he describes as the " highest .and warmest reign of party." He can only turn it to ridicule. The very dogs in the street are more contumelious and quarrel- some than usual : a committee of Whig and Tory cats has been making night hideous on his roof: and the very ladies are so •eaten up with their zeal for religion, that they cannot find time to say their prayers, f But he leaves us no room to doubt that his views on it were formed chiefly in the company of Whig politicians. Peterborough, Somers and Burnet are those whom * In section xi. of the Tale we are a Presbyterian Lord Mayor, ostenta- told how Jack got upon a great horse tiously went with his insignia of oiEoe and ate custard. The sentence refers to the Conventicle, to a notable result of occasional con- t Swift to Dr. T'mlall, Dec. 16, formity, when Sir Humphrey Edwyn, 1703. H 2 100 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1701—1704. he quotes, as proving by their support that the Bill was not really for the benefit of the Church. He went so far indeed as to write against the Bill : though in so half-hearted a way that the pamphlet, unlike most of those he wrote, was too late for the purpose it was to serve.* Swift would not break with the Whigs as yet, but his position was not a comfortable one. His friends the Whigs might have fair prospects, but they were still out in the cold. They were the "best friends in nature." But they wanted, so he tells us, " the little circumstance of power and favour." f The civility of a cast courtier was proverbially cheap. But worse than this, he doubted how far his principles would allow him to follow them. He was uneasy and vexed with himself. The jan-ings of party displeased him at any time : but it is clear that in 1704 Swift was equally out of joint in his relations with one party and the other. He had no thought of a sudden change, or indeed as yet of any change at all; but there were plenty of doubts to unsettle his allegiance : and Swift was beginning to feel himself unfit to be a submissive Whig. The ever-recurring suggestion again came back to him ; should he go back " to speculation and study," and wait for a change of scene? He was in a position in which any false move, any factious action, any deliberate injury to his Church, by one party, might drive him permanently into the arms of the other. In May, 1704, after the close of the Session, he left England for the restful scene of Laracor, and for that companionship from which all political thoughts were banished. There he knew he could find interest in all his hopes, and a patience that would wait till his ambition ripened. He Avent back to Lara- cor in June, 1704, imsettled, indeed, but still nominally the adherent of a party whose hopes were not high, and of whose tenets he was beginning to have some doiibts. So much for the honesty of his pohtical principles thus far. * Smift to Dr. Tisdall, Feb. 3, f Smift to Br. Tisdall, Dec. 16, 1701. 1703. «HAP. IV.] SWIFT IN THE FIRST YEARS OF QUEEN ANNE. lOl Before he left London Swift had taken a step decisive, indeed, for his fame, but which prudence might have told him would endanger his future prospects in the Church. But prudence was a virtue to which Swift had little claim : and even had its warning been stronger it might not have stopped the issue of that which was to be in some respects the most typical product of his genius. The Tale of a Tub had been lying by him now for about seven years. It received his final touches, and was this year published, anonymously, along with the Battle of the Books, and a shorter Discourse on the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. If the Battle of the Books had been transcribed and handed about amongst Temple's friends, its authorship could hardly have been quite imknown: and the joint issue of the two must surely, to a small circle of readers, have suggested Swift as the author of both. From whatever reason, or by whatever means, however, that author- ship was, to the public, carefully concealed. To discover the meaning of the book which has stirred minds so widely diverse as this has, which rests upon founda- tions so simple and yet so unquestionably broad and strong, and in which each generation has found novelty and variety, we need not judge too minutely the Hghts and shades of the satire, or ask om'selves how and when this or that touch was added. During these early years we have seen that Swift held on certain leading points opiaions different from those with which he is chiefly associated. We may suggest various explanations of these early views : how Swift may have despised the Dissenters too much to notice them : or may have hesitated as to the best policy to be pursued in order to meet them : or may have felt himself bound by party ties tg moderation. But in the Tale of a Tub we have no mere phase of opinion vary- ing by mood and circumstance : we have the real and perma- nent thoughts of the man, apart from all the dress of con- ventional opinion and party bias. No one will pretend to say that the Tale of a Tub might not, in all its essential 102 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1701—1704. parts, have been written when Swift was in close alliance with the Tories, just as well as when he was a professed Whig. It is because it expresses with such absolute and even reckless freedom, the whole range of the author's mind, because it plays so easily round all subjects of human interest, that the elasticity of its humour has moved each generation, and retains its hold upon us now with all the freshness and vivacity of 3-outh. It has abundance of faults. It is digressive, and occasionally diffuse : it has many mannerisms, and its humorous dress is of an antiquated, to some, it may seem, even an artificial, fashion. There is no graphic or dramatic interest to sustain the reader. It is often obscure, and some of its effects are due to topics which to us have no more than antiquarian interest. But all these are only new proofs of the central interest of the book. It is not only by its flashes of wit, by its bursts of eloquence, by the steady and relentless beat of its satire, that it is redeemed : but stHl more by the marvellous strength and grasp with which the whole of human nature is seized, bound, to the dissecting table, and made to yield to his pitiless scalpel, the tale of its subterfuges, and pretences, and tricks. Other satires have their special appli- cation. Who is it that can limit the range of the satire in the Tale of a Tub? A new epitome of the argument and purpose of the Tale of a Tub, forms no fitting] part of a biography of Swift. It is scarcely for a biographer even to indulge in detailed criticism. But what, we may ask, was the aim towards which Swift was then minded that his genius should work ? That genius, it must be remembered, was now at its period of greatest buoyancy and lavishness of resource ; just as at a later time we find it growing in depth, in concentration, and in keenness of ' cjTiical contempt. In what direction then did this abounding \ overflow of resource expend itself? There are few books in the language, so short and so current in the mouths of men, the fuU meaning of which it is harder to Chap. IV.] SWIFT IN THE FIEST TEARS OF QUEEN ANNE. 103 grasp. The common account of the hook is that it descrihes, under the names of three brothers, who interpret variously the terms of their father's will, the three main divisions which have appeared in Christendom, and which separate the Lutheran from the Roman Catholic on the one side, and the Calvinist on the other. As a treatise on Ecclesiastical divir sions, it was read in Swift's own day : and as such a treatise , it has in great measure been accepted since. If follies and absurdities are exposed, it is, according to this assumption, only in so far as such follies are exemplified in these eccle- siastical disputes. One simple fact alone disposes of this view of the Tale. Of the whole book (reckoning Dedications, Preface, Introduction, and Digressions — and no one of these can be taken away with- out marring its completeness) only about one third is even indirectly concerned with these ecclesiastical disputes. How these are treated, we may see presently : bat first, what are the broad foundations upon which the superstructure is raised ? It is in these that the abiding interest of the book is to be found. Swift begins with a Dedication, nominally from the Book- seller to Lord Somers. It is clearly written later, possibly five or six years later, than the rest of the work. Somers was the chief ornament of that party to which Swift still adhered : and it is with marvellous skill that a eulogy, sounding so oddly amidst the general sarcasm that pervades the whole, is pronounced without any lapse into flattery. The bookseller dedicates the book to Lord Somers, because it was to be given to the worthiest : and amongst all the learned whom he con- sulted there was not one who did not, while placing himself at the summit, assign the second place to Lord Somers.* The * It is perhaps -worth comparing and Greatest of Men, I dedicate these this with another dedication, nearer volumes. He for whom it is intended, to our own day, which has something will accept and appreciate the com- of the same sarcasm. The earliest pliment. Those for whom it is not edition of " Vivian Grey " bore the intended will — do the same." " Betur following dedication : — " To the Best diffmssimo " is the text of both. 104 LIFE OF JONATHAj!^ SWIFT, [1701—1704. very folly of vanity is made to pay tribute to tlie worth of Somers : the vein of sarcasm is not once interrupted : and yet in these few words we have a picture of Somers's position amongst his countrymen more vivid than would be given by volumes of elaborate adulation. • But a mere satire on fulsome and mercenary dedications would not be suf&cient outlet for Swift's genius. He rises to a new stage in the author's dedication to Prince Posterity. For the first time, here, Swift shows, without any of the consuming passion that gives an angry weight of denunciation to all his later efforts, a power that is peculiarly his own. It is that of covermg by dignified and even eloquent argument what we find the moment we get below the surface, to be nothing but arrant inconsistency and nonsense in a solemn dress. No method could work better in sarcasm. But when we ask what is the aim of the satire, it is easier to answer what is struck at than what is not. Is it the fictitious satisfaction which humanity looks for from posthumous fame : or is it the narrowness of eyesight which, content with the verdict of the moment, is blind to the view that posterity will take ? Is it the writers of the day who are being laughed at, or is it human nature itself which niust revolve in an endless circle, and can never hope to have a means of judging what is worth preserving and what is not ? The description of the dire work bj-- which Time so grievously wrongs his ward. Posterity, rises to eloquence in its veiled sarcasm : — " His inveterate malice is such, to the writings of our age, that of several thousands produced yearly from this renowned city, before the next Revo- lution of the Sun, there is not one to be heard of : Unliappy Infants, many of them barbarously destroyed, iefore they ham so much as learnt their mother- tongue to heg for Pity. Some he stifles in their Cradles, others he frights into convulsions, whereof they suddenly die : some he flays alive, others he tears Liuib from Limb. Great Numbers are off'ered to Moloch, and the rest tainted by his breath, die of a languishing Consumption." Not one word is wasted. The satu'e never hastens to disclose or pronounce itself : and yet, with marvellous skill, the reader Chap. IV.] SWIFT IK THE PIEST YEAES OP QUEEN ANNE. 105 is never allowed to lose that easy poise of attitude which helps him to feel as if he viewed from a sufficient height the sarcasm that underlies the solemn earnestness. In the Dedication to Lord Somers, Swift ridicules the mercenary cringing of the day, and in the Dedication to Prince Posterity, its blear-eyed narrowness of view. In the Author's Preface, which comes next, he takes another and a wider sweep. His book is to be a Tale of a Tub,* thrown to the wits to stay their on-coming rush upon the weak sides of Religion and • Government, even as sailors throw the barrel to the whale to save the ship. Some day a greater work is to be attempted on a complete scale : and an Academy is to be founded in which room is to be made for all the certified wits, and where they are to indulge their vagaries at peace. Meantime Swift throws his contribution to stop then- instant attacks. Here he flings down the glove to the Wits : and it is this challenge, and the merciless rout with which he follows it up, that form the central ideas of the book. He overwhelms with ridicule the Witwoulds and the Petulants of the day. He turns inside out their weak, hothouse, town-bred humour: and with aU the pitiless force of his politest and gravest irony he pursues the miserable figment of rancorous satii'e that each drivelled out against his neighbours. Step by step the satire advances, helped out by occasional glimpses of the lurking smile : and, as he concludes, the assumption of reverence has so grown upon the author that he can only hope some day to produce his labour of years in a Panegyric on the World, and a Modest Defence of the Rabble in All Ages. The Introduction is the coping stone to the four opening chapters. It brings into a focus the follies that he has so far satirized, and shows them, as they were actually fermenting in * Mr. Forster quotes the use of this Irish Dissenters in this very year, phrase, by Sir Thomas More, and after- 1704, speaks of the Bill disabling them, wards by Ben Jonson as the title of a as a " Tale of a Tub " — exactly the comedy. It is noteworthy that Defoe, sense of the words in the title chosen writing against the treatment of the by Swift. 106 , LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1701—1704. the would-be learned circles round him, in these years from 1697 to 1704. No weapon of sarcasm is neglected, and after the ground has been mapped out, and the general positions assigned, each new illustration, each subordinate metaphor, seems to give some new point to the ridicule. Men can get over the heads of others only, he says, by three contrivances : the Pulpit, the Gallows-Ladder, and the Stage Itinerant. Those who use these instruments represent, amongst us, first, the Modern Saint, who has all the worm- eaten rottenness, all the inflammable quality, of the wooden Pulpit from which he speaks : next, the lovers of faction and of poetry (strangely grouped together), ascending painfully the ladder of the gallows to descend betimes so fatally : and, lastly, the votaries of Grub Street, whose type is found in the mountebanks of the Stage Itinerant. "We of Grub Street — ^for he reckons himself amongst the number — ^have not been appreciated by this superficial age. They do not understand our profundities : they do not know the intri- cacies which must be unravelled before thej^ reach our mean- ing. We have lost our rightful allies : the scientific virtuosos of Gresham College, and the literary wits of Wills', have opposed us most cruellj'' with all the rancour that deserters ever show. There is nothing left for us but to catalogue the long list of our treatises : to publish forth the profundity of our learning : to preserve for posteritj^ our just contempt for antiquity : and to add, possibly, another to our profound pro- ductions, as the author is about to do. Satire such as this reaches far bej^ond the accidents of ecclesiastical controversies, beyond the realm even of literary cliques : it pursues human nature, and routs it out from all its subterfuges and disguises. "What is all this innate desire for notoriety worth ? " is the question that it seems to ask. "What is the value of the verdict that assigns that notoriety? By what means is it gained ? " " And yet, if we abandon the pursuit, is there anytliing better we can pursue instead ? " Chap. IV.] SWIFT IN THE FIEST TEAES OF QUEEjST ANNE. 107: There is no skimming over the surface to catch a transient smile. On the contrary, each metaphor in the satire is fol- lowed up with the elahorate care which one of the Eoyal Society might have shown in explaining to his fellow Greshamites the intricacies of a scientific process. There is nothing for us but the pulpit, the gallows, and the mountebank's stage. So long as we push and jostle one another in order to rise for a moment above the crowd, we must use one of these means. And, translated from metaphor, what are they ? If we are not "Modern Saints" or fanatics, "refined from the dross and gvossness of sense and human reason ; " if we are not mad with party virulence or poetic frenzy, climbing only that we may dangle at a gibbet's end ; then it is left us to be the mountebanks of the stage itinerant. There is no escape. Nature has made us all of the company of Grub Street, although the sect of Gresham please themselves with the "husks" of "virtuoso experiments," and the wits of Wills'' rejoice in the " husks and the harlots " of modern comedj-. So much for the basis on which the Sathe is buUt. When he. has mapped this out, he breaks into the story : but it is of comparatively little importance, and he shows marvellously little adherence to the thread of such story as he has to tell. He soon digresses, and what follows is httle niore than an expansion of the theme which he has propounded ia the introductory chapters. The ecclesiastical references are few i the main object of the satire is not this or that phase of rehgious opinion, but the inherent foUies of the age : and even these follies themselves are shown to be only varia- tions upon the everlasting weaknesses inherent in human nature. If there is anyone to whose tone that of Swift bears a resemblance, it is the" author of Hudihras.* The same, or nearly the same, follies, roused the ire of each. The same * Mrs. Pilkington tells us how, long repeat the whole of Hudibras by after, she found that Swift could heart. (Memoirs, I., p. 136.) i08 . LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1701—1704. contempt for the assumptions of infant science appears in each. By each the same tone of irony is assumed. Fanaticism provokes the same ridicule in the one and in the other. Each travesties the sophistries of the saints, and finds the origin of zeal in the vapours. But here the parallel ends. The thin and monotonous stream of Butler's wit is scarcely heard beside the full flow of Swift's satire. The method of ■each is different. Butler keeps close to the satire with which he pursues the fanatical sects of his daj', and only occasionally illustrates it by glancing at some more general truth of human nature. With Swift it is exactly the reverse. From the larger glance with which he surveys human nature, he brings him- self gradually down to analyse this or that phase of its follies. Butler works from his own surroundings outwards : Swift, from a wider view of human natm'e,- works downwards and inwards. By turns he strikes at the Greshamites, with their fantastic and ill-balanced schemes of physical philosophy : at the wits of Wills', with their efforts after eccentricity that assumes the name of wit : at the fanatics, with their spleen and hatred, for which " they make a shift to find the plausible name of Zeal " : at the universal treatises which were to make this age the wonder of the world, and to supersede such effete productions as those of Homer with his " gross ignorance of ihe Laws of this Realm : " at those proud possessors of mother wit,* whose imagination is much too lofty to submit io Reason : who made " Invention the master, and gave to Method and Reason only the of&ce of its Lacqueys." These are the aims of his sarcasm, and to attain these aims he spends three-fourths of the book on those digressions, which give to his genius room for its lavishness of wit. Even when, from follies that are as old and as wide-reaching as human nature itself, and from the lower range of eccentric oddities * " Whose imaginations are hard- have obserred from long experience, mouthed, and exceedingly disposed to to he a very light rider, and easily jun away with their Eeason, which I shook off." Chap. IV.] S-\7IFT IN THE FIRST TEARS OF QUEEN ANNE. 109 that were specially characteristic of his own age, he comes down to his parable on ecclesiastical disputes, he approaches these by a method all his own. The philosophy of clothes,, as he explains, is seen in operation over all nature, mental and physical. On this profound philosophy rest all our arbitrary distinctions and all our current reverence for ranki and of this philosophy one phase is the religious adornment which divides us into sects. The fanaticism of our day, which accidental coincidences of vapours in the brain pro- duce,* is as old as the Sect of the delists with their wind- bags, and as the phrenzy of the priestess of the Delphic oracle. His contact with the religious sects that he found around him, is thus suggested by a broad and general theme of satire. But when he is once brought down to deal with these sects, he leaves us no reason for regretting that the portion of the book which contains the nominal story, is so small. The account of Martin, Jack and Peter, the names under which the Church of England, the Dissenters and the Romish Church are typified, is the poorest piece in the whole. The metaphors are often strained : their proportion is irregular : the satire has lost its wide human interest and has dwindled into detail. We are glad to get rid of Jack's aversion to bagpipes, of his indig- nation at sign-posts, of his prejudice against grace before meat. "We are wearied with Peter's Roaring Bull, his pardons sold to Rogues, his Raree shows, and his all-comprehending bread. The grasp of Swift's satire throughout the greater part of the book shows us, by its own contrast, how comparatively narrow was this. This part of the Tale is not only the weakest : it is also the most offensive. But it was this which struck the minds of con- temporaries most quickly. It was here that the force of the parallels was most plainty perceived : and once perceived, we * Compare Iludilras, Part II., Canto iii., v. 773, with the ninth section of the Tale. k IIQ; LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1701—1704. <;an' scarcely wonder that they caused offence. The most - sacred mysteries of Christianity are treated with a callous indifference, of whose effect Swift was probably utterly un- conscious. In writing the Tale of a Tub, Swift clearly gave himself a freedom in regard to religious matters which he ~ liev-er afterwards assumed. He never of set purpose adopted ^_the tone of the sceptic, and such natural scepticism as Avas inherent in him, he afterwards tamed into silence. But in ike Tale of a Tub, he treated religious matters not freely only, but with what to ordinary minds appears irreverence. This absolute unconsciousness of the effect of his own words, this impervious insensibility in uttering things from which most men would recoil, is seen still more notably at a later period of Swift's life, in that coarseness at once so noisome and so apathetic, which has left on his later pages a stain of another kind. The same characteristic, which it is difficult to disconnect from the forebodings of mental disease that cast a shadow on his life, now led him to stir to exasperation, and yet all unconsciouslj'', the religious sentiments of those whose Church he desired to defend. But he neither weighed the con- ; sequences, nor could he afterwards understand the sensation , that he caused. For us, however, it need cause no surprise. Swift had proclaimed war against the Wits and the Fanatics. Between him and them there never could be peace. And in the unrestrained flow of his satire there was plenty of material that helped the Wits and the Fanatics to rouse the susceptibili- ties of the Orthodox, and to represent Swift as a dangerous and irreligious buffoon. In the lavish metaphor, in the ever - varying style, in the light cynicism of the Tale, there is none of the saeva indignatio that impelled Swift's later jjen. But the foundation of much of his later trouble was laid in the struggle that was now begun. The wits and the pedants ~ covered their shame under this one-sided aspect which they contrived to give to the book: the wide sweep of Swift's general sarcasm was overlooked, and undue weight was given Chap. IV.] SWIFT IN THE FIRST TEARS OF QUEEN AjJ^NE. lit / ' to the scattered pages that seemed to treat too lightly of religious symbols.* -^ Before we condemn unreservedly Swift's attitude towards these religious symbols, we must mark the impression made vift to Tisdall. Feb. 3, for cousin ; and Wotton asserts that 170-J. Chap. IV.] SWIFT IN THE FIRST YEARS OF aUEEN ANNE. 117 ship that had made him more of a Tory than Swift was as yet prepared to proclaim himself, but not more than secured for him a good deal of Swift's sympathy. While Swift was absent from Dublin during this winter, Tisdall saw much of Stella and of Mistress Dingley, and was apparently entrusted by Swift with some of their business aifairs. Swift carried on with him a correspondence on the political affairs of the day, and especially on that topic that, more than any other, was making ecclesiastical bias the criterion of party, the Bill against Occasional Conformitj\ As the letters proceed, the political references become more impatient and more transient, and the tone of irony on Tisdall's pretensions to Stella's favour, more distinct. But Swift's banter seemed to Tisdall onl}'^ a wilful ignoring of his claims. He had proposed in proper form, for Stella's hand, and he seems to have resented not so much Swift's claim to decide the question, as Swift's interference with the suit from personal motives. He wrote in anger, and Swift replied with the perfect temper that now and then he could assume in spite of bitter feelings. The incident does not seem to be a very extraordinary or inexplicable one. Swift found himself suddenly confronted with the necessity of choosing to make Stella indisputably his own, or of parting with her love to another. He was anxious to avoid either alternative, and he acted as this anxiety prompted. The over- minuteness of biographical criticism has concocted further evidence about the incident, favourable to Swift or the reverse. On the one hand Deane Swift, whose eccentric judgments scarcely merit much attention, thinks it well to make a show of impartiality in blaming his kinsman for preventing a promising alliance by insisting upon terms to which Tisdall could not yield. Sheridan, who is almost as little to be trusted as Deane Swift in details like this, ascribes the rejection to Stella and to Stella only. Looking to Swift's own letters we have an explanation, as simple as it well could be, of an incident, unpleasant indeed for Swift, entangled by the 118 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1701—1704. strange conditions that he had imposed on himself and Stella, but reflecting no stain of selfishness or cruelty upon him. He admits most cordially to Tisdall his preference for Stella above all other women.* He avows to him his wish that the suit should be carried on in the form most just and most respectful to Stella and to Stella's mother. But in avowing to Tisdall that marriage was a thing that neither his own fortune nor his humour ever allowed to cross his mind. Swift gave intimation quite as plain that this and this only kept him back from claiming the love of Stella. Tisdall's love of domestic peace and happiness he warmly congratulates : and with something of sadness, he contrasts the tmfruitful ambition that was eating up his own years, t Most men would have understood this hint. It was perfectly clear that Swift had chosen Stella's as the love he was to cherish through life. Quite as clear is it that he knew Stella had chosen his. He had formed ambitions for himself and her, which might be ended for ever by the blundering of one who had intervened in a friendship that was tolerably well known to the world, and who had done so with less, and not more, to offer her, in the way of worldly goods, than Swift himself possessed. Swift could not, nay more, he would not, chnch the friendship by marriage, merely in order to have an answer for Tisdall. He told him, however, almost as plainly as words could, what his own views were, and what it was that as yet kept Stella and himself apart. The letter was written just before he left London, and it had the desired effect of closing the episode. Swift never forgot the grudge against Tisdall, and is never doubtful about getting a response to his own ill-feeling against him, from * " If my fortunes and humour t " I give you joy of your good served me • to think of that state, I fortunes, and envy Tery much your should certainly, amongst all persons prudence and temper, and love of on earth, make your choice : because peace and settlement : the reverse of I never saw that person whose con- which has been the great uneasiness of versation I entirely valued, but hers." my life, and is likely to continue so." Chap. IY.] SWIFT m THE FIRST TEARS OP QUEEN ANNE. 119 Stella.* But when he came back to Dubliia he must have found clear proof that the ascendancy which he had gained oyer her heart in the old days at Moor Park was stronger than he had dreamed. The open avowal of his preference for her above all women, must have forced on him a much more definite recognition of his relations for the future, to her whose conversation alone " he entirely valued, and who, of aU persons in the world, would be his choice." Alas, for his own life's peace, these plans still looked forward to something to come, instead of grasping the present. Ambition had first to be satisfied. Then, and not till then, might there be room and time for love. * The Journal has many references Swift's morbid insensibility to what to infirmities of Tisdall, which only was coarse could make him recall. CHAPTER V. TEAKS OF WAITINO AND SUSPENSE. 1704—1708. 2ETAT. 37 — 41. Swift's position in literature and politics— The decadence of the Tories — Suc- cesses of the Whigs — Blenheim — Tory factionsness — Dissolution of 1705 — The Irish Parliament — Swift's early efforts for his Church — Correspondence with Archbishop King — Contrasts between the characters of Swift and King — The Tories and the Church — The Memorial of the Church of England — Convocation — Hopelessness of the Tory cause — Swift's personal life- — His associates in London — His place amongst them — His literary work during these years — 3Icditation on a Broom Stich — Vanhrxtgh''s Ilmse — Baucis and Philemon — Long stay in Ireland — Invitation to Moor Park — Continued suspense — Ministers leaning to the Wings — Pembroke, Lord Lieutenant — Society at the Castle — The " Castilian " Language — Swift in London again — Hopes and disappointment — Harley's scheme — Its failure — Dismissal of the Tory remnant — Swift's labour to secure the First Fruits for his Church — His meeting with Godolphin — Wavering allegiance to his party — The death of Prince George — A new period opening for Swift, In the last chapter we saw how Swift had gone back to Ireland just before Midsummer, 1704, already with some feelings of dissatisfaction with the "Whigs, although little inclined to break with those associations that had hitherto bound him to their part3\ In this chapter there is but little to tell of the personal details of Swift's life, for the four j^ears that follow. But we may trace with some certaintj"- the effect which the shifting phases of the party struggle had on his future during these years. We may get one step forward in the discovery of what caused that change in his party allegiance which has been so often ascribed to dishonest motives. We may see him gradually assuming a larger place in the brilliant literary Chat, v.] YEAKS OF "WAITI^^G AND SUSPENSE. 121 circles of the day : and acquiring, year by year, greater stubbornness of purpose, greater independence in his choice of action, and greater keenness of cynical contempt. "When Swift left London he had alreadj"- the reputation of a keen and effective controversialist, and of a master in a charac- teristic vein of humour. By his intimates, his genius was rated higher : but it must not be forgotten that not one of those works on which his later fame rests, was yet published ; and that he forebore to grasp the wider fame which the Tale of a Tub, when it appeared soon after, might have brought to him. During the three or four years that followed, we may observe 110 infrequent signs of the impression that his genius had pro- duced. We see the beginnings of those friendships which helped to define his literary position, and we find him associating with the great on terms that prove how his power had already made itself felt. But such glimpses are now merely' fragmentary. For the most part, during these years, he seems to stay his hand, amid the uncertainty of the political struggle, and the doubt he felt as to his own position therein. It is only when that position is gammg new definiteness, and his aims are becoming more clear, that he again tries his pen on any important efforts. The change in the fortunes of political parties during these years was indeed rapid. At the beginning of 1704, the Torj^ partj"- seemed not only to be in possession of power, but to be in a fair way of maintaining, if not of advancing, its influence. The dissenters were unpopular : and from that unpopularity, the Tories were most Hkely to benefit. They could further count upon the inclination of the Queen in their favour. The Whig junta, whatever sympathy it might have from some of the ministers, seemed then far enough from realizing its hopes. But when little more than a j^ear had passed, Toryism had become completely demoralized ; and the process is interesting in Swift's life, as it shows us whj' Swift still refused to be a Tory, in the sense in which Toryism was understood in 1704 and 1705. The stars in their courses, indeed, fought against 122 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1704—1709. Toryism. If a Tory admiral gained successes, they stopped short, as it were in very spite, of the point which could make them great national triumphs. There were discontented Whigs who murmured against the Government : but the only effect of their murmurs was to strengthen the Ministers, and make them more free to show their independence of extreme party views. In the spring of 1704, the Government had been ostensibly Tory : before the close of the year, not only were many of its members changed, but those who remaiued were more inclined to show their independence of Tory dictation. First came the victory of Blenheim. "With a hazardous, recklessness of enterprise which success, and success alone,, could justify, Marlborough had disregarded the nervous timidity and the pedantic expostulations of the citizen strategists of the Dutch States, had left the neighbourhood of the Low Countries, had effected a junction with Prince Eugene, and with him had advanced to meet Tallard and the Elector of Bavaria in the heart of Europe. The allies had met a force of sixty thousand men, the pick of the French army, with a deficiency of eight thousand in point of numbers, and with the additional dis- advantage of having to cross an almost impassable morass in the face of a scathing fire. Never was success more briUiant. With a total loss in killed and wounded of about thirteen thousand, the alHes cut to pieces the army of the Grand Monarch. Of the sixty thousand soldiers that had met them only twenty thousand, at most, ever fought again beneath the standard of Louis. The victory was won on the 13th of August, 1704. News like this had never reached England within the memory of man. The nation fairly lost its head in the rejoicings. Fickle^ as she afterwards proved, England was now ready to rush into exaggeration in the pride she felt in Marlborough's feat. Time only was necessary to wear out the triumph. The war would certainly become irksome : the weight of the taxes ■would be felt : the successes would grow paler : the objects Chap, v.] TEAES OF WAITING AND SUSPENSE. 123. of the war less clear. Heedless of this, the Tories began the. attack as soon as Parliament met, on the 29th of October. The Bill against Occasional Conformity was once more pressed, but without the aid of St. John, and against the now avowed opposition of the Ministers. It passed the Commons :. and in order to press it through the Lords, an expedient was found, drawn from the worst period of Charles the Second's reign. A plan was formed of tacking the Bill to a Money BUI, and so throwing upon the Lords the responsibility of rejecting it, and of stopping supplies at a moment of all others most critical. The plan was fortunately defeated. The more moderate Tories stood aloof: and the rabid of their party showed only 134 votes against 251. Their headlong rashness had failed to ruin the constitution, but had to all appearance shattered their own party. DemoraUzation never proceeded more rapidly, and never seemed to be more com- plete. The Ministers were fi-ee to disembarrass themselves of such Tories as remained in their ranks ; and on the 5th of April, 1705, Parliament was dissolved. In Ireland, matters seemed to go as well for the Govern- ment, with its newly-developed Whiggism. Parliament there- met on the 10th of Feb. ITOf. The Commons expressed their devoted loyalty to England : their zeal for the Church was avowed in language studiously moderate, and had acquired none of that aggressive vehemence which soon after became a sign of party feeling. They voted the required supplies : and then turned to schemes for the improvement of trade- Under each of these questions, there smouldered some fire that was to burst out later in Swift's life : but as yet the danger was not visible. It was only when a proposal for the- improvement of the Hemp and Flax manufacture (one of the few industries that the economic selfishness and blindness of England had left to Ireland) came under consideration, that dangerous ground v/as reached. In the course of this a ques- tion as to the commutation of the tithe payable to the clergy 124 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [I70i— 1708. upon these manufactures, was mooted : the indignation of the Irish House of Convocation was roused : the clergy and the Commons bandied words with one another; but when the struggle threatened to rise high, it was stayed by a summary prorogation. It is curious that no biographer of Swift has taken notice of this quarrel, anticipating a struggle in which thirty years later he took so active a part. These thirty years, indeed, made his voice more authoritative, and defined his fittitude : but the indication of a desire to curb the rights of his order doubtless excited in the mind of Swift, much the same feelings in 1705 as in 1733. Already Swift had begun to exert himself for privileges of ihe kind which appeared to be here attacked, and had begun .an effort which was ultimately to complete his separation from the Whigs. He had already entered on that long correspond- ■ence with Archbishop King * of Dublin, which endured, in * William King liad been a promi- nent adherent of tlio HoTolution, and had proved the sincerity of his conyic- tions by undergoing imprisonment at the hands of James II. As a first reward he received the Bishopric of Deny, and in 1703 was translated to Dublin, wliere he continued to be u, commanding figure in Dublin Society ^nd in Irish politics for a quarter of a contuiy. " I have great reason to be vain," writes Lady Carteret to Lady Sundon in 1724, " of having the Arch- bishop of Dublin for my lover. Few people have his wit and spirit. He is a prodigy at fourscore." — SundoJi MS. Brit. Mws.) His Palace of St. Pnlcher's, or St. Sepulchre's, now transformed into a barracks, stood dose to the Deanery in which Swift passed the last thirty years of his life. In principles a staunch Whig, he fell into disfavour when Toryism came for .a few years to the front, and recovered iis influence when the Hanoverian succession had actually taken place. But in his later years he found him- self set aside as interfering with Wal- pole's scheme of governing Ireland from England only : and offended personal feeling threw him into the arms of the Irish Patriots. Never stooping to dishonesty, he yet never professed to set aside views of worldly ambition, and remained to the end a, shrewd and clear-eyed man of busi- ness, graceful in manners and yet with a certain assumption of commonplace moralizing. It was this last that grated on S'wif t. Lord Orrery tells a story of King having been instrumental in preventing Swift's appointment as Dean of Derry, on account partly of his youth, partly, as was alleged, of his constant visits to London. The story is without other authority. Thus much, at least, may be said : Swift never gives a hint of this ground of complaint in any letter to King, where angry encounters are constantly Chap, v.] YEARS OF WAITING AND SUSPENSE. 125' spite of many strains and much irritation on both sides, till death ended it in 1729. These strains and that irritation were due to an essential difference of temperament between the two men. Swift was keen in his likes and disKlves, vehement in his partisanship, impatient of patronage and advice, and indisposed to tolerate mediocre ability in any assumption based on official rank. King was prosaic, moderate in cha- racter, domineering in his diocese, inclined to be pompous in his relations with those of inferior rank, and suspicious of those around him. "We shall have to view some curious pas- sages of arms : and Swift's feeling, at its v/orst, is summed up in his own words, that the Archbishop was " a wit and a scholar, but I hate him as I hate garlick."* Before the close of 1704, Swift had written from Trim to the Archbishop, then in London, urging on his attention the necessity of striving for a remission of the first fruits and tenths to the Church in Ireland. A concession of the same sort had been granted in England on the occasion of the last Eoyal birthday (6th Feb., 170-^), and Swift sought to gain for his own church a favour analogous to that which founded the Queen Anne Bounty Fund. The matter in- volved scarcely any pecuniary benefit to Swift himself. His influence with the Archbishop might well, under the prompting of self-interest, have been husbanded for personal objects : and to become known as importuning for such a claim was not a good way to gain the patronage of the Ministry. But the zeal that he here shows did not slack till he had won his point, and this was not tiU after he had faiiiy broken with Godolphin's ministry. The election in England was now proceeding. The Tories repeated : he never refers to it to any King was the cause of his first disap- other correspondent : and throughout pointment in the struggle of life, their long acquaintance he is frequently * Quoted by Lord Orrery in some on terms of cordial friendship which MS. notes in an edition of his Ee- would be unlikely, had he known that marks, belonging to Lord Cork. 126 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1704—1708. ■were hard pressed. One question and one question only seemed likely to serve as a rallying cry : Was the Church in danger? Some day they might trust to the national instinct being thereby excited and kindled into fervour ; but now they found it to be a question that did not admit of very clear and definite statement. Their defence of the Church was at once timorous and bigoted : their political principles were as j-et both factious and chaotic. Confused as were their aims, the Tories were compelled to resort to several incompatible election cries. The "Whigs, with a clear issue before them, and resting on the successes gained in a war, as to which the nation had as yet no misgiving, naturally carried the day at the elections. "Wliile the Tories were still only planning a method of attack, the Whigs suc- ceeded in sending a majority to the new Parliament of 1705. The siunmer months brought new successes abroad, cele- brated in London with all the usual i^omp of a religious cere- monial likely to impress a London crowd. Within a week of that thanksgiving service, however, on the 31st of August, the Grand Jury had to consider a so-called seditious libel. The Church party had begun their attack : and a pamphlet which was now prosecuted, called the Memorial of the Church of England,* may well be considered the war-note of the High Churchmen against a Ministry which they now entirely dis- trusted. The Church, so it was affirmed, might seem out- wardly to be flourishing : but within " there is a hectick fever, lurking in the very bowels of it." The deeds of the Dissenters, when they had the Church in their power, are recapitulated : the hopes that they had been encouraged to form under William III. : the despair that had overtaken them on his death : their continued rancour : the bitterness with which all the enemies of presbytery were proscribed in Scotland: * " The Memorial of the CImrch of Church aiid. ConMitution." It was England,, humlly offered, to the con- written by Dr. Drake, with the help sideration of all true lovers of our of others. Chap, y.] TEAES OF WAITING AND SUSPENSE. 127 and finally' the renewed hopes which they cherished from the iimidity and prevarication of the Ministers in connexion with the Bill against Occasional Conformity. On the 25th of October, the new English Parliament met in -circumstances most favourable to the Whigs. That party was growing stronger day by daj'', and was closing in upon the Court itself. In the last days of October, it is true, the staunch and humorous Tory, Arbuthnot, Swift's friend of after years, foiuid favour sufficient to obtain the post of Plij^sician to the Queen ; but he must have found his post an irksome one in its ■surroundings for some years to come.- The relative strength of parties may be taten as represented in the voting on the Speaker's election, when the Whig candidate obtained 248 votes against 205 for his opponent. The cry of " The Church in Danger," hereafter to be an overwhelmingly strong one, was as yet little more than the feeble grumbling of a discontented faction. The murmur was at length brought to the issue of debate. Rochester, Nottingham, Haversham, and some of the Bishops urged the reality of the danger : Halifax, Somers and Wharton ridiculed it as a delusion invented hj an ill-affected faction. The impression left by such fragments of the debate as are preserved, is that of a wrangle where neither side fully stated their views. The Tories could, indeed, assert that Occasional Conformity was permitted : that sectaries were numerous : that Ministers were wavering friends of the Church. But they fiould not saj', although they felt, that the hopes of the Dissenters had been encouraged by the late King : that these hopes, after a brief eclipse, were again in the ascendant in view of the Hanoverian succession. They could not complain of the hopes of the Dissenters during the past century without reviving the lingering suspicions that the Church had suffered because she had been inclined towards Popery and absolute power. They could not point to their fears for the future without implicating themselves in a charge of Jacobitism. 128 LIFE OF JOJSTATHAN SWIFT. [1704—1708. On the other hand the Whigs were compelled on their side to show the same insincerity. They could not boldly say " we have allowed Occasional Confonnity, because it strengthens the Dissenters on whose support we have to rely." They could scarcely profess, " You Churchmen have a monopoly which it may be needful to curtail, and your creed contains dogmas which may run counter to a break in the Succession. You helped on the Revolution, no doubt, but you were forced into an inconsistency in so doing. We have shaken ourselves free from these hamperings, and we, are resolved to proceed, if need be, further in the same course." AH this the Whigs might have said, but could not : still less could the Ministers, who were as yet hardly the proclaimed allies of the Whigs. The Church was declared not to be in danger : and this speculative opinion adopted by the Lords, was imitated by the House of Commons. It served as a new stage in the definition of parties : the Church was driven one step farther from the Whigs, and the Ministers were driven one step closer to them. The full meaning of this afterwards became apparent. The extreme Churchmen were, for the time, worsted in Parliament : and they fared no better in their proper domain. Convocation, too, saw this year a struggle between the High and the Low Church partj% The Bishops in the Upper House agreed upon an address that repudiated all idea of danger to the Church. To this the more fiery High Churchmen of the Lower House refused to agree. They drew up an address of their own, which adroitly evaded the point in question, and showed their conviction that, if the Church were not in danger, its safety was due only to the benign infliience of the Queen, and not to the care of her Ministers. Atterbury, again, stood in the forefront of the struggle. The contest raged fiercely, and the constitution of the Church seemed scarcely equal to the strain. At length prorogation was fixed on hj the Ministers : and the Prolocutor was summoned to hear the Queen's mandate read in the Upper House. He came surroimded by Ghap. y.] yeaes of waiting and suspense. 129; a group of his supporters, amongst whom was Atterbury. The Queen's letter was read : but scarcely had the Bishop of Norwich, who was acting for the Archbishop, begun to read, when its purport, of proroguing convocation, was perceived. Atterbury's heat almost broke into open violence. Plucking the Prolocutor's sleeve, he cried, " Begone : we have no business here." But on the other side there was one, scarcely less bold or less prone to excitement. Gilbert Burnet of Sarum, while his brethren sat in amazement, stepped from his seat to the bar, rated the group for their insolence, and bade the Prolocutor quit the House at his peril. The threat was enough : the prorogation was pronounced, and for the time the crisis was past. In March, ITOf, these winter sessions came to a close. They left the Tories still a scattered party. They had not learned their watchwords well. They had reached, as yet, no principle which could command the ardent support of any but the partizan. They had as yet attained to no popular cry which might gain them the ear of the country. In politics they were no more than a faction : in the Church they were nervous bigots. Their opponents had a safe majority in Parliament, and two more sessions of that favourable Parlia- ment to run ; and might well afford to overlook the attacks of a disorderly and heterogeneous opposition. Swift had crossed to Ireland in May, 1704, and remained there tUl April, 1705. During the summer and autumn that followed, while the Whigs were to all appearance rapidly growing in power and importance, he was in London, and in constant intercourse with all the leading members of the party, both political and literary. For the first time we catch some glimpses of his intercourse with the choicest spirits of the day : for the only time, perhaps, we find that intercourse unalloyed by any bitterness of political alienation. Swift was still a Whig : the hopes of his party were still rising. Those with whom he associated were no longer men whose civility 130 LIFE OF JONATHAN S"\VIFT. [1704—1708. was of the proverbial tjpe that belongs to cast courtiers. If he had misgivings as to party allegiance, if his invincible independence suggested to him lines of divergence from his party, this would onty tend to make him appear less of a rival to those of his associates who were thorough Whigs, less of a partizan to those others who leaned to the Tories. No period of Swift's life, perhaps, contains more of happiness than this ; if he was unsettled, he was also to a great extent free fi-om the dis- agreeable trammels of partj^ ties. He was now in the prime of manhood, with experience widened, but energies not slacked. He had found congenial work, even though compelled to let the laurels He ungathered. The illness that was to torture him through life had not yet suggested to him its full strength and pertinacity. The position he had attained in the Church, did not indeed answer to his expectations, and stiU left him a poor man : but he was already independent, and his hopes were high. The bitter humour, the self-torture, the cynicism from whose ravages he was himself the chief sufferer, had not as yet been stirred to their depths. At Laracor he had quiet occupations as a relief from the doubts and anxieties of politics. When he broke from that scene, it was to pass weeks at Leicester with his mother, in his affection for whom Swift had weU-nigh the only deep-lying emotion that was to him even as it is to other and more ordinary men. From Leicester he could come to London to find honoured welcome by his brother wits, held free of the company by all, recognised as its leader already by a few. If he touches for pastime on politics, it is within a range where he carries the sj^mpathy of his associates. If he had begun a struggle for his Church, it had not yet reached that pitch of intensity that made failure appear a personal insult and injury, prompting him to abjure the bond of poHtical allegiance. And pervading all his life, already leavening aU his friendships, there was the one enduring tenderness of his life — the com- panionship of her he valued most on earth. It was now that Swift first drew close to one whose friend- Chap, v.] TEARS OF WAITING AND SUSPENSE. 131 ship, in spite of all later jarrings of opinion, retained a deep and vital influence over him. Addison had not yet graduated as the chosen champion of the Whigs in literature : hut he was abeady the member of the Whig coterie whose sanity of judgment, and whose tutored genius gave him amongst the brotherhood a weight that no other had. He had ended his work as bear-leader : he was now attacking the town, whither lie had come with the reputation of a scholarship as polished, :and a wit as fine, as any that belonged to the coterie of Christ ■Church : but tainted by none of their malignancy of faction. He had just published his volume of Italian travels, and -the copy which he presented to Swift is still preserved in Mr. Forster's library, with the inscription, " To Br. Jonatlum Swift, The most agreeable eompanion. The Tnwst Friend, And the Greatest Grnitui of his Age, This Booh is presented Tiy his vnost JImnhle servant tlie Aut/wur." * The feeling that existed between the two is clear enough from such words, used by one who weighed their meaning well. In later years Swift would recall their meetings : how they talked long into the night, so engrossed in one another that they sought no third companion in their talk.t In all Swift's experience, was there one other man, who filled the place that Addison might have filled for him ? In all the circle that bowed down to Addison, was there one who could, or did, per- form that office of adviser, at once critical and appreciative, in which Swift might have done so much for Addison's future fame ? We know how both regretted later alienations, how they strove to overlook them, how they inveighed against the violence of party that kept men asunder. But now they were * Mr. Forster infers not rashly, that of a Tub. The words contain more he who wrote these words at least than a conventional compliment, suspected the authorship of the Tale f Delany's Observations, p. 32. k; 2 132 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1704—1708. close friends, admiring, with the generosity of genius, the gifts that belonged to each. In the little notebooks of personal expenses which Swift kept with care and regularity, and several of which accident has preserved for us, we find the companion- ship marked by many an entry that records their meetings.* There were others too, in the circle. Congreve was knit to Swift not by the brotherhood of wit only, but by the associa- tions with the old school at Kilkenny, where both had been educated under the shadow of the castle of the Ormonds. Congreve was now in the zenith of his fame : not yet what he afterwards became, the battered beau and spoilt favourite of a lady + of rank, who took her pastime in literature ; but stiU the most brilliant wit, the most facile comedian, and the choicest boon companion of the day. Prior, with all his slipshod laxity, and his pursuit of a tattered and counterfeit fashion, was keen enough in his appreciation of genius, to know that one a head and shoulders higher than his surroundings, was come amongst them, and he cultivated the friendship of Swift accordinglj'. Ambrose Philips, the author of the Pastorals, gibbeted to a not very enviable immortality by the nickname of Namby-Pamby, and by the mention he found in Pope's satire at a far later day, was now by the accident of political comrade- ship, admitted to the friendship of Swift, t Another of the circle was Pdchard Steele, hereafter to come to close quarters with Swift, and to emerge from the combat, after proving * Thus : " Tav", Addison, 2s. 6d. ; ness, is a familiar one. "We shall find, Tav°, Addison, Is. ; TaV", Addis", hereafter, that Swift's friendship did 4s. 9d.," and so on : see note-books in not wane, even under the clouds of the Forster Library at South Kensing- political dissension, and when Con- ton, greve had lost all but the memory of + The story of poor Congrere's his power to charm, "blind and gouty decadence, when + Of Philips we shall hear more under the degrading patronage of the when he crosses Swift's horizon, as daughter and heiress of the great Duke the secretary of Archbishop Boulter, of Marlborough, he became a pam- when the Drapier was a name dreaded pered doll, to be replaced after death in all the circles of orthodox Whig- by a puppet fashioned after his like- gism. Chap. V.] TEABS OF WAITING AND SUSPENSE. 133 how small a man of real genius might make himself appear. Vanbrugh, the brisk comedian whose laurels had been gathered by facile adaptations from the French, with occasional aberra- tions in the direction of architecture and heraldry, had akeady become the butt of what was, for Swift, no unldndly satire on the tiny edifice he had raised on the ruins of Whitehall, — a house whose weight. Swift asserted, was enough to tax the strength of no less than four sturdy porters. Swift, lodging, most probably, as we know was his habit in later years, in some of the subm-ban purUeus of St. James's, had aheady become a notable figure in this companjr, which met at "Wills' Coffee House in Bow Street, or in the St. James's Coffee House, where the Whigs at that time most resorted. First, a few had heard of the uncouth Irishman, tamed by Sir William Temple, with eccentricities which it was amusing to exaggerate. Then, he had entered the arena of political controversy : had returned with some triumph from the fray, and was patronized by the leading of&cial Whigs, from whom the hterary clique were prepared to take their cue. Next he became known as the author of various occasional pieces, each with its own peculiar strokes of humour or of grace. The Tale of a Tub indeed found an audience which was both wide and appreciative : but its authorship was a matter of hazardous guesswork except to a very few. Certainly laiown as the author of some of these pieces, and vaguely credited with the authorship of more. Swift had just the sort of reputation that would gam him a ready reception amongst the wits, to whom his indifference as to hterary fame was some recommendation, as it precluded rivalry. In later years Swift, with his usual cynical candour, professed that his literary efforts were dhected to gaining the social distinction which was not his by birth.* * II ' 1 will farther tell you that aU used like a lord by those who have an my endeaTours from a boy to distin- opinion of my parts : whether right guish myself, were only for want of or wrong, it is no great matter ; and a title and fortune, that I might be so the reputation of wit or great learn- 184 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1704—1708. But his cynicism stands convicted of inconsistency by the fact that in these years when social distinction had to he gained, he rehnquished that which might have come from acknowledging what he had written. From first to last Swift's attitude to his Hterary work is as strange as much else that puzzles us in his conduct. Keenly anxious about the fortune of his books, keenly alive to the criticism with which they meet, he is yet careless as to the method of their appearance. Ambitious of power, and willing to use every means of increasing his in- fluence, he yet keeps up a mystery, more or less constant, about the authorship of them aU. Alive to the help which money gives to independence, and gradually increasing in his attention to it, he nevertheless neglects, in almost every in- stance, the pecuniary gain which authorship might have brought.* From fiirst to last, with all his changes of mood. Swift's authorship is a thing of accident, pursued with no- certain aim, regulated by no fixed idea, despising rules either of expediency or of art. A story is told of his first entry into one of the haunts of the wits, which we may take to have been the St. James's Coffee House. + Those who frequented the place had been astonished day after day by the entry of a clergyman, unknown to any there, who laid his hat on a table, and strode up and down the room with a rapid step, heeding no one and absorbed in his own thoughts. His strange manner earned him, unknown as he was to all, the name of the " mad parson." On one evening in particular, Addison and the rest were watching him, when ing does the office of a blue ribband, Motte for £300. The ilfisceUanies or of a coach and six horses.'' Sivift ■which Swift and Pope published, to Pope, 5 Ap. 1 729. about the same time as Chillher, also * " I never got a farthing by any- yielded some profit : but Swift re- thing I writ, except one about eight signed it to Pope, years ago, and that was by Mr. Pope's t Sheridan teUs it as of Button's, prudent management for me." {Smift the coffee-house in Bussell Street, to Pultency, 12 May, 1735.) This was Covent Garden, where Addison " gave Gulliver's Travels, the copyright of his little senate laws : " but Button's which seems to have been bought by was not established till 1712. Chap. V.] YEARS OF WAITING AND SCSPENSE. 135 he was observed to cast his eyes on a country gentleman who had just entered the tavern. At length he approached, and abruptly addressed him, within earshot of the listening circle. "Pray, sir," said Swift, " do you remember any good weather in the world? " The countryman stared, but recovering him- self, presently answered, "Yes, sir, I thank God, I remember a great deal of good weather in my time." " That is more," said Swift, " than I can say : I never remember any weather that was not too hot, or too cold : too wet, or too dry : but, however God Almighty contrives it, at the end of the year 'tis all very well : " and with these words he left the astonished crowd as usual. The story is told on the authority of Ambrose PhiHps : and anticipating as it does, the wayward humour, and impetuous eccentricities of Swift's later days, it serves to tell something of the impression that Swift left amongst his friends of these early and little known days. Of the humorous pieces which he had now produced, and which were all that employed his activity during these years of waiting and watching, there are three which are characteristic enough to deserve special notice. One of these is a parody of the eminently respectable Robert Boyle, whose Moral Medita- tions had proved too much for the patience of Swift, when compelled to read them aloud as a pious sedative to the Lady Berkeley. To scoff at the Lady's chosen counsellor might prove inconvenient : so Swift hit upon the device of inserting his own manuscript in the volume, and reading, as one of the discourses, a meditation on a Broom-Stick, moralizing with the gravest comedy over the vicissitudes that attend its lot. It served as well as any of the discourses which it parodied, to attune the aristocratic listener to a sedate and soothing con- dition of pious satisfaction: and when detected, showed the estimate that Swift had formed of the discourses clearly enough to release him from the drudgery of reading them. Evanescent as was its occasion, it is significant that one of Swift's earliest skits should have been directed against what 136 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [170i— 1708. '■was, or appeared to him to be, pious cant. Another piece, already alluded to, consists of some light, and not ill-natured •ridicule of the house that Vanbrugh, the comedian, herald, and Eoyal architect, had built for himself on a part of the site of Whitehall. An earlier version of the lines than that which was afterwards published, was discovered by Mr. Forster at Narford,* and by him certain verses, before unprinted, have been reproduced. In either version, the main object is not the ridicule of the tiny house which it pleased Vanbrugh's fancy to buUd : but rather the corruption of the contemporary stage, and the feebleness of contemporary wit. The printed version seems to differ from that discovered by Mr. Forster, chiefly, if not entirely, in the greater clearness of the purpose, the greater 'flow of the humour, the excision of what was tawdry and obscure. •The pigmy structure, which owes its origin to the flimsy creations of feeble wit, and which has replaced the palace of "Whitehall, is itself a type of modern pretentiousness : " Like Bacchus tliou, as Poets feign Thy mother burnt, art born again ; Born like a Phoenix from the flame : But neither bulk nor shape the same ; As Animals of largest Size, Corrupt to Maggots, Worms, and Flies, A type of Modern Wit and Style, The Rubbish of an Ancient Pile. So Chymists boast, they have a power From the dead ashes of a flower, Some faint resemblance to produce ; But not the virtue, taste or juice. So modern Rhymers ■wisely blast, The poetry of Ages past,t Which after they have overthrown. They from its Ruins build their o'wn." The remaining piece that claims notice as characteristic * Narford, in Norfolk, is the resi- Dublin under Lord Pembroke's lieu- dence of the family descended from tenancy. Sir Andrew Fountaine, often men- + It is worth noting here, as well as tioned in the Journal, as an intimate more than once in the Tale of a Tub, of Swift, both in London and in how Swift returns to the depreciation Chap. V.] TEAES OF WAITING AND SUSPENSE. 137 of this period of his life, is one that is ahnost unique amongst the efforts of his pen — the Baucis and Philemon. Unlike his later style, it contains from first to last scarcely^ a touch of satire : the whole piece depends simply and entirely on its grace, and facility, and marvellous deftness of description. The old story of mythology is translated into a modern dress, but with skUful avoidance of all appearance of mere burlesque. Of this poem, also, Mr. Forster found at Narford a version with considerable differences from that which was published : and to these differences some added interest belongs. The hand of Addison was known * to have been exercised on the jDoem, and his obliterations and excisions were accepted by Swift with a magnanimity which few authors are strong enough to show. The changes, it appears, were chiefly in the direc- tion of shortening : and this shortening was accomplished, as the Narford manuscript shows, by cutting out many strokes that gave vigour and force to the description. In the first version, the reception of the Hermits, " Saints by trade," in the village where their miracle was to be wrought, gives a much more vivid picture of the villagers, disturbed by the begging of " two sturdy rascals " with their usual " stroller's cant " ; the hospitality of Yeoman Philemon and Goody Baucis is drawn with more fulness of detail: and the metamorphosis of the pair into the parson and the parson's wife, and of their kitchen into the parish church, is even more lively than it was as pubhshed. Addison doubtless apphed to the piece some canon of taste which Swift admired and respected, in spite of its divergence from his own. But whatever changes it suffered, the piece remains as that where Swift's wit is perhaps in happiest opera- of the Moderns as compared with the listen to admonitioB, Dr. Delany re- Ancients, showing that however casual peats the fact, " which Swift himself might have been the occasion of the was often wont to mention, that in a Battle of i/ic iJoofa, the view it sup- poem of not two hundred lines (-Baaci* ported continued to be cherished by and Philemon) Mr. Addison made him Swift. blot out fourscore, add fourscore, and * As a proof of Swift's readiness to alter fourscore.'' Observations, p. 19. 138 LIFE OF JOXATHAN SWIFT. [1704—1708. tion, sportive, light, and fanciful, and with no suspicion of bitterness. As a rule, his wit plays only in lambent flashes against a cloudy and murky background : here it is in blight sunshine. Such playful, and only half-sarcastic, strokes as it contains are aimed at his own profession, but with nothing of unkindliness. Yeoman Philemon alters in little more, when he becomes the parson, than the pudding sleeves and length of skirt that are added to his grazier's coat. His tone is just the same, although he prates now of tithes and dues instead of crops ; and learns how to shake his head over his pipe, and read the news, with due professional orthodoxy of senti- ment : — " Against Dissenters would repine, And stood up firm for Eight Diviue." The writer of these lines, it is worth noticing, is no bigoted High Church Torj% So easily does the piece flow, so ready is its versification, so terse and telling its descri^Dtion, that we scarcely notice, in first reading, how many are the touches drawn from Swift's observation of the country villages through which he passed on his way between Holyhead and Leicester, Farnham and London. We have the homely pair : their kitchen with its furniture, its walls adorned with chapman's ballads, that after the transformation furnish out the quaint devices common on the walls of the country church. In half a dozen lines we have a complete picture of the parson over his pipe and newspaper, performing christenings and acting as the centre of the village gossip : " A shambling awkward gait he took, With a demure dejected look, Talkt of his offerings, tithes and dues, Could smoke and drink and read the news ; Found his head filled with many a system, But classic authors — he ne'er mist 'era." And lastly we have old Goodman Dobson, " of the Green," prating of the village story from noon to night, trotting off to Chap. V.] YEAES OF WAITING AND SITSPENSE. 139' show to new-comers the twin Yew-trees, that served as induhit- ahle proofs of its veraciousness, and gathering round him on. Sunday, for weekly practice, a crowd of familiar auditors tO' hear the old tale repeated. The whole picture might he drawn from the life, as he saw it on the village green of some Surrey or Leicestershire village. During the whole of 1706, and down to the late autumn of 1707, Swift remained in Ireland. In midsummer, 1706, Joha Temple, writing to Swift to consult him about his Irish estates, had invited him to Moor Park. Swift replies to the inquiries in a tone that shows how much he had already considered the evils of Ireland. He m-ges Temple to avoid rack rent : and goes on : "I forgot to tell you that no accounts from your tenants can be relied on. If they paid you but a peppercorn a year, they would be readier to ask abatement than to offer an advance. It is the universal maxim through- out the kingdom. I have known them fling up a lease, and next day give a fine to have it back again. It has not been known in the memory of man that an Irish tenant ever once spoke truth to his landlord." He turns aside, rather than refuses, the invitation. " 1 am extremely obliged," he says, " by your kind invitation to Moor Park, which no time will make me forget and love less. If I love Ireland better than I did, it is because we are nearer related, for I am deeply allied to its poverty. My little revenue is sunk two parts in three, and the third in arrear. Therefore if I come to Moor Park, it must be on foot: but then comes another difficulty, that I carry double the flesh you saw about me at London, to which I have no manner of title, having neither purchased it by luxury, nor good humour. * * * Whig and Tory has spoiled all that was- tolerable here, by nii.x.ing with private friendship and conversation, and ruining both ; though it seems to me full as pertinent to quarrel about Copernicus and Ptolomee, as about my Lord Treasurer, and Lord Piochester ; at least for any private man, and especially in our remote scene. I am sorry we begin to resemble England only in its defects. Abovit seven years ago frogs were imported here, and thrive very well ; and three years after, a certain great man brought over Whig and Tory, which suit the soil admirably."* * Mr. Forster printed this letter, dated 15 June, 1706, for the first time. 140 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1704—1708. Meanwhile these months, that Swift spent quietly in Ireland, were full, in the larger world, of great events. The session of Parliament which had closed so auspiciouslj' for the Whigs in the spring of 1706, had been followed by a summer as full of success. In April Marlborough had set out for the Hague ; before a month was gone he had added another, in Ramillies, to the now long list of victories which might have seemed to justify a war even less reasonable than that on which England Avas engaged. Addresses of congratulation poured in from all sides ; and on June 27, St. Paul's was the scene of another of the usual Thanksgivings. In September, a new disaster befell the French arms in the battle of Turin : and the campaign in Italy cost Louis not less than 20,000 men. Each new disaster to the enemy seemed to open new opportunities for turning the war into one of aggression, and for strengthening the Whig supremacy by opening up new vistas of national ambition. In October Louis found himself obliged to make overtures for peace : but they were coldly received : the reply was long delaj-ed : and when it came, it proposed conditions which closed all prospects of a speedy end to the war. When Parliament [met, on the 3rd of December, the Ministry found themselves as yet confronted with hardly any opposition. Addresses from both Houses encouraged the war, in spite of murmurings that were now heard through the country. The Duke of Marlborough received lavish additions to his akeady long list of honom-s and rewards. Even in Convocation, the High Church opponents of the Ministry seemed to be hushed, and the Lower House assented, all but unanimously, to a Whiggish address which was drawn up by the Bishops. A display of the spoils of victory was made in procession to the Guildhall : supplies were liberally voted : and on the 31st of December (1706) Parhament adjourned for a short recess, leaving the Ministers on the full tide of apparent popularity. Chap, v.] YEAES OF "WAITING AND SUSPENSE. 141 But as the session went on, after the recess, signs of opposi- tion began to arise. The Union with Scotland, pressed for- ward with feverish urgency, greatly stimulated that opposition. It was disliked because it seemed to involve an insult to the Church, to introduce a jarring chord into the constitution, to promise an influx of needy members to both houses, ready on payment of a bribe to be the henchmen of Ministers. The English mob was jealous, and stung to the quick by the coyness with which the poorer nation had met the advances of her wealthier sister. The Tories took up the cause of the Church, so threatened. A New Act for the Security of the English Church was passed, which, as a protest against the compact with Presbytery, gave a certain consistency to the Tory party ; but this was the only effect of their struggle. In spite of all protests, the Union became law. But new difficulties soon met the Ministers. The suspicions of the Church party became stronger ; their alliance with the Tories became more close. Even in Ireland the same ten- dency prevailed. The Church of Ireland, which, at the begin- ning of Queen Anne's reign, had conceived new hopes, and had found itself, as it believed, triumphant over the Pres- byterians, was now suspicious of the Government, and these suspicions became more decided when the Duke of Ormond gave place to Lord Pembroke, who in June, 1707, assumed the office of Lord Lieutenant. Pembroke's antecedents gave sufficient indication of his political inclinations. He had fallen under the displeasure of the court in the halcyon days of Torj'ism under Charles II, In the Revolution he had taken a prominent part. He was the friend of Locke, and to him the Treatise on the Human Understanding had been dedicated, at a time when Locke's name was the foremost amongst the men whose views were more advanced than those which any political partj' dared to avow. He had held high office as a diplomat, and wide travel and liberal culture had left their imprint on him. From Italy he 142 LIFE OF JOK'ATHAN SWIFT. [1704—1708. Tiad brought tliose choice antiques which began the glories of Wilton. Such a man was not likely to penetrate too deeply into Irish politics, or to trouble himself too much with the battles of the sects. But such part as he took was not Ukely "to be adverse to the Whigs. He came avowedty to heal or gloze over difficulties which Swift and those who thought with Tiim had no wish to minimise. But his easy bonhomie pre- Tsnted differences of opinion from becoming too violent. He came to Ireland with even more than that usual display of courtly munificence by which the progress of the Viceroy to Dublin was always marked. He lavished bounties of more than two thousand pounds even on the English towns through which he passed.* The same munificence was repeated on his visits to the more remote districts of Ireland. Such displays, ■contemptuous rather than complimentary, satisfied the con- sciences of the Enghsh Governors of the country. In his opening address to Parliament Pembroke followed the usual precedents of recent j^ears. The Queen, he declared, " would be glad of any expedient for strengthening the interest of her Protestant subjects in Ireland." This was a well-maderstood formula, and was meant only to suggest the abolition of any Presbjterian disabilities. The Episcopahans refused to assist in this method of strengthening Protest- antism : and Parliament was deaf to the invitation. Roman Catholic disabilities were hicreased : but those of the Presby- terians were not removed. His mission having failed, Pem- broke closed the Parliament and went back to England in November, 1707. In the train of the Viceroy, Swift returned to England. As with Lord Berkeley and the Duke of Ormond, so even in larger measure with Lord Pembroke, he had been on easy terms at the Castle. His life had run smoothly in the lively society of Dublin, where his Prebend of St. Patrick's and his footing at the Castle, caused him often to be, and * See Delany's Observations, p. 212. Chap, v.] YEAES OP WAITING AKD SUSPENSE. 143 ■where, in spite of his grumblings, he found abundance of congenial friendship. The two brothers Ashe, one his tutor in old days at Trinity, and his adviser in more than one of the darker passages of his life, the other the blithe punster, Dilly Ashe, who will turn up again in Swift's more noted days : the Dean of St. Patrick's, Dr. Sterne, famous for his •dinners, by whose promotion room was one day to be made for Swift ; Sir Andrew Fountaine, who had come from NorfoUi in the Lord Lieutenant's train, and whose close intimacy with Swift, begun at "Wills', was now strengthened: these, with Dr. Haymond of Trim, the poor economist, but kindly friend, and Archdeacon Walls, the business adviser of Swift, formed the •circle amongst whom Swift moved in these earlier Dublin days. Pembroke himself sought their company, and entered cordially into its amusements ; amongst which not the least was their zealous rivahy in punning.* It was by a pun that Swift be- gan his intimacy with the Viceroy himself ; t and the " Cas- tUian language " as Swift calls their elaborate tricks of ortho- graphy, became a favourite amusement of the Httle society that gathered round the inner circle of Pembroke's household, t * This punning procliTity is the thing more than verbal quibbles and first, amongst a number ,of similar conceits. The latter are interesting methods of trifling, by -which Swift only as giving us the biographical fact, relieved more serioiis thoughts. Com- that the strain of Swift's passion and IDared with those that followed it, the the force of his clear intellect, relieved dog-Latin and the perverted spelling their tensity with little thought of of the correspondence with Sheridan, dignity in relaxation, the practical joking which the gossips t Swift had found Lord Pembroke describe as belonging to his later undergoing a long lecture on what his Dublin days, and the rhymed and lecturer called " the commonwealth jesting fragments which indiscrimina- of bees.'' "They are a very ancient ting tradition has preserved, the puns nation," said S\vift ; " Moses num- are almost dignified. But even as bered the Hivites amongst the nations puns they are not often amusing. All Joshua was to conquer." Delany, these methods of trifling are in Swift's Observations, p. 212. case too clearly the results of a strain J Specimens of this " Castilian " perforce relaxed, to have real humour. language are given in a MS. dialogue Swift's vein of humour never becomes by Swift, which Mr. Forster found at visible save when it works with some- Narford, and some passages of which 144 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1704—1708. "When he left Ireland with the Viceroy in November, 1707, He bade farewell to the easiest period of his life. With this return to England, Swift begins what is a long, and for him, an eventful visit. Political affairs were at a critical- turn when he arrived. Pembroke had been brought back to join the naval council of Prince George of Denmark, whose growing infirmities were aggravated by the anxieties about the Navy, whose nominal head he was. On this and on other points, the Ministry were finding it hard to resist attacks. Par- liament had now been sitting for a month. An attack upon the Ministers was opened, which proceeded upon the topics of the decay of trade, the failure of English anns in Spain, and, above all, the neglect of the fleet. This time not Haversham. only murmured in his spleen, and Rochester and Nottingham in the fury of their Tory zeal. For once, Wharton and Somers were on the same side. The Whigs were no longer to be tem- porized with. Either the Ministers must throw them over, or must proclaim clearly, in the face of the world, their alliance with the Whigs, and their breach with the Tories. They were forced to choose the latter. The Whig Junta was the master of the situation. Swift came, on a commission from Archbishop King, to wage for his Church the battle for the First Fruits and the Twentieth parts of the Church benefices — a battle that cost for some j^ears much labour, and earned but little thanks. If secured at all, these could be gained, as they had been for England, only by political favour. It was Swift's business, therefore, to watch the complexion of politics, and to learn how he might make the best terms for his Church. On his way to London, he stops, as usual, to visit his mother at Leicester : and writing * to Archbishop King from Leicester on he has reproduced. They illustrate the those who from familiarity caught easy and careless tallc that whiled away the hints they were meant to convey, hours at the Castle. But they reflect * The letter was printed, for the Swift's humour only at its woi-st : first time, by Mr. Forster, fi'om the and could be of little interest save to Records of Armagh. Chap, v.] TEAES OF "WAITING AND SUSPENSE. 145 the 6th of December, 1707, he tells him something of the pre- vailing political feeling as he finds it there. Rents may be slack in coming in : but " this long war has here occasioned no fall of lands nor much poverty among any sort of people " : and, "there is a universal love of the present Government, and few animosities except upon elections," of which he happened to see one on his arrival. It only serves as a text for his usual contemptuous complaint of party. " The parties," he says here, " are as usual — High and Low : there is not a chamber- maid, prentice, or school-boy in the town, but what is warmly engaged on one side or the other." Swift made his application, as a Whig, to what was now a Whig Government. The business of his Church moved but ill. He had little power to act, and was ill backed up by Others, upon whom, as he thought, a heavier obligation lay. But the increasing influence of his friends of the past, Lord Somers and Lord Halifax, seems to be on the point of gaining some very tangible advantage for Swift himself. In January 170y, the Bishopric of Waterford was vacant : and his claims were urged, or were believed by Swift to have been urged, upon the Government, by Lord Somers,* whose voice, at this juncture, it was hardly possible for the Government to dis- regard. Never, even in the time of his highest influence, did Swift come nearer, in his own belief, to one of the prizes in the Church. In a letter to Archdeacon Walls t of January 22, he speaks with unquestionable bitterness of the appoint- ment that has been made, of a certain Dr. Thomas MiUes. " I once," he admits, " had a glimpse that things would have gone otherwise. But now I must retire to my morals, and pretend to be wholly without ambition, and to resign with patience." * This is made perfectly clear by Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Vol. iii., the letters from Swift to Lord Halifax p. 201. See also Forster's Life of of June 13th, and Nov. 13, 1709, which Swift, p. 211. were first printed (one with a wrong + Amongst Mr. Murray's MSS., but date) in. Cunningham's Edition of printed almost entirely by Mr. Forster. l-i6 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1704—1708. His hopes were dispelled ; * but he could still look to Lord Somers as his friend : he still refused to surrender all belief in the flimsy promises of Lord Halifax : and it was certain that if these two had the will, their power to help him was increasing. Before many months were gone, Somers was to become Lord President : and in the next year. Swift seeks, through Lord Halifax, to obtain from Lord Somers, as Lord President, the aid for his claims to the see of Cork, which he believed that he had for his claims to that of Waterford when Lord Somers was the unrecognised, although real, master of the Government.! If that Government still hesitated about the expediency of avowing Whig principles and striking an alliance with the "Whig leaders, circumstances soon decided them. Vague rumours of an attempt of the Pretender, which were realized and dissipated, at the same moment, in March, 170-f, were abroad some months before. On the 11th of February, Robert Harley, who had joined the Government only recently as Secretary of State, and one of whose clerks had just before been mvolved in a charge of treasonable correspondence with France, was dismissed. I The dismissal was in reality a retri- * " The Court and the Archbishop cities : and his work, like his pay, was of Canterbury," he writes, " were casual and irregular. He was in debt, strongly engaged for another person anxious to make money, and careless {i.e. himself) not much suspected in how he made it. From Greg's own Ireland." Swift to Archiislwp King. account we see how correspondence of Feb. 5, 170|. the most confidential sort was patched + Letter to Lord Halifax, Nov. 13, up late at night, at an hour when. 1709. Pr fi nn t h i Tli i 1 iii [ i ii T Tnlr / "in Harley, as a, rule, was drunk : and th £u . ill uf ! !. !.pulled XbVLi. — But 4ie how the bad French of the secretary's did Tint ti'" ^"'^1 T^""^ letters was corrected by this needy J The attempt to involve Harley in and iU-paid clerk. Harley at the most the guilt of this obscure and petty was careless : poor Greg seems to have traitor, William Greg, was a spiteful shown as much honesty as could and unworthy piece of malice. Greg's fairly be expected : and if anything story illustrates clearly enough the did leak out, it was due to care- hap-hazard method of conducting lessness and to the rotten system, public business which prevailed. He Swift afterwards vnrote a, defence of had been employed in various capa- Harley against the charge. Chap, v.] TEARS OF 'WAITING AKD SUSPENSE. 147 Tjution for a hazardous game that Harley had played. Already he had arranged that compact with Mrs. Masham which, two years later, was to produce events so full of consequence. The compact had miscarried for the present. But, as Swift wrote to King, " though his project has miscarried, it is reckoned the greatest piece of court skill that has been acted these many years."* Harcom't and Henry St. John followed Harley: a new recruit, destined to rise to greater things, was attached in Robert Walpole ; and when the year 1708 had fairly begun, the Government was purged of any remnant of Torjdsm.t The change strengthened the Ministry, and the elections in April (1708) were again in their favour. Murmurings, no doubt, were heard. Writing to Archdeacon Walls on January :22, 170f , t Swift had so far changed since his letter in December to Archbishop King as to say, "the people begin to he heartily weary of the war;" and similar symptoms were to ibe seen elsewhere. But the summer campaign brought a new ■success in Oudenarde : and the murmurers were silenced for the time. Swift had, meanwhile, been doing what he could for himself and for his Church. When he had come up to London from Leicester in the beginning of the year, he had joined his friend, Sir Andrew Fountaine, in liis house at Leicester Fields, and through him Swift hoped to gain, with more ease, Lord Pembroke's aid for the apphcation of his Church. But it soon appeared that this was to be bought onlj^ at the cost of concession to the Presbyterians in Ireland in the matter of the Test. Swift would listen to no such bargain. * Swift to Archbishop King, Feb. set, at the Council, refused to sit with 12, 17Qf. Harley, that the Queen yielded and + Swift's own correspondence, dismissed him. It is curious that it clearly based on good authority, shows was the same Duke of Somerset whose us how narrow the turn of affairs was. sudden appearance in the Council was Harley was satisfied that he had gained largely instrumental in procuring the the day, and that Godolphin was going. fall of St. John, in 1714. It was only when the Duke of Somer- J MS. belonging to Mr. Murray. h 2 148 LIFE OF JONATHAN SVIFT. [1704—1708. Five years before, he had -written to Tisdall, speaking with nothing but contempt of the Nonconformists' schemes, as too futile to be worth opposing. But his relation to them had now become more marked. He saw more clearly the danger of their claims, and the increasing support which these claims found from the Government. He never hesitated as to his attitude in the face of this new danger. In the Irish convocation he had been the chief opponent of any repeal of the Test. His friend and diocesan. Archbishop King, was equally decided. Swift would counsel no bargaining away of privileges for money : but he might still hope that the bargain would prove unnecessary. Sooner than others, he saw the weak points of the "Whig oligarchy. Schemes, like that of Harley, might not miscarry again. The Whigs might go to lengths which would ahenate from them many of their own party.* Swift continued to press his application on behalf of the Church : and to do so, not, indeed, as the opponent of the Ministry, but yet with full determination not to pay for the countenance of the Ministers, by ignoble surrender of her privileges. But much of his attention as was absorbed with knotty questions of politics, and with struggles into which he was gradually being drawn. Swift found time for other thoughts. He renewed his former intimacy with Addison, now Under- Secretary in Lord Sunderland's ofBce, and drawing the reward of well-timed eulogy in a comfortable official salarj-.f In literature, too, Swift was not quite idle. One of the few pieces that he wrote was that on the "Tritical Faculties of the * " If they carry things too far I in far later days. They happened to shall go to Vienna or even to Laracor, discuss their tastes on scriptural char- rather than fall in with them." — Smift aotei-s : and it was with some shame tn Walls, Not. 9, 1708. Mr. Murray's at the suspicions that It might have MS. inspired in a listener, of a mutual flat- t Delany tells a story of the two tery, that they blushed to find them- which is characteristic enough, and selves praising, Addison the name of which interests lis the more that it must Jonathan, Swift that of Joseph. — Dc- have been related by Swift to Delany laivj's Ohscrvatioyi-i, p. ."3. Chap. V.] TEAES OF WAITING AND SUSPENSE. 149 Mind," a plaj'ful parody of the would-be erudite and philo- sophical treatises that traded on trite quotations, and in their profundity lost all thread of sequence. Nonsense never wore, on first sight, a dress apparently so reasonable and so profound. "With his friends, in Ireland, he aU this while maintained a correspondence in which lesser matters were mingled with affairs of Church and State. Sterne, the Dean of St. Patrick's, ■was at this time Swift's intimate friend, and with him ■was carried on a correspondence that was half friendly, half official. The Deanery had been the centre of a generous hospitality, marked even amongst the hospitalities of Dublin : and Swift follows with interest the building operations on which its present master was now engaged, and which were to result in that rambling mansion in time to he occupied by Swift him- self. He will have nothing to do with the upholstering : but on the garden he wishes to give his advice, as a subject with which he is conversant, and he begs that the Dean wUl wait for his return before arranging his plans. Laracor had made him an adept in the art.* But civilities like these are onlj'' excuses for graver hints. The Test has to be supported and efforts for its repeal have to be resisted. Sterne must organize that resistance. The bishops are too selfish to do anything for the Church : and the stubborn and inert dulness of the Irish clergy, blind to the opportunity and thinking only of the present, must be aroused to some sense of danger. Others are active enough : it must be the Chm-ch's task to keep the government in the right path. The wheels of his mission drave heavily. For him, as for other suitors, the alarm of the French invasion had been made an excuse for delay. "With difficulty, by the intercession of Lord Sunderland, the keenest and most truculent of Wliigs, and of Lord Somers, now the chief support of the Ministry, he obtained access to the Lord Treasm-er, Godolphin.t From * Swift to Dean Sterne, April 15, t In June, 1708 (see Swift's Letter ■1708. to Archbishop King, June 10, 1708). 150 LIFE OF JOKATHAN S"WIFT. [1704—1708. this first meeting, Swift's antipathy to Godolphin would seem to date. Looking at the two men, we can hardly wonder at it. The dull and pompous dignity, the pervading mediocrity of Godolphin were as vinegar to Swift. From the first he saw through those empty platitudes ; the impression of which is carried down to our own day by the insipid features that look out at us from Godolphin's portraits. The antipathy would he as strong on Godolphin's side. In the ordinary courtly phrases that cloak unwillingness to act, he expressed himself to Swift as wanting power, as only passive in the matter : the real power, he urged, lay with the Lord Lieutenant, to whom,, if Swift pleased, he would repeat what Swift had said. This was doubly offensive to Swift : it meant nothing, and was a palpable pushing aside of his request. But it also hinted more : that Swift was come from L'eland unbefriended and unauthorised, with no means of access to that Lord Lieutenant,, whose intimate boon companion he had been. Swift answered that he was well known to his Excellency, and that his present object was only to secm'e the Lord Treasurer's goodwill: that,, indeed, any mention of the matter to Lord Pembroke, might place him in the awkward position of apiDearing to sHght that lord. Driven thus into a corner, Godolphin was compelled to speak to the question. He did it with what was, for him, more than usual plainness. He might advise, so he told Swift, the grant- ing of the First Fruits, if only he were sure that proper acknow- ledgment was to be made. What that acknowledgment was. Swift could very well understand, but Godolphin would not more fully explain. It clearly meant the giving up of the Test,. and the swallowing of all Whig principles entire by the clergy of Ireland. Such an acknowledgment Swift neither could nor would give : and thus the interview ended. Swift's disgust at the delay, the pompousness, the enigmatic utterances of the Lord Treasm-er, was not lessened when he found himself deceived either by Godolphin or by Pembroke. Chap.Y.] TEAES Oe WAITING AND SUSPENSE. 151 The deceits of Ministers may sometimes serve useful pur- poses of their own : they always give food for laughter to those whom they believe their dupesj Pembroke told Swift that he, and he only, was in charge of the matter under the Queen: Godolphin now told him that he had the papers and that the matter had long been before him. Between the two, Swift could only wait and indulge liis contempt, in suspense : and do what he could to save his Church from the odium of a suspected Toryism, without allowing her to drift into adopting all the maxims of the Whiggish creed. At times the point seemed to be gained. Swift was made to believe that the First Fruits and Twentieth parts were actually granted, and he informed the Archbishop of the fact. When the hottest months came on and London emptied, all the world waiting for the result of the siege of Lille, that was to decide the future of the war. Swift went with the world into the country. For six weeks he was absent in Kent,* and then returned for a few days to town before going to the fashionable resort of Epsom, where the Court went to drmk the waters. On the evening he came to town from Kent, the n ews of Prince George's death on the 28th of October (1708) greeted him. The changes that followed, contributed largely to the new attitude which Swift soon assumed, and to the new energy with which he now applied himself, after these years of doubt and hesitation, to defend the views he held. * He writes on the 20th of October, to hear of Philips' arriral, and how he to Ambrose Philips, whose feeble verse hopes soon to join him in town. The and facile time-serring had not yet dis- letter was first printed by Nichols in gusted Swift, to say how pleased he is \n.& Illustrations of Literature(^\y. 730). CHAPTEE VI. SWIFT'S VIEWS ON" CHURCH AND STATE MATURED. October, 1708— June, 1709. iETAT. 41. Swift waiting for the issue of the struggle — Results of the death of Prince George — Changes in the Ministry — Wharton as Lord Lieutenant — A scandal refuted — Swift drawing further from the Whigs — The question of the Test in Ireland — The Letter on the Sacramental Test — The change in Swift's views — "In suspense " — -Failure of his mission — Leaves London in disgust — Last visit [to his mother — Back in Ireland — Other Literary work of the year — Argwnent against Aholishviig Clirixtiaiiity — Its scope and meaning — Project for the Advancement of Religion — Its biographical importance— r/ic Sentiments of a Clmrch of England-Man — The principles it upholds — S^vif t on Despotism and Anarchy — His conception of Liberty — The humorous work of the year — Tlie Predictions for 1708 — The jokes on Partridge and their sequels— BickerstafE on his defence — Bickerstaffi in the Tatler — The Apology for the Tale of a Tui — Social incidents of his English visit — The circle of his friends — His picture by Jervas, in his prime. In the last chapter we saw Swift watching the shifting phases of the political struggle, and, as he watched, standing pui-posely aloof from all active interference. Meanwhile he cultivates the literary friendships that he had already formed, fiUs his leisure with the careless exercise of his lighter humom% or, j)assing to Laracor, busies himself with the quiet occupations that his garden and his canal afforded. Akeady Swift felt him- self to be out of joint with the Whig party. Soon he ceased to wait for the issue of the party struggle. The period of sus- pense was ending : that of active interference was near at hand. The death of Prince George of Denmark, which Swift learned on retiu-ning from his visit to the country, in October, 1708, was an epoch in the party struggle. It left the poor Queen, the only pathos in whose life is her utter loneliness, Chap. VI.] SWIFT'S VIEWS ON CHUECH AND STATE, 1^3 without the one tie which had at least apparent sincerity in it. Brainless, dull, and incompetent as he was, the Prince had at least more motive to be true to her interest than the crowd of hungry cormorants whose effusive adulation only thinly cloaked the speculations in which they discounted the results of her death. But sad as the loss was for her, it was a gain to the ministers. It checked complaints about the naval administra- tion. It gave places for new Whig adherents. Lord Pembroke was brought to the Admiralty, leaving room for Lord Somers as Lord President, and for Lord Wharton, as Governor of Ireland. No appointments could have marked more con- clusively the Whig alliance of the ministers. Pembroke, says Swift, had need of all his philosox^hy to console him for these changes : "he takes aU things mighty well," says Swift, " and we pun together as usual ; and he either makes the best use, or the best appearance with his philosophy of any man I ever knew." * To Swift, already disUldng Wharton, and, as it seems, distrusting Somers, the changes really involved a new, and distasteful, ministry.! * Sreift to Sean Sterne, Nov. 30, application, for reasons left you to 1708. guess." He then speaks of " an afEair . + Swift had not yet conceived the at Drogheda, which is made a bitter intensity of hatred for Wharton handle." Scott in a note explains this of which he has left the proof in words as referring to " some disputes in cor- that bum still : but that he had sus- poration affairs." In reality it picious, is peifectly clear, (see especi- referred to a, complaint of some tri- ally his letter to Archbishop Eing of fling hardship suffered by a Presby- NoT. 30th, 1708.) That letter has been terian minister (see Scott, VIII. 358). strangely misinterpreted. From be- "I hope you are prepared," Swift ginning to end it is clearly written in goes on, " to take off the sacramental a spirit of strong antagonism to the test, because that will be a means to Presbyterians, and of equally strong have it taken off here ; " a sarcastic suspicion of the inclinations of the reference to what he deemed an iU ministers to help the Presbyterians. tendency, likely to spread. Further In a previous letter, the Archbishop on he speaks with evident irony of had advised Swift to come over with the " moderation," which Swift held Wharton. Swift here speaks of the to be wanton carelessness, of Whar- chaplaincy, and the manner in which ton's secretary, who would go to it has been filled up : adding " Tour church or meeting-house, indifferently, friend {i.e. Swift himself) ■ made no Scott quotes a note, in which Luson 154 . LIFE OF JONATHAN SVIFT. [1708—1709. But a story has been told of his relations to Wharton, which involves a charge of baseness and ingratitude against Swift. That he detested Wharton most cordially is clear : but could it be asserted with truth that Swift poured out aU the bitter- ness of his satire only because Wharton refused to him a post for which he supplicated, we should have to shape Swift's character anew. Yet Dr. Salter of Charter -house long after published in the Gentleman's Magazine, a story, supported by letters which he asserted himself to have seen, to the effect that Swift had turned upon Wharton, because AVharton refused to make him chaplain at Lord Somers's intercession. He had seen, he says, Lord Somers's letters : he had seen Swift's original application and his letter of thanks for Somers's inter- cession : and finally he could vouch for Wharton's reply to the intercession, in the words: "My Ijord, we must not prefer these fellows : we have not character enough ourselves." It might be enough to say that Salter himself appears to have been a man from whom common accm-acy was not to be expected.* But fortunately, in this instance his falsity is proved. To begin with. Swift's first prejudice agaiast Wharton was conceived at his earliest interview, shortly before the Earl went to Ireland — an interview that had been sought, onlj' in order that Swift might lay before the Viceroy his appH- cation on behalf of the Irish Church, t Next, Swift distinctly denies, in a private letter, (written without the least thought of meeting this scandal, which was not started till after his own death,) that he made any application at all for the chaplaincj-.^! had expressed his surprise that Swift very shallow coxcomb : " "a poor should hare praised aWhig, and corrects prattler," one whose character was it by saying that Swift now called him- sufficiently known to command little self a Whig. But in truth there is no respect. praise, but only irony in the para^ t See Memoirs relating to tlie graph. Swift still tried to believe Cliange in the Queen's Ministry in himself a Whig : but his detestation 1710 : Scott, iii. 189. See also Sivift of the Church principles of the Whigs to ArclMsliop King, 26 March, 1709. was becoming each day more strong. J S7mft to Archbishop King, 30 * He is called by Bishop Percy " a Nov. 1708. Chap. VI.] SWIFT'S VIEWS OK CHUECH AND STATE. 155 Thirdly, he tells us himself of a letter from Lord Somers to Lord Wharton on his behalf : but he also tells us the fate of that- letter. It was first of aU refused by Swift : when left by Lord Somers at Swift's lodgings, it was not given by him to Lord Wharton before his departure from London : and when it was- finally delivered in Dublin, Swift "immediately withdrew," as- if to show that he desired to reap no advantage from it.* During the autumn of the next year, he continued to keep at a distance from the vice-regal court, although on good terms- with Addison, Wharton's secretary, t Finally he writes to Lord Halifax, in November, 1709, t recalling with gratitude Lord Somers's previous countenance, and trusting it may continue,, but shewing no such impatience as would argue disappoint- ment and distrust ; nor referring in any way whatever to an. affair the impression of which would have been fresh in his- mind had it ever happened as reported. The calumny is of a type common in the life of Swift. Its- only real foundation lay in the facts, that some friends had suggested to him the chaplaincy : that Lord Somers had possibly asked it for him, though against Swift's will : that Swift had thanlced Somers for previous kindness : and that he turned, soon after, with bitter anger upon Wharton. For each of these facts there is the clearest explanation : but it has pleased slanderers of Swift to seize uj)on any plausible oppor- tunity to satisfy their ill-will, by accusing him of acts the most unlike his character. Even slandei', they forget, must have a. certain appropriateness in its falsehoods, if it is not to be self- condemned. Intense as it was. Swift's bitterness was never j)altry. But while Swift's sarcasm had no such ignoble origin, it is certain that Lord Wharton was the first to stir the full bitter- * Memoirs relating to the Change, autumn of 1709. (Scott, XV. 347.) &c. (Scott, iii. 190.) X The letter was first printed in + Zbidem. See also Letter from Cunningham's edition of the " Lives of Addison to Swift, written in the the Poets " (ISSi), vol. iii., p. 202. 156 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1708—1709. ness of his anger, and that his feeling towards Wharton hastened his breach with the Whigs. There were two motives now impelling him to this. He was angry that no progress was made with his petition for the First Fruits : and he was afraid that the Whigs were seeking to confer favours on the Presbyterians, by the abolition of the Test. The former annoyed him partly on account of the slight laid upon himself ; the latter, solely because of the evil it would do to his Church, The Irish Dissenters were straining every nerve to undo the Act of 1703. The friends of the Church were anxious lest they might be successful. Swift was resolute against any yielding up of the principle of a Test ; and to this position he continued steadfast throughout his life. But he was stiU un- prepared to break completely with the Whigs. So little is he inclined to any inconsistency of tlie kind, that he feels it need- ful, not to protest the fidelity of his political allegiance, but rather to represent to his friends that his attachment to the Whig party will never betray him into anj' abandonment of the privileges of the Church.* Partly with the view of getting rid of the perplexities gathering round him, he turns his thoughts in a direction whimsical enough. Lord Berkeley is going as Envoy to Vienna, and Swift thinks of accepting his offer of the Secretary- ship of the Legation. Anything — even Laracor — was better than to continue to be mixed up with the action of the Wlugs, if they " carried things too far." t To go to Vienna would give him breathing time. He would have the comfortable provision of two guineas a day : and he might wait for the ripening of events and the prospect of advancement in the Chiu-ch without loss of principle. Lord Berkeley's embassy, however, was abandoned, and Swift never set out on a mission * " No prospect of making my Plainly, Swift expected to be classed fortune, shall ever prevail on me to as a Whig. Sivift to Archbishop King, go against what becomes a man of Nov. 9, 1708. conscience and truth, and an entire t Sivift to Arclideacon Walls, Nov. riend to the established Church." 9, 1708 (Mr. Murray's MS.) Chap. VI.] SWIFT'S YIEWS ON CHTJECH AND STATE. 157 ■which might have given so strangely different a colour to his life. But at home, he was rendered every day more uneasy by the evident intentions of the Government : and in the month of December 1708, (while still in London,) he wrote the Letter on the Sacramental Test, in the character of an Irish member of Parliament, dating from Dubhn. It was one of a series of tracts, which help us to appreciate Swift's position at this time. Brought out with aU his usual solicitude to conceal the authorship, the tract was readily enough recognised as his.* There was no mistaking its terms. It was a clear challenge to those who wished to abolish the Test : a clear appeal to logic against toleration : a clear renunciation of party allegiance, if such a sacrifice of principle as the abandonment of the Test were demanded by that allegiance. It is useless to deny that Swift's views had undergone a certain change from the day when he wrote to Tisdall f that it was not worth while to struggle with the Presbyterians : from the day when he began to write a pamphlet against the Bill which proposed to forbid Occasional Conformity,! and quoted Somers and Burnet, as authorities whose support of such con- formity proved it to be advantageous for the Church. § ' But it is grossly unjust to accuse Swift of any lack of principle in making the change. In the iirst place he now saw the PreS' * In his letter to Archbishop King, likely to be merely a rvso on the part of 6th January, 170§, Swift makes an of Swift. It did not deceive the effort, it may be half -humorous, to Archbishop. In his letter to Swift of disclaim the authorship, by speaking 10th February, he agrees with Swift's of the tract as one of which " some judgment concerning the tract — parts are very well, others puerile, and perhaps a little maliciously. But he some facts, as I am informed, wrong goes on :" You need not be concerned : represented." The author, he says, I will engage you will lose nothing has reflected upon Swift himself, as by that paper." His belief as to the nnfavourable to the Test. It is just author could not well be more clearly possible that this may have been in expressed. the page which Morphew omitted in + Swift to Tisdall. Feb. 3, 170^. the edition of 1711, and which cannot J Ihidcm. now be discovered. But it is more § Sivift to Tisdall. Dec. 16, 1703. 158 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1708—1709. iDj'terians, vastly increased in power and in pretensions. Next, he found, or fancied that he found, the Whig party buying a ■political advantage by the bait of toleration to the Presbyterian y a person of things no7v stand, lie attended with Quality : and Tlie Sentiments of a some inconvcniencies, and perhaps not Church of England-Man, nuth Re- produce those many good effects, pro- sped to Religion and Government Chap. VI.] SWIFT^S VIEWS ON CHURCH AND STATE. 163 he is concerned with it only as an instrument to tame the unruly, as a code which gives its sanction to morals, as a dogma which discourages the flimsy pretences of originahty, and as a system that sets a limit to the pursuit of the un- profitable jargon of philosophy. In the Tale of a Tub he had given a loose rein to his humour in the treatment of religion : in the Project for the Advancement of Religion he deals with it .as a system of police. Finding the subtlety of his humour misintei-preted, he is resolved to write so that the most prosaic .could have no pretext for misinterpreting what he said. It is curious, as supporting the view that Swift's separation fromi the Whigs was a gradual process, begun before he recog- nised it, and depending upon no personal or selfish motive, that, in after days, he looked back upon these tracts as bolts aimed at the government of the day. He then felt as if the opinions they expressed, had been out of harmony with the pronounced aims of Godolphin's ministry. But so far was this from being the case, that Swift was then reckoned, by others and by himself, as a Whig: and read apart from the light which his later life throws on them, the tracts have no party bias against the Whigs, unless the spirit of defiance shewn on behalf of his own order, were to be so interpreted. The Argument against Abolishing Christianity has an interest far beyond that of any passing controversy. The sweep of its irony is as strong, as unrelenting, as unvarying, as that of a whirlwind. There is no fitful gust, no lapse into fretfulness or anger, no break in the perfection of the assumed tone of apology, and of judicial expostulation. But the apparent' lightness of touch only thinly disguises the seriousness of the sarcasm. At the outset he ventures, with a semblance of timidity, to assert his dissent from the general consensus of opinion in favour of abolishing Christianity. But it is with the hesitation and modesty befitting one who holds a paradox so scandalous : and as if afraid of his own assertion, he hastens to guard against misinterpretation, by disclaiming any idea so M 2 164 LIFE OF JONATHAN SVIFT. [1708—1709, insane as that of defending real Christianity, such as may at any time have produced an effect on men's belief and actions. This, indeed, is proper only for an uncivilized age : but its dangers, he thinks, are only so many arguments in favour of maintaining the conventional fiction that now prevails. If men are not allowed a God to revile and renounce, they may be tempted "to reflect upon the Ministry." That any real belief could be propagated by accepting the fiction, ought not to be asserted : it is a reflection upon the wisdom of the' nation. The financial aspect of the question is doubtless an important one, but not so clearly decisive of the matter as would seem. No doubt it costs a good deal to maintain ten thousand parsons, and a score of bishops : but these parsons have their uses : their diet is moderate enough to let them breed a healthy progeny: and it may be well not to let the tainted wits and men of fashion reduce the world tO' one great hospital. Nor would these revenues suffice to keep a hundred gentlemen of fashion, as " easy " in their circum- stances (for this is the cant phrase) as they must needs be on any fair calculation. The offer of such scanty support might even offend their dignity. As for the argument that one day in seven is lost by the practice of Christianity, this is paltry cavil. Sunday serves excellently for a dose of physic : the wits need not make the course of their life different on that day : and churches, even should they resort to them, serve the purposes of assignations, rather better than any other places that could be named. But a stronger objection to Christianity remains behind. Religion gives rise to sect and party : and sect and party are certainly inconvenient. By all means, he is ready to admit, abolish Christianity if you will tlierebj' destroy sects. But can you do so ? Is there nothing in human nature that would pro- duce sects, even though Christianity had never been heard of? If we abolish its name, can we be sure that the plague will dis- appear ? If there was no word for Ij'ing, would men be Chat. YI.] SAVIFT'S VIEWS ON CHUECH AND STATE. 165 truthful ? If diseases had no names, would men be sound ? "Will you satisfy dissenters, if you throw down the walls, and let them enter at their own sweet will ? Swift's answer tells much of his judgment on his fellow men. " To all this I answer : tliat there is one darling inclination of mankind, which usually affects to be a retainer to religion, though she be neither its parent, its godmother, nor its friend : I mean the spirit of opposition, that lived long before Christianity, and can easily subsist without it. Let us, for instance examine, ■wherein the opposition of sectaries among us consists : we shall find Christianity to have no share in it at all. Does the Gospel anywhere prescribe a starched squeezed countenance, a stiff, formal gait, a .-singularity of manners and habit, or any affected forms and modes of speech, different from the reasonable part of mankind ? Yet, if Christianity did not lend its name, to stand in the gap, and to employ or divert these humours, they must of necessity be spent in contraventions of the laws of the land, and disturbance of the public peace. There is a portion of enthu- •siasm assigned to every nature, which, if it hath not proper objects to work on, will burst out and set all into a flame. If the quiet of a state can be bought by only flinging men a few ceremonies to devour, it is a purchase 310 wise man would refuse." On the whole, he believes that he has ground for hesitating to accept the ordinarj^ belief in the expediency of abolishing Christianity. " Whatever," he goes on, " some may think of the great advantages to trade of this favourite scheme, I do •vevy much apprehend, that in six months' time, after the Act is passed for the extirpation of the Gospel, the Bank and East India Stock may fall at least one per cent. And since that is fifty times more than ever the wisdom of our age thought fit to venture for the preservation of Christianity, there is no reason we should be at so great a loss, merely for the sake of destroying it." Is the sarcasm here chiefly against the sceptic who would sweep away Christianity ? Or is it against the conventional .artificialities that pass for religion ? Or is it against the essential shallowness of human nature that makes these artificialities all that we can compass ? It would be hard to ■say : perhaps Swift himself scarcely knew which thought was 166 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1708—1709. uppermost. But the strength of his assault, whatever was its chief object, comes from the rigid tenacity of his creed. He made his Service to his Church that of a soldier to his countiy,* and refused to look behind an order. The post was his to defend : and sarcasm was the weapon in Ms hands wherewith to guard it. The Project for the Advancement of Belie/ion, if it has less general interest, is of even more biographical importance. It is written in the character of a "Person of Quality,"! and is dedicated to Lady Berkeley, the wife of Swift's patron, for whose behoof the Meditation on a Broom Stick had been written a few years before. For the first time Swift is, so far as we can tell, didactic and nothing else : but his didactic manner is unique. It is hard to say whether there is some lurking sarcasm, or whether the tract is written simplj- as it jsrofesses to be, to convej'' gravely a proposal for social reformation. We have no right to assume a sarcastic reference when none is even hinted at : but, on the other hand, we can scarcelj' avoid detecting some irony in its grave propounding of superficial * " The -want of belief is a defect so, have approTecl it. It is wiitten wliich ought to be concealed, when it with the spirit of one who has scenj cannot be OYercome." " I look upon the world enough to underTalue it myself, in the capacity of a clergyman, with good-breeding. The author must to be one appointed by Providence certainly be a man of wisdom as well for defending a post assigned me." as piety, and have spent much time in Thovglits on Itdigion. Scott's 2nd the exercise of both. The real causes- Edition, Tol. VIIL, p. 55. of the decay of the interest of religion t There is a special interest in what are set forth in a clear and lively Steele says of it in the Tatler, dating manner, withoutunseasonablepassions;: on April 20th, 1709, from Wills' Coffee- and the whole air of the book, as to house. " This week being sacred to the language, the sentiments and the holy things, and no public diversions reasonings, shews it was written by allowed, there has been taken notice one whose virtue sits easy about him, of even here, a little Treatise, called and to whom vice is thoroughly con- ' A Project for the Advancement of temptible. It was said by one of this Religion : dedicated to the Countess company, alluding to that knowledge of Berkeley.' The title was so un- of the world the author seems to have, common, and promised so peculiar a the man writes much like a gentleman, way of thinking, that every man here and goes to Heaven with a very good has read it, and as many as have done mien.' ' Chap. VI.] SWIFT'S VIEWS OX CHUKCH AND STATE. 167 remedies for sores that have eaten deep into the flesh. Virtue, according to his proposal, is to be propped up by religion : and both are to be ensured by a sort of habit, by a forced obedience to convention. Open disregard of morality is to be discouraged by social penalties, and so men are to become virtuous, by virtue becoming fashionable. Neglect of ordinances is to be punished, and so men are to become religious, by con- straint. No one but Swift could have written in such a strain without degenerating into cant, or wearing his cynicism on his sleeve. Swift does neither. He clearly felt then, as he felt all his life long, that men were to be driven, not led : that they must be bidden to assume a virtue, if they had it not, and that to argue or speculate upon the grounds and motives of morality, was a waste of time. He lays bare, with an almost callous dehberation, the cankers of society — the abuses of the magistrature, the perversions of justice, the dishonesty of trade, the rascality of lawyers, the defects of education, and the vices of fashion. But having done so, he makes no perfervid appeal to higher principles. Obey rule and convention, be orderly, avoid giving scandal^ — this is the duty of the members of society : to enforce this, the duty of the civil magistrate. This is the lesson, he seems to saj^, which it is most expedient to teach : this the ideal, he seems to feel, which, poor as it may be, is the highest you can attain. The tract obtained what was ever the foremost aim of Swift, the attention of his own day. Men of the world paused to listen to one who was felt, in the words of Steele, " to write like a gentleman, and to go to Heaven with a very good mien." Swift knew that religion would never prevail by the cant of a false humility, or by a forced and technical style of its own, that proclaimed its alienation from ordinary humanity. With set purpose, then, he relinquished such tricks. This and the Letter on the Sacramental Test are both more or less contentious. Directed against certain abuses in society, and certain errors in politics, they have the hold cut and 168 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1708-1709. slash of political polemics, even though they professedly spoke for no party at the moment. In the third of these pamphlets of 1708, that on The Sentiments of a Church of England-Man with respect to Religion and Government, there is a judicial air scarcely to be paralleled in any other of Swift's works. It avowedly takes the same view of the rehgious question as that adopted in the Project for the Advancement of Religion. In the one as in the other, Swift spends little care or thought over the details of a creed, the spiritual conditions it produces, the emotions it excites, or the speculations upon which it rests. He is concerned only with its effect upon the conduct of the individual : with its place as a factor in society. In regard to religion he is perfectly definite. Dissenters are to have tolera- tion, but toleration is not to be supposed to involve equality. He refuses to discuss the question of the abstract truth or false- hood of this or that creed ; such a question would be foreign to his conception of the principle at stake. The expediency of State maintenance of religion was, as Swift knew, scarcely disputed by any in his day. But it was to be justified in principle only on the ground of the pubhc welfare : and if the creed which the state maintained, were not worthy of such preference as would exclude dissent, this justification vanished. Comprehension he treats as impossible : it would, as he shews, simplj'- imply a re-casting of the national creed at each of the new departures of dissent. Such an argument rests upon foundations which would not now be currently accepted : but it is unquestionably logical so far as it goes. Its logic, however, discards all sympathy, either with religion, or with the speculations by which religion may be affected : and treats of it only as a matter of state policy and nothing else.* * Swift did not, of course, pro- proved, for all practical purposes. He fessedly admit the principle that the distinctly renounces, elsewhere, " the Christian religion was a system of atheistical notion, that religion is only police, with whose abstract truth we a contrivance of politicians for keep- were not concerned. He simply re- ing the vulgar in awe." (Bxamiiner, fused to discuss it, holding it as No. XXIX.) But his rigid refusal to Chap. VI.] SWIFT'S VIEWS ON CHUfiCH AND STATE. l69 But while Swift maintains thus rigidly the privileges of his church, his creed involves no divine right in a hierarchy, admits, indeed, no other hasis for it than expediency alone. So it is with state government. He exposes with admirable skill the fallacies upon which notions of divine right, and absolute prerogative, and the so-called sovereign power, are based.* He shews that Hobbes, in his defence of absolutism, was merely misled by terms : that in claiming supremacy for the sovereign power, he was only asserting what was inherent in the verjr name : but that he erred in identifying with the name the executive power vested in the monarch, rather than the legislative power which is properly supreme. He defends the theory of the Revolution, as implying the right of resistance, and shews that no theory can be invented for it, which can divest it of its real meaning of a re-grant of authority from the people. To us this may seem a truism : but in maintaining it we must not forget that Swift was defending what was, in his days, a hotlj"- attacked position. He exposes the absurdity of passive obe- dience : and]unquestionably, so far, at least, as civil affairs are concerned, he dreads the non-resistance theories of the Tories, even more than the possible extravagances of the Whigs. Anarchy is better, he says, than despotism : " as much as a savage is a happier state of life than a slave at the oar."i But the pamphlet also makes clear — and this is no slight indication of Swift's attitude to his fellow men — what it was that he understood by liberty. He was one of those to whom a real liberty, which outward forms may help or may destroy, but which they never can create, was the very breath of life. For this alone, Swift strove : but, more than once, as he struggled tolerate argument on the question, through, the ordeal of being a sworn brought him nearer to the latter posi- confederate of Toryism, tion than he would himself have been t The inaccuracy of expression ready to admit. here is characteristic of Swift's prose. * Fallacies which, as we shall find, Terse and expressive as it is, it is he opposes with equal decision long often technically and grammatically afterwards, when he had passed incorrect. 170 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1708—1709. for it, he fancied that he was struggling for popular liberty, with its strangely different aims. The objects and desires of that popular liberty, he, in his heart, despised. What he sought for, was a freedom of compelling assent to his own opinion, as implicit as he felt that his intellectual superiority deserved. The religion of the state could not really force Swift to limit the range of his own thought : but he had forced himself to recognise a dogmatic creed as expedient, and thus steeled liimself against showing any tolerance for others' doubts. If their betters were not galled bj^ dogma, dissenters could not expect the state to submit its creed to their judgment, though exercised in the name of liberty. It is much the same in the domain of civil government. In spite of his avowed dislike of tyranny, there are possible dangers in the Revolution against which he would guard. The sovereign, he says, must not place himself at the mercy of one j)olitical partj^ To do so would be to allow to faction too much power. But as, year by year, it became more evident that this was just what the Revolution had made inevitable, so Swift's sjmipathies, un- consciously to himself, took, with greater definiteness, an opposite course. He abhorred the power of an oligarchical faction, in his heart, far more than the arbitrary despotism of a monarch, which was already a thing of the past. Yet he still spoke of himself as resisting tyranny, when what he really resisted was the predominant success of the Whigs, with their sophisms and insincerities, with their specious pretences to be the defenders of the libertj', that, in the sense in which Swift understood the word, they really destroyed. * From these pamphlets, with their more serious, bearing on the life of Swift, it is a relief to turn to a happier flight of his humour. In January or February of ITOy he wrote his " Predictions for the year 1708." The occasion has been often * This tract, expressive as it is of when he was looking back over a large Swift's views in 170S, should be com- part of his political career, in 1720. pared with the Letter to Pope, -(vi-itten See chap. Sill. Chap. YI.] SAVIFT'S. VIEWS OK CHUECH AND STATE. 171 told. John Partridge was a shoemaker who had practised successfully on the superstitions of the time, and had attained some notoriety, from the days of Charles II. down to those of Anne. He seems to have joined together the trades of quacli,. of extortioner, and of "philomath," which was the name by which he and his confreres imposed upon the vulgar. He was- now the publisher of the Merlinus Liheratus, and had con- trived to gain some notoriety, apparently even beyond the- shores of England. Swift may have been irritated by the- quackery of mountebanks such as Partridge : but more pro- bably he merely saw in the popular superstition an opportunity for a stroke of humour. With the most demure gravity, he' issued Predictions for the ensuing year, in the name of Isaac. Bickerstaif, a surname he was said to have taken from a black- smith's sign. He has no intention of discrediting astrology ; but. desires only to expose the absurdities of the pretended astrolo- gers who have degraded the science as Partridge has done. They were vague and timid, and uttered prophecies which any turn of events could equally explain : but Bickerstaff is bold in the minuteness and detail of his information, giving the public, how- ever, only an instalment of his lucubrations, and keeping others,, — so deep is his sense of political responsibility — in reserve. He is not too positive. Like a wise prophet, he knows there are limits to his science, and that though the stars affect the incli- nation of men, their influence must at times yield to reason. He will not, therefore, assert too positively that his prophecies may not be subject to modifications, but in the main he will submit them to the speedy test of actual events. The first pro- phecy, he says, is indeed trifling enough : it relates merely to Partridge the almanac-maker. " I have," says Bickerstaff, " consulted the stars of his nativity by my own rules, and find he win infallibly die upon the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever : therefore I advise him to consider of it, and settle his affairs in time." This "trifle " is, of course, the central point of the piece ; 172 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1708—1709. Lut Partridge finds himself in good company. The archbishoj) of Paris is to die on the 4th of April : the Dauphin is to die of strangury on the 7th of May ; and Louis XIV. himself, is to die at six in the evening of the 29th of July. The stock of prophecies is liberal enough : and it is left for time to determine ■what is their truth. It is hard to conceive how any one can liave failed to detect the jest : but as a fact it was accepted in good faith. Swift followed it up forthwith by a Letter to a Person of Honour, in which Partridge's death on the 29th of March is described. His repentance is most edifying. He feels his end near, and ■"repents his fooleries from the very bottom of his heart." He explains, in the sincerity of a death-bed confession, how his almanac was constructed. He did it only because, "he had no other way to gain his bread, and mending old shoes was a poor livelihood." He is troubled by the thought that he may liave hurt even more by his quack physic, than by his false astrology. The jest was now fully started : and it was carried on by ■other hands than Swift's, aided by the strange credulity that accepted Bickerstaff as real. The Inquisition in Portugal ordered his book to be burned. The Stationers' Hall struck the dead Partridge from their rolls : and Partridge himself was furious, not at the travesty of his own predictions, but at the mistaken prophecies of Bickerstaff. Bickerstaff became the favourite of the town : and the most amusing contribution to the current topic vsras the answer published in Partridge's name under the title of " Squire Bickerstaff detected." This was written most probably by Thomas Yalden,* with the assist- * The Eev. Thomas Talden was a been indebted to him for assistance fellow of Magdalen College, where he in his prose. Yalden was afterwards Tiad as friends Addison and Sach- involved for a time in the suspicion everell. A story seems to have been of being connected with Atterbury's set on foot at Oxford, of some plot. His chief distinction is liis jjlagiarisms he had committed, from appearance in Johnson's Lives of the Congreve's poems : bo he may also have Poets. Chap. VI.] SWIFT'S VIEWS ON CHUECH AND STATE. 173- ance of Congreve, and possibly also of Nicliolas Eowe, It is, in fact, no answer at all, but an indignant protest against the sufferings to which the hapless philomath has been subjected. He hears the bell tolling for him : the undertaker calls to arrange for the hangings : the sexton wants to know whether his grave is to be plain or bricked. His best friends expostu- late with him on his unneighbourly conduct in keeping his death a secret even to them : and tell him that it looks a little like disaffection to the church. It is indecent, they urge, that he should be frightening people'at his window,'when he ought to have been in his coffin these three hours. "Worse and worse, when he ventures out, it is only to be dunned by the sexton and the undertaker for the expenses of his burial, or to be stared at, as a ghost. The Parish Clerk, "discreet and sober" as he is, has sent two or three times, and begged him to come and be buried decently, or else to produce a certificate of burial elsewhere, as the Act requires. The jest might even now have died out, had not the veritable Partridge revived it, by his almanac for 1709. There he insisted on the denial of his death, with some vehemence : and decried the pretensions of the new claimant to astrological lore. This gave Swift another opportunity. Isaac Bickerstaff now wrote a tract in his own vindication, in his usual style of grave and moderate expostulation. Mr. Partridge might at least, he thinks, have been more civil in his language, when the point on which they differed was a merelj^ speculative one. The cause of true philosophy is injured by such treatment : it has shocked the susceptibilities of the learned abroad. He has indeed been contradicted by a Frenchman. But can he be expected to stoop to vindicate himself against a French- man, a Papist, and an enemy ? As for Mr. Partridge's denial of his own death, it is against all proof. A thousand readers of his almanac declare " that no man alive ever writ such damned stuff." Partridge's wife has herself said that he has "neither life nor soul." If an ill-informed carcase still 174 LIFE OF JONATHAX SWIFT. [1708—1709. walks about, and calls itself Partridge, is tliat Mr. Bickerstaff's (fault ? Partridge declares that he is alive now, and was so on ihe 29th of March. But surely this is cavilling : it implies that he need not have been living all through the interval : •and that he was not so living is all that Bickerstaff said. He cannot, out of regard to himself, refrain from a com- Iplaint of the Letter to the Person of Honour, that told of Partridge's death. Bickerstaff is there said to have made a mistake of four whole hours. He is sorry to have to refer to the matter : he would not willingly have thought about it further : but after careful inquiry he finds he was wrong, at the most, by half-an-hour. He hopes this need raise no •clamour : but that the author will in future be a little more tender of other men's reputation as well as his own. Thus ended the jest, so far as Swift and his friends were concerned, save for a short broadsheet which he issued in 1709, with a pretended black-letter prophecy of Merlin. Partridge was bewildered ; but however ignorant Partridge continued to be, Swift's authorship was well known to his friends. Bickerstaff became his recognised title : and it was appropriated by Steele, with Swift's full permission, in order to make the fortune of the new venture on which Steele was now starting, in the Tatlcr* From April, 1709, tni January, 1710, the lucubi-ations of Isaac Bickerstaff kept the attention of the town. Swift aided his friend, sometimes with hints, sometimes with actual contribu- tions : and when he issued the first volume, Steele acknow- ledged the help he had received from the borrowing of the name. In closing the whole series, Steele again referred, and this time bj"- name, to Swift, to whose " uncommon way of thinking " and to the " peculiar turn of whose conversation " * " It happened very luckily that a and by an inimitable spirit and hu- little before I had resolved upon this mour, raised it to as high a pitch of design, a gentleman had written pre- reputation as it could possibly arrive dictions and two or three pieces in at." Dedication to first volume of the my name, which had rendered it Tatler. Steele was rash enough soon famous through all parts of Europe ; to call down that humour on himself. ■Ghap. VI.] SWIFT'S VIEWS 01^ CHURCH AND STATE. 175 lie was so much indebted.* It is by siicli casual words of ■description as these, that we can appreciate the sort of estimate -which Swift's humour extorted from his contemporaries. Just before he quitted England, Swift was occupied with another literary, episode. The Tale of a Tub had already run through four editions : and a fifth was about to be issued by Tooke. It did not actually appear till 1710, but the Apology which was published in it, for the first time, is dated June, 1709. Swift allows the immaturity and possible rashness of his work. But he will not allow that it was irreverent : he will not allow that his treatment of religion is objectionable to any for whose judgment he cares. He dwells on his defence with something of iteration. He even condescends to explain allusions, and to interpret his irony. He shows that free ridicule of false pretensions is no new thing in dealing with religion : that it had been the express object, amongst others, of the author t of the letter on Enthusiasm, which had attracted so much notice on its appearance in 1708. To those who have attacked it, he shews, generally, the leniency of contempt. They are, he says, with necessary con- sciousness of his own genius, " like annuals that grow about a jroung tree, and seem to vie with it for a summer, but fall and die with the leaves in autumn, and are never heard of more." The horse-play of William King, I the civilian, who had written some rough remarks on the Tale, did not prevent Swift's later kindliness to the author ; and the attempt moves him only to a mild expostulation with King, for having " writ against the * Preface to fourth volume of the , % This is the second of the trio of Tatler. William Kings, who come across f The third Earl of Shaftesbury. Swift's path. He was an easy and His authorship was still anonymous : somewhat slipshod wit, who had and Swift curiously enough ascribes joined the Christ Church faction in the Letter, which in the Apology he the Boyle and Bentley controversy, says he never read, to his friend Colo- and who was afterwards joined with nel Hunter, the Governor of Virginia. Swift in the Examiner, and profited Swift to Colonel Hunter. Jan. 12, by his patronage when in need. We 1708. shall come across him again. 176 LIFE OF JONATHAN SVIFT. [1708—1709. conviction of his own talent, and entered upon one of the wrongest attempts in nature, to turn into ridicule, by a week's labour, a work which had cost so much time, and met with so much success in ridiculing others." To Wotton,* his more erudite opponent, he is ready to pardon his invective : his comments have, says Swift with quiet irony, done much service in elucidation. We have lingered over his political relations and his literary occupations, during a period so critical. But his social life also, stands out, side by side with this, in much vividness of detail. Early m his own visit, Esther Johnson had come with Rebecca Dingley for some months to London. It was the last time that she visited England, and we know of her visit t only hj Swift's casual reference to it in a letter to Archdeacon Walls, on the 22nd of January, ITOf, + and again in a letter to Dean Sterne, § where he speaks of Stella's dog Pug, and his escapades when they took him to Greenwich Park. Addison, Steele, Congreve, Rowe, and Prior, were all amongst his friends ; Lord Berkeley and his family were in the immediate neighbour- hood of London, in their classic home at Cranford.|| Anthony Henley of the Grange vouchsafed his friendship ; and Halifax, once the fellow-worker, now the patron, of literary men, attempted, as we have seen, without much success, to make Swift succumb to his influence, and paj^ incense at his * Sec above, Chap. IV. || Scott prints a letter from Lord + This visit was unnoticed by Berkeley to Swift, inviting him to Swift's biographers, until Mr. Forster Cranford, and urging him to give a brought it to light, by means of Mr. copy of a work he had just completed Murray's MSS. to the Archbishop of York for pre- J Mr. Murray's MSS. " The ladies sentation to the Queen. It is curious of St. Mary's," he writes to Walls, that Scott, who rightly conjectures the " are well, and talk of going to Ireland book to have been the Pvojcct for in spring. But Mrs. Johnson cannot tlie Advancement of Rclig ion, illo (another of his sort)." t There is a letter written by Swift J The whole tenor of the Fmr Last to Ambrose Philips on Oct. 30, 1709, Years of the Queen, a,-adi of the Change which tells us something of his feel- in tJie Queen's Ministry, proves this, ings at this time. He is cultivating But even earlier, Swift (Journal, Chap. YIL] THE FALL OF THE "WHIGS. 185- Just ten days before the opening of Parliament, on the 5tL of November, a sermon had been preached before the Lord Mayor and Aldermen at St. Paul's, which, for no merit of its- own, was to attract an attention and to work results, allotted to few productions of its class. The preacher was- Dr. Sacheverell, of St. Saviour's, Southwark, to whom a good voice and a fine presence, with the most extreme of High Chm'ch doctrine, had already brought some notoriety. One sermon he had preached at St. Mary's, Oxford, on the 11th of September, 1707, upon the guilt and danger of presump- tuous sins, in a style sometimes smart, but always vulgar, coarse, and tawdrj^, and often as regardless of grammar as of sense ; trusting for attraction to that constant political refer- ence which pleased the taste of the day. Speaking of hypo- crisy, he cannot refrain from specifying a type of it, in "that quintessence of fanaticism, occasional conformitj'." It was a form of presumptuous sin against which few of his audience stood in need of warning.* Another sermon was preached by him in August of this year (1709), at the opening of the assizes at Derby. His vigour of style had rapidly increased, along with the directness of his political allusions. The subject was the " Communication of Sin : " and the sin whose contagion is most clearly depicted, is that of Dissent. " The execrable miscreants Arius and Socinus," he tells his audience, "rotten in their graves, still stink above the ground, and live again in a hellish transmigra- tion of their damnable heresies." He calls up for judgment. " the atheistical monsters Hobbes and Spinoza, side by side August 24, 1711) acknowledged how potent and vanquished by wine and. much the Tory ministers owed to women, strive after vice with their Sacheverell, unwilling as they were to decayed and rotten constitutions."' admit it. Yet sentences even worse, which can * It seems strange that a University hardly he quoted even in secular audience could have been pleased with pages, are frequent. This fact, as shew- a style which sought strength by ing the taste— or the leniency— of the touches such as this : " Old men, day, must not be forgotten in judging- emerit in the Devil's service, left im- of what to us is coarse in Swift's style. 186 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1709—1710. with the illiterate and scandalous wretch Fox, with his dia- bolical Inspiration; and the two or three Jesuits in masquerade, who crept into a conventicle, and rose in a few years to grasp the crown and upset Church and State." The same hands, his audience were warned, were now at work. But the sermon now under notice, and by far the most important in its fruits, is the one preached on the 5th of November, which was printed at the request of the Lord Mayor.* It bore the title of " The Perils of False Brethren both in Church and State," and was avowedly a paiiy manifesto. "Without actually impugning the Eevolution, he strips off from it, so far as may be, aU notion of resistance. He shows how the doctrine of Non-resistance has been implicitly affirmed by all the great authorities of the Church. He points to what he conceives to be the end and aim of all these schemes of toleration, Hnked as they are with figments of original contract, in " a wild negative idea of a national Church : " a "hetero- geneous incorporating mixture : " "a pious idea of making our house of prayer a den of thieves." Those dissenters, who had persecuted the Church, who had enjoj'ed their day of triumph, and who now had fallen, were anxious to slip in by a back door. All this was a rough and reckless statement of the case ; but we must see what was set forth by Sacheverell, if we are to judge how a change soon came over the spirit of the nation, and how that change had the sympathy of Swift. Neither he nor any moderate men sympathised with exaggera- tions like those of Sacheverell. But the High Chmxh party had other and abler exponents than the preacher of St. Saviom-'s. It was gaining in its hold upon the nation, and in order to secure a majority, it had only to prove that the real and vital privileges of the Church were in danger. S^vift might condemn the whims of such as Sacheverell in England * The court of aldermen refused to But the sermon had been printed, concur in the Lord Mayor's request. before their refusal was known. Chap. VII.] THE FALL OF THE -WHIGS. 187 and Higgins in Ireland, but this did not make him blind to dangers which gave force to Sacheverell's rhodomontade. Even before the government took any action, Sacheverell's sermon raised a ferment. The preacher was answered, argued with, denounced, and libelled. Some of the replies exposed his faulty logic, his halting grammar, and his gross vulgarity. But others thought it needful to accuse him of flagrant vice. In the Modern Fanatic he was made the mark for the vilest scurrility : lewdness, drunkenness, profane swearing, and trea- sonable tendencies, are onty a few of the crimes laid to his charge. He is accused in one breath of undue haste in seeking the degree of Doctor of Divinity; of unfiUal neglect which left his mother dependent upon charity for support : of pos- sessmg a sanguine complexion ; and of habitual brawling. Such a confused mass of invective could have but one effect : it gained him a little sympathy, and much notoriety. The coping stone was put to the whole by the action of the govern- ment, in his prosecution. Two motives combined to prompt it : the ministers felt themselves waning in popularity ; and they attributed the weakening of their position to the efforts of the High Church party. They made no distinction between the moderate Churchman who simply defended his own privi- leges, and the fanatic who discredited the Revolution, and all but advocated treason. They were determined to do all they could to discredit the whole Church party through Sacheverell and his exaggerations. But in the case of Godolphin another motive was also at work. Volpone was the name used by Ben Jonson, and of common colloquial application, as a synonym for the man of fox-like cunning. Speaking of apparent, but false, Mends, Sacheverell had said, " In what moving and lively colours does the Psalmist point out the crafty insidiousness of such wUy Volpones." The reference to Godolphin was plain, from the already current application of the nick-name to him : and forty years of statecraft had not made Godolphin strong 188 LIFE OF JOJS'ATHAN SWIFT. [1709— 1710„ enough to despise it. If the application were doubtful, it was made more prominent hy the extraordinary awkwardness, of Burnet, who referred to it, not obscurely, in the House of Lords. Amongst Godolphin's colleagues, Somers, at least, dissuaded him from the prosecution. But wounded vanity prevailed. Mr. Dolben, a Whig henchman, was chosen to bring the obnoxious sermon under the notice of the House. The Commons resolved to impeach Sacheverell of high crimes and misdemeanours : and the ministers entered upon a struggle of their own making, in which the sense of the country was soon against them, in which they drove a mass of moderate men into new definiteness of opposition, and which ended in their own defeat. "When Parliament met again after the Christmas recess, the articles of impeachment were carried to the House of Lords. It was the end of February before the trial came on; and throughout the length of its solemn farce, the court con- tinued to be a sort of fashionable resort, in which the preacher provoked alternately the anger of his male audience by his in- solence, and the sympathy of the ladies by his pathetic description of the danger that threatened his innocence. At length on the 23rd of March, judgment of three years suspension was pronounced ; the offending sermon was to be burnt by the hands of the hangman : and for a result like this, the ministry had roused against them the whole sympathy of the nation, and had all but given the death-blow to the hopes of the Protestant succession. SachevereU was now the popular hero. His name was everywhere toasted : crowds cheered him as he passed through the streets : the ministry were hooted ; and the Queen was greeted by cries that invoked her aid for " Church and 'Cheverel." At length open violence was used. The meeting houses were wrecked : and dissent and occasional conformity were attacked, as the tools whereby the Hberties of -Chap. VII.] THE FALL OF THE "WHIGS. 189 ■the church and the nation were to be sacrificed to the •exigencies of faction. All this had little reason in it : and those who profited by it Tiad probably little design of bringing it about. SachevereH Ihimself can have had no such ambitious aim. If any one man 3)lanned the result of the trial, that man was Atterbury — of iiU extreme High Churchmen the one most akin in sympathy to Swift. The defence delivered bj^ SachevereH, which was unquestionably the most effective part of the trial, was most probably from the hand of Atterbury himself.* To the mistake of this prosecution, another, even more serious, ■was added. The Duke of Marlborough, in a letter addressed "to the Queen during the campaign, requested for himself the post of Captain-General for life. The claim was so astounding, as to rouse even the sluggish intellect, and submissive temper, •of the Queen. Cowper had been consulted, and pronounced in no indistinct terms, against the proposal. Argyll, with something of the melodramatic arrogance that distinguished him, undertook, if the proposal was pressed, to take Marl- borough, dead or alive, at the head of his army. Marlborough shewed here, and often on other occasions, that he stood iiltogether outside the range of English domestic politics : that the constitution of his own country was a problem that he had never solved : and that to carry out his great project of French subjugation, he was blind enough to risk all his popularity on a project that no thinking Englishman could listen to without disgust. Even the decisive failure of his scheme did not * The current aceount of the de- defence of one Zen — sley, a clergyman : fence, as prepared by Atterbury, hot? he there saw a grave little man, suggests another story told regarding in a black habit, who dictated the de- Atterbury a few years later, by fence : and how lie recognised his Thomas Gent, the printer of Tork, host some years after, -when he went whose autobiography is noticed by to see Bishop Atterbury driven in a Southey in his Doctor. Gent tells how coach to the Tower. (Life of Thomas about 1718, he was taken to " a Gent, edit. 1832, p. 87.) Secrecy and monastic looking building " at West- plotting were as the breath of life to minster, to arrange for printing the Atterbury. 190 LIFE OP JONATHAIT SWIFT. [1709—1710, j)reveiit Its causing a scare, nor make it a less effective weapon, hereafter, in the hands of Swift. Meanwhile, the disputes between the Queen and the Duchess of Marlborough had now reached their last stage. The Queen, driven by personal insolence and tj'ranny on the one hand, alarmed for the church and for the prerogative of her crown on the other, had sought help and relief from an intolerable incubus, where she could; and she had found it in Abigail Hill and Eobert Harley. When Parliament was prorogued, in spite of an apparent security of position, there was much to cause uneasiness to the Whigs. The shouts and bonfires of the London mob had reflected a feeling that was widespread through the country. The length of the war, the heavy burden of taxation, the distress in the agricultural districts, the undefined fear of uncon- stitutional schemes on the part of the ministiy, to which Marl- borough's ambition had given rise ; the dictation of the Whig junta ; and the jealousy of dissenting encroachments, had all swelled in volume till their force could no longer be ignored. In the Queen's own heart, they jarred on all her warmest sympathies. In the nation at large, thej^ roused a deep-lying antipathy to innovation. In the minds of all the moderate men, they kindled a distrust of the Wliigs. For such distrust, Swift's mind was alreadj"- fully prepared. The drunken mobs that pulled down Burgess's* chapel, shook their fists in the face of the Horse Guards, and were pursued through Lincohr's Inn Fields, Drury Lane, and Long Acre : that stopped the coaches in the streets, and forced the occupants to pledge Sacheverell's health, had very Httle thought of the abstract propositions of Filmer or of Locke. Tory money may have been, as Burnet hints, t at the root of some of the excesses : but even Tory money could only use * Burgess was u. noted Dissenting sect, preacher, who attained much celebrity + History of his oivn Time, p. 849, in wider circles than those of his own ed. 1S3S. Chap. VII.] THE FALL OF THE AVHIGS. 191 the occasion, not create it. Two years before, the same mobs had been burning the Pope, the Devil, and the Pretender, in effigy, together, as the three symbols of the Tory faith. But now the current had carried the mob the other way. Once roused, there was no mistaking the feeling. The "Whigs were disconcerted : no minister knew to which of his colleagues he could trust. The Tory party, including many who had but little sympathy with Sacheverell, were jubilant. A typical form of address was drawn up, and passed from one corporation to another. The Queen was assured of their loyalty to Crown and Church. It was hinted that better times might- come, and present danger cease, if the Queen were to consult her people. Here and there, dissentient voices were heard, but on the whole, the unanimity was astonishing. When Sacheverell set out in May to take possession of a living in Shropshire to which he had been presented, his progress was made the occasion of shewing how wide-spread was the re- action. At Oxford, at Banbui-y, at Warwick : at Shrewsbury and Ludlow, he was received as a conqueror returning from a successful campaign. Flags waved from the steeples, the streets were decked with flowers, and troops of yeomen and country gentlemen met him on horseback as he neared each town. When he alighted at his inn, the corporation came to pay their respects, and beg him to accept a gift of wine. The streets were crowded with holiday-makers, each wearing a white and gold rosette, with a gilt laurel leaf in the hat. If a Whiggish bishop or parson interfered to prevent the ringing of the bells, the mob seized the church, and locked the in- cumbent out. If the clappers of the bells were taken away, the hammer from the nearest smithy served to ring out a welcome to the doctor and his suite. For all this, mad and reckless as it was, the ministers had themselves to blame. Wavering Whigs went over to the other side. Marlborough and Godolphin found the factions opposed to them growing in strength. Anne was more and more 192 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1709—1710. inclined to listen to new whispers. The war continued, but its -triumphs were more rare. Godolphin lost hope : Marlborough Tvrote letters of expostulation from the seat of war : and the Duchess, with her passionate violence, was daily widening the breach between her mistress and herself. Such was the new world which Swift found around him, when he came back to England in September, 1710. Save for a visit to Bishop Ashe at Clogher in the previous November, he had spent his time between Dublin and Laracor.* In spring he had taken a prominent part as an opponent of the abolition of the Test. Brodrick, the Speaker, had just been appointed Lord Chief Justice, and the first act of the new Parliament, when it met in May, would be to elect his successor. The Court was pressing a candidate who was in favour of abolishing the Test : or, as the phrase ran, who desired to unite the Protestant interest in the kingdom. Swift wrote against the ministerial candidate, urging the majority not to be supine enough to let themselves be led by the views of the Governor, into accepting what their consciences dis- approved.! WhUe he still lingered in his solitude at Laracor, he re- ceived, on the loth of May, the news of his mother's death. | * Thronghout the whole of this stay f A Letter to a McmJicv of Pa liia- in Ireland, he seems to have been con- mcnt in Ireland on C7bon.ii>ig a iwte tribnting more or less regularly to SjJcalier there, Scott assigns a wrong Steele's Tatler. The earliest of the date. Alan Brodrick resigned the Tatlcrs printed amongst his works is Speakership, on being appointed Lord that of June IS, 1709, which refers to Chief Justice, in this year : and his the female Platonic Societies then in successor was elected on May 19, 1710. vogue, some specimens of which are Scott accepts the tract as written in described in John Bunole's whimsical 1708, at which time Swift's close memoirs. But it is hard to believe, in connexion with the Castle would spite of Swift's power of disguise, that have prevented his WTiting what is a a piece, so totally unlike his work, distinct attack upon the Lord- eithcr in style or subject, could have Lieutenant's policy, come fi-om his pen. Of the whole J The memorandum in which it was series ascribed to him, comparatively recorded was copied by Mr. Nichols few bear any intrinsic marks of his from one of Swift's memorandum- hand, books, thatisnow lost. "On Wednesday, Chap. YII.J THE FALL OF THE WHIGS. 193 There is no overstrained show of grief in the simple record of it in Swift's own words : but it tells us enough of the love he bore her, and of the weight of the blow that had now fallen. Henceforth, save for one, upon whom, as upon himself, he laid the burden of a mysterious and undefined bond, Swift stood alone : and yet he never felt the want of companionship more than now, when he was drifting away from those with whom he had hitherto acted — was fretting at the uncongenial solitude in which he was placed, and was feeling the gradual inroads of disease. During June and July, Swift was engaged in a corre- spondence with Tooke, his bookseller; and it is at the close of a letter to Tooke that there occurs what is really the first indication on Swift's part of an inclination to change sides. As the facts have shewn us, he had long been opposed on many points to the Whigs : but he had hesitated, partly from association, partly from dishke of the Tories, to break altogether with them. Now he has new plans of work : he will soon be over in England : " Since it is hkely," he says, " to be a new world, and since I have the merit of suffering by not complying with the old." This is the first clear evidence of a personal motive coming in to confirm Swift in opinions to which he had already been, for some time, inclined. But it is important to notice tbat this personal motive did not precede, but followed, his change of view. For a while longer he lingers on with occasional opportunities of association with Addison at Dublin and Finglas. Addison between seven and eight in the even- about ten o'clock, after a long sick- ing, May 10th, 1710, 1 received a letter ness, being ill all ■winter, and lame, in my chamber at Laracor (Mr. Per- and extremely ill a month or six ■weeks cival and John Beaumont being by) before her death. I have no^w lost my from Mrs. Fenton, dated May 9th, barrier bet^ween me and death : God ■with one enclosed, sent from Mrs. grant I may live to be as ■well prepared Worrall at Leicester to Mrs. Fenton, for it, as I confidently believe her to gi^ving an account, that my dear have been ! If the ■way to Heaven, mother, Mrs. Abigail Swift, died that be through piety, truth, justice, and morning, Monday, April 24th, 1710, charity, she is there." 194 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1709—1710. left finally, in August 1710 : and Swift wrote after him from Dublin, in terms that proved no open breach to have as j'et taken place, fullj"- as Swift recognised the changes that were now imminent in the ministry. Whatever government may come or go, he says, Addison is at least sure of the veneration of Ireland. " In short," says Swift,* "if you will come over again when you are at leisure, we will raise an army, and make you King of Ireland." Lord Wharton soon followed his secre- tary : and then, on the 31st of August,! Swift set out. He crossed the channel that night : travelled from Holyhead in the train of Lord Mountjoy ; and on the 7th of September he reached London, to judge for himself of the " new world " whose formation he had foreseen. Changes had already been rapidly proceeding. Godolphin and his colleagues saw Mrs. Masham's | influence now supreme over the Queen. Harley, who had been foiled before, was now in league with her ; and the confederacy boded no good. The first decided blow was struck in the removal of Sunder- land, in June, 1710. The Whigs found their power slipping from their hands. They could not appeal to the countiy, because the country was thoroughly roused against them. Amongst the monied men in the city lay their chief support : m the allies of England abroad they might find assistance against the Tories. The alarm of the monied men and of the allies was, therefore, sedulously fostered. To the foi-mer it was represented, that Godolj)hin's withdrawal from office would occasion a collapse of credit : to the latter, it was urged that the fall of the Whigs meant the abandonment of the war, and the desertion of her allies by England. In their panic, the Whig ministers turned to strange helpmates. Sir Gilbert Heathcote, and other * Swift to Addison, kagnst 22,17 10. Mrs. Masham liy her marriage with t The dates are taken from the Mr. Masham, who had been groom of usual memorandum books. the chamber to Prince George of Den- t Abigail Hill had now become mark. Chap. VII.] THE FALL OF THE WHIGS. 195 worthy city magnates, were sent to remonstrate witli the Queen. The Emperor and the Diitch instructed their envoys to state their views on the domestic politics of England. Anne might fairly consider that this was only a confession of their selfishness and weakness, and that to dictation so ill-timed and so unconstitutional she need ]pay little heed. Both to the ■city magnates, anxious about their stock, and to the allies, anxious lest English troops should be withdrawn from fighting for their interests, evasive replies were returned. In August, just on the eve of Swift's arrival, still more decided steps were taken. Parliament was to be dissolved and the verdict of the country asked : and" meanwhile, Godolphin •was desired to break his staff. Harley was brought into the Privy Council, and was named Chancellor of the Exchequer . The .change was already wrought. o 2 CHAPTER VIII. SWIFT AND THE NEW MINISTEY. September, 1710— May, 1711. 2ETAT. 43. Swift's advent in the "new world" — His own leoords of his conduct — His mission for the Irish Church — Breach with the WMgs deferred — The last of his Tatters — Desoription of a city sliomer — Overtures from the Tories — Two' Invitations for one day — Meeting with Harley — Takes service with the new Ministry — The election — Sid Hamefs Rod — Swift's mission for the Irish Church more hopeful — Coldness of Whig friends — Addison and Steele — The Examiner — Weak points in the ministerial position — Marlborough — The monied class — The October Club — Swift's defence of the Ministry — Appeal to the people — ^Attacks on Marlborough and Wharton — Piece-meal toleration — Defence of the landed aristocracy against the monied class — Influence of the Examiner — Opening of Parliament and Convocation — A- white-letter day for Tory and High Churchman — Position of the Ministry — The inner cabinet and Swift — His new circle of friends — Stumbling- blocks in the way — The attempt of Guiscard, and its results — A new lease- of power for Harley. "VViTH Swift's advent on the " new world " which the changes of the last few months had brought about, a new scene in his life opens. It is now we have to bring to the test the charges against him of selfish and dishonest inconsistency. There is at least no excuse for misrepresentation. From the moment of his landing in England down to his quitting it, in June, 1713, we have in the so-caUed " Journal " a record of unexampled minuteness and fidelity, in which Swift jDoured out, for the behoof of Esther Johnson, every passing idea that was borne in upon him from the scenes in which he took part, and the men with whom he associated. He tells us in that Journal more than mere opinions : he gives us a picture of the whims Chap.VIII.] swift and THE NEW MINISTEY. 197 and fancies, and prejudices, that lie at the root of opinion, and shew far more of a man's character than we can learn from any formal expression of his political creed. In the con- fidences meant only for an eye that would interpret them with leniency, and to whom his very caprices would have a special meaning, we can read the character of the man, and can see not only that he was honestly attached to the new ministry, but that he could not honestly have continued his allegiance to the Whigs. He came over, at first, with very little idea either of the new position he was to take up, or of the part he was to play. He had thrown out, as we have seen, a casual expression of the hope that, failing other help, the new powers might give him some countenance. But he did not yet despair of accomplish- ing his mission on behalf of the Irish Church through his Whig friends.* He had been bitterly irritated by his previous failure, in the spring of 1709 : but now he came, with a definite com- mission from the Irish Bench, that joined him with the Bishops of Ossory and Killaloe, as representative of the Irish Church. The whole amoimt of the remission asked for from all the sources, amounted to no more than £3,000 a year : but, small as it was, it meant something to a Church whose fabrics were fast disappearing by the devastations of time and of civil war ; where glebe houses were an exception, and where half- a-dozen livings had to be grouped together, to produce a pit- tance for the incumbent or a congregation for the church. It was now feared that any hopes of the grant were liliely to be extinguished by the ill-will that Wharton felt for the thwartiag * So little truth is there in the be fairly asoribecl to Scott himself : notion that Swift came over " burning and it is one of the great defects of for revenge on the Whigs." Yet even his edition that the volumes are anno- Scott, favourable as he is willing to tated by various hands, and often on be to Swift, makes himself responsible inconsistent principles. It is neces- for this idea, by allovring it to appear sary to point out, however, how com- in the prefatory note to the Examiner, pletely the remark misrepresents (III., 259). Neither this note, indeed. Swift's relation to the Whigs when he nor many others in the edition, can came over at this time. 198 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1710—1711. of Ms test-abolition policy by Parliament and Convocation. The two bishops had hitherto been pressing the cause, but with so little zeal that, on Swift's arrival in London, he found they had already left. To this task he now set himself, with little hope of success and with little liking for the instruments with which he had to work. "He never went to England," so he wrote to Stella, " with so little desire in his life." Let his commission succeed or not, he would stay only to iinish it. The Whigs received him with open arms. " The Wliigs were ravished to see me," he writes,* " and would lay hold on me as a twig while they are drowning." At first there is no sign that the breach be- tween himself and them is ui-eparable. His letters are addressed to the care of Steele, who, though an ardent Whig, had not yet lost his government appointment. His associates in the early weeks were all prominent Whigs — Addison, Steele, Garth,t Congreve, and Halifax. He con- tinues for a time even to write for the Tatler, I in which he had * Sept. 9, 1710. hj Swift : along \vlth a, letter from + Dr. (afterwards) Sii- Samuel Garth, Tobiah Greenhat, in No. 03, on a Col- the author of the Dispensary, one of lege for damsels, which is also un- those against whom we shall after- likely to be his : No. 35, a short letter wards find Swift bringing a charge on the Family of Ix, which is probably of encouraging a riot on Queen by Dartiquenave : No. 59, a short Elizabeth's birthday. See chap. IX. letter from Obadiah Greenhat, ridi- X About Swift's earlier contribu- culing an Irish bull which Steele had tions to the Tatler some doubt exists. made, which bears signs of S>Tift"s Drake (Essays_ on Tatler and SxJccta- style : a part of No. 66, on Preachin", tor, vol. III.) assigns almost the same with a reference to Atterbmy, almost pieces to Swift as are admitted by certainly written by Swift : parts of Scott, save that the latter prints as No. 67 and 6S, on the Chamber of Swift's, in addition, a part of No. 7i, Fame, which have all the marks of referring to the Table of Fame, which Swift ; No. 70, a short letter from bears many marks of Swift's style, Jonathan Eosehat, on the faults of and No. 81 , which is almost certainly clerical oratory, also bearing signs of not his. The other pieces assigned to Swift's work : No. 71, on Clerical him, both by Scott and by Drake, are : Neglect, which appears more like the in No. 9, the verses on a Morning in work of Steele than Swift ; No. 230, Town ; No. 32, On Madonella, a, referred to in the text : the verses in female precie^tse, almost certainly not No. 238 ; and a letter in No. 258, on Chap. VIII.] SWIFT AND THE NEW MINISTET. 199 helped Steele in the previous year. He hegan again by a paper * on the false taste that was corrupting style, anticipating, as it were, the strange proposalt which he soon after made to Harley for an English Academy. At present aU he has to urge is the vulgarity of the coUoquialisms that were creeping in, and the affectation of the modish abbreviations that docked words of a syllable or two. What he wants to restore is described in a characteristic sentence, as " that simplicity which is the best and truest ornament of most things in human life." He followed it up by one or two short poems, amongst which the most notable is the Description of the City Shower, which in some sixty lines of mock heroic poetry, gives us a picture, com- plete in all its graphic details, of the streets of town when their passengers were overtaken by the rain. Dulman sauntering to the coffee-house : the poet, grieving for the sufferings of his thread-bare coat : the " daggled females " rushing to the shop for shelter, only to " Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy : " the tucked-up sempstress, trudging through the mud : the beau boxed up in his chair : the spruce Templar, who waits in patience, all the while he affects to call a coach : the shed where, pursued by the elements, " Triumphant Tories, and despondent Whigs Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs." It is not surprising that Swift was pleased with the parody, and shewed something of the author's irritation at the scant appre- ciation by his Irish friends, t Lord Somers, too, receives him cordially, and recalls to him that recommendation to Lord Wharton, the recollection of which was not likely to be palatable to Swift. Lord Halifax the use of the phrase " Great Britain," + See Chap. X. which is signed with the initials, J. S., J See Scott, XIV., 99. He tells us M. P., N. E., for Swift, Prior, and that the smells in his lodgings helped Rowe. him to a part of the description. * No. 230. (Journal, Nov. 8, 1710.) 200 . LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1710—1711. renews his professions of friendsliip : asks Swift to dinner, and courts him with that flattering attention of which he was so complete a master. But Swift's position was becoming every- day more clear in its estrangement from the Whigs. At first he scarcely understood the fuU extent of the change in popular feeling. In the earlier letters, he speaks of it almost as a joke. Day bj"- day, its completeness becomes more evident. It makes him doubt and hesitate. The Whigs irritate and annoy him, but he scarcely feels that he himself can find a place amongst the Tories. Steele, he says, will lose his place as Gazetteer, " aU the world detesting his engaging in parties." * The Whigs are " decHning courtiers : " t a "cunning, provoked, discarded party: "t Swift is ready to regret his connexion with them, but he as yet sees nothing for it, but to remain an "mdifferent spectator " of the struggle. " The Tories tell me,"§ he says, " that I can make my fortune if I please : but I do not understand them, or rather, I do understand them." The changes went on apace. Cowper, the Lord Chancellor, made way for Sir Simon Harcourt : Somers ceased to be Lord President, and Lord Rochester took his place : even Boj'le, the Secretary of State, was involved in the fall of the Whigs, as one of the managers against SachevereU. Brydges, || whose proffered friendship Swift received coldlj'-, retained his post of Paymaster, only by patching up a hasty alliance with the Tories. On the 21st of September, Parliament was dissolved; and just as the country was plunged into the excitement of an election, new Tory adherents were brought into the Ministry. E-esignation followed resignation : " each," says Swift " as sincere as a miser's death-bed repentance." The Duke of Buckinghamshire became Lord Steward. Henry St. John, who had left office with Harley in 1708, now came back as * Journal, Sept. 10. § Journal, Sept. 30. t Journal, Sept. 18. || Afterwards Duke of Chaudos-: the t Journal, Sept. 20. Timoii of Pope's Satire. Chap. VIII.] SWIFT AND THE NEW MINISTET. 201 principal Secretary of State. Swift's old friend Lord Berkeley, now lying on his death-bed, was named Lord Lieutenant of Gloucestershire : and George Granville, hereafter to be one of the " Brethren " of the Club, and to attain fame as friend of Swift and Pope, became Secretary at War, supplanting Walpole. The Duke of Hamilton was made Lord Lieutenant of the County Palatine: and finally, on the 18th of October, the Duke of Ormond succeeded Wharton as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In all these changes. Swift might find satisfaction, but it did not appear how he was to find his profit. But the turning point soon came. We have it in his own words.* "After I had put out my candle last night, my landlady came into my room, with a servant of Lord Halifax, to desire I would go dine with him at his house near Hampton Court : but I sent him word I had business of great importance that hindered me, &c. And, to-day, I was brought privately to Mr. Harley, who received me with the greatest respect and kindness imaginable : he has appointed me an hour on Saturday at four, afternoon, when I will open my business to him." The change involved no sui'render of principle. Already he had discarded the Whigs : he had laughed at their discomfiture, and had watched with contempt their awkward efforts to secure his favour. Already he had told Halifax that he "was the only Whig he loved" — which was a civil way of sajdng that he loved no Whigs. He had already blamed Steele for the officious zeal with which he had rushed into the party struggle. So far he had only disliked the Whigs : the further step was that now he became the ally of the Tories. Opinion, principle, inclination, and resentment at personal neglect, all combined to bring him over to that camp, where his sympathies had long lain, and the gates of which had been so readily thrown open at his approach. Already he had in his pocket his lampoon on Godolphin.t The few lines describing the fate of Sid Hamet's Rod had a * Journal, Oct. 4, 1710. i Sid Samet's Hod. See Journal for Oct. i. 202 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1710—1711. success, which comparing them with Swift's other efforts, may to us seem somewhat strange. " It is cried up to the skies," says Swift : * and he recurs to it over and over again, with the curious pertinacity that he often shews as to pieces which we would scarcely regard as adding to his fame. The lampoon became the first war-note in his struggle with the Whigs. His application for the First Fruits now took a new and hopeful aspect ; Harley promised to lay it before the Queen : and the only doubt now was as to the date when it would take effect, and the manner in which it should be announced. Esther Johnson had feared that the changes in high places might thwart his efforts ; but it is far otherwise. " Revolutions a hindrance to me in my business ! " he says, t " Revolutions ? — to me in my business ? If it were not for the revolutions, I could do nothing at all : and now I have all hopes possible." He is setthng down now in his new condition. His talk of an immediate return to Ireland is less definite. He had new interests and new friends in London | ; nor were these as yet of one party only. A young Whig poet, named Harrison, a sprightly student fresh from Oxford, had attracted his friend- ship, and he was determined to make the poet's fortune. Steele and Addison are still much with him. Congreve, an old man before his time, still greeted him as the most delightful of companions. § On the other hand, Matthew Prior, the steady adherent of the Tories, and now anticipating Swift in the Examiner : Nicholas Eowe, whom interest was leading over to the same side : Freind and Arbuthnot, the literary physicians of that party, — were all coming under his influence, and learn- ing the charm that acted so strongly in spite of the pride and * Journal Oct. 14. the Boohs. + Journal, Oct. li. § Congreve was now blind with a X Morphew at this time published cataract : and though, as Swift says, VnciidbmiBOtMiscellanicsinProseaiid "never rid of the gout, yet looks Verse. London, 1711. It did not con- young and fresh, and as cheerful as tain the Tale of a Tub, or the Battle of ever." Journal, Oct. 26. Chap. VIII.] SWIFT AND THE KEW MINISTEY. 203 restlessness that made him dreaded by those who knew him only on the outside. But presently there arose vexations and irrita- tions. Some of his former friends had reproached him for "his greatness amongst the Tories"; but "he valued them not."* When the same reproaches came from Addison and Steele, Swift felt them more. Steele had got into trouble by his rash interference in the party struggle. Swift attempted to stay the penalty : but he did so with the result that might have been expected from one so vain and petulant as Steele. The matter was talked over with Addison : but Swift " found party had so possessed him, that he talked as if he suspected me, and would not fall in with anything I said." Swift goes on : — " So I stopped short in my overture, and we parted very dryly ; and I shall say nothing to Steele, and let them do as they will : but if things stand as they are, he will certainly lose it (his post), unless I save him ; and therefore I will not speak to him, that I may not report to his disadvantage. Is not this vexatious 1 And is there so much in the proverh of proffered service ? When shall I grow wise ? I endeavour to act in the most exact points of honour and conscience, and my nearest friends will not understand it so. What must a man expect from his enemies ? This would vex me, but it shall not ; and so I hid you good night." t Amidst these stispicions of his friends, and under the burden of ill-health, Swift entered with no light heart upon the task of defending the Ministry. The difficulties to be met were enormous. The first was the opposition of Marlborough ; another, almost as threatening, was the opposition of the monied class. Rumours were industriously spread that the New Ministry would usher in the rule of the Pretender by applying a sponge to the National debts.! But Harley found » Journal, Oct. 20. argument against Swift's having any + Journal, Oct. 22. notion of such a scheme being on foot t The avowed opposition of the is, that he did a little stockjobbing ministerial supporters to the monied himself, by investing £300 in the men, gave some colour to these in- funds, when they were low, in the sinuations of repudiation. But there sure confidence that the fall was only is no evidence whatever that any such temporay.— See Journal for Oct. 13, scheme was dreamt of : and the best 1710. 204 , LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1710—1711. that exaggerated support was as dangerous as opposition. The wilder Tories refused to listen to reason. Banded together in the October Club, they strove to press the Ministry into extremes. If their advice had been followed, to use St. John's own words, the Ministry would have been blown up in four and twenty hours. Nothing was more necessary than to soothe the wild impulses of these undisciplined supporters, without losing their support. The Ministry were now about to meet Parliament.* They were safe in a large majoritj^ if that majority could be kept within bounds. Harley, if he had few other talents, had at least learned by experience something of the art of leading a parlia- mentary majorit3^ But beyond this, a wider verdict had to be secured, a wider support to be conciliated: and this was a part onlj' of the task now entrusted to Swift. He began to write in the Examiner on the 2nd of November, 1710, and continued it till June in the next year. No Hteraxy defence of an administration was ever more admirably devised. Swift was then at the height of his power : all his energies were roused to the task, and he brought to it every stimulus that personal irritation could suggest. To say that he dis- tanced all his competitors, is only half the truth. He took a totally different range. The mass of these strove to gain attention by a jerky, half-colloquial style, by what was known as "banter," of a rough and ready sort, and by a clumsy twist- ing of an opponent's arguments which was supposed to be attractive to the crowd of readers. t Nothing could be in stronger contrast with the strength and range of the sarcasm of Swift. Whatever were Swift's feelings to Whigs or Tories when he left Ireland in August, there can be no question as to his * It opened on the 25th of Novem- of his answerers, the most efEective ber. point in which is its truth to the + In No. SXII. of the Examiner, originals which it is intended to hold Swift has given a parody of the efforts up to ridicule. Chap. VIII.] SWIFT AKD THE NEW MINISTRY. 205 genuine anger now. Each week had shown him more com- pletely, the deceptions which the Whigs practised to upset their opponents, the personal bitterness which they brought into the struggle, and the evident affectation of the alarm which they professed to feel. The first words of his first Examiner ridicule the pretensions of the man who makes himself a partizan, when so placed as to have no real interest in partizanship. His contempt had been roused by the afiected fears around him. " Several of my acquaintance among the declining party," he says, " are grown so insufferably peevish and splenetic, profess such violent apprehensions for the jiublic, and represent the state of things in such formidable ideas, that I find myself disposed to share in their afflictions although I know them to be groundless and imaginary, or, ivhichis luorse, purely affected. To oifer them comfort one by one, would be not only an end- less, but a disobhging task. Some of them, I am convinced, would be less melancholy, if there were more occasion." Subterfuges and tricks like these, he sets himself with all his heart to strip off. He claims* to write as "an impartial hand " : and to explain away rather than to oppose the delusions which the discarded party would spread over the nation. To begin with, he is unwilling to admit the clear distinction between the parties, which Godolphin and his adherents would fain make out. " Let any one," he says,t " examine a reason- able honest man of either side, upon those opinions in religion and government which both parties daily buffet each other about, he shall find hardly one material point in difference between them." The bitterest opponents of the Ministry are not those who differ with their principles, but those who envy their power. "The bulk of the Whigs," he says,]: some months afterwards, " appears rather to be linked to a certain set of persons, than any certain set of principles : so that, if I were to define a member of that party, I should say, he was one who believed in the late Ministry." And as their vaunted principles Examiner, No. XV. f Ibid. % Examiner, No. SLIII. 206 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1710—1711. sink on examination, into the merest envy, so their numbers, in spite of their claim to represent the nation, dwindle into a handful. He is never tired of ridicuKng the pretension which spoke of the Ministry as a faction — a faction, forsooth, which is supported by Queen and Parliament, by the clergy, and at least nine-tenths of the nation.* Such flimsy pretences he brushes aside : and beyond the handful of malcontents, he appeals boldly to the nation, by the same instinct which guided himself in his later Irish struggle, and which he seems to have suggested to Bolingbroke as the keynote of the political ideal with which Bolingbroke endeavoured to link his own name.t He lays hold of "this mighty change in the dispositions of the people," which the discontented "Whigs would fain describe " as only a short madness in the vulgar." I " WiU they stand to this appeal," he says again, " and be determined by the vox populi, to which side their title of faction be- longs ?"§ Having thus reduced his opponents to the level of a discarded faction, and no national party, Swift pursues two distinct methods in dealing with them. In the first he attacks the views they represent : in the second, the personal character of their leaders. Members of the recent Ministry are attacked under the thin disguises of names from ancient history : but the brunt of his satire is reserved for his spiecial enemj^ Lord Wharton, and for the man whose name chiefl.}'' threatened danger to the Ministry, the Duke of Marlborough. In the character of Verres, Wharton and his misdeeds in the Govern- ment of Ireland, are held up to scorn. No j)ains are spared to press home each charge against him, to cover him not only with hatred, but conteinpt.il With ]\Iarlborough a very different * Some three or four times in the J E.raminer, No. XIV. course of these papers, Smft claims § Examiner, No. XXSI. the same proportion (nine-tenths) of || The pamphlet on the character of the nation, as supporters of the Lord Wharton, in which Swift iu- Ministry. dulged his hatred more freely still, ■f See Chapter XV. came out early in December. Chap. VIII.] SWIFT AND THE KEW MINISTRY. 207 method is pursued. Swift knew how false, as a piece of tactics, it would have been to rouse sympathy for Marlborough by unmeasured invective, and he repeatedly declares in the Jom'nal that his efforts have been given to temper the attacks on Marl- borough. When he has to deal with him he invariably chooses ■one method. He paints in strong colours the vices of ambi- tion and avarice. He shews what circumstances may heighten our dislike of them, what means of gratifying them are most odious. He lingers over the stains that they leave upon a name that might otherwise be glorious. And thus, -without making any too visible attack ujDon Marlborough personally, he leaves the picture he has drawn to find its •counterpart in the Dulie, and makes the reader, and not him- self, responsible for the identification. But beyond personal invective, Swift is never weary of attacking the fallacies on which he now believed the Whig party to rest. He shews how flagrantly inconsistent their religious toleration is, with that political intolerance which bans aU those who do not subscribe to the narrow articles of their shifting political creed. " They impose a hundred tests ; they narrow their terms of communion : thej' pronounce nine parts in ten of the kingdom heretics, and shut them out of the pale of their Church. These very men, who talli so much of a i-ift to Addl- § To serve the ordnance with oil. son, Aug. 22, 1710.) Chap. X.] THE TOEY TEIUMPH AND SWIFT^S EEWAED. 245 reward. But it seemed as if she was soon to pass with her ribaldiies and her frailties beyond the reach of help. " Poor Mrs. Manley," he says, "the author, is very ill of a dropsy and sore leg; the printer tells me he is afraid she cannot live long. I am heartily sorry for her : she has very generous principles for one of her sort ; and a great deal of good sense and invention : she is about forty, very homely, and very fat." — (Journal, 28 January IT-frO Other more respectable literary aspirants found a helping hand from Swift. One Diaper, the author of some Eclogues of the Sea, seemed to him to have promise enough to merit help. It needed, indeed, but little genius to win the kindly notice of Swift, and the reflection he makes on Diaper's appearance in the world of wits is amusingly characteristic of Swift's odd ignorance of his own place above the little circle and beyond the reach of its petty praises. "I hate," he says, "to have these new wits rise, but when they do rise, I would encourage them : but they tread on our heels and thrust us off the stage." Diaper, he says, is "a poor little, short wretch : " half parson and half wit : a curate in the country, but in town a loiterer in the tavern with a sword dangling at his heels. Swift finds no way of helping him, but to make him x^arson out and out, and to get a living for him from the Lord Keeper Harcourt. But pending this, he collects money for liim at the Societj"-, and .carries it to the garret where the poor witling, that was treading on his heels, was lying sick and starving like so many of his kind. Well-known as Swift had been before, the publication of the ■" Conduct of the Allies,'" had not only drawn upon him the attention of friend and foe, but had made him the aim of a hundred shafts. The less of principle that was involved, the more bitter became the antagonism of parties. Every incident served to bring it out in full rehef. Early in January, the long expected visit of Prince Eugene to England, began, and in its course it produced a singular rivalry. By both sides 246 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [17!?— 1713. our victorious ally was feted and dined : by the Whigs because they hailed him as the opponent of the Peace : by the Tories because they could not allow the belief to grow that one who shared the nation's triumphs was less honoured by Torj' than by Whig. It was expected, Swift tells us, that forty thousand Whigs would meet him at landing, and renew their efforts at agitation defeated two months before. But, as it turned out, his arrival roused more of curiosity than political enthusiasm. The Ministry, now triumphant in all but the continuance of the Duchess of Somerset at Court, was proceeding with more resolution to the settlement of the Peace. The Duke of Ormond was sent to the seat of war in place of Marlborough ; and it was distinctly tmderstood that his task was to be, to hold his own hand and that of the Allies.* The Whigs fretted themselves to the quick, but fretted themselves in vain. Men fought with weapons that were strange even to the proverbial bitterness of such conflicts. Vehement as Swift was, his was not the most unscrupulous invective. Society was ranged, dur- ing these months, into two hostile camps, assailing one another not by sarcasm and contemptuous denunciation onl}', but by open charges of instigating to plots and riots and assassinations. Every alarm of the town was distorted into some machination of the Whigs : every rumour of civilities to the French was- believed to imply a pervading Jacobite taint amongst the Tories. During March and April, the streets were distm-bed by the worse than foolish escapades of the hell-rakes of the * It was now th.it Swift wrote the to have been the work of St. John ;. Semarlis on, the Barrier Treaty (of and he shows that it contains a hint of 1709, by which we had bound our- a possible retnm to the Stuart line, selves to defend the Dutch frontier). provided that the Pretender were to This was followed by a second, and less become a Protestant: a scheme to known, pamplilet, called " llie Jlc- which St. John seems to liave been marks on the JBnrrier Treaty Vinili- inclined, and which is consistent with cated, in a Letter to the Author." the reserve of his statement, in the This also lias sometimes been ascribed Letter to Windham, that no formed to Swift : but Mr. Dilke (Pfl7;f7'.w>/' rt intention of n Jacobite restoration Critie), on better grounds, supposes it had yet obtained. Chap. X.] THE TORY TEIUMPH AND SWIFT'S EEWAED. 247 town, who were known by the names of Mohawks, or Hawku- bites, the lineal descendants of the " Hectors," the " Mims," and the " Tityre tus " of other days. Swift compares them with the Houghers of Cattle in Ireland, whose exploits were familiar to him : but even the excuse of class hatred, or of antipathy of creed and of race, was absent in the case of the overfed insolents who now rendered the streets of London dan- gerous. Women were not safe from their cruelties : and he who was unfortunate enough to cross their path at night, seldom escaped without some mark, in a slit nose or ear, which he would carry to his grave. "With apparently but little foimda- tion, these coarse and bloodthirsty buUies were reckoned by the Tories to be bands organized by the Whigs. Swift, at least, accepts the common belief : and knowing how obnoxious he was to the other party, he was forced to spend money that he could ill spare on coaches, so as not to pass through the streets after dark on foot. Meanwhile the peace was siu-ely advancing. The chief guide in all the negotiations was St. John. Bishop Eobinson and Lord Strafford — the former a careful man of business, the latter a man " of little capacity or literature, but immea- surable pride " * — were little else than mouthpieces of the Secretary at home. According to instructions, they kept up cordial relations with the envoys of France : and the fact was enough to redouble the denunciations of the Whigs. " Han- nibal " it was said,t " was at our gates : " in other words, the ministers were in league with the Pretender. The knell of the Protestant Constitution, so they prophesied, was about to be rung. Once aroused, this new note of alarm rapidly increased in strength. Swift tells us for himself, with indubitable sincerity, whatever may have been his accuracy, that there was no more * Journal, Feb. 15, 17^?. forebodings of whicli were answered f This was the title of a pamphlet in another, under the title, "Hannibal which had much vogue, and the not at our Gates.'" 248 LIFE OF JONATHAN SATIFT. [I711— 1713. fear of the Pretender than there was of the Grand Turk. From first to last (and it may be well to clear up the point once for all) there is not a shadow of foundation for the idea that Swift did not abhor any thought of a Jacobite restoration, as strongly as the most fervid Whig.* To suppose otherwise would be to trust to the unsupported attacks of his enemies, against his own consistent declaration, against all probability, against the tenor of liis expressions to his most intimate friends. At a later day the suspicion took definite shape t : but it was repudiated by Swift with an energy of indignation that it was not in his nature to have assumed from motives of expediencJ^ But although fears of Jacobitism did not make Swift uneasy, he is not so confident about other matters. He doubts the ability of the ministers to carry the peace. He hates this " driving everything to an inch." He longs for some deci- sive action. He dreads the trimming of the Lord Treasurer with the Whigs. He dreads the hesitation of the Queen. He dreads still more the ominous signs of disunion amongst the colleagues. He dreads the fanatical partizanship of the extreme Tories of the October Club. To meet this last, he prmts a Letter to the Octoher Cluhl, in which the moderation of the Ministry is accounted for by vague intimations of difficulties that have to be avoided, of hindrances that lie in the way, of eventual rearrangement of matters such as would please the heartiest supporters of sound principles against the violence of the common enemy, the Whigs. Swift had here the task hardest of all — to prove to others the absence of * An unlucky passage in the Con- sage, as it originally stood, instead of duct of [the Allies, suggesting that the being favourable to the Jacobite Dutch stipulations agaiust the Pre- claim, only affirmed more distinctly tender might take it out of the power the right of Parliament to carry out of the Legislature to alter the succcs- a revolution destructive of hereditary sion, however much the necessities of right. the kingdom might require it, was t Hee Chapter XII., p. 302, and the interpreted by Chief Justice Parker as letter from Delafaye to Archbishop treasonable. Swift altered it in later King there printed, editions : but it is clear that the pas- J See Scott's Swift, Vol. IV., p. 81. CHAr. X.] THE TORY TRIUMPH AND SWIFT'S EEWAED, 249 those causes of disquietude, by which he was himself at the moment seriously disturbed. Swift moved about amid a brilliant society, to all appearance the most successful of the throng — attended by suitors, the patron of literature, caressed by the great, the resort of all who had a cause to be advanced : and yet, amongst them all, with scarcely a friend whom he could count sincere. Before we condemn Swift for taking such a position, we must not forget what motives called him to it. The desire to play a man's part in shaping the results of a European war : the determination to aid in crushing a faction whose specious principles he believed to be a cloak for selfishness : the ambition to hold his own amongst those whom fortune had made great — these roused liim to the work, and unswerving courage made liim persevere. But his vision was too clear, not to show him how much there was of the contemptible in the stage on which he acted.* During April he was further troubled by a tedious and painful illness which he calls the shingles. On the symptoms of it, he dwells with a detail sufficient to remind us that we are dealing with a man whose modes of thought were jjeculiar, and with an age when delicacy was not excessive, and when the modes of expression were those to which our own age is averse. The illness was only a short inter- ruption to the activity of his pen. Besides the Letter to the October Cliib, he had written in February, the Fable of Midas, a short poem which ridiculed the avarice of Marlborough. As soon as convalescence came, in May, he was busy upon another pamphlet,t the object of which was to prove that * " I cannot leave this place in one is oUiged, ly his princijilos as a prudence or honour. And I never Whig, to oppose the Queen; in a letter wished so much as now, that I had to a Wliig Lord" The Whig Lord is staid in Ireland ; but the die is cast, supposed, on the authority of an MS. and is now a-spinning, and till it note by Charles Ford, to have been settles, I cannot tell whether it will Lord Ashburnham, the son-in-law of be an ace or a sis." Swift's friend and patron the Duke of f Some Reasons to prove tJiat no Ormond. 250 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [ITif— 1713. under the guise of Whig principles, the leaders of the Whig party were seeking only to embarrass the Administration, and drive the ministers from office : that independence of thought and action, a real adherence to true Whig principles, and a thorough [abhorrence of arbitrary power, were to be found, not amongst the opponents, but amongst the supporters, of the ministry. " We are Whigs," he virtually makes the Op- position say, " and as such we claim the assistance of all Whigs to oust the ministers, no matter what their principles are, and however near they come to our own." " Eemain Whigs," say Swift's friends, " and profess as freely as you will your principles : but have loyalty enough to support us as the Ministers of the Queen, until we are proved to have acted against those principles that you profess." The pamphlet was followed up by another paper, which even more distinctly carried the war into the enemy's camp : it was a mock letter from the Pretender to Lord Wharton, which threw upon the prominent Whig the suspicion of Jacobitism so freely cast at the ministers. At last success, which covers so many sins in politics, came to Swift's friends. On the 6th of June, the outhnes of the peace preliminaries were announced ; and they were accepted by the nation with a feeling of relief. From all parts of the countrj', addresses poured in, congratulating the Queen on the prospect of peace and the securities by which it was to be accompanied. Even Whigs sent in congratulatory memorials : and their ill-will was shewn only in the increased emphasis which they imparted to their iterations of confidence in the securities for the Protestant succession, which they felt sure Her Majesty wovild take. On the 4th of July, St. John, to whom the chief management of the Peace had so far been entrusted, and who was now to bring it to a conclusion, was ennobled by the title of Viscount Bolingbroke. By a fatal mistake he allowed jealousy of his rival's honours to i^ersuade him to surrender his own vantage Chap. X.] THE TOEY TRIUMPH AND SWIFT'S EEWARD. 251 position in the Commons. Even in the accomplishment of his wish he was doomed to disappointment : instead of gaining rank equal to that of Haiiey's earldom, he attained only to the inferior grade in the peerage. The shght that this implied prohably vexed him more than the flimsy splendom* of the title pleased him. The last remnant of doubt as to the ministerial policy had passed away : and it was now deemed needful to check the utterances of those who attacked with too much boldness the course to which the Government stood committed. For every pamphlet that Swift or his understrappers had written, there had appeared a score of abusive rephes : " If I wrote a pamphlet on a straw," says Swift, " I believe it would be answered by the score." Prosecutions had been tried, partly at Sivift's own instigation * : but only with the natural result of inflaming the bitterness of the pamphleteers. Now the more efficacious machinery of a prohibitory tax was put in force. The tax — an impost of a halfpenny on each paper — began with Augast : and before the Act came into force^ Swift prophesied that "Grub Street" had but ten days to live. A fortnight later he writes (Aug. 7th, 1712) : — " Do yon know that Grub Street is dead and gone last week? No more gliosis or murders now for love or money. * * * The Observator is- fallen : the Medleys f are jumhled together with the Flying Post :J the Examiner is deadly sick : the Spectator keeps up and doubles its price ; I know not how long it will hold." Meanwhile Bolingbroke had been received with lavish honours in Paris, as envoy for the completion of the Peace. A suspension of arms was signed in August : and a pleni- potentiary had been named, in the person of the Dulce of Hamilton, to arrange the final terms of the Peace. With * Journal, Oct. 28th, 1712. chief conductor. t The Medley was one of the Whig J The Flying Post was the Whig papers that had answered Swift's paper, conducted by Eidpath, who lias Examiner. Mainwaring had been its obtained a place in the " Dunciad." ■:252 LIFE OF JONATHAN SAVIFT. [l/Jf— 1713. singular recklessness, Bolingbroke contrived to give ground for the suspicions of the Opposition, hy apparent familiaritj'' with the Pretender : and amidst outcries against the betraj'al of our allies and the tampering with our liberties, the Peace was drawing to its final stage. In September, 1712, Swift, who had gone earlier in the summer to the Gravel-pits at Kensington, for change of air, moved for a time to AVindsor, where the Court was now fixed, .and where he alwaj's found his surroundings speciallj' attrac- ±ive. It was here that we must suppose he wrote the work to which in later days he gave the name of the History of the Last Four Years of the Queen* Uncertain as we must be with regard to the date of particular references or passages in the 'ivork, 3'et it is not difficult to perceive, runnmg through the whole, the spirit rather of the uneasy partizan, provoked at opposition and eager to invent calumnies against his opponents, than the ardour of the free champion who has no misgivings as to the cause which he defends. If the impression is correct, it only serves as an additional proof of the cloud of doubt and hesitation that surrounded Swift, not from any relenting to his opponents, not from any infidelitj' to the main aim of the minis- terial policy, but from want of confidence in the resolution and the prudence of his friends. When the ministers returned after the autumn recess, the .business of the Treaty was agam resumed ; and the month ot November was marked by two incidents that startled the town. •One of these forms a strange comment on the tensitj' of p)arty feeling. A band-box was sent to the Lord Treasurer : and ,Swift being in the room with Oxford at the time, midertook to open it. He did this with some care, and found two inkhorns (cases for ink and pens) filled with gunpowder, and containing bullets. The contrivance seemed at once too flimsy for a real attempt at assassination, and yet too serious for a mere practi- cal joke. Whig lampoons attributed it to Swift's own con- * See Appendix III. Chap. X.] THE TOET TRIUMPH AND SWIFT'S EEWAED. SSS"' trivance as a means of enhancing his favour with the minister.- Such a theory is disproved by the very simj^le consideration that a self-contrived alarm would have sought more seriouS' implements : to us, knowing Swift's real feelings to the' ministers, and how lightly he held their favoiu', it is not only impossible, but absurd. The other incident has in it so much of dramatic interest as to have formed a chapter in a classic fiction. The Duke of Hamilton and his Duchess were amongst Swift's intimates. The Duchess was then about thirty-three : " with abundance- of wit and spirit . . handsome and airy, and seldom sparing anybody that gave her the least provocation, bj' which she has many enemies and few friends." So Swift writes of her : and this was a type of character not unhkely to attract him. Her husband was then at the height of power and influence, and august antiquity of race, aided by his talents, had acquired for him a foremost place in society. He had been named as Plenipotentiary to France, and had formed and expressed a desire that Swift should join his train. On the 30th of October, Swift had met him and received from him the friendly^ though homelj', compliment of a present of snuff. On the morning of the 15th of November, all the town was startled by the news that the Duke had, the night before, been stabbed in the back, after a duel in Hj'^de Park, where he had killed the already notorious Lord Mohun. The whole affair was involved in doubt and darkness. The duel, it was said, had arisen from some violent words used over a legal dispute — or such at least was the cause outwardly assigned : and when one of the principals had fallen, it seems to have changed into a general melee. Eightly or wrongly it was assumed by the Tories to have been another of the Whiggish plots. To Swift fell, in great measure, the duty of combating the frantic gi'ief of the Duchess. "It is not possible," he says, " for anybody to be a greater loser in all regards. She has moved my verj'' soul." He saiv it was useless to attempt, at 254 LIFE OF JONATHAN SAYIFT. [1715—1713. first, any assuaging of the passion of sorrow. " She never grieved," he says again, "but raged and stormed and railed." The first thing is to bring around her the friends whom her caprices and her bitter tongue had ahenated. Her sister-in- law, Lady Orkney* — "the wisest woman," sa3's Swift, "1 ever knew" — is brought by him to visit her. "I am re- •solved," he says, " to make them friends : for the Duchess is now no more the object of envy, and must learn humility from the severest master, Affliction." It -was in their sorrow, ■as much as in their prosperit}^ that such as she sought the aid of Swift. In their prosperity his wit and cynicism amused them : but, unlike most cynics, he had the tenderness that knew how to tutor grief. Early in January, that same tenderness is roused by the death •of Lady Ashburnham the daughter of the Duke of Ormond. She was nis greatest favourite," and his grief for the young life so suddenly snatched away moves that vein of almost des- pairing melancholy which was so easily stirred in Swift. " I Tiate life when I tliiiik it 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 to be a blessing." He cannot shake off the feeling of sadness : and yet, as is so common in the incidents of Swift's life, his symx^athy with those on whom the bereavement has fallen most heavily, stands close to his perception of the odd guise in which even real sorrow sometimes dresses itself. The affecta- tion of grief in Lady Betty Butler, Lady Ashburnham's sister, moved only his disgust. He was received by her with the ordinary ceremonial of afiliction in the days of Queen Anne. " The jade was in bed in form, and she did so cant, she made me sick." But even the sincerer grief of tlie mother was not spared by Swift's morbid acuteness of vision. " There is some- thing," he says, " of farce in aU these mournings, let them * Lady Orkney, whose connexion married the younger brother of the with William III. is well known, had Duke. Chap. X,] THE TOEY TEIUMPH AND SWIFT'S EEAVAED. 255 be ever so serious. People will pretend to grieve more than they really do, and that takes off from their true grief." The blow is followed by another which touches Swift to the quick, although the victim was more humble, and though Swift's acquaintance dated merely from a year or two, and depended largely upon favom-s he had been able to bestow. We have seen the interest that he took in little Harrison : and he had managed to procure for him the promising jjost of secretary to the envoys at Utrecht. He had now come to London on some special mission, and Swift receives him as a son. But Swift finds that the promised salary had not been forthcoming, and that with the usual remissness of the Treasury in these days, " they have never paid him a groat though I have teased their hearts out." The " Queen's minister " was deep in debt : his rank obliged him to use a coach in his visits, and yet he had to "borrow money for its hire. A few days later, Swift hears that the poor fellow has fallen iU : he begs and borrows money for him, and sees to his removal to the healthier air of Knightsbridge. The iUness increases, and Swift cannot shake off, in the midst of his busy life, the concern he felt for the " ijoor lad," as he calls him. On the 14th of Februaiy, the end came : and it is best told in Swift's own words. " I took Parnell this morning, and we walked to see poor Harrison. I had the Ihundred pounds in my pocket. I told Parnell I was afraid to loiock at the door : my mind misgave me. I knocked, and his man in tears told me his master was dead an hour before. Think what grief this is to me. I went to his mother, and have heen ordering things for his funeral, with 'as little cost as possible, to-morrow at ten at night. Lord Treasurer was much concerned when I told him. I could not dine with Lord Treasurer nor any where else ; but got a bit of meat towards evening. No loss ever grieved me so much.'' He is pestered in his own sorrow by the mother and sister, whose grief is outrun by their desire to profit by the death. It is characteristic of Swift that he looked back on his un- selfish friendship for the unnoticed youth, as a folly rather than an act of kindness. " I shall never have courage," he says, 256 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [17i|— 1713. " again to care for making anj'tody's fortune." "What others, more anxious for effect, would have represented as disinterested charity, Swift recognises in himself as only a weakness that courts superfluous care : and he avenges it on himself by the painful minuteness with which he sees to the jiist administra- tion of anything that poor Harrison had left. Amidst cares of politics, and grief for loss of friends, much of Swift's attention was occupied dming this j'ear with another subject. Early in the previous spring he had endea- voured to enlist the interest of the Lord Treasurer, who aspii-ed to the fame of a literary patron, in a literary project which was bold enough, but which was strangely out of sympathy, not only with the genius of our language, but more than all with the terse idiom of Swift, moulded as that was by the very im- press of his character.* He proposed the foundation of an Academy under the protection of the Queen and the ministers, which should take under its charge the regulation of the English tongue. t The hint was of course taken from the French Academy, from the style which had gro^vn up under the patronage of the Grand Monarque, and from the example * To a, certain extent, the plan is coming ; I vriU pnt the same question anticipated in the Tatler (No. 230) to him.'' He did so : and Mr. PiLking- which Swift wrote early in this visit to ton answered, "To be sure, a man England, ridiculing the ofEensive stjde ought to MTite good English." "Nay, that was mutilating our colloquial, but liis own English : I say his own : and even our written language. It is what do voii understand by that ? " interesting to compare with this what " Wliy, sir," said he, " what shordd I seems to be ^ well-authenticated re- understand ? " " Plague on you for a miniscence by Mrs. Pilkington of his Dunce," said he : " were your \rife later days. "I would have every and you to sit for a fellowship, I would man,'' he says to her, "write his own sooner gire her one than admit you a English." She assents : but is roughly Sizar." (Memoiis, I., p. 118.) told, " I am sure you do not under- \ The title of the Tract was, " A stand my meaning." " Very possible, PrnjHtsal for correctmg, improvitiff, sir," says she, " but I certainly under- iind asccvtaivinff the Hiifflish fimgiic, stand my own." She explains it to in a letter to the most limiourahJc be, " not to confine oneself to a set of liohert. Marl of Oxford and Mor- phrases, but to make use of such words timer, Lord Jliqli Treasvrcr of Great as naturally occur on the subject." JJritain.'' It was the only piece to " Hush," says he, " your husband is which Swift ever attached his name. Chap. X.] THE TORT TEIUMPH AND SWIFT'S EEWAED. 257 of the School of Boileau, which Swift had so closely studied. There was thus much of literary foresight in it, that Swift discerned the real lack in our literature which it was to be the business of his own contemporaries to supply. He conceived of it in a narrow way : he mistook the means by which it was to be accomplished. But he saw that literary effort, with no more solid guidance than the English taste prevailing in his own earlier years, would certainly end in hopeless confusion. He had seen the conceits and intricacies of the School of Cowley pass out of fashion. He had seen the taste which preferred the stilted affectation of the rhymed drama to Shakespeare, in its own turn pass away. He had wasted effort himself on the fantastic absurdities of the so-called Pindaric ode. But successive variations of taste had not im- proved our literary judgment. Some standard v^as needed, if the dunce were to be known from the genius, whose place he now usurped. Scarcely a year before there had appeared a metrical essay on the rules of criticism, from one who, though little more than a boy, had a judgment ripe enough to select the indis- putable commonplaces of criticism, and a command of language sufficient to secure for the selected maxims a permanent cur- rency in the mouths of men. Swift must have read Pope's poem, and must have felt sympathy with its miotive. Pope had attempted to lay down simple rules for the guidance of taste : Swift might well think, that if the work were to be complete, that also which had been done in France must be done here, and a standard of language imposed. Had he studied the sources of our language, had he considered its mingled elements, and noticed how these moulded idiom, he might have had less hope for his scheme. Fifteen years later, indeed, he was moved to an indignant protest against a French translator's critique on the barbarian genius of Gulliver's Travels. His respect for French rigidity may then have been modified ; but now he feels so much interest in the scheme 258 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [17i|— 1713. as to make the Tract in its favour tlie one exception to the anonymity of his writings. The beginning of April, 1713, at length brought the Peace. The treaty was then signed at Utrecht. Swift, if he did not receive the news with rapturous enthusiasm, yet could not but feel pleased at the success of the cause for which he had laboured. The dangers of the present, which were avoided by the peace, were indubitable. " And I do not find," he says to Archbishop King * a short time before, " that in public affairs, human wisdom is able to make provisions for futuritj' which are not liable to a thousand accidents. We have done all we can. For the rest, curent posteri." On the 28th of March, he again writes to King, with even more of an apologetic tone : " After all, my Lord, I grant that from a distant view of things, abund- ance of objections may be raised against many parts of our conduct. But the difficulties which gave room to these objections are not seen, and per- haps some of them will never appear : neither may it be convenient they should. If in the end it appears that we have made a good bargain for you, we hope you will take it without entering too nicely into the circum- stances. I will not undertake to defend our proceedings against any man who will not allow this postulatuni, that it was impossible to carry on the war any longer : which whoever denies, either has not examined the state of the nation, with respect to its debts, or denies it from the spirit of party. * * * I hope, my Lord, we shall in time luiriddle you many a dark problem, and let you see that faction, rage, rebellion, and revenge, and ambition, were deeply rooted in the hearts of those who have been the great obstructors of the Queen's measures and of the kingdom's happiness ; and if I am not mistaken, such a scene may open as will leave the present age and posterity little room for doubt, who were the real friends and real enemies of the country." Such were Swift's motives in the struggle : such his reflec- tions on the result. How far they were justified it is for his- tory, and not for the biography of Swift, to say. We are con- cerned only to see with what sinceritj'- he bore his part in the contention of the da3\ * Jan. 3, 17^. Chat. X.] THE TOET TEIUMPH AND SWIFT'S EEWAED, 259 The immediate result was a clear gain of strength to the Ministry. Men paused for the next move. Was it possible that Oxford contemplated, and might obtain, a coalition of the moderates of both parties ? Faction held its hand to watch. But now Swift felt he had done his work : and now, if ever, the moment was come when he must claim his reward. Hitherto he had not been importunate : had refrained, indeed, from pressing his own advancement. He had grumbled occasionally in his Journal to Stella : he had doubted the solid advantage that might come from the lavish civility and the familiarity with which the ministers greeted him. " More of your lining, and less of your dining," he says, half angrilj"-, half humorously. But now, self-respect demanded that he should be placed in a position, where the tongue of scandal might not assail him as a. penniless priest, ready to do the bidding of a party on the ■flimsy chance of a reward. His help, if it were to be given longer, must be given from a standpoint of independence ; and to secure this he must press his claims with some imperious- ness. Were he to forego the claim now, his previous work "would be discredited, his influence with the Ministry would be scouted, he would occupy the most contemptible of all positions — that of a castaway tool. He had to demand, therefore, from the ministers, either the fulfilment of their promises, or a statement of their intentions. He now knew, as is clear from the passage below, that the chief obstacle was in the Queen : and if the ministers found themselves powerless to remove the prejudice against him that the Duchess of Somerset and the Archbishop of York had mspired, he desires only to know it. At length the end came, as it is told in his own words. April 13 (1713). Thia morning' my friend, Mr. Lewis, came to me, and showed me an order for a warrant for three deaneries : but none of them to me. This was what I always foresaw, and received the notice of it, better I believe, than he expected. I bid Mr. Lewis tell my Lord Treasurer, that I took nothing ill of him, but his not giving me timely notice, as he promised to do, if he found the Queen would do nothing for me. At noon, Lord Treasurer, hearing I was in' Mr. Lewis's office, came to me, and said s 2 260 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [17^—1713. many things too long to repeat. I told him I had nothing to do but go to Ireland immediately : for I could not with any reputation, stay longer here, unless I had something honourable immediately given to me. We dined together at the Duke of Ormond's. He then told me he had stopped the warrants for the Deans, that what was done for me might be at the same time, and he hoped to compass it to-night : but I believe him not. I told the Duke of Ormond * my intentions. He is content Sterne should be a bishop, and I have St. Patrick's : but I believe nothing will come of it. Stay I will not : and so I believe, for all yoii saucy p p t can say, you may .see me in Dublin before April ends. I am less out of humour than you would imagine : and if it were not, that impertinent people will condole with me, as they used to give me joy, I would value it less. But I will avoid company, and muster up my baggage, and send them next Monday by the carrier to Chester, and come and .see my willows, against the expecta- tion of all the world. What care I ? Night, Dearest Rogues, M.D. April 14. * * * Lord Treasurer told Mr. Lewis, that It should be determined to-night : and so he will for a hundred nights. So he said yesterday, but I valued it not. 15th. Lord Bolingbroke made me dine with him to-night (I was as good company as ever) and told me the Queen would determine something for me to-night. The dispute is Windsor or St. Patrick's. 16th. Mr. Lewis tells me, that the Duke of Ormond has been to-day with the Queen : and she was content that Dr. Sterne should be bishop of Dromore, and I Dean of St. Patrick's : but then out came Lord Treasurer,, and said, he would not be satisfied, but that I must be Prebendary of Windsor. Thus he pei-plexes things. I expect neither : but I confess, as much as I love England, I am so angry at this treatment, that if I had my choice, I would rather have St. Patrick's. * * * 17th. * * * The Queen says she will determine to-morrow with the Lord Treasurer. The warrants for the Deaneries are still stopped for fear I should be gone. Do you think anything will be done? I don't care whether it is or no. * * * 18th. This morning Mr. Lewis sent me word, that Lord Treasurer told him the Queen would determine at noon. At three Lord Treasurer sent to me to come to his lodgings at St. James's, and told me the Queen was at last resolved, that Dr. Sterne should be Bishop of Dromore, and I Dean of St. Patrick's. * * * I do not know whether it will yet be done : some tLulucky accident may yet come. Neither can I feel joy at passing my days in Ireland : and I confess, I thought the Ministry would not let me go : but perhaps they can't help it. Night, M.D. 19th. * * * After dinner Mr. Lewis sent me word, that the Queen staid tUl she knew whether the duke of Ormond approved of Sterne for a * The Dnke, as still holding the office of Lord-Lieutenant, had a voice in the arrangement. Chap. 2.] THE TORT TRIUMPH AND SVIFT'S REWARD. 261 bisltop. I went this evening, and found the Duke of Ormond at the Cook- pit, and told him, and desired he would go to the Queen, and approve of Sterne. He made objections : and desired I would name any other deanery : for he did not like Sterne. * * So aU is now broken again. * * This suspense vexes me worse than anything else. It was only on the 23rd of April, that the Duke consented, and that the warrants were signed. Swift was vexed at the vacillation, at the strain which a return, so much under his deserts, had called for, and at the prospect that it opened of long, probably final, banishment to Ireland. The picture of timidity, shufHing, and ingratitude on the part of Oxford, isnot a pleasant one. But so far as Swift was concerned, it would be unjust to view his claim as more than the self-assertion which his dignity required. We need not of course look, either in the age or in the man, for the unctuous expressions of disinterested motives with which it is occasionally the modern habit to garnish the natural satisfaction which ecclesias- tical preferment brings. Swift had been careful not to choose his profession as a last resort; but once chosen, he looked upon his position in the Church rather as implying a code of discipline with which he was obliged to comply, than as in- volving a peculiar set of motives by which he was compelled to be animated. To rise in the Chm-ch was the sign of his in- fluence : and that influence he was unwilling to surrender. Pride, much more than covetousness, prompted him to demand the satisfaction of his claun. For the next few weeks Swift was occupied with prepara- tions for his departure, with receiving congratulations from some, and expressions of regret at his gomg from others — in- cluding the ministers who were themselves its cause. The last weeks of his stay in London, saw him involved in a dispute with Steele, which showed both men in a characteristic light. On the 28th of April, Steele inserted in the Guardian an indignant protest against an attack made by the Examiner on Lord Nottingham, but more specially against a cowardly libel 262 LIFE OP JOKATHAN SWIFT. [17i|— 1713. on Nottingham's daughter in the same paper. He applied the word " miscreant," not unjustly, to the man who had allowed himself the licence of dragging a lady's name into a contro- versy where her father only was concerned. The protest was answered in the Examiner : and then on May 12th, Steele returned to the charge. This time he wrote in his own name to Nestor Ironside : and after various hits at the supposed author, he proceeds thus : — "However I will not bear hard upon Ms contrition : but am now heartily sorrj I called bim a Miscreant : that word I think signifies an unbeliever. Mescwycmt, I take it, is the old French word. I will give myself no manner of liberty to make guesses at him, if I may say him.* * * I have carried my point and rescued innocence from calumny ; and it is nothing to me, whether the Examiner writes against me in the character of an es- tranged friend, or an exasperated mistress." He then proceeds to hint not ohscurelj'', at other productions by the same author, which answered to those ascribed to Swift. Enough was said, first, to identify Swift with the Examiner : next, to throw at him the common charge of scepticism : and lastly, to couple him with poor Mrs. Manley, whom Steele is not ashamed to describe as his own discarded mistress. Swift had in reality long ceased to have anything to do with the Examiner : and we can now tell that, at the moment, he was the last man in England to strain his honour in writing against the enemies of the Ministry, with whom he was not too well pleased just then. Steele can hardly have been ignorant that Swift's connection with the Examiner had ceased : and his subsequent conduct proves that spite, and not ignorance, prompted him in the accusation. Swift took what he trusted was the easiest means of remon- strating. He wrote to Addison, disclaiming the charge, and accusing Steele of base ingratitude in making it. He asserts what his Journal shows to be true, that he had stood Steele's friend with the ministers, and prevented his dismissal from his post. The letter was clearly meant for Addison to deal with, Chap. X.] THE TORY TEIUMPH AND SWIFT'S EEWAED. 263 and it would not have been hard for Addison, knowing both men, to have composed the quarrel, by convincing Steele of the manifest wrong he had done. But once again, as he often did, that calm and regulated spirit refused to sully itself with other men's quarrels. He simply handed the letter to Steele, and left him to reply. Steele's answer was offensive, as only that of a weak and vain man could be. " They laugh at you," he says, beguming with the non-essential point — " if they make you believe your interposition has kept me thus long in my office." As for the charge he made he maintains that it was tempered with mercy out of forbearance for Swift. Swift's disclaimer he affects to treat as a mere trick that none but an Irishman would have attempted. With the assumed sneer of patronage, he congratulates Swift on his new promotion. For this letter no defence is possible. If Steele beUeved what he wrote, there was no need to write at all : if he doubted its truth, as it is at least absolutely certain he had reason to do, he was carried away by vanity, and that spite which ingratitude breeds : if he knew it to be false, as is most pro- bable, his conduct needs no comment. Swift replies in a letter, which indignation would certainly have made much stronger, had not the keen desire so characteristic of him, to clear away the calumnies of one who was once a friend, re- strained his wrath. He explains what he had done, or had attempted to do for Steele, and closes his letter thus : — " Be pleased to put these questions to yourself : — " If Dr. Swift be entirely innocent of wliat I accuse Mm, how shall I be able to make him satisfaction ? And how do I know but he may be entirely innocent ? If he was laughed at only because he solicited for me, is that a sufficient reason for me to say the vilest things of him in print under my hand, without any provocation ? And how do I know but he may be ia the right, when he says I was kept in my employment at his interposi- tion ? If he never once reflected on me the least in any paper, and has hindered many others from doing it, how can I justify myself, for endeavour- ing in mine to ruin his credit as a Christian and a clergyman 2 " To this Steele replies by a flimsy and conditional expres- 264 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [ITif— 1713. sion of gratitude for anything Swift may have done, and by boasting of his own independence and nobility of spirit. He closes with some words of what perhaps he lived to think somewhat high-pitched valour, but containing a reminiscence, which, extorted as it was from his spiteful vanity, confirms the impression of the singular attraction exercised by Swift. " I do assure you, I do not speak this calmly, after the ill-usage in your letter to Addison, out of terror of your wit, or my Lord Treasurer's power : hut from pure kindness to the agreeahle qualities I once so passionately delighted in, iu you." To argue with illogical and u-relevant verbiage like this, was useless : and Swift closes the correspondence, on the eve of starting for Ireland, by simply re-stating the injustice of the charge, and the benefits that had been so gracelessly forgotten. His revenge, as we shall find, was not long delayed. On Monday the 1st of June, Swift set out from London, riding in six days to Chester, which he reached on the 6th. He went on to Holyhead on the 8th, and reached Dublin on the night of Wednesday the 10th. On the 13th he was in- stalled as Dean of St. Patrick's. CHAPTEE XI. DISSENSION AND ITS FRDITS. June, 1713, to August, 1714. ^TAT. 46. Letter of greeting from Archbisliop King — Swift's resentment at its tone — Need of Mm in London — Difficulties of the Ministry — Opposition to the Treaty — Urgency for Swift's return — His hesitation — Vanessa and her passion — Swift's attempt to soothe it — His discontent with Ireland— Eeturn to England — The Prolocutorship — Attacks from all sides — Walpole's Short JERstory of tlie Last Parliaineni — Swift to the rescue — Personal attacks — Discussion of the Treaty — Steele and Tlie Crisis — The Puhlia Spirit of the W7iigs — The opening of Parliament — Fears of Jacobite Plots — Swift and the Lords — Steele's expulsion from the House — Dissensions in the Tory ranks — Amusements in the midst of danger — The Scriblerus Club — Swift retires to Letcombe — His life there — Scriilcrus and his prospects — Pope's ambassadorial visit — The struggle between Bohngbroke and Oxford — The Schism Bill — Oxford's Memorial to the Queen — His fall — The illness of the Queen — Confusion in the Ministry — Shrewsbury Lord Treasurer — The Queen's death — Euin of the Tories — Note on the Wagstaffe Volume. Just as he was about to start for Ireland, Swift had received a letter from Archbishop King which was scarcely likely to reconcile him to his new position. King and he stiU. con- tinued in a state of watchful, almost suspicious, friendliness. Their language to one another is that of respect and even of friendly courtesy : but it never deepens into any warmth of regard. The form which the Archbishop's greeting now took, made his regret for the loss of Swift's predecessor perhaps a little more prominent than was necessary : and began with exhortations which were perhaps a little premature. " Your predecessor in St. Patrick's did a great deal to Hs cliurcL. and house, tut there is still -work for you. He designed a spire for the steeple, ■which kind of ornament is much wanting in Dublin. He has left your economy clear, and £200 in bank for this purpose. . . . Bricks and lime are 266 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1713—1714. good and cheap. But we have no workmen who -understand anything of the matter. I believe you may be acquainted with several that are con- versant with such kind of work, and, if you would discourse some of them, and push 6n the work as soon as settled, it might be of use to you, and give the people here an advantageous notion of you." * Almost every phrase in the letter was gall and -wormwood to Swift. His work was, forsooth, to be the completion of Sterne's design for a -useless spire on the top of St. Patrick's tower ! He was to use any time in London that was left him to take leave of statesmen and wits, in discussing the merits of bricks and workmen ! And if he did this weighty work hope- fully, he might give an advantageous notion of himself to the people of Dublin, for whose opinion he did not care a straw ! And to crown all, the Archbishop speaks of St. Patrick's, not even as ordinary courtesy would have demanded, but as " the provision her Majesty has made for you." Swift answers by expressing his sense that his Grace's loss in Sterne will not be made up by him : and for the steeple, he has not much to say for it; "he is confident no bricks made in that part of Ireland will bear being exposed so much to the air." We shall return to the surroundings of Swift in his new post, in a later chapter. Scarcely had he now left London, before his need was felt as sorely as he would have wished it to be. On the 2nd of June, indeed, Erasmus Lewis sends a cheerful letter to speed him on his way at Chester. The Ministry had just obtained a triumph. From the moment that the Peace was announced, the Opposition had exerted aU their efforts to strike a blow at the ministerial credit, and they had apparently a majority in the House of Lords. Descending to the worst depth of faction, the Whig leaders had joined -with the discontented Scotch, to procure a repeal of the Act of * The letter is one which Dr. Mant tions thrown on Swift's life by the has printed (History of Churcli of correspondence, seemed to be too Ireland, II., 250), out of the mass of slight and too scattered to justify the MSS. which Archbishop King left to printing of further extracts in this Trinity College, Dublin. The illustia- volume. Chap. XI.] DISSENSION AND ITS FEUITS. 267 Union. The division showed a tie : and it was only by the proxies that the ministers gained the day. But they did gain it : and this triumph Lewis announces to Swift as " the greatest victory we ever had." * But the triumph was not lasting. On the 9th of July, Erasmus Lewis wrote as follows : — " We are all running headlong into the greatest confusion imaginable.. Sir Thomas Hanmer is gone into the country this morning, I believe much discontented : and I am very apprehensive neither Lord Anglesey nor he will continue long with us. I heartily wish you were here : for you might certainly be of great use to us, by your endeavours to reconcile, and by re- presenting to them, the infaUible consequences of these divisions. We had letters this morning from Ireland. What is the reason I had none from you ? Adieu. I hope your health is not the cause." The difficulties were indeed serious enough. Besides the dispute between Oxford and Bolingbroke, there were other dangers. The Treaty of Commerce, which proposed a system approaching to free trade between England and France, re- quired, as it dealt with finance, to be supplemented by an Act of Parliament. But the commercial and manufacturing class were wedded to protection, and utterly unable to under- stand Bolingbroke's liberal scheme as anything else than a conspiracy for destroying the trade of the country, and with it the monied class. Petitions poured in against it. Genuine panic joined with the bitterness of the Opposition faction. The committee on the Bill dragged its slow way through petitions and evidence : and at last, on the motion for reporting the Bill to the House, it was lost by a majority of 194 against 185. By nine voices, the Whig party were thus able to defeat the leading feature of Bolingbroke's peace, and to render abor- tive a scheme of free-trade, the first proposed in England, and devised by the bold genius of a Tory minister. In these circumstances there was but one who could give the needed help. On the 30th of July, Lewis again presses Swift : * Lewis to Swift, 2nd June, 1713. 268 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1713-17H. " The Lord Treasurer desires you'll make all possible haste over : for we want you extreroely." Swift made excuses and hung back. He was, perhaps, not imwilKng that those who had parted from him so lightly should feel their loss. His reception in DubUn] had not indeed been pleasant. He had been hooted in the streets, and libels had been fixed on the door of his own cathedral.* He had quickly left the city, and was now spending his time quietly enough, looking after his willows, and finding his only recreation in riding about the roads near Laracor and Trim in Stella's company ; for the " St. Mary's Ladies " t had followed him to Trim, where their cottage was within a couple of miles of his vicarage, and close to the house of Raymond of Trim. He had longed for quiet : but now that he has attained it, he cannot avoid regrets at enforced obscurity : perhaps receives as not unwelcome the summons to the wider sphere that he had left. There was, indeed, a new and personal cause of trouble to increase his perplexities and uneasiness. When he left London, he had found for the first time that a friendship begun with no other thought than that of kindly interest, had deepened into something far more serious. We have seen how his acquaintance with the Vanhomrigh family had ripened into intimacy, and how in the mind of Mistress Long, | at least, there had been some perception of its dangers. Esther Johnson may have had her doubts even thus early. So long before as March, 17-ff-) she had hinted surprise at his fiiend- ship with the Vanhomrighs, as people of no consequence : and Swift had playfully stood up for them, as keeping company equal to his own. So early as July, 1710, " Miss Essy," as she * This seems the best-supported Ministry, story : but Delany {Obsei-tiatiu/is, p. + He gives this name to Esther 87) throws doubt on it : and possibly Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, because the adverse reception to which Deane in Dublin they lodged opposite St. Swift, in his Essay (p. 183) refers, may Mary's Church, on the north side of apply only to the time when Swift came the LifEey. back, the representative of a fallen J See Chap. IX., p. 227. Chap. XI.] DISSENSION AND ITS FETJITS. 269 ■was familiarly called by him, had written to Swift : and she wrote to him again in the next spring.* Since then the intimacy had increased. She had sought his guidance and help in her reading : he, on the other hand, had found in her society a relief from weightier cares. A language of familiar banter was used by Swift, perhaps with the purpose of leading her mind away from any graver thoughts : a language light and playful, but very different from that " little language," as they were wont to call it, that knit together the past memories of Stella and of Swift. With that lifelong bond, this new friendship never, even remotely, interfered. So little truth is there in the idea, first started by Sheridan, and from him rashly adopted by Scott, that professes to fix a date early in this year when the feeling for Vanessa made all expressions of warmth and endearment in the Jom'nal give place to cold and business-like formality. But just as he started from London, Swift had found that Vanessa's feehng was something stronger than common friendship. He had written a short and kindly letter of adieu from St. Albans : and from Dunstable he wrote to the mother to tell of his progress, and to convey a few words of banter to both her daughters ahke. But the replies from Vanessa, following qtiicldy one upon another, became stronger and more impassioned. Every letter from him is prized : her whole anxiety is about his health. "I believe," she says, "you little thought to have been teased by me so soon .... but I had not self-denial enough to forbear." The mark, she says, is still in the book they were reading, where he left it. She wants to know about his new horse, Bolingbroke. She suffers tortures of anxiety till she can hear whether the pain in his head is better. Her passion aheady makes her letters broken and inconsistent. " If I talk," she says, " impertinently, I know you have goodness enough to forgive me, when you consider how great an ease 'tis to me to ask these * These two letters are known to in Swift's notebooks, now in South have been leoeired only by the entries Kensington Museum. 270 LIFE OF JONATHAII SWIFT. [1713-1714. questions. * * * Oh, what ■woTild I give to know how you do at this instant ! My fortune is too hard, your ahsence was enough without this cruel addition. ■Sure the powers ahove are envious of your thinking so well, which makes ".them at times strive to interrupt you." " If you think I write too often," she says again, " your only ■way is to tell me so, or at least to write to me again that I may know you don't quite forget me." Then follows the first word ■of what was perhaps the real secret of her uneasiness, in the thought that another's love was dearer to Swift than her own. ■" If you are very happy, it is ill-natured of yoii not to teU me so, except 'tis what is inconsistent with my own." For his ibehoof she has gathered what political news she could: she tells him of her reading : she Imks it somehow with their friendship : she strives to flatter him by describing how dire is ihe Ministry's need of his help. Clearly the passion he had kindled was no matter for laughter, or for sport. With aU his knowledge of human nature. Swift scarcely fathomed the depths of a woman's heart : and the very tenderness of sensitivity that underlay his rough coating of cynicism, tempted him to avoid any harsh or too decided step to crush out the flame he had kindled. He writes quietly, but not unkindly. He has, he tells her,* quitted Dublin, where he fomid but few friends. He has hidden him- self down at Laracor, preferring " a field bed and an earthen floor before the great house there which they say is mine." "I told you," he goes on, "when I left England, I would endeavour to forget everything there, and would write as seldom as I could." He is not coming over till he is sent for : but he does not conceal from Vanessa the dreariness of his new life : perhaps, indeed, he sought rather to impress it on her mind. " At my first coming," he says, " I thought I should have died with dis- content, and was liorribly melancholy while they were installing me : hut it begins to wear oif, and change to dulness. My river walk is extremely Letter of 8th July. Chap. XL] DISSENSION AND ITS FEUITS. 271 pretty and my canal in great beauty, and I see trout playing in it. * * * I am now fitter to look after willows and to cut hedges, than to meddle with affairs of State. I must order one of the workmen to drive those cows out of my island, and make up the ditch again ; a work much more proper for a country vicar than driving out factions, and fencing against them." Swift might well fancy that nothing was so likely as this to drive from Vanessa's heart what he thought was but a passing folly. To paint the hardships of his life as in strong contrast with the ease of her life in London, and with those cosy evenings that he speaks of when they drank coffee in "the sluttery ; " to show her his humdrum occupations, so different from those that attracted her vanity when she felt herself the companion of one who guided ministers, and shaped treaties, and struck terror into his foes, — these were the methods by which Swift hoped to cure poor Vanessa of her foolish love. The plan succeeded no better than any one of the schemes for curing passion which those who do not enter into its intensity are so ready to attempt. The dulness with which Swift tried to frighten Vanessa, really weighed heavily on him. The thought that he was dismissed as a discarded tool, gnawed him at the heart. He would fain have given up all thoughts of courts and courtiers, but the habit was too strong on him to let him rest at ease. He had deceived himself if he thought he had learned thoroughly the emptiness of what they had to offer him. Here and there, the restlessness breaks out. Writing to Atterbury, just appointed Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster, he feels that to that fiery spirit he can speak out his mind, and he assures him " Hae latehrs nee dulces nee, si mihi orcclis, amoenae." Laracor was not the quiet and peaceful retreat that it had seemed to him, when jaded by the frets of politics: and Dublin •was worse still. There " they were all party mad." " It is one felicity," Swift goes on, " of being among willows that one 272 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1713—1714. is not troubled with faction." In Dublin his friends were few, and of the old ones some had drifted away. We shall see, further on, something of the circle that he formed when his banishment was final: but now some three or four comprise all his friends. Sir Constantine Phipps, the Lord Chancellor, now under the cloud of a threatened attack by the House of Commons for his supposed leanings to Jacobitism : Judge Nut- ley, pressed on his acquaintance by Prior, who, nevertheless, doubts whether Nutley's gravity would not lose him Swift's esteem : "Worrall, who was living within the liberty of St. Patrick's, and whose friendship dated from nearly twenty-five years back : and Archdeacon "Walls, the Dean's business fac- totum — these well-nigh completed the list. Walls soon asked Swift to stand godfather to a little daughter : and in spite of his doubts as to the opportuneness of the new arrival. Swift, on the 7th of August, gives assent : " I received your notification, relating to one Dorotliy (Mrs. "Walls) and her new productions, which like other second parts are seldom so good as the first. I shall be in town, I hope, by the time appointed, and contribute as far towards making your new inhabitant a Christian as one of that sex can be." * There is more in the same mood, proving that the duhiess was not perpetual : and some domestic mishap, bewailed by Walls, serves to stir Swift to a joke. " Your melancholy story of the cask is not new to me. I have known it very frequent to have empty wooden vessels stufft with books." But, with the scent of battle in the air, he is not displeased when the summons to return becomes too peremptory to be disregarded. He is glad to get away from Ireland, although when once he feels himself again in England, the sense of hopelessness retm-ns. On the 31st of August he sets out : and on the 17th of September he thus writes from London to Walls, when on the eve of renewing the life of " sturt and * Sn-ift to Walls (Mr. Murray's MSS.) Chap. XI.] DISSENSION AND ITS FEtTITS. 273 strife," behind ■which those private cares, that are at once the perplexity and the interest of Swift's biography, are so often forced to disappear. " Our St. Mary's friends, I suppose, have toU you I got well here. It is an empty toTvn, and I believe I shall go to Windsor for some time. I protest I am less fond of England than ever. The ladies tell me they are going to ive at Trim, I hope they will pass their Christmas at Duhlin. Our club is strangely broke ; the Bishop at Dromore, I here, and none but you and Stoytes left. Our goody Walls, my gossip, will die of the spleen. Pray write to me when you have leisure. I care not five-pence for your Dublin news, but of our friends, and of my own affairs : and give my service to Mr. Commissioner Forbes. You wUl have the Duke of Shrewsbury* soon over with you ; and Sir John Stanleyt his Secretary ; I have not yet seen the Duke nor the Duchess ; for they are at Windsor with the court. My service to the alderman and goody and Catharine, and Mr. Manly and lady : I think I know no others. Enclose your letters to me under a cover, which cover you must direct to Erasmus Lewis, Esc[., at Mr. Secretary Bromley's o£Bce at Whitehall. My service to Parnell. I have lazily deferred this letter till the post is going. Pray God bless my little goddaughter. I hope to breed her up to be good for something, if her mother will let me." In a letter to Walls from Windsor, only a fortnight later, he speaks of a proposal to make him Prolocutor of Convocation, in which he is not unwilling to acquiesce. | " I will confess to you, there are two reasons why I should comply with it ; one is, that I am heartily weary of Courts and Ministers, and politics, for several reasons impossible to tell you : and I have a mind to be at home, since the Queen has been pleased that Ireland should be my home. The other reason is, that I think somebody educated in Ireland should be pro- * The Duke was appointed Lord to have struck him much : that in the Lieutenant. matter of laying on taxes, the House + Sir John Stanley was the uncle of Commons was generally misled by of Miss Mary Granville, afterwards an erroneous supposition that two and Mrs. Pendarves, and finally Mrs. two make four, whereas they only Delany. It was to his house that she make one. A tax when doubled, he and her sister were carried on the means to say, often yields only one night so graphically described by her, half of that which it brought in be- when her father was arrested in 1714 : fore it was increased. See Scott's and by Sir John she was in great edition of the works, Vol. VII., pp. measure brought up. Swift, in two of 170, 258. his later Irish papers, recalls a saying J Swift to AroliHeacon Walls, Oct. 1, of Stanley'Sj'the truth of which seems 1713. (Mr. Murray's MSS.) T ^74 LIFE OF JONATHAK SWIFT. [1713—1714. locutor ; and I hear there are cleaigns of turning it another way. But, if you find it wiU not do, I hope you will cj^uit the design in proper season." He had hoped that, at last, what he felt to be the ingratitude of the Irish Church, for the work he had done, might be wiped away, and that without the countenance of the Episcopal bench he might be chosen as representing the Lower Clergy. But he writes again and again to Walls, urging him not to press the matter unduly. For his own part, he does not wish the post, save as "an honest excuse to leave courts and public thoughts." He " will not hawk for an appointment he nowise seeks to desire, and then fail of it."* He thought he was secure of Archbishop King's help : but once again he finds the Arch- bishop a fickle friend, and Lord Chancellor Phipps tells him what difiiculties he may have to encounter there, t " I cannot discharge the part of a friend, if I omit to let you know that your great neighbour at St. Puloher's is very angry with you. He accuses you for going away without taking your leave of him, and intends in a little time to compel you to reside at your deanery. He lays some other things to your charge, which you shall know in a little time." Such threats as these were little likely to reconcile Swift to his Irish post. His anger became stronger when Walls wrote to him that he must come over, and work for his election to the Prolocutorship. Swift replies thus : I — " I have had two letters from you very lately. The last, of the 19th instant, came yesterday. As for those you sent me about the Prolocutor- ship, I reckon them for nothing. I would see you all whipt before I would venture myself in any manner to come over upon a fool's errand : and for what ? for a place I would rather be without, neither would I take it upon any score but being chosen freely by a vast majority, which would let the world see they thought me a man fit to serve the church. And since they have not chosen me, they shew they do not think me such a man, and con- seqtiently they and I do not deserve each other." Swift had, indeed, found enough to busy him without troubling * Smift to WalU, October 20th. t Swift to Walls, November 26th, t PUpps to Swift, October 24th. 1713 (Mr. Murray's MSS.) Chap. XL] DISSENSIOJT AND ITS FEUITS. 275 himself over Irish prolocutorships. He had reached England on the eve of the election of a new Parliament. The con- stituencies were about to pronounce their opinion on the Peace and on the Commercial Treaty. The Whigs professed themselves to be striving for the honour of England, for the safety of the Protestant succession, for the well-being of English manufactures. The Tories put m the front of their appeal the boon of Peace which they had secured, the benefit of cheaper commodities which their Commercial Treaty offered, and the loyalty to Church and Crown, which they •defended, but which new-fangled notions were undermining. All seemed to point to the success of the Whigs. The victories, to which Marlborough had accustomed the people, were missed. The merchants had been roused to ardent pohtical partizanship, by the only ef&cacious instrument, that of self-interest. The fears of Pope and Pretender were vividly presented to the mob. The disastrous betrayal of our interests to France was heightened by all the exaggera- tion that partizanship could stimulate. The Whig supporters wore locks of wool in their hats to shew the British industry that was threatened by the unheard of laxity of Bolingbroke's commercial scheme. They burned in company the efi&gies of Pope, Devil, and Pretender. On the other hand the Tories could only appeal to the unobtrusive benefits of peace and the abstractions of passive obedience. To typify their creed they wore branches of the oak leaves, that had sheltered the fugitive Hng. Steele was urging in the Guardian the double dealmg of the French in the matter of the Dunkirk fortifications : and he was feebly answered by feeble hands in the Examiner* A " Short History of the Last Parlia- ment" from the pen of Walpole, far as it falls below the trenchant simphcity of Swift's style, was still strikingly efiective. In a mock dedication to the Lord , by * After Swift quitted the Examiner, Manley, and others whom she could it was kept up for a time by Mrs. get to assist her. T 2 276 IIFE OF JONATHAN BWIFI. [1713— 17M. whom lie means to indicate Lord Oxford, he gives him lavish ironical praise as a true, thorough, and successful friend to France, whose labours had undone the ill-work of Marlborough in curbing the ambition of the French king. He shews in the clearest Ught the ludicrous inconsistency of that Parhament, by turns favouring the war, and then, in answer to the call of the ministrj'-, succumbing to the Peace proposals. What motives were at work ? What motives could have acted, but bribery and selfish greed ? The allotment of places, the disbursement of secret service money, the shameless bribery, are all touched on by the masterly hand of one who- was ah-eady qualifying for the place of adept in Parliamentary corruption. If the majority were ever by chance independent, even the fact that they were so, is turned to their disgrace : it is but a sign of the flimsiness of their conviction, which allowed them these freaks of momentary liberty. Swift had not come at aU too soon. A month before Lord Oxford had been apparently in the full tide of success. Then it seemed as if the only object of any one who would learn poHtics was to unravel the enigma of his mind. Men had not yet discovered that the seeming mystery- covered little but incapacity. But already the seeds of failure were laid. The extreme Tories suspected and hated Harley's moderation. Bolingbroke Avas growing bolder in his pronounced enmity. Ill health was pressing on the Lord Treasurer, and confirmmg him in that vice of drunkenness which was hereditary in his familj'. Before the close of November, Swift, whose fidelity to him never varied, had to console him as well as might be under crushing bereavement — the death of his eldest and favourite daughter, the Marchioness of Caermarthen.* " I could hardly think of anything," says Swift to Walls, " haviag just lost a friend I extremely loved, the poor Marchioness of Caermarthen. She was but 24 yeai-s old, a most excellent person, adorned with all possible good qualities. She was * Swift to Walls, 2G Not. 1713. (Mr. Murray's MSS.) Chap. XI.] DISSENSION AND ITS FRUITS. 277 Lord Treasurer's eldest daughter and his favourite. He is in great affliction: and so are five hundred others." The seeds of decay were there, and Swift was fully alive to its dangers. It could be no matter for surprise to him that, after the blows he had aimed at the Whigs, he should now be singled out for attack. He was pointed out by those who followed Steele's insinuations, as the writer of the Examiner : and this, false as it was, became the text for Abel Boyer's Political State, for November, 1713. Swift's relations with Harlejr, the reward of the Deanery, his supposed infidelity, the Jacobitical leanings ascribed to him, were all made the subject of Boyer's laboured invective; and the libel was pointed by the full quotation of Swift's own burlesque imita- tion of the seventh of Horace's First Book of Epistles, in which he had just described his own introduction to the Lord Treasurer, and their subsequent dealings, with a freedom and a want of reticence, that almost served as baits to the lampooner. He gave his enemies the very handle they wanted, when he spoke of himself thus : — " A clergyman of special note In shunning those of his own coat : Which made his brethren of the gown Take care betimes to run him down : No libertine, nor over nice, Addicted to no sort of vice : Went where he pleased, said what he thought, Not rich, but owed no man a groat : In State opinions a la mode, He hated Wharton like a toad : Had given the faction many a wound, And libelled all the Junta round." One cloud that threatened his friends was the iUness of the Queen. "We are here," says Swift,* "in odd circumstances. Few of the Whigs will allow the Queen to be alive, or, at best, that she can live a month." The illness passed, but it * Smift to ^ValU, 2nd Feb., 17^. (Mr. Miuray's MSS.) 278 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1713—1714. left an impression of danger on the Ministry. The close of that life would open questions of exceeding difficulty, "which were scarcely likely to he settled by a Ministry in which the essential weakness of division had appeared. The elections, no doubt, contrary to all expectation, had gone adversely to the Whigs, and the Ministers found themselves with a large majority. But even with this the meeting of Parliament was deferred, as it would seem, from the timidity or hesitation of the Ministers. The chief topic of discussion for the opposition wliile await- ing the opening of Parliament was the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht. Bad as this Treatj^ was, the Whigs averred that even its poor conditions were still unfulfilled. Dunkirk's fortifi.ea- tions were still intact : and it was feared that the Ministers were inclined to relax the requirement for their destruction out of deference to the desires of France. Steele, now in the full flush of his honours as the new Member of Parliament for Stockbridge, had been bestirring himself in the discussion, and partly from political ambition, partly in hope of a little gain, he had written a pamphlet on the Importance of Dunkirk. It had been answered by Swift, who now found the opportunity of revenge for which he longed, in a pamphlet with the title of The Importance of the Guardian, written in his most scath- ing style of sarcasm. This appeared in December, 1713. Steele followed up his first efi'ort by prodiicing, on the 19th of January, The Crisis, which was intended to arouse the nation to the dangers now threatening the principles of the lievolu- tion. It was ponderous, ill-conceived, and unreadable : re- producing at full length the tedious detail of the Acts of Settlement. But such as it was, the Whigs caught it up eagerly : and Steele's vanity prompted him to a new eflFort in the Englishman, where he went further afield, and interfered even with Irish politics. He was answered in a style of the fiercest scorn by Swift : and this answer — The Ptoblic Spirit of the Whigs — which appeared in March, remains as the solitary .Chap. XL]; DISSENSIOK AND ITS FEUITS. 279 monument, that towers high above all the passing incidents of the fray. Meanwhile, on the 16th of February, Parliament had at length met. The Queen's health was felt to be hazardous : the stocks were falling: the Ministry knew their position to be threatened. Country gentlemen, beyond the limits of the "Whig party, began to have suspicions of Jacobite designs. Ireland was intractable, and seemed indisposed to accept ministerial guid- ance. Disunion was now so serious, that Oxford and Boling- broke hardly kept up a semblance of civility to one another. Ex- treme Tories dreaded lest the moderate men, whom they called the "Whimsicals," would coalesce with the Whigs : moderate men feared lest the extreme Tories should make terms with the Pretender. When Parliament opened, its first act involved something of a slight on the Ministry. Sir Thomas Hanmer, a Tory, but a Tory who was now separated from the Ministry, was elected as Speaker instead of William Bromley, one of the members for Oxford University : and his election was viewed as a sort of triumph for the Whigs. Steele, with his usual and characteristic tactlessness, kindled into fury the ill- will that was already slumbering against him for the Crisis. He not only rose to make his maiden speech on the first day of the Session, and on a subject usually treated in accordance with the strictest notions of Parliamentary etiquette : but with a reminiscence of a Latin idiom, unknown to nine-tenths of his hearers,* he described himself as " rising to do honour to Sir Thomas Hanmer." The first weeks of the Session were spent mainly in attacks by the Commons on Steele, and by the Lords on Swift. Swift, in his pamphlet, by some contemptuous language, possibly by an over-candid utterance of some home-truths, had mortally offended the Scottish representatives. He decried the Union as an unmitigated evil for England, rendered necessary only by the ill-management of Lord Godolphin. At * Ass^irgere alicui. 280 LIFE OF JONATHjLN SWIFT. [1713—1714. most it saved only a year or two of campaigning, which would have been all that the reduction of the Scots could have required. Proud, poor, turbulent, and shifty, the Scottish representatives were only too ready to find some means of making themselves troublesome. With the Duke of Argyll at their head, they now went in a body to petition the Crown for redress. The Lord Treasurer, unwilliag to aUenate the Northern Lords, had recourse to the sure refuge of vaciLlation and weakness — evasion and untruth. He issued a Procla- mation offering ^300 reward for information as to the author, of whom he declared that he knew nothing : and at the same time, when Morphew and Barber, the publisher and printer, were summoned to account for their share in the production, he secretly sent £100 to Swift to re-imburse these under- strappers for their loss and trouble. The thought was not an unkindly one : but the imposture is aU the more strange, as he can scarcely have hoped to ]persuade anyone that he was not actually privy to the Tract. The fury of the Scotch champions passed lightly over the head of Swift. But it was otherwise with his opponent Steele. His arrogance, his folly, the cool effrontery of his maiden speech, angered even his own party, and rendered their defence lukewarm. The House of Commons had more effectual means of sating their vengeance than was possessed by a clique of impoverished Scotch nobles. The Crisis was condemned : and, by a curious freak of parliamentary virulence, the member for Stockbridge was stripped of his blushing honom-s, and expelled from Parliament.* Swift was not liliely to slacken his effort, because of attacks and suspicions from without. But dissension within sickened and disheartened him. Freely as his labours had been given, * It may be convenient in this con- whioli Tvas afterwards republished as nesion to deal with what seems to be the work of Wagstafie. See Jfote at an incident of the Swift and Steele the end of tliis chapter for a discussion quarrel, viz., the Character of Steele, of this point. Chap. XL] DISSENSION AND ITS FEUITS. 281 he now only longed for an end of them. " I am now," he writes to Walls,* " under a great load of uneasy business which I hope to get over." Amid the struggle, his most con- genial interest lay in the planning of new literary schemes, and in drawing more close the ties that bound him to Arbuthnot and Pope and Gay. These years of hot political strife, much as they had absorbed Swift in the exciting whu-1 of affairs, had been blanks as regards all permanent hterary work. Now, as the struggle was growing hopeless, and as its end appeared to be near, the schemes in which he was linked with these more sympathetic comrades, regained their place. The chief was the plan conceived by the Scriblerus Club, devoted to prolong ' ' the memory of that learned phantom which is to be im- mortal,"f Martinus Scriblerus. Swift, Gay, Pope, and Arbuth- not formed the Club : Parnell soon joiaed them : and Oxford and Bolingbroke shared in their designs. They met at the rooms in St. James's Palace which Arbuthnot held as Court Phj'sician : and their evenings there were given to planning a treatise which was to hold up to ridicule the absurdities of pedantic learning in all its forms. Arbuthnot was the centre of the group, and the name of Martia himself was sometimes applied to, and accepted by, him. He became the moving power, and the first fragments which actually appeared owed much to his hand. The memoirs of the half-crazed pedant, after the Don Quixote tj'pe, who was to be the hero of the whole, were begun by him. But the other friends, too, were full of the plan. Pope was " returnmg from Troy." I Gay was idly looking about for employment : and Swift was ready to beguile by hterature his political disgust. Bolingbroke was proud to air his versatility : and Lord Oxford's stolid phlegm let him find amusement in the jingling couplets which were the * Swiff to Walls, 6tli March, 17Ji. J " The season of the Campaign (Mr. Murray's MSS.) before Troy, is near over," so Pope f The phrase occurs in a letter from himself says in a letter written at this Pope to Arbuthnot, 2nd Sept., 1714. time to Arbuthnot. 282 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1713—1714. tinsel part of the design, and in which he was pleased to shew his own facility.* Swift mistook the stolidity for fortitude, and was glad to invite his chief to throw off cares which he fancied might be pressing him too hard. But the storm was at hand. Disaster soon broke up the coterie and shattered their designs. A few fragments indeed appeared, from the pens of Arbuthnot and Pope and Gay, with perhaps some help from Swift. But the Scriblerus Club is chiefly of interest in the life of Swift, not as it made him contribute to the joint production, but as it gives a new turn to his thoughts at so critical a moment. The literary monuments of Scriblerus are not to be found in anything that proceeded directly from this ineffective partnership of wit, but in the isolated efforts of the two greatest of the group — in Gulliver's Travels and the Dunciad. The dangers were rapidly taking definite shape. Swift more than any other might, it had been hoped, appease the fatal disputes : but even he had failed. His patience was worn out : and in May he announced his intention of retu-ing and leaving the Ministry to their fate. He was still pressed to stay : for, as one of those who looked for his help + alleged in excuse of his importunity, " You have an unlucky quality that exposes you to the folly of those who love you : I mean good nature!' The wrongs Swift has suffered, this correspondent admits : but " choose," he says, " to stay and convince the world that j'ou are as much above private resentment when the public is con- cerned, as you are incapable of being tired out in the service of your country : and that you are neither afraid nor unwilling to face a storm in a good cause." But at the end of Maj^, Swift left. He buried himself at Letcombe in Berkshire, in the house of his friend Mr. Gery, * " He used," Pope said to Spence, night, when his all was at stake.'' " to send trifling verses from the Court + Chiverton Charlton, Yeoman of to the Scriblerus Club almost every the Guard, -svriting to Swift on the day, and come and talk idly every 22nd of May. Chap. XL] DISSENSIOIT AND ITS FETJITS. 283 the vicar, whose unassuming worth had attracted Swift, even though he had been guilty of what Swift held to be the signal folly of man-iage, and had been unwise enough to ask Swift's advice about that marriage only when it was too late to break it oif.* One Molly Gery, Swift had known as far back as his Farnham days, and it was probably this old friendship for the family that now decided the choice of his place of retirement. No contrast with the life he had just quitted, could have been greater than this. He sought it only in despair. He had striven long and faithfulty, but now he could do no more. He refused to witness longer the blindness, the vacillation, the wretched jealousies, that were ruining the cause he had at heart. His absence was soon felt. Others attempted to take up his work: but they could not fill his place. "You have formed a new character," says the Lord Treasurer's own cousin, "wbich no one is vain enough to pretend to imitate." + Swift stayed at Letcombe for just two months and a half, before he left for Ireland. These were eventful weeks for the country'; and they formed a curiously critical j)assage in Swift's life. To understand much that is strange in his later years, we must attend carefully to his mood now : and every scrap of evidence that throws light upon that mood, is of interest. On the 11th of June, he writes thus to Walls t : — " I think it is long since I -wrote to you, or yon to me. I am now retired into the country, weary to death of Courts and Ministers and husincss and politics. I hope to be in Ireland, if possible, by the end of the summer ; sooner I cannot, having many papers to look over and settle while I am here. I was six weeks compassing the great work of leaving London, and did it at last abruptly enough : but go I would : the reasons I may live to tell you, or perhaps you will guess them by their effects before I see you. I shall say no more, but that I care not to live in storms, when I can no longer do service in the ship, and am able to get out of it. I have gone through my share of malice and danger, and will be as quiet the rest of my days as I can. So much for politics." * Journal for May, 1712. t Swift to Walls, 11th June, 1714. t Thomas Barley to Swift, June 19, (Mr. Murray's MSS.) 1714. 284 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1713—1714. Then he breaks off, to deal with endless details about the business arrangements which he trusted to "Walls. In a more amusing and more confidential strain, he writes to Arbuthnot : * " My stomach is piouder than you imagine, and I scorned to write till I was Avrit to. I have already half lost the idea of Courts and MinLsters. I dine between 12 and 1, and the whole house is a-bed by 10, and up at 6. I drinlc no wine and see but one dish of meat. I pay a guinea a week for dieting and lodging myself and man with an honest clergj'man of my old acquaintance, and my paying is forced, for he has long invited me. I did not know till last night that the Princess Sophia was deadt when my land- lord and I chanced to pay a visit to a farmer in a neighbouring village, and was told so over a mug of ale, by a brisk young fellow, just come from London, who talked big and looked onus withgreat contempt. * * * The fashion of this world passeth away : however I am angry at those who dis- perse us sooner than these may need. I have a mind to be very angrj', and to let my anger break out in some manner that will not please them at the end of a pen.J # * * You are a set of peoi^le drawn almost to the dregs : you must try another game : this is at an end. Your Ministry is four- score and ten years old, and all you can endeavour at is an Euthanasia, or rather it is in a deep consumption at five-and-twenty. * # * Writing to you much would make me stark mad. Judge his condition who has nothing to keep him from being miserable but endeavouring to forget those for whom he has [the greatest value, love, and friendship. Biit you are a Philosopher and a Physician, and can overcome by your wisdom and your faculty those weaknesses which other men are forced to reduce by not thinking on them. Adieu, and love me half so well as I do you." Swift was perhaps helped to the oblivion he desu'ed by j)lanning for Scriblerus. Pope tells him that Arbuthnot was ascribing his retirement entirely to zeal for the scheme : that his " only design is to attend at full leisure to the life and adventures of Scriblerus." And Arbuthnot himself, § after hintmg at some of the growing troubles, and telling how " the * Sivift to Arhuthnot, 16th June, on tlui Present State of Affairs, -wldch. 1714. Printed by Mr. Cunningham, in was written just now, but by Boling- his edition of Lives of the Poets (1854), broke's intervention was delayed so Vol. III., p. 203. long, that it was allowed to stand over f The Eleotress died on the 28th of till later years. May. § Arbuthnot to Siriff, June 26, ? This refers to the Free Thoughts 1714. Chap. XI.] DISSENSION AND ITS FEUITS. 285 Dragon* dies liard," turns also to Scriblerus. "Pray remem- ber Martin," he saj^s, " who is an innocent fellow, and will not disturb your solitude. The ridicule of medicine is so copious a subject, that I must only here and there touch it." Then he gives a sketch of his own and Pope's plans for fulfilling the common design, adding, " I do not give you these hints to divert you, but that you may have your thoughts and work upon them." Swift replied in the following letter, now first printed, which paints for us, with strange clearness of outline, both Swift's relations to his literary feUow-workers, and his outlook on political affairs t : — Juhj 3rd, 1714. I reckoned yon woultl have held up for one letter, and so have given over. That is the usual way I treat my hest ahsent friends when I am in London. Did I describe myself as in a happy state here 1 Upon my faith you read wrong : I have no happiness hut being so far out of the way of the Dragon and the rest. Lewis reproaches me as one who has still an itch to the Court only because I asked him how the Sumina nrum went : was not that unjust 1 and quotes upon me Quae liwis miseris tarn dira cupido ? I do assert that living near a Court with some circumstances is a most happy life, and would be so still if the Dragon did not spoil it. I find the triumvirate of honest councillors is at an end. I am gone ; Lewis says he lives in ignorance in his castle, and you meddle as little as you can : one thing still lies upon you, which is to be a constant adviser to Lady M(asham). The game will of course be played into her hand. She has very good sense hut may be imposed upon. And I heard a whisper that the Squire J plies there again. 'Tis, as you say, if the Dragon speaks kindly of Parnell he is gone. 'Tis the Ossories that get the Derryes and the Chesters the Yorks.§ To talk of Martin in any hands but yours is a folly. You every day give better hints than all of us together could do in a twelvemonth : and, to say the truth. Pope, who first thought of the hint, has no genius at all to it in my mind. Gay is too yoimg ; Parnell has some ideas of it, but is idle : I could put together and lard and strike out well enough, but all that relates to the sciences must be from you. I am a vexed unsettled vagabond, and my thou"hts are turned towards some papers I have, and some other things I * The Dragon was the familiar name broke, for Oxford. § Dr. Hartstong, Bishop of Ossory, + Stvift to Ariutlmot. (MS. letter had just been translated to Deny : in the Forster collection.) and Sir WiUiam Dawes from Chester X The familiar name for Bohng- to York. 286 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1713—1714. ■would fain get from you and Lady M(asliam), and would have had from the Dragon but that is impossihle till he is out, and then I -n'ill go to him to Herefordshire and make him give me hints. I have got my History* from Secretary Bromley ; and they shall never have it again, and it shall ■be an altered thing if I live. The hints you mention relating to medicine are admirable. I wonder Tio"w you can have a mind so decjiuje in a Court where there are so many million of things to vex you. You must understand I have writt this post to the Dragon, but you must not take notice of it nor I fancy will he, for what I writt is very odd and serious. I think to go and ramble for a, month about Herefordshire and those parts. Ask the Dragon whether he will order his people at his castle to receive me. Why do you not .■send your Parliament agrazing 1 What do you mean by your Proclamation and £5000 ? t Till I hear reasons 1 dislike your Politics. Wliy do I talk of it say you? Why did that puppy Barber Avrite of it to me? But the Commons offer £100,000. If I was the Pretender I would come over myself and take the money to help to pay my troops. They had better put out a Proclamation that whoever discovers the Pretender or the longitude shall have £100,000. % This strain is a sacrifice to Hanover, the Whigs, and the Qu(een)'s state of health. It will neitlier satisfy Hanover, silence the Whigs, nor cure the gout. Give him a pension and oblige him to live beyond the Alps. What's become of your project to make it high treason to bring over foreign troops ? I wish a little care was taken for securing the kingdom as well as the succession. § But country Politics are doubly insupportable, and so I have done and retire to lament with my neighbours the want of rain and dearness of hay. Farmer Tyler says the white mead at Chawdry has not been so bad in the memory of man, and the summer barley is quite dried up, but we hope to have a pretty good crop of wheat. Parson, 'tis thought, must stick to his bargain, bi\t aU the neighbours say the Attorney was an arrant rogue. We cannot get a bit of good butter for love or money. I could tell you more of the state of our affairs, but doubt your taste is not refined enough for it. The ironj'' which appears in the closing lines here has marks peculiar to his later humour, and the picture which he gives of his life throughout these letters, bears out that which Pope * The History of the Peace of the absolute ignorance on Swift's part Utrecht. It never appeared. of any Jacobite designs, this sentence f The proclamation offering a. re- would supply it. ward of £5000 for the Pretender, dead § This was the extent of Swift's or alive, was issued, after the death of Jacobitism : that is to say, he was the Electress, to appease the alarms of strongly in favour of the Revolution a Jacobite invasion. Settlement, but refused to accept it as X If anything were needed to prove the be-all and end-all of politics. Chap. XI.] . DISSENSION AND ITS FEUITS. * '287 gives to Arbuthnot in the form of a mock news letter, on the 4th of July.* " This day the envoys deputed to Dean Swift on the part of his late confederates, arrived here during the time of divine service. They were received at the back door, and having paid the usual compUments on their part, and received the usual chidings on that of the Dean, were introduced to his landlady, and entertained with a pint of the Lord Bolingbroke's JFlorence. The health of that great Minister was drank in this pint, together with the lord Treasurer's, whose wine we also wished for ; after which were commemorated Dr. Arbuthnot, and Mr. Lewis, in a sort of cider, plentiful in these parts, and not altogether unknown in the taverns of London. There was likewise a sideboard of coflfee, which the Dean roasted with his own hands in an engine for the purpose, his landlady attending all the while that office was performing. He talked of politics over coffee, with the air and style of an old statesman, who had known something formerly, but was shamefully ignorant of the last three weeks. When we mentioned the welfare of England, he laughed at us, and said Miiscovy would become a flourishing empire very shortly. He seems to liave wrong notions of the British Court, but gave us a hint as if he had a correspondence with the King of Sweden. As for the methods of passing his time, I must tell you one which constantly employs an hour about noon. He has in his windows an orbicular glass, which by contraction of the solar beams into a proper focus, doth burn, singe, or speckle, white, or printed paper, in curious little holes, or various figures. We chanced to find some experiments of this nature upon the votes of the House of Commons. The name of Thomas Hanmer, Speaker, was much singed, and that of John Barber entirely burnt out. There was a large gap at the edge of the bill of schism, and several specks upon the Proclamation for the Pretender. I doubt not but these marks of his are mystical, and that the figures he makes this way are a significant cypher to those who have the skill to explain them." Swift's own letters as well as the laboured artificiality of Pope's description lead us to the same conclusion as to his mood during these weeks. By his former associates he was kept fuUy informed as to the " chaos of affairs " which now prevailed. The rapidly approaching fall of Oxford, the tricks of Lady Masham, the growth of Bolingbroke's influence, were all chronicled for him. Swift, in his retirement, received them as from a world to which he no longer belonged. His * Printed in Mr. Elwin's Edition of Pope. {Utters, II., 468.) 288 ' LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1713—1714. friends were still pressing, on his behalf, his appointment as historiographer, for which he had asked in a memorial drawn up three months before. But all direct interest in politics he had, as he fancied, laid aside for ever. He had before spoken with anger and vexation of the toil and wony that his political work had caused him : but he had never spoken of politics with the apathetic cynicism that he now assumed. Though he would not allow himself to disown them in failure, he was nevertheless disgusted with his friends : it may be, that he was in some sort disgusted with himself, and with his iU-spent labour. When his money affairs in Ireland go wrong, through the carelessness and dishonesty of Parvisol his agent, he seems to let loose an amount of pent-up indignation that covered perhaps more than Parvisol's wrong-doing. " Such a rascal," * he says, " deserves nothing more than rigorousjnstico. He has imposed upon my easiness, and that is what I never will forgive. I beg you will not do the least thing in regard to him, hut merely for my interest, as if I were a Jew, and let who will censure me. * * * His vanity, pride, and carelessness, are ruining me when I am laden with debts, and the Court will not give me a penny to pay them. I am above £150 in debt in London since I came. * * I am weary of Ministers : I stole from them all, and have here a little qniet. * * * Do as you please, but let no regard to him influence you. I will take all the blame of hardship on myself : lay it on me as strong as you please." The indignation, the cynicism, and the apathy, were indeed the signs of a mind ill-at-ease with itself. He cannot shake off the longing to be back, even though the favom-able circum- stances, which, as he said to Arbuthnot, might make living near a Court a most happy life, were wholly gone. He would fain have seen his lot cast amongst the friends who were so much to him : biit he saw that the hope of a settlement in England was vanishing. He had, for nearly four years, turned from the literary work in which he was unrivalled, and had narrowed himself to party : and now he dreaded lest his power was gone. " I could put together and lard and strike out," as he says to * Sn-ift to Walls, July 3, 1714. (Mr. Murray's MSS.) Chap. XL] DISSENSION AND ITS FEUITS. 289 Arbutlmot, " but I am a poor unsettled vagabond. " To wean himself from the past ; to strike out a new line ; to allow his sarcasm to shake itself free from casual environments, and to recover its broader and more permanent tone, — this was now to be the work of Swift : and it began during these few weeks of apparent quiet, but of real struggle and self-discipline. During Swift's absence the Schism Bill, which was to pre- vent Schoolrdasters carrjdng on their functions unless they had taken the Sacrament according to the rites of the Established Church, was pushed rapidly forward. It was Bolingbroke's Bill: and his object was to show that a vigorous defiance had taken the place of the timid moderation of Oxford. The Bill was finally carried on the third reading in the Lords by eight votes : and it was to come into operation on the 1st of August. Swift did not love the Dissenters : but he might well doubt the expediency of a measure which was to be the sign of his patron's ruin. On the 8th of June, Oxford addressed a memorial to the Queen, partly intended as a justification of his past action, partly as a means of winning back some of the favour that was fast deserting him. The paper is itself his chief indictment. It is pusillanimous, cringing, and without real perception of a minister's duty. He declines responsibility for failure, because he had been over-ruled. He assumes credit for having con- cealed defalcations for which his colleagues were to blame. He admits, with almost inconceivable want of pride, that he had despatched Bolingbroke on a mission to France, not for the public good, but that he might gain Bolingbroke's goodwill. Swift could have known nothing of the letter : but much as he held himself bound to fidelity, and much as he deceived himself as to the real capacity of Oxford, is it possible that Swift can have silenced all doubts as to the man, who was weak enough to write a letter such as this ? Opposed by Mrs. Masham, and disliked by the Queen, Oxford still clung to office. Bolingbroke saw that he must strike at once, and in the 290 LIFE OF JONATHAN S"WIFT. [1713—1714. last week of Julj^ the Chancellor was summoned to town to carry out the changes. Oxford lost his self-control, and took to womanish scolding aiid fretful threats. Erasmus Lewis, his faithful guide and adherent, told Swift that in all his vexations, he was chiefly vexed by this pusillanimity on the j)art of his chief.* On the 27th of July the end came. The Lord Treasurer and Bolingbroke had a conference with the Queen, which ended in a scene of angry wrangling. Between eight and nine o'clock in the evening, Oxford was summoned to resign the "White Staff. Bolingbroke had triumphed : but the scene of the morning left the poor Queen stunned and done to death. Amidst the hungry claimants, it could not be settled who should have the staff. It was generally agreed that it should be put in commission : but the commissioners were not named. Content with his triumph, Bolingbroke might well pause. And meanwhile, at his house in Golden Square, he entertained Stanhope, Pulteney, Craggs, and Walpole, as if in ostentatious proof that to him the coalition was possible which Oxford had aimed at in vain. Less than a month before, Swift had v^rritten to take, as he thought, leave of Oxford. The letter tells its own story. July 1, 1714. Mt Lord, Wien I was witli you, I liave said more than oaoe, that I would never allow q^iality or station made any real difference between men. Being now absent and forgotten, I have changed my mind : you have a thousand people who can pretend they love you, with as much appearance of sincerity as I ; so that, according to common justice, I can have but a thousandth part in return of what I give. And this difference is wholly owing to your station. And the misfortune is still the greater, because I always loved you just so much the worse for your station ; for, in your public capacity, you have often angered me to the heart, but, as a private man, never once. So that, if I only look toward myself, I could wish you a private man to-morrow ; for I have nothing to ask ; at least'nothing that you will give, wliich is the same thing : and then you would see whether I Lewis to Sivift. 21 July, 1714. Chap. XL] DISSEIJ^SION' AND ITS FEUITS. 291 should not with much more ■williiign.ess attend you in a retirement, when- ever you please to give me leave, than ever I did at London or Windsor. From these sentiments, I will never write to you, if I can help it, otherwise than as to a private person, or allow myself to have been obliged to you in any capacity. The memory of one great instance of your candour and justice, I will •carry to my grave ; that having been in a manner domestic with you for almost four j'ears, it was never in the power of any public or concealed enemy, to make you think ill of me, though malice and envy were often ■employed to that end. If I live, posterity shall know that, and more ; ■which, though you, and somebody that shall be nameless, seem to value less than I could wish, is all the return I can make you. Will you give me leave to say how I would desire to stand in your memory ? As one, who was truly sensible of the honour you did him, though he was too proud to Toe vain upon it ; as one, who was neither assuming, officiotis, nor teazing ; who never wilfully misrepresented persons or facts to you, nor consulted his passions when he gave a character ; and lastly, as one, whose indis- <;retions proceeded altogether from a weak head, and not an ill heai't. I will add one thing more, which is the highest compliment I can make, that I never was afraid of offending you, nor am now in any pain for the manner I write to you in. I have .said enough ; and, like one at your levee, having made my bow, I shrink back into the crowd. I am, etc. Jon. Swift. It was thus that a striking chapter in Swift's life was closed. On the 25th of July, he wrote a letter to Arbuthnot* where politics were scarcely named, and where the prospect of the " Dragon " going was only lightly alluded to. He is chiefly occupied with expressing his friendship for Arbuthnot, and with encouraging him in his work on Scriblerus. " Our talk was of the Dragon's being out, as a thing done : so no more reflection on that neither : — Qu'est ce que I'homme ? And so you will lend me all your money. The mischief is I never borrow money of a friend. You are mightily mistaken : all your honour, generosity, good nature, good sense, wit, and every other praiseworthy quality, wUl never make me think one jot the better of you. That time is now some years past, and you will never mend in my opinion. But, really. Brother, you have a sort of shuffle in your gait : and now I have said the worst that your most mortal enemy * Sn-ift to ArVutlinot : printed by Cunningham. (Lives of the Poets, IIL, 204.) u 2 292 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1713— 17U. would say of you -witli truth. * * * Go on for the sake of wit and humour, and ciiltivate that vein which no man alive possesses but yourself, and which lay like a mine in the earth, which the owner for a long time never knew of." Swift was thus throwing politics aside in his retreat, when the news of Oxford's fall came to him as an accomplished fact, from neutrals, from enemies, and from Oxford himself. Clearly the fall was complete and final. Swift must himself have seen, as Lewis said to him in a letter, that Oxford's parts were decaj^ed : Swift had every excuse, and every motive, for standing aloof from him in his fall. He had striven long and his own reward had been poor. He was cultivated by Bolinghroke. He had already planned to go to Ireland : as he told Walls * "his trunk, with all his clothes and linen, was sent last week to Chester, and he was in rags." But he did not hesitate one moment in choosing his part, which was to cling to a friendship which had brought him so little, now that it could bring him even less. Oxford asked him to stay with him in Herefordshire, and Swift feels " he could not possibly refuse " the request.! But he knew what it meant. " I shall lose all favour with those now in power by following Lord Oxford in his retreat. I am hitherto very fair with them : but that will be at an end." But it was not long before the scene shifted again. Boling- broke's triumph was short-lived. The stormy disputes around her had shaken the poor Queen's health. Vexed, anxious, not knowing whom to trust, she listened, like one dazed, to the altercations raging round her. She told her attendants that " she could not outlive it." On Thursday the 29th of July, fatal sj'mptoms appeared. Shooting pains in her head were not relieved by cupping. She lay in a comatose state : and a message was sent in haste by the Duchess of Ormond, to summon the ministers, who were sitting at the Cockpit in "Whitehall, to Kensington Palace. They sat there in continuous * Sn-ift to avails. 20th July. (Mr. Murray's MSS.) f Hid. Chap. XL] DISSENSION AND ITS PRUITS. 293 conclave, when the door of the Council Chamber opened and two peers whose position warranted their intrusion, entered the room. They were the Dukes of Somerset and Argyll. At first there was some commotion : but the Duke of Shrewsbury presently rose and thanked them for their presence : business proceeded; and Bolingbroke felt himself checkmated. The Duke of Shrewsbury was chosen to fill the post of Lord Treasurer : the dyiug Queen's bedside was approached, and with a last effort of the honesty of purpose that gave some brightness to a life otherwise dreary and even ignoble, she praj'ed him, as she handed to him the staff, to "hold it for the good of her people." Promptitude and energy now took the place of confusion and delay. The Privy Councillors withm reach, Whigs as well as Tories, were summoned to the Board. The hopes of the Jacobites were dashed. The guards were increased : the garrison at the Tower was reinforced : the train bands were called out : and the ships of war were set in order. A cordial understanding was established between the Treasury and the Bank of England. Bolingbroke, lately so supreme, found himself taken to task for neglect of the national safety, in leaving the seaports unprovided against attack. Communications were opened with the Elector : the Heralds were ordered to be in readiness ; and the Hanoverian envoy was requested to attend with the Black Box that contained the appointment of a Council of Regency. Such were the preparations pressed forward during Friday and Saturday. During these days the Queen lay all but unconscious : and on Sunday morning at seven o'clock, she ended the life of ceaseless vexation and anxiety that august position and great power had brought to a homely, narrow, dull, and uneducated woman. Her fifty years had little of brightness in them: and at an age when many have not passed their prime, she was a lonely, worn-out, wreck, with husband and children gone, and with no real friend on earth. 294 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1713—1714. "Sleep," says Arbuthnot to Swift, "was never more welcome to a weary traveller, than death was to her." The news reached Swift soon after noon the same day. Bolingbroke's messenger passed through Wantage with the tidings, and a friend sent thence a hurried line to Swift at Letcombe. From Bolingbroke, he received a letter on the 8rd of August, half boastful, half defiant, half desperate. " All is lost but his spirit:" "everything is quiet and wiU con- tinue so : " " the Tories seem to resolve not to be crushed : " "the Whigs are a pack of Jacobites : " — the letter contains as many inconsistencies as lines. The writer had not settled whether the case was desperate : and if desperate, what was the most picturesque bow with which he could retire from the stage. Lewis, the wary and practised politician, saw that all was lost : " all old schemes, designs, projects and journeys," are broken by the snapping of the Queen's thread of life. The country went with the new order of things. Oxford was hooted by the ,same crowd that had cheered him to the echo three years before : and Bolingbroke was greeted with but doubtful applause. On the 4th of August the Duke of Marlborough, who had returned from abroad, entered London, escorted b.y two hundred noblemen on horseback. Swift saw more quickly and more clearly than his con- federates, that the Whig triumph was complete. The rabble, whose support had amused him, was changed : " Trade and Wool," now took the place of the old cry for " SachevereU and the Church." With something of the eye of an artist he saw how the favour of the mob could be excited on the side against his own. " If they will retain me on the other side as their counsellor," he says jestingly to Bolingbroke, " I will engage them a majority." But he never loses heart, or hesitates as he did before the blow had fallen. " I have seen a letter from Dean Swift," says Arbuthnot to Pope in September: "he keeps up his noble spirit, and though like a man knocked Chap. XL] DISSENSION AND ITS FEUITS. 295 down, you may behold him still with a stern countenance, and aiming a blow at his adversaries." Arbuthnot, too, saw that the end was come. Like Swift, he drew from it a lesson of proud and cynical humour. "I have an opportunity," he suggests to Swift,* "calmly and philosophically to consider that treasure of vileness and baseness that I alwa3's beheve to be in the heart of man." He watches the burst of dayhght on the wreck : the women cast from intrigue to tears : the schemes that had busied them scattered : their hopes at an end. For himself he had gained little and had little to lose. Such as it is, he is readj' to give it up : " I have not seen anj'thing as yet to make me recant a certain inconvenient opinion I have, that one cannot pay too dear for peace of mind." For the rest, " Fuimus Tories : " the Argives of Whigs will triumph, and his only regret is that Scriblerus may get morose and dull. NOTE ON THE WAGSTAFFE VOLUME Qj. 280). One of tlie most bitter attacks on Steele, was that made in a Pamphlet on the Character of Richard St — le, Jisq., by Toby, Abel's Kinsman. It was republished, in 1726, in a volume purporting to contain the miscellaneous works of Dr. "William Wagstaffe, who had been Physician at St. Bartholo- mew's Hospital, and who had died at Bath, the year before, at the age of 40. The volume begins with an account of Wagstaffe and his family, which seems, in the main, to be founded on fact. But the question remains, by whom were the works, collected in the volume, written? The hypothesis of the late Mr. Dilke, in his republished Papers of a Critic, is that they are mainly from the hand of Swift, with a few written by another hand, and inserted in order to mislead. Wagstaffe seems to have been a good- humoured, somewhat careless, wit, whose pen may well have produced some stray pieces, although he never attained to any reputation, and, according to his professed biographer, never acknowledged his authorship. We have no authority for saying that he was a friend of Swift's : t but * Arbuthnot to Smift. Aug. 13, 1714. married. In the Journal, Swift speaks t The nearest tie I can find is first of going to see the library of Swift's friendship for Sir Charles Ber- " poor Charles Bernard," which was nard, the Physician of St. Bartholo- to be sold : and then of attending the mew's, whose daughter Wagstaffe sale, to little purpose. 296 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT, [1713—1714. Swift tindoubtedly knew some who were Wagstaffe's friends : and tlie death, of the little-known physician, and careless wit, may have given Swift the opportunity for which he wished. As Mr. Dilke points out, at the very time Swift and Pope were collecting their miscellanies : and here seemed a favourable opportunity for turning off upon the ohscure Wagstaffe, works ■which they did not desire to own. The proof of Mr. Dilke's hypothesis, which is almost irresistible, rests on several grounds. Even by the admission of the writer of the biography, Wagstaffe could not correspond to the author of the Cluirader of Steele. Wagstaffe, it is stated, "when he wrote it, did not even know Steele by sight." Yet, in the first paragraph, the Character refers to Steele's " short face : " and almost every line shows it to have been the work of one who had a personal pique against Steele. The pieces in the volume all belong to the years when Swift was in London, and was defending the views they contain, between 1710 and 1714 : Wagstaffe lived till 1725, and, with so facile a pen, produced nothing more ! The collector asserts that Wagstaffe kept his anonymity strictly : yet ^Yithin a year after Wagstaffe's death, this nameless editor is able to publish a volume, which ascribes a tolerably long list of works to him, M'ith no hint of a doubt in any case. But, further, the Character of Steele, at least, if nothing more hi the volume, is filled with marks of Swift's style. Throughout the volume there are references, which seem to bespeak Swift's hand.* The author of Gulliveriana ascribes the Character to Swift : and in the Englishman, Steele refers, not obscurely, to Swift as its writer. The Cliaracter refers to those charges of Steele's ingratitude to the patrons who kept him in office, which Swift brings against him in his letter of 13th May, 1713. Even the relenting towards Steele which the biography expresses,t is not unlikely to have been dictated by some memory of former friendship, surviving in Swift, when their quarrel had been dead and buried for a dozen years. Lastly, there is a curious point brought out by Mr. Dilke in regard to the letter from Dr. Andrew Tripe,J printed in the volume. That letter is * The indications are slight scpa- p. 209, where Ormond, Oxford, and rately, but almost conTincing, in union. Bolingbroke, are sketched with just Amongst others, see p. 220, where the the colouring Swift would have em- danger of Tory disunion is sketched in ployed. a few sentences amazingly like Swift : f The Character, fi^e preface says, also p. 224, where there is a quotation does want some apology, for its treat- from Swift's favourite, Rochefoucauld: ment of a gentleman of known parts p. 208, where there is a, reference to and abilities. the feeble answers to the Conduct of % Its title runs : A Letter from the Allies: p. 95, where Burnet and the facetious Dr. Andrew Trijic, at Bidpath are conjoined, exactly as Swift Bath, to his luring brotlier, the pro- would have conjoined them : and found Greshamite, slieiring, ^'c. Chap. XI.] DISSENSION AND ITS FEUITS. 297 occupied largely either -with, medical metapHors or details. It is entirely different from the letter from Dr. Andrew Tripe to Nestor Ironside, which was one of the Scriblerus Club productions, and is generally printed amongst Swift's works.* But when Pope is endeavouring to shift off from his own or his confederates' shoulders, the authorship of tlie latter, he writes thus : " We are assured by another that he (i.e. Pope) wrote a pamphlet called Dr. Andrew Tripe, which proved to be one Dr. 'Wagstaffe's."t Pope was here clearly endeavouring to turn his readers off the scent, by identifying the Scriblerian Dr. Andrew Tripe, with the medical treatise to the Gresliamite, which may really have been written by "Wagstaflfe, and which had just been published in the so-caUed Wagstaffe volume, by his literary ally, Swift. On the whole then we may take it that Wagstaffe, though he may have been an occasional scribbler, was neither the author of all the pieces in the volume, nor even (as Scott supposes) an " under spui'-leather " to Swift : but that Swift was in the main responsible for the volume, and that the most important pieces in it are from his own hand. Mr. Dilke mentions, in connexion with this disguise, the fact that Swift jpublished his Polite Conversations imder the name of Simon Wagstaff. But it is doubtful whether this is a confirmation of the former personation, and not rather the reverse. If a man called himself Simon Wagsta_^in 1738, it is rather against than in favour of the theory that he published his tracts under the name of Dr. William Wagsta_^b in 1726. The surname was also used as a disguise by Oldisworth, in annotations which he published on the Tatler (nominally translated from the French), in 1711, under the name of Walter Wagstaff, Esq. * Scott's 2ud Edition, IV., 279. + The Dunciad, quarto Edition of 1743. Testimonies of Authors, XXV. CHAPTEE XII. SWIFT IN RETIBEMEN-T. 1714 to 1720. ^TAT. 46—52. Efiect of the quiet time at Letcombe — Disgust fritli politics — Libels that pur- sued Swift's retirement — The spurious JEssays — His position in Dublin and at Laraoor — Troubles as Vicar and as Dean — The completed triumph of the Whigs — Swift to Oxford, on his fall — The fellowship of slarery — Parties in Ireland — Swift suspected of Jacobitism — The " English Garrison " in Ireland — Toleration Act — Swift's view of it — Union against a common danger — His occupations — Literary schemes — Reviving interests — Vanessa — The relations between her and Swift — Cadcnus and Vanessa — ^Vanessa at Celbridge — The letter to Stella — Vanessa's death — Her will, and Letters — Stella — The nature of her bond to Swift — Eestraiuts imposed on it — The Marriage — What it meant to each. These quiet weeks at Letcombe, after the storm and tur- moil of political struggle, were of critical importance in Swift's life. At the end of the four years of ceaseless excitement, in which gratified ambition had been chequered by doubt and im- patience, and occasional disgust, he had to balance the results of his life so far. Looking back on the early years of depen- dence and self-distrust : on the early pride and ambition : on the mistaken literary efforts that had preceded the first pro- duct of his full exuberance of genius in the Tale of a Tub, his was a strange experience. Scarcely had he discovered the richest vein of his genius, before he had found the dangers it was likely to involve. His boldness of speech had been miscon- strued. The humour with which he set forth the ludicrous inconsistencies in all vulgar conceptions of the supernatural, had puzzled the timid and conventional thought of his time. Chap. XII.] SWIFT IN RETIREMENT. '299' To restrain that humour, he had turned to what he might sup- pose the safest of all spheres, that of religious, social, and political essay-writing. He sought to make himself, above all, simple, clear, and logical in his method. Theory and specu- lation he set aside as fanciful and absurd. But in spite of himself, his humour would break out. With almost wayward exaggeration, he had thrown all his energies into the political struggle : and now, when the crash came, he was left " a poor cast courtier,'' whose aims and ambitions seemed suddenly to have slipped from liis grasp, and all that he had gained from the struggle was a contempt for the trickery of politics. Vexed with the imposture, he had carved out new literary schemes, and formed deep and lasting literary friendships. With this legacy from the past he had now to find new aims, and to achieve new influence. Swift never sought to cover his retreat by any assumptions of philosophical indifference. To leave England was a grief to him : to leave his friends, still more so. " When I leave a country without probability of returning," he writes to Pope, " I think as seldom as I can of what I loved or esteemed in it, to avoid the desiderium which of all things makes life most un- easy." From a position of enormous influence he had now sunk into one which made it prudent for his friends to avoid him. Thus Addison conveys his fear, through Jervas, to Pope.* " He owns he was afraid," writes Jervas, " Dr. Swift might have carried you too far among the enemy during the heat of the animosity : but now all is safe, and you are escaped, even in his opinion." Pope resented this expression of alarm : but others might not be so indifferent : and such suspicion no doubt aggravated Swift's lot. That was not made more bearable by the fact that he was pursued by the utmost bitterness of lampooners. One of their productions was The Hue and Cry after Dean Swift, borrowing its title from a tract written in the interest of the * Jcnas to Pojjc, Aug. 20, 1714. 800 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720. late Ministry, called The Hue and Cry after the Pretender. Its ribaldry and insult were made all the more pointed by extracts from what professed to be his Journal. These extracts, not unlike in stjde to those in which he parodied the last scenes of Bishop Burnet's life, are curious chiefly for the strange accuracy with which thej^ repeat some of the features of the letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, portraying some of those personal foibles which Swift loved to detect in himself as well as in others, and which he exposed with an almost morbid frankness. Save for the difficulty of believing that it could be so, one is tempted to think that some treacherous friend had obtained access to the letters, and used their con- tents to give point to the satire. Another ingenious plan for mortifying Swift, was the pro- duction of a volume of " Essays, Divine, Moral and Political, hy the author of a Tale of a Tub.* Subscribed with his own line, " In State Opinions a la mode," the frontispiece repre- sents Swift breaking off at the gate of St. Patrick's Deanery, from the divines, with whom he had been riding, as the phrase was, " tantivy to Home." The essays were a parody of works by Swift, the authorship of which had at various times crept out. The Dedication to Prince Posterity, suggested of course by the introduction to the Tale of a Tub, gave a defence of SAvift, which really amounted to an indictment against him ; and it was largety composed of tags and sentences out of his own works. The Essays on Religion piece together more of the same kmd of fragments, representing it as his intention to shew that Religion is worthless ; Christianitj^ is ridiculed * Mr. Dilke may very probaljly be But still more strong is the indication right ill ascribing those to Steele. The of authorship given by the stress plan is not unlike that wliich would which is laid in the Essay on Friend- suggest itself to Steele : the intimacy ship, on tlie circumstances of the wliich he once enjoyed with Swift breach with Steele : and by the fre- would account for the reflection which quent reference to what was Steele's they often give of Swift's own peculiar hobby, the necessity of the thoughts with a startling fidelity. dismantling of Dunkirk. Chap. XII.] SWIFT IN EETIEEMENT. 301 througli phrases taken from the "Argument against abolishing Christianity:" and Priests are satirized by a similar juxta- position of various scattered remarks. The Moral Essays ascribe to him not only a contempt for virtue and for the ties of friendship, but even scandalous immoralitj^. Those on politics chiefly aim at proving Swift's flagrant inconsistency. His actual surroundings, so far as we can picture them to ourselves, were embarrassing and cheerless enough. In his own words : — " My state of health none cares to learn, My life is here no soul's concern, And those with whom I now converse Without a tear will tend my hearse. Some formal visits, looks and words. What mere humanity affords, I meet perhaps from three or four. From whom I once expected more. * * * :>f My life is now a burden grown To others, ere it be my own." He was in debt to his predecessor Sterne for a large rambling, useless house; the expenses of installation cost something more ; and the thousand pounds, which he was to receive from the Queen's last Ministry, to meet these and other debts, were withheld upon their fall. His home was dismal : and already the best part of Dublin society was being driven from the liberty of St. Patrick's by the unhealthy dampness which may well have aggravated Swift's maladies in later yeai's. At Laracor he found things looking gloomy enough to suit with the prevailing melancholy of his mood. " The wall of my own apartment," he writes to Bolingbroke, "is fallen down, and I want mud to rebuild it, and straw to thatch it. Besides, a spiteful neighbour has seized on six feet of ground, carried off my trees, and spoiled my grove." He has plenty of occu- pation indeed, in visiting his parishes, and lookmg after his tithes and farms ; but it is occupation of a sort that contrasts impleasantly with the scenes in which he had lately borne a part. •302 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720. Both as Vicar, and as Dean, he had petty trouhles. At Laracor a dissenting chapel was set up, and fallen as Swift •was, he wasted energy in resisting this insult on his church, as ;at once immoral and illegal. With St. Patrick's chapter he Tvas involved in even more serious disputes, where he had the mortification of finding that Archbishop King supported his ■opponents. His authority was not, indeed, likely to be very gently administered : and when he applied to Bishop Atterbury for advice, even that fiery prelate counselled moderation. In England, meanwhile, matters were moving fast against Swift's friends. A Parliament, mainly Whig, met in March, 17t4- a committee of secrecy was appointed : and before its report was issued, Bolingbroke suddenlj^ withdrew, and took service with the Pretender : Ormond waited for his impeach- raent, and then fled : and Oxford was thrown into the Tower. All seemed lost : and it was now that Swift shewed his fidelity to his friends. To Oxford he wrote as follows : — Dublin, July 19, 1715. My Lord, It may look like an idle or officious thing iu me, to give your Lordship any interruption under your present circumstances ; yet I could never forgive myself, if, after being treated for several years with the greatest kindness and distinction, by a person of your Lordship's viitue, I should omit making you at this time the humblest offers of my poor service and attendance. It is the first time I ever solicited you in my o^vn behalf; and if I am refused, it will be the first request j'ou ever refused me. I do not think myself obliged to regulate my opinions by the proceedings of a House of Lords or Commons ; and therefore, however thej'' may acquit them- selves in your Lordship's case, I shall take the liberty of thinking and calling your Lordship the ablest and faithfullest minister, and truest lover of your country, that this age has produced. **********I have seen your Lordsliip labouring under great difficulties, and exposed to great dangers, and overcoming both, by the providence of God, and your own wisdom and courage. Your life has been ah-eady attempted by private malice ; it is now pursued by public resentment. Nothing else remained. ******** God Almighty protect you, and continue to you that fortitude and mag- nanimity he has endowed you with ! Farewell. Jon. Swift. " No misfortunes," the Duchess of Ormond writes in answer Chap. XIL] S"WIFT IN EETIEEMENT. 303 to his letter sent on the downfall of the Duke, " can lessen your friendship, which is so great as to blind you on the side of your friends' faults, and make you believe you see virtues in them, it were happy for them they enjoyed in any degree." So too. Lady Bolingbroke, who had even more serious ills to bear than her husband's loss of power and of&ce, found com- fort in Swift's fidelity: "Your letter," she says, " came in very good time to me, when I was full of vexation and trouble, which all vanishes, finding that you were so good to remember me under my afflictions, which have been not greater than you can think, but much greater than I can express." Knowing what were the troubles of her married life, there is a touch of pathos for us in what she adds, with a confidence which she could repose in Swift : " As to my temper, if it is possible, I am more insipid and dull than ever, except in some places, and there I am a little fury, especially if they dare mention my dear lord without respect, which sometimes happens." Swift did not lower either his standard of fidelity to friends, or the sternness of his front to foes. Suspected, and even in danger as he must have known himself to be, he never swerved from the decisiveness of his opposition to the new order of things. He valued the Protestant succession and would have tampered with no schemes to upset it : but he was enraged to find what claimed to be a guarantee of liberty made the excuse for its curtailment. Rightly or wrongly. Swift became thoroughly impressed with the idea that, in the name of Protestant liberty, true liberty was being destroyed. This determined his attitude when he again set his hand to active conflict ; and the first note of what animated his life hereafter was struck in the fierce irony expressed in a letter to Atterbuiy of April, 1716.* " I congratulate with. England for joining with, ns here in the fellowship of slavery. It is not bo terrible a thing as you imagine : we have long lived Swift to Atterhury, April 18, 1716. 304 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720. under it : aud wlieaiever you are disposed to know how to behave yourself in your new condition, you need go no further than me for a director. But, because we are resolved to go beyond you, we have transmitted a bill to England, to be returned here, giving the Government and six of the Council power for three years to imprison whom they please for three months, with- oiit any trial or examination : and I expect to be among the first of those upon whom this law will be executed." The bitterness of indignation that breathes through these words, represents Swift's fixed opinion on the new order of things. " The scene and the times," he tells Pope,* " have depressed me wonderfully." "As to your friends," Arhuthnot assures him, " though the world is changed to them, they are not changed to you." But no assurances would tempt him back to England, and in Ireland he stood, as yet, listlessly aloof. He interfered occasionally in appointments, in regard to which he fancied that his position gave him some right to have a voice : but it was an interference prompted only by the desire to serve his friends, and stimulated only by the deter- mination not to bate one jot of his privileges. " They shall be deceived," he writes to Walls of those in power,+ " as far as my power reaches, and shall not find me altogether so great a cully as they would willingly make me." But except for this, he stood as yet apart and apathetic. Ireland had adopted with no long delay the new order of things. Sunderland was Lord-lieutenant, and in his absence, the Lords Justices were chosen from amongst the pronounced enemies of the late government. Instead of Archbishop Lind- say, a Tory and High Churchman who, in 1713, had obtained the primacy through Swift's aid, Archbishop King, who owed Swift a grudge for being passed over, was now chosen as one of these Lords Justices : and for a time the feeling between him and Swift was one of absolute estrangement. King led a section of the Church which so far accepted the new order of things. But another party amongst the clergy were fierce in their * &Hft to Pope, Aug. 30, 171 C. t Siv-ift to Walls. May 5, 1715. (Mr. Murray's MSS.) Chap. XII.] SWIFT IN EETIEEMENT. 305 denunciations of all that was allied with the Whigs, and carried their Tory principles to the verge of Jacobitism. Small sparks were enough to kindle flame between these sections. A long discussion, which violently agitated the Church, had been opened by Dr. Browne, Bishop of Cork, in a sermon* preached against drinking in remembrance of the dead. The contention was nominally doctrinal, but was in reality directed against the "Whig custom of drinking to the immortal memory of William III. : and those who had neither doctrinal scruples, nor Jacobite sympathies, yet took the side of the Bishop of Cork from mere antipathy to the Whigs. On the other side Dr. Synge, Bishop of Raphoe,t defended the custom : and opinion varied accord- ing to the pohtical bias of each theologian. For the oppo- sition. Swift's friend Delany, in " A Long History of a Short Session of Parliament, in a Certain Kingdom," shewed how the remissness of the Tories, and the eager zeal of the Whigs, had changed what was originally a Tory, into a Whig, parliament, bent on the destruction of the Church. He was followed by a crowd of pamphleteers on his own side : and those of the Whigs were as numerous as the Tories. In 1714 1 we have a doggrel poem, reflecting on the late government, as " Perkin's Cabal or the Mock Ministry," and holding up to ridicule the lewdness of Bolingbroke, the dull crassness of Bromley, the scoundrelism of Prior and Moore, the " true prelatic pride " of Atterbury, and Phipps, as '• The very Jeffries of Ms age, Frantic and wild with party rage.'' In 1715 we have " The Last Will and Testament of the Pre- * Of DrinMng in Rememhrance, of Browne ; and the controversy became tlie Bead : a discourse delivered to the general. Swift's well-known answer, Clergy of the Diocese of Cork, oy Peter, when asked to drink to Irish com- Lord Bishop of Corh, Not. 4, 1713. merce, that " he never drank in + " Defence of Eating and Brinhing memory of the dead," is of course in Bemembrance of the Dead, by Ed- explained by the controversy. mard, Lord Bishop of Raphoe." This } Irish Academy Pamphlets, Vol. was followed by a rejoinder from Dr. XXX. 306 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720. tender,'"* bequeathing to his supposed adherents the legacies most suitable for each. Atterbury is to have " a troop of dragoons to be mounted by Irish Papists : " Prior, "all the empty and full bottles found in my house : " and Swift, " the liberty of writing a second part of the Tale of a Tub, with as much blasphemy as he shall think proper." Amidst this violence of controversy, the following letter to Archbishop King shews that Swift was exposed to a danger not hitherto suspected by his biographers. "My Lord. " I received yesterday a letter from Mr. Manley, giving an account of the seizing of a parcel of treasonable papers with one Jefferies directed to Dr. Swift. I acquainted my Lord-Lieutenant with it, who was very well pleased with this fresh instance of your grace's diligence and zeal in the King's service, which cannot fail of being highly acceptable to his Majesty. His excellency commanded me to give you his thanis for it, and he hopes that if there appear enough against the Doctor to justify it, he is kept in confinement, and Mr. Houghton also : but how far that may be justifiable your grace is best able to judge. I presume they are at least held to very good and suflioient bail. If anything can add to your grace's character this application to the public service will undoubtedly heighten it in the esteem of all good men, which like all other things that may happen to your advan- tage will give a particular satisfaction to, my Lord, your grace's most duti- ful and most obedient servant. " Charles DELATATE.t "Bath, JM"a2/25, 1715." The suspicion led to no such steps as King's correspondent desired, and its baselessness needs no elaborate proof. It is evidence of the fact, indeed, that Swift had more warrant for supposing his letters to have been tampered with in the Post Office than has generally been thought ; but it is evidence of nothing else. A man is scarcely to be held responsible for all that is addressed to him in the midst of a doubtful and turbulent political crisis. No one doubts that there were Jacobites amongst Swift's friends : still more amongst his * Irish Academy Pamphlets, Vol. King's MSS. in the possession of Dr. ■XXXII. Lyons, was printed in the Eeport of + This letter, from Arclibishop the Eecords Commissioners, 1871. Chap, XII.] SWIFT IN EETIEEMENT. 307 casual correspondents ; but this did not make him one himself. His own words to King give a candid description of his position, although he was doubtless deceived as to the in- clination of one at least amongst his patrons : — * " Had there been ever the least overture or intent of bringing in the Pre- tender, during my acquaintance with the ministry, I think I must have been. Tilery stupid not to have picked out some discoveries or suspicions. And although I am not sure I should have turned informer, yet I am certain I should have dropped some general cautions, and immediately have retired. When people say things were not ripe at the queen's death, they say they know not what. Things were rotten : and had the ministers any such thoughts, they should have begun three years before ; and they who say .otherwise, understand nothing of the state of the kingdom at that time. " But whether I am mistaken or not in other men, I beg your grace to believe, that I am not mistaken in myself. I always professed to be against ithe Pretender ; and am so still. And this is not to make my court, (which I know is vain), for I own myself full of doubts, fears, and dissatisfactions ; which I think on as seldom as I can : yet if I were of any value, the public may safely rely on my loyalty ■ because I look upon the coming of the Pretender as a greater evil, than any we are Kkely to suffer under the worst Whig ministry that can he found." Swift felt annoyed that his rectitude should be doubted by one for whose sake he had risked the suspicion of his former friends as unduly favourable to a "Whig. He had striven to put the best interpretation on King's conduct to Lord Oxford : and now King was the first to accuse him of having been ready to go all lengths with a treasonable ministry. On the 22nd of November, 1716, the Archbishop wrote: t " We have a strong report that my Lord Bolingbroke will return here and be j)ardoned : certainly it must not be for nothing. I Jiope he can tell no ill story of you." The insinuation was one which might fairly rouse Swift's indignation. It not only charged himself with treason, but charged Bolingbroke, his friend and patron, with a readiness to purchase his own safety by betraying one whom he had himself misled. In the letter already parity quoted, he expresses surprise that his grace * Sivift to King, Dec. 16, 1716. t King to Sivift, Nov. 22, 1716. X 2 308 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [171i— 1720. could for so many years act along with him and be liis corre- spondent, while believing him to be " a most false and vile man." The sting so rankles in Swift's mind that he sj^eaks of it even in a business letter to Archdeacon Walls.* He has received, he says, a letter from the Archbishop, which was " Civil and friendly except in one article, for which I will be revenged by an answer : he says 'tis confidently reported that Lord Bolingbroke is return- ing : that the consideration nuist be to discover secrets : and his Grace hopes that my Lord has no ill things to say of me. By which the Archbishop plainly lets me know that he believes all I have said of myself and the late Ministry with relation to the Pretender to be Court lies.'' But while Swift refused to accept the tenets of the Jacobites, he held firmly to the opposition, as representing his former friends. King attempted what was scarcely a very creditable device for breaking Swift's credit with them. In a letter written shortly before, (Nov. 13, 1716), Swift had spoken frankly of the schemes of the Non-jurors as " a complication of as much folly, madness, hypocrisy, and mistake, as was ever offered to the world." He hinted even that the new Govern- ment might find in these mistakes an opportunity for recovering influence with the Irish clergy, by a little well-timed attention. Any personal view was the last present to Swift's mind in the suggestion. But King quoted the letter in London, as a proof that Swift was readj^ to change " to principles more in fashion, and wherein he might better find his account." + The report came to the ears of Erasmus Lewis and Bishop Atterbury : and to them Swift cleared himself, with warmth that -was fully justified, of an accusation as hurtful to his honour as the charge of Jacobitism would have been to his political judgment. For two or three years Swift stood apart and suspected as one of the small clique of Tories and High Churchmen who were fighting against the partj'' of the Whigs and Moderates. * Snift to Walls, Dec. 19, 1716. f The words occur in a letter from 'Mr. Murray's MSS.) Swift to Atterbury, July IS, 1717. Chap. XII.] SWIFT IN EETIEEMBNT. 309 But fierce as the battle was, it exbaustecl itself. Antipathies died out in the presence of a danger that threatened both sides alike, and that changed the face of Irish politics. This change is the most marked feature of these six years, from 1714 to 1720. The English government had found, or fancied that it had found, a better way of governing Ireland than by raising one party against another. Support was now to be sought from none but the peculiarly " English party : " any thought of national feeling in Ireland was to be rigidly excluded from consideration. Even men like Archbishop King found themselves set aside. Nothing was left for such men but to strike a truce with those whose enemies they had hitherto been. There was no longer to be room in Ireland for two parties. Beginning with this principle, the English Government aimed at preventing any Irish institution from becoming imbued with Irish ideas, and from thus growing too powerful. The Presbj'terians were to be encouraged, because their encourage- ment tended to weaken the Irish Church : and the Irish Church was to be impregnated with the leaven of English "Whiggism, which would leave its administration in the hands of unswerving and paid adherents of the government. In 1719 the government pressed forward the Bill granting toleration to the Presbyterians. It was fiercely oioposed : and in the Council passed only by the Lord-Lieutenant's casting vote. In the House of Lords the bench of Bishops almost unanimously opposed it : Archbishop King of Dublin, Archbishop Synge of Tuam, and Bishop Sterne of Clogher* united against it. But it passed by the votes of those whom King calls " our brethren lately sent us out of England : " t and became the forerunner of a long series of acts passed by the same means, and in pursuance of the same policy. * Sterne, Swift's predecessor at St. St. George Ashe, in 1717. Patrick's, had been moved from Dro- t Arclibisliop Xing to Archhislwp more to Clogher, on the death of Dr. of Canterbury, Kov. 10, 1719. 310 LIFE OF JONATHAN SVIFT. [1714-1720. In common opposition to this policy, old enmities were buried. Swift and King came together once more. Swift strained every nerve to give the Church of Ireland a national spirit of her own, distinct from that imposed on her by Walpole. It seemed to him, at that time, no hopeless task : but he soon found he had to fight against the deliberate machinations of the English ministry, who designed to permit no such influence to the Church. It was thus that, beginning in 1714 as the adherent of a discomfited party, he became, in 1720, the champion of Irish nationality, the vindicator of Irish liberty, against the stratagems of the English Whigs. Before we turn to his work in that capacity, we have to look to other sides of his life. During a part of these six years he was busily occupied with the arrangement of his business affairs.* He descends into the details of these with an almost painful minuteness, finding refuge in this, it would seem, from more painful thoughts. When he came to the Deanery he came with a burden of debt. Even debt did not prevent his making a benefaction to his own parish of Laracor, in the shape of some glebe lands ; but it gave him the absorbing desire to increase his store, and to make himself secure against that most grinding form of dependence which povertj^ brings. He was not, however, without other interest. As time went on he recovered from the first crushing weight of the blow that had fallen on himself and his friends. He renewed his corre- spondence with Pope, with Bolingbroke, with Arbuthnot, and even with one from whom he had been parted by political differ- ences, Addison. From the first, indeed, the tone of Swift and his friends in regard to the new order of things is one of uncom- promising hatred and contempt. The countiy, so one gathers * The MS. letters to Archdeacon of his farms, the packing of his clothes, Walls have, as will be seen, been made the management of his servants, and use of •wherever they could throw any the storage of his wine, seemed scarcely light on Swift's Ufe. But to produce worth the space which it would have Toluminous directions as to the letting demanded. Chap. XII.] SWIFT IN EETIEEMENT. 811 from their letters, seemed to them given over to hypocrisy, slavery, and the dunces. There was no place in its public business for an honest man ; no favour to be expected from it for one who thought for himself, and respected his own inde- pendence. But one influence after another came to mitigate this. An attitude of despairing contempt is not very enduring : it is apt to relax itself. Swift was perhaps the first to suggest how the dunces could be made use of : and to find in them " tools as necessary for a good writer, as pens, ink, and paper." * Literary schemes recovered their interest. Swift renewed his own reading, and was busy in bringing slowly to full ripeness the work that was to attract his widest audience.! He suggested to Gay a new type of humour, in a travesty of pastoral poetry, which should give us pastorals for the Quakers, for the Chairmen, and even for Newgate. Prior was helping out the slender resources which his extravagance had left him, by publishing a subscription edition of his poems : and Swift, like others, was busy helping the poet's scheme. And at the same time that new interests were arising, the political horizon was clearing. Lord Oxford's trial began with all the usual deadly paraphernalia, and ended only in smoke, t He was once more greeted with cheers in the streets of London. The government was weakened by dissension in its own ranks. Opposition was threatening in and out of Parliament. Boling- broke's banishment promised to come to an end. The wits found that, even without the aid of patronage, thej^ could hold their own against the dunces. The hopes of Swift and of his associates became more bright. Writing to Bolingbroke, near * Smift to Pope, Aug. 30, 1716. in the Downs, on 5th Dec, 1715 ; a few + There are several indications that lines further on he says, " At the time Gulliver was written during these I am writing, it is five years since my years, and completed, in something lastretum to England." Scott's Swift, like its present shape, in 1720. Vanessa Vol. XI., p. 369. Swift's imaginary is found alluding to an incident in the dates are generally fixed by the time book about that time. At the close of at which he wrote . the fourth part Gulliver casts anchor J July 1, 1717. 312 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720. the end of 1719,* Swift speaks of the decay of his own powers : but it is in the half -jocular tone, which indicates rather an unsatisfied thirst for active employment than a fear of unfitness for it. " I am six years older and twenty years duller. * * I have gone the round of all my stories with, the younger people, and begin them again • * • I lay traps for people to desire I would shew them some things I have written, hut cannot succeed. * * * If I can prevail on any one to personate a hearer and admirer, you would wonder what a favourite he grows." When Swift wrote this, he was feeling the need of a more stirring arena of work. The circle of his friends was drawing together again: they were urging him to join them: and the invitation was not without its effect. The dangers that had threatened those whom he had supported, were now past : and the virulence of the libels on himself had lost some of its bitterness. The government which he detested, and whose continued power seemed to him a continued triimiph for hypocrisy, a continued exaltation of the dunces over the wits, was shewing signs of weakness. Ireland, which had been broken into parties after the model of those in England, and where for a time tlie adherents of the government had carried the day, was now uniting in one strong spirit of antagonism to a government that expressed itself more and more through the mouthpiece of a narrow EngHsh clique, and in a pohcy disgracefully selfish. In politics and in literature at once, Swift was ready for a new start : and the opportunity for it was not long in coming. But before we leave this intermediate halting place in Swift's career, there is another aspect of his life to be dealt with. The darkest passage in that life is the one which has gathered about it most of human interest : and the drama now passed through an important phase. To deal with this completely, it wUl be necessary to anticipate, for this purpose only, two or three of * Swift to BolinglroTie, Dec. 19, 1719. Chap. 211.] SWIFT IN EETIEEMENT. 313 the years which followed Swift's return to active pubhc Kfe. These years complete the story of Vanessa. It is needless to say that in the records of Swift's life as in the memory of men, the names of Stella and Vanessa are indissolubly linked together. They both present something of the same picture, so old in its pathos, and yet so fresh in its interest, of a woman's tenderness and a woman's passion beating against the loneliness, often the self-absorbed loneli- ness, of genius. His relations to both bring out the same strange contrast in his character — its sensitivity along with its fierce cjmicism. Both are victims of the wounds which morbid gloom hke that of Swift's inflicts on others, and on itself — wounds in the sharp pang of which its own weary burden finds a strange sort of relief, cruelly as they cut into the hearts of others. Once or twice Stella and Vanessa crossed one another's path. For years they shared Swift's interest. But, beyond this, there is no real reason why their stories should be told together. They worked on different moods, they touched on different parts of his life, they stood in totally different relations to him. To trace in the growth of one intimacy any conscious infidehty to the other, and to concoct a history of Swift's feeling, and its changes from Esther Johnson to Hester Vanhomrigh, is a task which nothing but the imagination of Swift's biographers has suggested to them. With other men such a process might have some fitness ; but the peculiar aspects of Swift's relations to women have been made the subject of so much curious conjecture, that he may at least, in common fairness, claim to be acquitted of a vulgar and thoughtless infidelity. We see the truth about Stella and Vanessa, only when we look at them apart : and we must cast aside the inveterate habit which one biographer has borrowed from another, of considering them only as if their history made two sides of one story, two aspects of one passion. We have abeady seen how, on the eve of quitting England in 1713, Swift had learned the truth about Vanessa's passion. 314 LIFE OF JONATHAN SVIFT. [17H— 1720, At first he had attempted to turn it aside, as most men would have done, by scarcely affecting to treat it seriously. But when he came back to London in the same year, it was to renew, almost in spite of himself, his former intimacy with Vanessa. She knew, and had learned to sympathise with, his political interests. Her circle was the same as his. She threw herself on his assistance and advice : and she sought his guidance in her studies. When she found him again-near her, she probably forbore the more marked expression of her passion, likely at once to have alienated and to have alarmed him. But the intimacy was renewed, and the recollection of the few letters written to him when absent, perhaps made Swift more tender to the feeling which had prompted them, however unwise it might be. To have checked it would have been doubtless wiser : but the dangers were less visible to Swift than they would have been to other men. So matters drifted on, tiU the midsummer of 1714, when Swift quitted Lon- don for the solitude of Mr. Gery's house at Letcombe. His first letter thence was to Vanessa, probably for no other reason than that she knew most of his movements, and had followed most closely his recent hopes and fears. But he soon became cautious. She pressed him for advice as to her family troubles. Her mother was dead and had left debts : her 3'ounger sister was not strong : her surviving brother was a good-for-nothing spendthrift: and her own fortune was in danger. Swift gives her such advice as he can, and obtains for her an advance of money : but ruthlessly hints a doubt that some of her troubles were swelled by affectation ; possibly, even, he may have thought, expressly intended to draw the bonds of their intimacy more close. When about to leave for Ireland after the Queen's death, he writes to Vanessa with the utmost caution : " his letters will be few," and if she comes over, " he will see her very seldom." He knows how sharp is the tongue of scandal, and he has no wish that it should be busy with her name or his own. When she does come to look after her pro- Chap. XII.] SWIFT IN EETIEEMENT. 315 perty, his letters continue to have the same cautious tone, inconsistent with the notion either that he was throwing off, for Vanessa's sake, any former hond, or that he was suggesting to her any hopes of a closer tie in the future. " I say all this," he adds, after one of his cautions, " out of the perfect esteem and friendship I have for you." These are words that no man could use to wipe out the memory of an accepted passion ; they could be intended only to prevent its growth. SettUng in Ireland, she lived partly in Dublin, and partly at Marlay Abbey, near Celbridge, which she had inherited from her father : and his earlier letters after her arrival prove that he was almost jestingly deprecating a passion which he called indis- creet, and which he fancied, however wrongly, was not absolutely sincere. This coldness inflames her the more : she urges his presence on the old excuse of wanting his advice. "What can be wrong," she asks, "in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman?" "Counterfeit" she says, "that indulgent friend you once were ; " — still without a hint that he had ever encouraged other thoughts than those of friendship. He is provoked at times to anger at what he holds to be a whimsical folly : but his anger only goads her passion still more. " Treat me as you do," she says, "and you will not be made uneasy by me long." " See me and speak kindly " she cries ; without that kindness there is " something in your look so awful, that it strikes me dumb." Swift might have been wiser to have been stiU cold and restrained in his reply : but he could force himself to no more than a kindly assurance, as far as possible removed either from the ardour of a lover, or the effusive insincerity of one who was conscious that he had wronged her, in word or deed. When she changes to threaten- ings he meets it only by banter : when scandal begins to be busy, he plainly tells her — again neither like the ardent nor the faithless lover — " that it was what he had foreseen : that it must be submitted to : and that by the help of discretion it Avould wear off." 316 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720. What, then, was it that Vanessa's friendship meant for Swift ? He might have been wiser to crush it at once and for ever : instead of that, for nearly eight years, he strove alternately to humour or to keep it in check, and failed hopelessly in the end. During these years what side of his nature was it that this friendship laid hold of ? Not, we fear it must be said, the best. When Swift was absorbed with the outside homage that was paid to him : when he put his pen, however honestly, yet unreservedly, at the service of a party ; when he was elated with a somewhat truculent triumph, then it was that Vanessa's friendship grew, and with these scenes it was chiefly associated. She flattered his weakest side : she learned the catchwords of his partj', and, unlike Stella, she became, as she fancied to please Swift, a "politician."* From very hatred of cant. Swift at times professed that creed of worldly selfishness, which despair- often suggests to every man, but of which no man desires to have a reminder at his hand. The maxims of such a creed are repeated for behoof of Vanessa, much as they might have been for Matthew Prior, with his motto of " Vive la bagatelle ! " "Live for the good that the present moment can give:" " riches are nine-tenths of happiness, and health is the other tenth : " " converse with fools, and let them help you to avoid the spleen ' — these, and the like, are the phrases scattered through the letters written to Vanessa. They serve, along with other signs, to show us that the friendship, bred in the heated air of political faction, satisfied, after all, only a small part of Swift's nature. The cynic rarely loves to have his cynicism returned upon his hands. Cynicism Swift had in plenty : it was not this that a woman's love ought to have brought to him. But Vanessa's love involved Httle more than * Contrast this with what he says Rebecca Dingley together) ; " and I to Stella, "I never knew whether you value your conversation the more that were Whigs or Tories" (the Journal it never turned on politics." always speaks as if to Stella and Chap. XII.] SWIFT IN EETIEEMENT. 317 the ambition to have her passion returned, and the desire to attain her end by humouring a mood that needed rather to be soothed and changed. The friendship had begun in Hterary guidance : it was strengthened by flattery : it Hved on a cold and ahnost stern repression, fed by confidences as to literary schemes, and by occasional literary compliments : but it never came to have a real hold over Swift's heart. SHght as was its hold, however, when Vanessa had settled down in Ireland, when she had extorted from Swift, by the very vehemence of her passion, some tender apologies for his seeming harshness, the evil was done. Vanessa continued to pour forth her passion, jealous of anything that iinphed dis- behef in its reality, indignant with any jest that seemed to smUe at it. In 1716, its limits were even more definitely fixed. Swift and SteUa then entered into that formal bond which seemed to one or to both to express most fitly the relation in which they stood to one another.* That tie, the truest and most tender that was ever to bind Swift, was henceforth safe, he might deem, from intrusion or comparison. It was a tie as to the outward signs of which all the world was free to judge : but the real meaning of which was hidden from the public gaze. The friendship for Vanessa was suffered to drift on, but all out- ward signs of it were most carefuUy dissembled. His relations to Vanessa might, as Swift clearly feared, become the source of a vulgar scandal from which his pride revolted. The affection for Stella was avowed ; but beyond was a sacred region, mto the mystery of which he would not suffer the world to pry. On this limited footing the friendship for Vanessa con- tinued. It played only on the outside of Swift's life. Its course continued the same : on Vanessa's side, the fervency of passion : on Swift's, at times, a burst of real tenderness, occa- sionally a tribute of almost exaggerated compliment, varied now and then, by an impulse of uncontrollable impatience. Foolish * The ciroumstanoes of the mar- evidence for it ■will be found in riage are noticed further on. The Appendix IT. 318 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720. his action may have been ; but it was not unnatural. Moody and ill-at-ease as he then was, he was ready to accept as the best solution of a difficulty, a make-shift state of things, by which Vanessa was soothed. He attempted, indeed, what ■was an easy, but not a very compUmentary, expedient, to attract Vanessa's love into another channel. The younger Sheridan teEs us of a certain Dean Winter who was brought ±0 pay his suit to Vanessa : and Deane Swift adds as another suitor. Dr. Price, who became Bishop of Meath, and afterwards Archbishop of Cashel.* But Vanessa's passion had at least so much of the dignity of truth, that it would not be fooled out of its chosen aim. The old intimacy, on something of the old terms, was allowed to run on. The tie to Stella had been rivetted by what was only an empty and secret ceremonial ; and Swift perhaps conceived that a friendship, flattering to Vanessa's passion, might, without wrong, be added to it. When the intimacy had thus gained a new lease of life for want of the resolution that might have broken it off. Swift re- vived one of its earher associations. In 1718 he had written the poem of Cadenus and Vanessa,^ which remains as the monument of the ill-fated passion. It had been written when the first revelation of Vanessa's passion had struck him with " Shame, disappointment, guilt, remorse." This poem he now revised ; | and as it is the revised form which we may conclude has come down to us, the examination of it will not be without its use. Originally the poem was no doubt intended to recount, for * Delany mentions neither : so the " Missessy," with the first syllable of reader must judge for himself on the Vanhomrigh prefixed, probability of the story, for which f This revision has been hitherto the eridence is certainly not very overlooked : but it is not without im- strong. portanoe. In a, letter of May 12th, •f It is scarcely necessary to say that 1719, he writes : " Vous aurez vos vers Cadenus is a transposition for Decanus t, revoir quand f aurai mes pensies et or the Dean. Vanessa is " Hessy " or mon temps libre ; la muse viendra." Chap, XII] SWIFT IN RETIREMENT, 319 Vanessa's ear alone, the story of her passion. But it is not a narrative only : we may read it rather as an attempt to account for that passion in the way least wounding to Vanessa's pride. Her gifts and endowments of mind and body are set forth : she is the chosen object of the gods' attention : her advent is to test the discernment of the world : her infatuation for the Dean is explained as the suspension of judgment with which an angry goddess visits the resistance to her sway. But strong as the passion might be, its open declaration too had to be explained : and it is thus the explanation comes. " Two maxims she could still prodnoe, And sad experience taught their use : That virtue, pleased by being shown, Knows nothing which it dares not own ; Can make us without fear disclose Our inmost secrets to our foes : That common forms were not designed Directors to a noble mind." In these verses Lord Orrery finds an expression of the extra- ordinary opinion that vice turns to virtue when it loses shame. Delany rightly deems this a distortion of their meaning : and surely we may see in them only a bold and hazardous truth, whose motive is the justification, to Vanessa, of Vanessa's own avowal. There are other verses which Lord Orrery and De- lany unite in condemning. " Where never blush was called in aid, That spurious virtue in a maid, A virtue best at second-hand ; They blush, because they understand." But this too, we are entitled to excuse, as a truth, however one-sided, which Swift hazarded only that he might defend Vanessa's self-respect. Then comes a passage in the poem, which may perhaps be accepted as an addition made by Swift, when the poem was revised in 1719. The Dean now saw that the passion was not a transient one. Not its rise only, but its continuance and its 320 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720. deeper meaning must be touched upon. Vanessa may have demanded a solution of her doubts : and Swift had before him a delicate task which he managed with his usual want of skill to gauge a woman's heart. It is Cadenus who now be- comes — unlike the context of the poem — the pupil whose crass stupidity lags behind Vanessa's teaching : " Her scholar is not apt to learn : Or wants capacity to reach The science she designs to teach : Wherein his genius was below, The skill of eyery common beau, Who, though he cannot spell, is wise Enough to read a lady's eyes, And will each accidental glance Interpret for a kind advance.'' Jl Then cornel the hardest and most disputed lines of all : — " But what success Vanessa met Is to the world a secret yet. Whether the nymph, to please her swain, Talks in a high romantic strain : Or whether he at last descends To act with less seraphic ends : Or, to compound the business, whether They temper love and books together : Must never to mankind be told. Nor shall the conscious Muse unfold." No lines more unfortunate were ever penned : so much we are bound to allow. To defend them is impossible : but the coarsest suggestion that may be drawn from them, is not unUkely only, it is impossible. The poem was published at Vanessa's wish : a wish that would never have arisen, had it hinted at her shame. We must find another meaning, and it is not hard to do so. Swift had before suggested a mere intellectual friendship, in place of that complete imion to which Vanessa's passion clearly tended. These were the evident alternatives : and he hints at a third as a compromise, perhaps soothing to Vanessa, which might have linked the intellectual friendship with something of a closer tie. If a doubt Chap. XII.] SWIFT IN EETIEEMENT. 321 of its honoui' is suggested by the ambiguity of the words, we must remember for whose ears it was destined. The poem was written, not for the public, but for Vanessa and for her only. She knew what was the truth : and Swift clearly tells her that the secret must remain their own. It would have been well for her memory had she remembered his advice. Whether that advice involved disloyalty to Stella, or was excused by the embarrassment in which Swift found himself, is a point of casuistry which each reader must determine for himself. This understanding reached, the letters became more cordial. Swift soothes her with compliments, which it is possible that he did not expect to be interpreted too literally. She is told of her superiority to other women, whose caprices Swift despised. She receives his literary confidences.* She is promised a sequel to Cadenus and Vanessa which should celebrate the history of their friendship. But, in spite of cordiality, he trusted neither his own name nor hers to scandal. He seems never, tiU a year or two before her death, to have visited her at Celbridge. With a friendship so limited, her passion could not rest satisfied. In 1720, she allows it to break forth in a torrent of remonstrance. For ten weeks she has not seen him, " It is not in the power of time or accidents to lessen her inexpressible passion." " The love I bear you is not seated only in laj soul : there is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended with it." Religion cannot comfort her : " were I an enthusiast, you would be the deity I should worship." " Sometimes you strike me with that prodigious awe, I tremble with fear : at other times a charming compassion shines through your countenance which * In a letter written shortly before nothing less than being carried up to her death, she makes a clear reference the top of the house and served as a to a scene in Gulliver's Travels, the friend of yours was." The reference MS. of which she must therefore have is plainly to Gulliver's adventure seen. " One of these animals was so when carried to the house-top by the pleased with me, that it seized me monkey in Brobdiugnag. Scott's ^I'l/f, with such a panic that I apprehended A^'ol. XI., p. 15G. Y S22 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720. revives my soul." To outbursts like these Swift replies only >by calm advice, which shows how little he returned the passion. "Esteem, love, and value," are the words he uses — words cold ■enough in such a connexion : but he entreats that she "would not make herself or him unhappy by imaginations." These words revealed to Vanessa the real hopelessness of her long struggle. We need not, in excusing Swift, blind ■ourselves to the pathos of the last scene of all. She seems to have been at Dublin when this letter came : but she at once retired to Marlaj' Abbey, which was some ten miles off, and ^vhich remains to this day the monument of a love which no recklessness, no folly, no self-abandonment can deprive of the tragic dignity of its end.* For the first time jealousy is ^allowed to have its course : she puts her fate to the touch and -writes to Stella to ask whether she is the wife of Swift. 'Stella, secure in her own assured j)osition, however little that position had been asserted, avowed her marriage to Vanessa, :and sent the letter on to Swift. She could have chosen no method more certain to crush a rival whose claims she had hitherto disdainfully ignored. Vanessa must have felt that Jher last card was played : that she had defied a rival whose shadow had ever lain across her path. On receiving the letter, 'Swift rode, in bitter anger, to Marlay Abbejr. He entered un- ;announced : without a word threw on the table an envelope * Marlay Abbey stands close to the growth of centuries — more notable Tillage of Celbridge and beside the surely than the laurels which Scott's Liffey, which flows through the estate. informant found the characteristic of 'The river is in this place broken up by the place, as they certainly are not islets and rocks, and runs between now. Going up the river side, a path high wooded banks. The slopes on leads to a point in the rocks, where either side are covered with fine old there is a seat with steps leading down trees, chiefly beeches and elms. Close to the water. It is quiet and shady, to the house, between it and the river, and has a pleasant outlook upon the there stands a fine oriental palm, which river rushing broad and full amongst must have been there before Vanessa's its rocks. This is the spot which ■day. Across the river and beyond the tradition represents as the seat where :gardcn the chief feature of the grounds Swift and Vanessa used to read is a splendid yew plantation, the together. Chap. XII.] SWIFT IX RETIEEMENT. 323 containing Vanessa's own letter : and riding back to the Deanery, saw her no more. Years of irresolution on his own part, of hopeless passion on Vanessa's, of perhaps undue resif;nation on the part of Stella, had done their work. Each felt that a tragedj% not to be wiped out of their lives, had Tun its course. Its first victim was Vanessa, whose crushed :and baffled passion brought her death. She lived only for a few weeks after the crushing blow had fallen. Before her death she had time only to collect her forces for such vengeance as was in her power. In the interval, if we believe the common account — and the date of her exist- ing will perhaps confirms that account — she revoked a will in favour of Swift, and appointed as her executors and residuary legatees. Judge Marshall and Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne. Swift was not named even amongst the smaller legatees who •were remembered by gifts of a few pounds to buy a ring. The •omission could not have been accidental : and each must judge for himself what was the feeling with which that omission •was made, and what was the strength of love that sought this •way of satisfying its vengeance. Common report added, but added falsely, another condition to the will. Vanessa was said to have left injunctions to her executors to publish the letters between Swift and herself, and to give to the world the i^oem of Cadcnus and Vanessa. The will contains no such injunc- tion : but it is hardly possible to suppose that the letters were left to the executors without some impUed injunction of the kind. Bishop Berkeley wisely decided to suppress the corres- pondence : and it never saw the light till Sir Walter Scott was able to publish the letters from a transcript made by Judge Marley, which passed into the hands of Scott's friend, Mr. Berwick. The poem was published soon after Vanessa's death, which took place at the close of May, 1728. The best proof that Swift saw and dreaded the interpretation which the world might place upon the verses, is to be found in the shock the publication caused him. Angry with himself, tortured at Y 2 324 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720, once by remorse and by indignation at the tangle of circum- stance that had woven itself round him, he withdrew for a time' to the South of Ireland, and left Stella to wait, alone, for the- time when his remorse would seek consolation from herself.* Side by side with, and yet distinct from, the story of Vanessa with its stra,nge mixture of vanity and tragedy, there runs the far more intricate story of Swift and Stella. We have seen the hmitations of the bond that held him to Vanessa. But Stella's love was based on no chance intimacy. It was en- twined with the memory of his earliest hopes, and in spite of j)assing clouds, it retained to the end its living power over him. There is here no stoiy with imprudence for its origin, irresolution to confirm it, and mingled harshness and delusion for its close ; there is in it rather the working of his heart, the central tenderness that gave a bright lining to all his gloom. But, not less important in his biography, it tells also of the tortures which a morbid obedience to rashly formed and per- verse resolves, continued to inflict both on Swift himself and on her who was dearest to him. Without the stoiy of Vanessa, Swift's life woiild have stood out, more clear, more complete, and less ambiguous : t without the story of Stella, it would have been a maimed and lopped fragment, with one half of the man's nature wanting. Eound this incident the hveliest human interest, the most natural human feeling, spent upon his history, must ever gather : and we cannot, therefore, afford lightly either to discard or to accept any fragment of evidence bearing on the point. * An anecdote is told of her reference (Delany's Oiscrvations, p. 58.) And on one occasion to the poem : almost these words must have been spoken the solitary instance of her jealousy. after Vanessa's death. A gentleman in her presence remarked f So enth-ely is the evidence ^vant^ng, that Vanessa must be an extraordinary as I hold, to prove what Sheridan, for woman that could inspire the Dean to instance, maintains, that the love of to write so finely upon her. Stella Vanessa was a real passion with Swift, .Mniled, and said she thought it scarcely which did interfere with, and might so clear : " the Dean, it was known, easily have overwhelmed, his feeling could write finely on a broomstick." for Stella. Chap. XII.] SAVIFT m RETIREMENT. 325 We have seen how that tie was first formed, on the simplest and most easy foundation. Dissect as we may that early life with Sir William Temple, we cannot get beyond a few simple facts that tell us aU. we need care to know about it. A some- what vain, imperious, and irritable master : a ji'outh whose pride was all the more fierj^ because it was necessarily re- strained, and whose natural melancholy was deepened by dependence. On the other side a girl, still more likely to be overawed by the dignity of her distant kinsman, companionless in the staid and solemn household, save for the j'outh to whom she owed aU that she had learned, whose character must even then have moulded her own, and about whose future she must already have had mysterious anticipations. The Pindarics would be read by her without too great critical severity. She must have watched, perhaps with special guidance, the part Swift played in the literary controversy that occupied her jnaster's leisure. Under Swift's tuition, her mind received that masculine simplicity which he prized for its contrast to what he held, with morbid relentlessness of insight, to be the tricks and disguises of the other sex. She liad learned to regard him as her guide and protector : she had virtuallj', in retiring to Ireland after Temple's death, placed her life's happiness in his keeping : and henceforward she became his chosen companion and friend. The choice was one he never affected to conceal, though he fenced the companionsliip round with the safeguards that might keep scandal at a distance. When another sought for Stella's love. Swift repelled the intrusion, yet without breaking through those limitations on Jiis own friendship that had made such intrusion possible. For a time the relations between them were accepted without misgiving by Stella. She had all his thoughts to herself. 'Glimpses of ambition were opening, which she no doubt shared : and these early years at Laracor, with occasional visits to London, were years of peace for both. Stella was buoyed up ivith hope : and Swift was soured by none of the 326 LIFE OF JOXATHAN SWIFT. [1"U- 1720. misanthropy of his later years. When he -went to London on the memorable visit that began in 1710, it was reluctantly that he quitted Stella and Laracor — the canal, the willows, the fish- jiond — all associated with her companionship. For two years at least, all his thoughts are hers. His chief desire is to return : his aim is confined to bringing his mission to a successful issue, that will make the church his debtor : his ambition to attaining a future that will be easy for liimself and Stella. But presently, his life becomes more crowded. The intense desire of power was roused again within him. The companion of ministers, the champion of a party, the guide of a j)olicy, he became immersed in the excitement of the game of politics, and lost all but the sense of the stakes. All this raises a veil between him and Stella, and seems to set her image further from him. We need not assume that Vanessa ever usurped Stella's place in his regard : but yet Vanessa was inevitably associated with the scene in which he played so large a part, and the thought of which was so flattering to his pride. When he came back to Ireland in 1713, it was only for a short banishment, during which all his thoughts were of England ; and when he returned finally in August, 1714, it was in. a spirit of disajjpointed ambition, and despairing gloom> The real union between himself and Stella, -which may have seemed near in 1710, and which an earher satisfaction of his ambition might probably have brought about, was- now more distant than ever : and all the more that he now found himself embarrassed by Vanessa's passionate pursuit. It is clear indeed that, although there was no estrangement,, no very special warmth attended the meeting of Stella and Swift on his return to Dublin. His correspondence gives> no evidence even of their frequent intercourse in the period that immediately succeeded : and in the unpublished letters to^ Archdeacon Walls during the three or four years beginning with 1714, messages are indii'ectly given through Walls, which Chap. XII.] SWIFT IN EETIEEMENT. 32T convey no impression of very intimate relations. " My service- to Gossip Doll (Walls' wife) and the ladies " is the phrase with which most of the letters close. " Pray shew the enclosed,"' he says, in a letter of 1716, referring to a snuh administered by himself to a would-be wit, "to Mrs. Johnson, to see whether she be of my opinion." The wish to know her opinion shews that there was no breach, but the asking it. through another as surely shews that their intercourse was by no means regular. In another letter,* he speaks of reproaches, from the " ladies " for his not going to Dromore : and the excuse is again indirectly sent : " Gossip Doll " is to tell the ladies that he will write soon, but " as for coming down, 'tis- impossible." "Your black privy counsellor," he says again playfully to Archdeacon Walls ; i — " do not be alarmed, I mean only Mrs. Johnson." Elsewhere he speaks of enclosing a letter for Mrs. Johnson, in one to Walls. Scattered phrases like these shew that Swift was in no regular correspondence with SteUa : that the fact of their marriage was unknown to Walls : but. that, indh-ect as their intercourse now was, it was yet easy and friendly enough. Just then, while still humouring Vanessa's passion. Swift was. joined by the formal rites of marriage, with Stella. 1 In his mysterious life, no action was more mysterious than this. A. proneness to tender emotion, along with a constitutional thin- ness of temperament that allows the emotion easily to die away, is no possible explanation of the alternate tenderness. and coldness in Swift. But we must expect to find him in his life, sometliing the same as he is in his books. In the latter- he often applies the scalpel with an unnatural and cj'nical serenity, to the very sufferings of humanity that have excited * Smift to Walls. Dec. 30, 171G. disputed one : but the reasons which (Mr. Murray's MSS.) lead me to think that it admits of no + Sivift to Walls. June 18, 1716. doubt, are given in Appendix IV. (Mr. Murray's MSS.) Mean-while for the purpose of the J The fact of the marriage is a narrative this fact is assumed as true. 328 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720. — nay, are at the moment exciting, — his pity. So it is with his own life. His feelings are strong : but a certain intensity of will, a force of intellectual passion, is perpetually torturing and crushing them. So dealt with, by what was undoubtedly a morbid perversity, these feelings, keen as they were to begin "with, became cold and dead under the chilling influence of a gloomy misanthropy. The result never shews itself more •clearlj', m the havoc it wrought on himself and others, than in ihe story of which we have now to seek the clue. There were not wanting motives that might make Stella inclined to the step. In 1716, she could not fail to see that the tie that bound them together must be closer or must end. She had waited long and patiently : but she had found that her patience was rewarded only by seeing the love for which she had given up her life, growing cold amidst the calls of ambition, and colder still in the gloom that followed defeat. The meeting after four years of separation had shewn her that Swift had formed plans in which she had Uttle share, and that lie either could not or would not accept her love as satisfaction for the blank that defeat of these plans brought. She must doubtless have suspected the i^assion pressed on Swift by Vanessa, and the degree to which Swift had humoured it. The gradual fading of the hoj)e that she had cherished so long, told ■on her health, and Swift was not so bUnd as not to perceive Stella's suffering. In these circumstances Swift employed, it seems, his friend and old college tutor, Dr. St. George Ashe, Bishop of Clogher, to inquire from Stella the reason of her sadness. He may himself have shrunk from the interview, in ihe thought of the wrong done to Stella by his weakness in suffering Vanessa's love. He can scarcelj' have failed to know what Stella had hoped for, and what her stedfast devotion now gave her the right to claun. Stella told the Bishop that she had waited patiently while it had seemed that there might be xeason, in Swift's interest, for delay : but that now her waiting ■was rewarded only by coldness and neglect. Such indifference Chap. XII.] SWIFT IX RETIEEMENT. 329 gave slander a ground for attacking lier good name : in one way only could that slander be met. Swift agreed to make Stella his wife, so far as the formal ceremony of man-iage could do so : but upon the condition that they should be to one another only as tliey had been before, and that the world should know nothing of the new bond. The ceremony was performed in the garden of the Deanery, by the same friend, who had been the bearer of the message, the Bishop of Clogher, in the year 1716. The Dean and Stella continued to live in separate houses. No concealment was attempted of the fact that they were to each other friends of no common nearness : but slander was kept at a distance by the care with which Swift fenced round their intercourse. They never met except in the presence of a third person, and Swift, as we have seen, often chose an indirect channel to convey a message to his wife. No woman's constancy would have stood a harder trial : only an empty ceremony had rewarded her years of lonely endurance, and even that ceremony was to be a secret assurance to herself that calumny was base- less, not an open pledge behind the conditions of which the world would have no right to 'pvj. Slander was still to be fenced against, not defied. So far as their lifetime was concerned, the conditions imposed on the ceremony made it useless for any purpose whatever. How could calumny be stopped, by a formality, and a secret formalitj'', whose hollowness Stella her- self knew, and of whose existence the world knew nothing? Stella may have had other motives for her original request : but in accepting Swift's conditions, her only hope, beyond mere compliance with his wish, must have been that some day, if jjosterity should suspect her honour, the eventual announcement of her marriage might prove its suspicions baseless. What, then, were the motives that prompted, on Swift's side, a compromise so strange, and in what mood did each accept it? Swift had doubtless at one time looked on SteUa as his future 330 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720. wife. But sucli thoughts had now passed awaj''. Disappoint- ment was pressing heavily on him. Defeat had just befallen him, and he had not yet recast his weapons for a new fight, or roused his genius to new efforts. His friends were at a distance, some of them scattered in exile. He felt himself thrust, perhaps permanently, into obscurity. It was scarcely wonderful that thoughts which might have been cherished in other daj's, when his hopes were high, should now grow dim and fade. He had striven, too, for pecuniary independence as a means by which he might make himself free in action ; and the fruit of his long efforts was a burden of debt. We have seen how, prompted by the memory of his early days, and the endless embarrassments with which scanty means torture a proud man, Swift had fixed for himself, with almost morbid i^ertinacity, a rigid rule of parsimony. That parsimony involved no sordid avarice, because at this very time he was sinking some of his means in a gift to his parish. But it determined him never to entangle either himself, or one dear to him, in the endless petty cares of domestic poverty. "Weighed down by circumstances as lie was, many men might have sought the quiet of marriage, as a resting-place from his toils. It was not so with Swift. Defeated, power- less, growing old, attacked on ever}^ side by virulent enemies, he set aside, with a morbid self-torture, not so rai'e that it need astonish us, the quiet comfort that married life might have brought. He exaggerated the difficulties in its way. Nor were other motives wanting to increase his sullen determina- tion. Married life might have seemed to involve an oblivion more complete than his ambition desired, of all the stormy scenes he had left. He might reject the prospect of settling down into the monotonous life of an Irish ecclesiastic, amidst a people whom he despised. He might still see fights before him, where it would be better that he should stand unen- cumbered and alone. His health, too, was filling him with terrible forebodings : worn by the saeva indignatio that wasted Chap. XII.] SWIFT IN EETIEEMEKT. 331 his life, wearied by the struggle, burdened by -wariiings of decay, he might feel that side of his nature which a woman's love could touch, leaning more and more to the cold impas- siveness, to which it had ever been incHned. Swift tells a friend, even in earlier life, that his temperament was cold, and that this was a safeguard to his heart. His biographers have not unfakly accepted his own accoimt, and have explained by its means the mj'stery of his relation to Stella. With some- reservations this may be true : but the reservations are worth remark. A very little knowledge of human nature tells us,, that men do not commonly proclaim their coldness of tempera- ment, when it is so marked as to provoke ridicule rather than inspire respect. Nor are the qualities we find in Swift, exactly those we should expect to find in a nature over which passion had no sway. But without ascribing to Swift all that » strained interpretation of liis own words has been thought to convey, we may still find in him one of the most strildng instances of a phase of human nature that is not uncommon, where the very force of intellectual passion acts with the expulsive power of a new emotion upon other feelings. It was the consuming intensity of his hate and scorn that left so little room for feelings that with most men are so strong. With the growth of his satiric vehemence, these other feelmgs became even more straitened and more cold. To all these motives for SAvift's action, we must add the entanglement in which he found himself from suffering Vanessa's passion to live on. This would not argue in Swift any real division of feeling between Stella and Vanessa, and much less any idea of conscious deception of the latter. But he had rashly allowed her passion to continue : he knew how quick slander was : and he was certain that his announced mari'iage would rouse Vanessa's rancour, and make his name a jest. Prudence, natui'al indeed though scarcely dignified, was added to his other motives for keeping secret the concession that he made to Stella's wish. 332 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1714—1720. On Stella's side, -whatever her own hopes had been, it was enough that Swift willed it so. Moulded by his teaching, inured to patience, used to accept his will as law, she sub- mitted to the conditions he imposed. Had she any stings of jealousy, these might now be quieted by the thought that, formal as was her own tie to him, it was closer than any other. But she had, indeed, little choice in the matter. She had asked security for her reputation. Swift gave it ; and its ■secresy was a condition which, harsh as it was, might fair!}' be ■said not to lessen its efficacy to soothe her conscientious ■scruples. She bowed to the conditions, and allowed no outward sign, :at least, of her discontent, to shew itself. Their intercourse remained at once as Hmited, and yet as easy, as before. She was addressed by Swift, and addressed him, in a tone of cordial and often affectionate friendliness. To the world no change appeared in her manner to him who had been " her early and her only guide," and whose wife she now was. Swift's determination may have been mistaken, morbid, even •callous : but this need not lessen our reverence for Stella's devotion. It was not hers to criticise his m.otives : it was hers ■only to be loyal to his decision. She knew that the secret of her rightful place as his wife was safe in the keeping of a very few chosen friends. Before her death others might share it : in the end the world might know it : but meanwhile it need go no further. A few years later — about the j'ear 1723 — Swift's decision ■seems to have relented. It is to that year that it seems proper io assign a story which we may infer to have been told to Dr. Sheridan by Stella on her death-bed. She then announced to ■one whose honesty she could entirely trust, the secret of her life. But she told him also that about 1723, Swift had been ready to undo the conditions. By that time his hopes had revived, and the morbid gloom was lessened. Further, Vanessa ;as we have already seen, had drawn upon herself the announce- Chap. XII.] SWIFT IN UETIEEMENT. 833 ment of the marriage, and, at the same time, the wrath of Swift. To soothe Stella's just indignation. Swift may well have offered to proclaim to the world the position of his wife.* But her own health was now gone. Her years of patient loyalty, she may have thought, might now he prolonged to the end. She feared, and feared with reason, that the place to whick he called her was one which she could scarcely hope to fill. The oifer was what she must have chiefly prized : and that she- now had. She voluntarily resigned her rights : and answered that it was now " too late." A few weeks more brought the death of Vanessa, the publication of " Cadenus and Vanessa," with all its ambiguous phrases : and the noisy rumours which would only have been, kept alive by any publication of her own marriage to the Dean. Stella wisely resolved to wait and trust her cause to the judgment of posterity. * See Appendix T. for an exainma- narratiTe of Swift's offered announce- tion of the evidence on which this ment of the marriage is based. CHAPTER XIII. SWIFT AS IRISH PATRIOT. 1720—1725. iETAT. 53—57. Growth of an Irish party- Swift joins it from hatred to the "Whigs — The ills of '■ Ireland — Absentees or Out-liers — Neglect of fonner restrictive statutes — Degradation of resident landlords — ^Wretchedness of the tenants — Profes- sional Beggars — Irish affairs between 171i and 1720— Swift as Irish Patriot — The Vnivcrsal Use of Irish Manvfactures — Prosecution of the Printer — Duke of Grafton stays proceedings — Swift's Apolorjia to Pope — Swift against an Irish Bank — The Copper Coinage — Wood's Patent — Outcry against it — M. B. Jyrapier — Tlie details of the patent — The Committee of Inquiry — The Sacond Letter— The TJiird Letter— Are the Irish slaves 1—TIic Faurtli, Letter — The Lrapier's Protest — Proclamation against the Author — Carteret as Lord Lieutenant — Swift's letter to him — The Letter to Lord Midleton — The Bill of Indictment against the printer thrown out by the Grand Jury — The Drapier's Fame — The Fifth Letter — Walpole's New Scheme for Ireland — Archbishop Boulter and his rule. We have seen how, in 1720, the position of parties in Ireland had been modified, and smaller differences forgotten. For us the central interest now lies in the struggle maintained against that narrow and exclusive clique which governed Ire- land in avowed contempt of all phases of Irish opinion, and which considered itself as placed there only to subordinate the good of the country to English interests. Amidst the struggles of contending factions the real evils of the country had been overlooked : the need of reform had occu- pied the attention only of an insignificant handful. None had yet succeeded in rousing a national spirit to resist the nation's wrongs. Over-insistance on these wrongs was looked upon as veiled Jacobitism. The theorists proposed their schemes Chap. XIII.] SWIFT AS IRISH PATRIOT. 335 timidlj', and the Government neither accepted responsibility for the wrongs, nor troubled themselves to find a remedy. In putting on his armour for a new fight, Swift's first motive -was probably merely opposition to the Whigs. He looked back -n'ith bitterness to the fall of his friends. He detested what he iheld to be the cant of the Whigs, and their travesty of liberty. He was imbued with the fervent hatred of the Whig party that inspired his own literary clique. He was angry at his own banishment. Irish questions had, indeed, previous to this, occasionally excited his attention : but his real interest in Irish politics only now begins. His attitude in this new struggle is not hard to define. He ■scorned Jacobitism as little more than a frivolity. He s6t himself to decry the rampant bitterness of the High Church zealots. He had nothing but contempt for doctrines of divine right and absolute prerogative.* But he was opposed to the landlords on account of their aggressive selfishness towards his own Church. He denounced Presbyterian encroachments from liis life-long detestation of the fanaticism and doctrinal bigotry which he held them to express. He believed the Whig government of Ireland to be a government founded on cor- ruption. All these motives went to swell the current of his indignation against Irish wrongs. It is no part of the biography of Swift to give a full account ofthe economic history of Ireland in his time. But to illus- trate his work, it is absolutely necessary to know something of the condition of national ruin and semi-barbarism which pro- duced at once the motive in Swift, and the ready response in his audience. We may take the picture of this condition, as given us in the contemporary memoirs, in the pamphlets of Swift himself, and in others that dealt at the same time with * "He was reckoned by Ms friends,'' is, it doubtless expressed a partial says Deane Swift in a MS. letter in truth, as regards the bold front which Lord Cork's possession, " to be a Swift maintained against authority republican.'' Hash as the expression unjustly exercised. 336 LIFE OF JONATHAN S^yIFT. [1720—1725. the same questions, and were almost certainly familiar to the circle amidst which he moved. In Swift's day the most palpahle evil in Irish life was that of which, ever since, so much has heen heard — the number of absentee landlords, or " outliers," as they were called. In former days, under sovereigns who looked to the grantees of lands in Ireland for the defence of the kingdom against sudden rebellion, there had been a summary remedy for absenteeism. Again and again, the English kings, from the Plantagenets to the Tudors, had been obliged to equip costly armies to stamp out rebellion, to which the absence of the English landlords had been an inducement. The burden on the Treasury was un- welcome, and statutes of increasing severity had marked their sense of this breach of contract on the part of these English owners. By a statute of Richard II., two-thirds of the estate of an absentee were forfeited to the Crown. The Lancastrian kings had proceeded on the same policy : and Henry VTII. bad summarily resumed the whole Irish estates of some English nobles who were habitual absentees. Even under the early Stuarts the same course was pursued: and security was at least taken that absenteeism should not free a landlord from contributing heavily to the revenues of the country upon whose resources he preyed : while the holding of Irish offices was bur- dened with the requirement of residence in Ireland. But more recently a change had sprung up. Residence had not been encouraged. Statutes to enforce it still remained in the statute-book : but they were a dead letter. The landlord drew his rent from Ireland, but did not help to pay her taxes. He spent the rent in England : and, since lavish ostentation might help to social consideration one whose Irish blood would otherwise have been a bar to him, he frequently spent more than his rent, and left his estate encumbered with mortgages in the hands of Enghsh mortgagees. The holder of an Irish office thought onlj^ of its emoluments, and was indignant at any ill-timed suggestion of a visit to the countrj' burdened with Chap. XIIL] SWIFT AS IRISH PATRIOT. 337 his support, and nominally entitled to his services. There ■were stories of those who had landed at Eingsend on Saturday night, had received the Sacrament at the nearest parish church on Sunday, taken the oaths on Monday morning in the Courts, and set sail for England in the afternoon, leaving no trace of then* existence in Ireland save their names on her Civil List as recipients of a salary.* By this custom it was calculated at least £600,000 per annum, out of a total rental of £1,800,000, left the country, and was spent in England. The blame for it is not to be laid altogether at the landlords' door. There was little to encourage residence : and much, on the other hand, to make the life of a resident landlord unendurable. Scorned by those who had more freshly arrived from England, and who endeavoured to hold their Irish connection as loosely as possible, the Irish landlord found him- self reduced to a level in society that wounded his pride at everj' turn. He knew that to his exertions, and the exertions of those who went before him, the Enghsh tenure of Ireland owed its continuance. Yet no political career was open to him : the of&ces in his own country went to strangers : he was classed, in an uncalculating and indiscriminating contempt, along with those of an alien and conquered race. Scorned in the society of the English emissaries, he might withdraw to his ov."i estate : but his presence there did little good. He was with- out education, without any intellectual interest, and he could only strive to cover the wounds inflicted on his pride by a lavish display of coarse and brutal luxury. In a house neglected, dirty, and sordid, he spent his rents in endless carouses, whose only redeeming feature was a half-savage hospitality. His house swarmed with unkempt hangers-on, who might be seen cutting their food from the ox that was roasting whole in the hall, and quenching their thu'st from the tankard on their master's table. If any luxuries of furniture were, perchance, admitted, the false pride, which aped what it detested, was * Zist of Ahsentees, 2nd cd., p. 27. ■338 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [1720—1725. sure to prompt their purchase in the English market, and of English manufacture.* Despised themselves, the landlords repaid their contempt tipon the tenants. Thriftless themselves, they provided for their needs by forcing thriftlessness on others. All the thought of the tenant was to contrive means for meeting the recurring fines for renewal, careless how the indebtedness so incurred could be wiped out. Nor could the tenants help themselves. The vast majority were Eoman Catholics, t and as such felt themselves to be scarcely within the protection of the law. They were entirely without education, and no other •calling than that of an almost barbarous husbandry, was open to them. They were sunk in an abyss of poverty. " The people," we are told,t "go bare legged half the year, and rarely touch flesh meat." So wretched was Irish tillage that it was cheaper to import English corn than to use Irish, even with the expense of freight. § Their own occupation would scarcelj^ have kept the tenants above starvation point, and it was consequently little more than a pretence. As soon as the potatoes were planted, the hut was closed, and the familj' went forth on the more profitable employment of begging.H * It is useless to quote chapter and Ireland" (1714) they are reckoned to verse for each of the features of Irish be, in all except northern parts, as society here depicted. But those who 20 to 1. The discrepancy is constant, hare studied the masses of Irish The author of the Scheme of tlw Pro- pamphlets on the questions of the day portion ivhieh the Protestants of Ire- will recognise them as drawn from the land vmy probabli/ bear to the Papists pages of these contemporary records. reckons the fonner to be as about f There is scarcely any point on 6 to 14. which the evidence is more various J List of Absentees, 2ud ed. p. 32. than that which bears on the com- § See Swift's Pny^oraZ/in' Universal parativc numbers of Protestants and use of Irish manvfaetvres : and Con- Eoman Catholics. Boulter reckons the si derations fm' ^jromotinr/ the Affri- latter as 5 to 1 (vol i. p. 210) : in u, culture of Ireland, by R (obert) MP. letter in the Biitish Museum L (ord) V (iscount) M (olesworth) from Bishop Clayton of Killala to (1723). Lady Sundon, I find them reckoned at || Essay im the Trade and Improvc- 8 to 1 : wherens in the earlier tract vient of Ireland, by Arthur Dobbs, "On the conduct nf the Purse of Dublin, 1729, 2nd Part. Chap. XIII.] SWIFT AS IRISH PATRIOT. 339 Idle, lazj"-, and incorrigible, they wandered from house to house, often extorting a sort of black mail, and thus providing for the needs of ■winter. So profitable did this become, in the absence of any restraint, or in the apathy which pre- vented the local magistrates from enforcing the law, that 'heg^mg became a recognized profession.* Adepts were hired ^co complete the familj'- group, and these adepts shared the •spoils of the season at its close. Girls were debauched in ■order that they might, as fictitious widows, move compassion, and earn an alms. As the summer drew to a close, they came Ibacb, gathered in the potato crop, and then lived during the -winter months, an existence httle above that of brutes. A •class like this soon produced a class even lower and more 'dangerous than itself. The country was cursed with a brood of hedgers, born of adultery and incest, herding together in "troops where the ties of relationship were as completely lost as in a herd of cattle. They were thievish and revengeful, enemies to the industrious, an intolerable burden and plague- spot on the land. But in no other country could they have led a life so free from interference. The English clique at the Castle were too much occupied in checldng fancied disaffection, and in dispensing patronage so as to secure support amongst hungry partizans, to care for the welfare of the masses, to whom Whig and Tory were meanmgless names. The local gentry, despised by the governing cHque, threw off the respon- sibilities of their j)osition, and allowed matters to drift from bad to worse. The hetter population of the north, who had still their own energy to save them from despair, left the country in emigrant ships for the West Indies, where they were landed only to lead the life of slaves to those who bound them by chains of debt.t * Arthur Dobbs computes the num- Vol. I., p. 2C0. A few years later, in bor of able-bodied persons thus drawn 1736, Bishop Clayton writes from from labour, as 30,000 annually. Cork that the North, where the linen Trade and Iinjjrovemcnt of Iirlaitd. industry flourishes, is sending forth ■f See Archbishop Boulter's Letters emigrants, while the South, whose ■/. 2 340 LIFE OF JONATHAN' SWIFT. [1720—1725.. To combat such ills Swift stepped from the seclusion in Tvhich he had remained since 1714. The history of Ireland had not meanwhile been eventful. But it had been marked by at least two events of some importance — the rise of the dispute' as to the finality of the decisions of the Irish House of Lords,* and the passing of the act giving back toleration to the Pres- byterians, of which they had been deprived in 1703. It was in the year 1720, that Swift entered upon this new era of his life. Rarely has it happened to any man to exercise- decisive influence in so manj"- widely separated spheres of action. Few could have foreseen that the disheartened jiolitician, the misread satirist, the broken pamphleteer, was yet to appear in- two new capacities — enough alone to have vron for him a great name — as the Irish patriot, and as the author of the most comjprehensive satire that the world has ever seen. Anger first roused him : he saw all the wrongs of Ireland as the work of the Whig government. He felt himself that this was the histoiy of his own impulse. " I do profess without aifectation," he- writes to Pope a few j-ears later, -f- " that yom' kind opinion of me as a patriot, since you call it so, is what I do not deserve ; because what I do is owing to perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifj'ing sight of slavery, folly, and baseness about me, among which I am forced to live." The wrongs of Ireland were undoubtedly deepening. But that which first stirred Swift's pen, was not new. Since the days of Charles II. the Irish had been forbidden to seek a market in England for their cattle. Since the last years of William III. the most iniquitous of a long series of iniquitous laws had crushed out the Irish -n'ooUen manufacture by refusing it the liberty of exportation, and b}^ restricting it to the narrow hempen manufactures a new Act of Sccvr'oui the Depnulcnoy of IvcJanS, the English Parliament had (le.stroyeil, on the Crvn-n of Great lirifain, by founcl no such energy in her people. ivhich the appellate Jurisdiction of iSundon M.SS., British Museum. the Irish House of Lords -was actually * By the passing, on the 2rith of taken a-\vay. March, 1720, of a Bill for the Better f *'''/'' *" -^'^'S June 1st, 172S. ■CuAr. XIII.] SWIFT AS IRISH PATEIOT. 341 and precarious market formed by the contraband trade to France. Every year, however, increased the pressure. The •exasperation waited only for a voice to utter it. This was the function now assumed by Swift. The pam- .phlet which bore the name of "A Proposal for the Universal u,se of Irish Manufactures " was published in 1720. It proposes, in effect, a reprisal on England for her restrictions, by a refusal to use anything that comes thence. A confederation is to be formed, pledged to use nothing that is not of Irish manufacture. Everything, he trusts, will be burned that comes from Eng- land, except the people and the coals. This is the basis of the paper: but as it proceeds his indignation waxes warmer. That indignation is preserved, according to one of the most years the common standard of stupidity authority, talk more than sis, without in England, where he was never heard either gracefulness, propriety or mean- a minute in any assembly or by any log, and, at the same time, be admired party, with common Christian treat- and followed as the pattern of elo- ment : yet, upon ins arrival here, could quence and wisdom. " Chap. XIII.] SWIFT AS lEISH PATRIOT. 343' irony of the tract accepted the worst of the laws, as facts against which there could be no appeal. That feelings were deeply stirred was due only to the consummate skill with which the case was set forth. But the government were- insane enough to place upon the tract precisely the meaning that Swift would have wished, hut which their own interest would have hid them ignore. They took it as an attack upon themselves.* The Lord Chief Justice Whiteshed was urged forward : a prosecution against Waters, the printer, was insti- tuted, and the Grand Jury were induced to find a true Bill- But when the trial came on, the jury refused to find a verdict of guilty. Whiteshed bullied, and coaxed, and browbeat them by turns. He laid his hand on his breast and swore that the author's intention was to bring in the Pretender. The jury were stubborn : but at length from very weariness they brought in a special verdict which enabled the proceedings to- be prolonged. Whiteshed did not relax his efforts : but they were in vain, and when the Duke of Grafton assumed the functions of Lord Lieutenant in the autumn, he stopped the prosecution by a writ of nolle prosequi. Having thus put his hand anew to the plough. Swift paused. In a letter to Pope, of 10th January, 17-l-r,t he reviews his position: possibly for the sake of his friendship with Pope: more probably perhaps merely as a record of his consistency, for his own satisfaction. I He declares his utter ignorance of * The Government adherents en- Constitution and original right, have deavoured -w-ithout much success to placed them under a dej^endence on ansTver the pamphlet. Amongst the their mother country." Swift is one tracts belonging to the Royal Irish of the " laiia latrantia " whose bark- Academy, I find one reply published ing keeps off peace, in 1720, in -which Swift is bitterly f The date I7|i given by Scott is attacked for kindling ill feeling erroneous, seeing that the Duke of between England and Ireland, as he Grafton's arrival in Dublin as Lord had before done between England and Lieutenant, which took place in her allies. The writer is orthodoxly August, 1721, is referred to. humble. " The Protestants of Ire- J Pope declared that he never land," he says, " are sensible that received the letter : and, if we could nature and circumstances as well as trust Po e's word, it seems not im- ^^4 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1720—1725. tlie conditions of the political world since his retirement. But, although aloof from the strife of party, he finds himself the object of its bitter abuse. He resents this all the more because, when his favour was at its height, he never sought to do otherwise than save merit from being proscribed on merely political grounds. He had been taunted by his Tory patrons as a Whig : now he is stigmatized as the most rabid of Tory partizans. On the other hand, he wishes to make no court to the new Whig powers : " for the new principles fixed to those of that denomination I did then, and do now, from my heart abhor, detest, and abjure, as whoUj"- degenerate from their predecessors."* He desires only to be suffered "to rmi quietly among the common herd of people, whose opinions unfortunately differ from those which lead to favour and pre- ferment." Are his opinions so dangerous as to give warrant for the attacks made on him ? He has ever been against a Popish successor : he. has ever justified the Revolution : he has attached no weight to the mere right of inheritance other than that given it by law and by popular opinion, both of which must yield to political expediency. He has always had a mortal antipathy against standing armies in time of possible that the letter -was written selves, in the context of the letter, or only, and not sent. in the whole tenor of Swift's life. He * " He means partieulavly,'' says left the Whigs, as he now says, and as Warburton on this passage, " the every incident in his life shews, principle at that time charged upon because they developed Tiews to which them bj' their enemies of an intention he could not adhere ; because they to proscribe the Tories." Warburton's seemed to impair the privileges of his assumption is as absolutely without Church : because their conduct was foundation as his assumptions usually factious and intolerant. In all this are, and the implied charge against his jndgment may have been mis- 8wiftof hating the Whigs only because taken: but that is no excuse for the the Whigs were unwilling to receive often repeated chai-ge of political him into favour, might well be Jisre- inconsistency. That incousisteucy has garded. But it is more serious to no reality save to those whose con- find Mr. Elwin apparently accepting tinuity of principle is nothing more Warburton's interpretation as correct. than servile submission to all the I can find no warrant for this inter- tenets that pass current under a pretation either in the words them- certain party name. Chap. XIII.] SWIFT AS IHISE TATPJOT. 345 peace.* He has always desired that Parliaments should be annual, t He dislilced the monied interest in its opposition to the territoriid, which he thought the safer basis for govern- ment. He feared the growth of the national debt. He feared still more the encroachments on the liberty of the sub- ject, j by which the government, whose excuse was the pre- servation of liberty, was compelled to defend itself. These were his opinions, "when he was in the world:" if he has any, these are his opinions still : and he wishes only that a pohtical catechism were published once a quarter by authority. Otherwise he may strive to make his court by uttering Whig principles, and find that they have been exploded a month before, and that their utterance proves him only " a disaffected person." Having thus given an account of liis political faith. Swift turned again to his work for Ireland. He touched upon her follies as well as her wrongs. A proposal was now mooted for establishmg a national Bank for Ireland. It provoked con- troversy and jealousy against the monied interest, which was the chief support of the Whig party. Suspicion of stock- jobbers, and of "funds of credit," and knowledge of the evils of the South Sea Compan}-, probably supplied the motives of Swift's opposition to the scheme. Amongst other means of ridiculing" it, he wrote a tract proposing to establish " A Swearer's Bank," the profits of which were to consist of fines rigorously exacted for the use of profane language. By much * It need not be said that Swift + This is ono of tlie tenets to whioli spoke in this with the prejudice of his Swift adhered : and his advocacy of day. But an opinion which has been it is an early proof of that scheme of forgiven to many modern politicians, parliamentary reform, coupled with a although maintained against the ex- jiopular basis for monarchical goveru- perience of two centuries, need not ment, by which he and those who surely be much of a reproach to Swift, sympathized with him, hoped to coun- maintained, as he maintained it, in teract the tyranny of the Whig common with nine-teuths of his con- oligarchy. temporaries, and under the natural J Such as the suspension of JJaJjeas alarm which an innovation excites. Corjnis in 1715 and 171C. 346 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1720—1725. casuistiy he justifies the project : he gravely meets ohjections, such as its possible encouragement of swearing. But his con- tributions to the controversy, in which he chose his side with some rashness, are otlierwise of no more than passing interest. His next interference in Irish affairs had issues far more serious. There was at this time, admittedly, a very serious lack of copper coin in Ireland. It was so great as to hamper the small transactions of the poor, and render the payment of weeldj' or daily wages a matter of difficulty. The lack of coin seems to have dated only a few years back,* and it was caused by the fact that the copper coinage was undervalued in the ciu-rency, and had consequently left the comitry. Its place had been supplied by a host of worthless coins, the jnivate tokens used in payment of wages, and the "raps" which were current amongst the lower peasantry. The want had been duly reported to the English Cabinet : and it was taken up there, not as a real grievance to be met with speedy and scruj)ulous justice, but as a new opportunity for a job. "VVe only increase the difficulty of understanding what foUows, if we seek for too great exactness of information, and expect to find, either m the theories of 1720, a correct estimate of poHtical economy, or in the fierce invectives of partizans, a strict ad- herence to trutli. The patent to make a new copper courage was granted hj the English government to one "William "Wood, who had some connection -ndth the iron trade, and whose antecedents, it appears, were not very creditable. Naturally, according to the habit of the day, various officials had to levy black mail on the transaction : and the amount of the coinage had to be sufficiently large to enable Wood to recoup himseK' and make his own profit. It was fixed at £108,000: an amount altogether absurd, according to any estimate, unless the copper coinage was to have more than its proper place in * Prior, in his " Observations on Ireland," (Dublin, 1729), states tliat Coin in General, ivith some Projjosals twenty years before, the copper for rcgwlatinff the Value of Coin in coinage had been good and abundant. Chap. XIII.] S"\yiFT AS lEISH PATRIOT. 347 the currency of the country.* The greatest share of the' l)hinder was to fall to a lady, whose position was not without sufficient precedent at Court : but in whose case the somewhat blunt moral sense of the time had been stimulated into severity by party feeling. The Duchess of Kendal was to receive ^10,000 from "Wood. The patent had to pass through various offices, and receive various signatures : at each stage in its pro- gress, and to each signatory, some gratification had doubtless to- be paid. Finally, the plunder of "Wood — whose claim, or whose hold, upon the government it would be useless to attempt ta explain — was to be so large that when the patent was finally recalled the compensation allowed to him was a pension of i'3,000 a year for eight years.f These facts are sufficient, proof that the groundwork, at least, of a somewhat scandalous- job was here. The patent passed on the 12th of July 1722. As an additional insult to Ireland, it appears to have been passed without any consultation with those responsible for her government, evenj though the Lord Lieutenant happened to be in London at the- time. The full facts could not become known all at once.- It was not till more than a year afterwards that the twO' Houses of the Irish Parhament were so stirred by public feel- ing as to vary their usual submissiveness by presenting, memorials against the patent. Wood published a reply in the Flying Post of 8th October, 1723, which was only an aggrava- tion of the original offence. He claimed for the Prerogative * In a, Sclicme nf tlie Money Matters turns on Scasonahle Itcmarhs') denies- of IirJ a III!, hy John Browne (Dtiblin, that the currency, all included, can 1729), the total currency is reckoned at exceed £000,000. £514,000, of which the gold is f How far this was to cover the- J;.')00,000, the silver only £10,000, and sums he had disbursed, including the the copper £■1,000. This is exclusive bribes he had paid, it is impossible tO' of the paper currency consisting of say. It is not likely that any of the bankers' notes, reckoned at £400,000. money that went to the Duchess of But Browne's authority is not vci-y Kendal ever was repaid. The nation trustworthy : and the author of a had probably to recoup Wood for his reply to one of his tracts [Considera- useless bribes. ■348 LIFE OF JOXATUAN SWIFT. [1720—1723. •" the power to make the money of what metal, weight, fineness, and denomination the King in his great wisdom shall think fit ; to enforce its currency : and to give the profit arising from the coinage to whom he pleaseth." He confesses with astonish- ing effrontery, that the coinage may not be all the Irish could wish : but do they want to be like starving wretches who will not take food that is not cooked exactly according to their fancy ? So matters went on during the winter, the ill-will gradually swelling. The government began to awake to a sense, not of the injustice, but of the inconvenience that the injustice might bring. In March, 17-H- communications were passing between Lord Carteret, as Secretary of State, and the Duke of Grafton as Lord Lieutenant, in regard to an inquiry: and on the 9th of April, 1724, that inquiry was at length opened before a Committee of Privy Council at the Cockpit, WhitehaU. The ■memorials from both Houses, had been followed bj' addresses from Corporations, from Quarter Sessions, from Trades Guilds. But some more articulate, more definite, and more independent mouthpiece for the common indignation, was wanted. Then, and then only, was it that Swift stept in. The indignation had alreadj' risen to boiling pitch : he gave it voice, but it is not to be supposed that he created the universal force of feel- ing which soon animated all Irishmen, merely by a skilful exaggeration of a fictitious grievance. Swift's first pamphlet, published while the Committee of Inquiry was sitting in London, took the form of a letter written in the character of M. B. Drapier, directly to the Irish ipeople. It was, so the title page declared, " Very proper to be kept in every famil}^ " : and, to promote its circulation, the author says he had " ordered the printer to sell it at the lowest rate.* The * The price was twopence : and underneatli the summeT-house -n-hicli both printing and paper are of the was adorned with Stella's portrait, i7ery poorest. There is a tradition at was used for the purpose of clandestine Delville that the vault now to be found printing ; and the tradition was con- Chap. XIII.] SWIFT AS lEISH PATRIOT. 349 letter shews all the art that enabled Swift to sway at will the passions of men. In describing the patent, he uses the same sort of exaggeration that had been found in the memorials of the Irish Parliament. " If you beat down twelve English pence," he tells the Irish, " and carry the copper to the brazier, he will give you the nominal value, with but one penny of abatement. Do the same with Wood's halfpence, and you will get no more than a penny for your twelve pence." It is absurd to suppose either that this was true, or that Swift thought that it was true. His object was simply to put a scandalous tranS' action in the grossest aspect possible. Just as absurd are some of the pictures that he draws — -of purchasers who wiD: have to pay their debts in cartloads of Wood's trash, of two- hundred and fifty horses that will be required to bring up to Dublin the half-yearly rental of Squire ConoUy.* Swift wished to drag a i^olitical scandal to light ; he chose to picture as immediate realities what were only to be conceived as remotely possible results. The device was one of the ordinary and recognised methods of political controversy then : later ages may judge whether it has since "been discarded. But apart from exaggeration, there was enough of real injustice in the matter. In the reign of James II. — no verj-- severe comparison — a patent for copper coinage was granted, allowing thirty-two pence to be coined from each pound of copper, which was then intrinsically worth 18fL Wood's I)atent allowed thirty pence out of each pound, the pound being in 1723, intrinsically worth 12d. only. Tliis was bad enough : but there was no guarantee that the coin should even -■&*• firmed by the finding of some type of the Honse of Commons : was a there about forty years ago. But the close adherent of the government : story rests on no very sure foundation; nnd had directed the action of the .and it seems to imply an unnecessary Duke of Grafton, then Lord Lieute- caution, seeing that the publication of nant, when he vs-as openly thwarted the letters was perfectly open. by Viscount Midletjn, the Chancellor, * The mention of Conolly's name is whose advice he refused to follow, and i^ot accidental. Conolly was Speaker who opposed tlie patent. ■'350 LIFE OF JONATHAN S"WIFT. [1"20— 1725. reach the prescribed vakie. As a fact there were several varieties of Wood's coinage. Assays were of little value, •especially as the Comptroller was to be paid bj'' Wood himself. More than this, there was no real limit of the quantity issued. In previous patents, a clause had been inserted compelling the patentee to exchange his copper for its nominal value in the "Currencj'. Previous patents had, indeed, been little more than •extensions of the custom common during the seventeenth •century in Ireland, of private coinages. "Wood's patent was not so limited : the moment the coinage passed from his hands, he had no further concern in it. With a silver coinage so scarce as it now was, it was easy to set afloat the copper coinage : it might be trusted, in the mass of heterogeneous coins, to tell few tales. But even in the first letter, Swift enlarges the question from the details of the coinage. The halfpence are bad : but how, he asks, has this come about ? He answers his own question : " because 3'ou in Ireland are far from the ear of the King, and cannot mislead him like Wood and liis friends." " You must suifer unheard : your good coin will leave you, and you will be compelled to barter j^our goods against this dross." With a boldness of inconsistency that few but Swift could have ventured, he turns round to the cottar's point of view. The shopkeeper has been warned how his goods will go : now the cottar is warned that, with this dross as his only coin, he will find that he can buy nothing from the shopkeeper. " Do you fancy that we will part with our goods for a coinage that might well be made of old kettles or pebbles ? " All classes will be wronged : and the wrong will be suifered because we are so helpless. What then is to be done ? The answer is easy. Refuse this trash. Let it be the accursed thing in Israel. Have no fear of the roj^al prerogative : a prerogative strained is a thing which is not: and to give it heed is but dishonouring the King. You are bound to take gold and silver : but it is at your option to take copper. It is Chap. XIII.] SWIFT AS IRISH PATRIOT. 351 at your peril, as sane men, that you -will take this trash. The nation as one man, must bind itself to refuse : even the peasant should rather cling to his " raps " than accept this badge of slavery and starve. The Report of the Committee of Inquiry was dated the 24th 'Of July, 1724. It is singularly inconclusive in its defence of the patent. It compares the patents of former days : and urges as a justification for this, that whereas former patentees Ihad paid £16 a 3'ear to the Crown and Comptroller, Wood, -that is to say the Irish people, was to pay £1000. The assay is adduced as proving the soundness of the coin : but the only ■coins assayed were those coined after Lady-day, 1723, whereas all in circulation were coined before that date.* Irish officials, it is admitted, were not consulted : but there was no reason, it is asserted, why they should be. The main groimd of accusation, in the flagi-ant disregard of Irish interests, and of Irish views, is absolutely ignored. And yet this elaborate defence ends with the recommendation that this beneficial and necessary coinage should be limited to £40,000. Before the report of the Committee was published, a forecast 'of it and of the action of the Government was published in a ILondon paper, and repeated in Harding's Newspaper, in Dublin, on the 1st of August, 1724. The paragraph may have Tbeen meant as an assistance by a clumsy friend, or it may have Ijeen the attack of a more skilful enemy, of Wood. Wood, it was asserted, was willing to take goods for his coin, if silver were not forthcoming : he would restrict the amount to 5^d. in each payment, and it was hinted that unreasonable obstinacy might be met by exercise of the prerogative. Swift had here just what he desired. The Drapier's Second Letter is addressed on the 4th of August, 1724, to Harding, the printer, on the occasion of the paragraph. The merits arid details of the question, are now laid aside. Even Wood is * Mr. Sovithwell, one of the the orders wore strict which limited Assayers, told Archbishop King that the inquiry to the later date. 352 LIFE OP JOIfATHAK SWIFT. [1720—1725. almost forgotten in the vehemence of rage that a nation should be exposed to the menaces or to the mercy of such as he. He wiU restrict, forsooth ! So that our boasted freedom is held by the grace of Wood ! And there is talk of a proclamation ! If it comes, every honest citizen is hound to ignore what will be no more than a fiction based on error. Once for all, resist : or waste no labour, but accept your inevitable yoke of slavery. The Second Letter prepared men's minds for the Eeport. That Eeport reached Dublin when the letter had suggested the indignation which Swift meant that the Report should kindle, and the third letter, of 25th August, fell on ground well pre- pared. This time the " Nobility and Gentry of Ireland " were addressed : and the tone adopted was very different from that of the previous papers. The purpose of Swift in this letter is no longer to argue against a scheme which is universallj- condemned. With a grave irony, he shews the utter absurdity of the position. Is it true that the profit of an obscure mechanic is to be preferred "not only before the interests, but the very safetj^ and being of a great Kingdom, and a Kingdom distinguished for its loyalty, j)erhaps above aU others upon Earth?" "Are not,'' he asks, "tlie people of Ireland born as free as those of England ? How have tliey forfeited their freedom ? Is not their Parliament as fair a representative of the people as that of England ? And has not their Privy Conncil as great, or a greater share in the administration of puhlic affairs ? Are not they snhjects of the same king? Does not the same sun shine upon them ? And have they not the same God for their protector ? Am I a freeman in England and do I hecome a slave in si.x hours hy crossing the Channel ? " The lies of the witnesses, the dishonesty of the patentee, the rottenness of the coinage — aU these are cast aside, as if they were proved and needed no more said of them. The indepen- dence of Ireland is what he insists on : and the duty restin" upon the men of leading in her midst, to assert that indepen- Chap. XIII.] SWIFT AS IRISH PATHIOT. 353 clence. The king hag granted the patent. He cannot, it seems, withdraw it. "AVellthen, it rests with us to consult his dignity by doing for him what he cannot do for liimself, and accordingly to refuse every farthing of this worthless dross. The well-being of Ireland clearly points to one course : it is for you to lead on it." Swift probably guessed when he wrote this letter with its tone of suppressed indignation, that it assumed an independence of spii'it which did not really exist. It was skilfully drawn so as to prepare men for a new appeal, and was far from a last word. For two months he waited : and on the 13th of October, 1724, the fourth and far the greatest of the Letters appeared. It was addressed " To the whole People of Ireland." Again it casts aside the lesser controversy as to the coinage and its conditions. Ireland is summoned to assert her inde- pendence, no longer as a decent and reasonable interpreta- tion of her relations to England, but with the indignant voice of a nation that has borne her yoke of slavery to a degraded tyrant, far too long. She is to wrench her freedom from the crumbling and mouldy corruption of English misrule. There is not a line of the whole letter that is not instinct with life, and thrilling with sarcastic force. The flimsy technicalities of debate are torn to pieces. The phrase " depending kingdom," which, as applied to Ireland, had been made to justify any stretch of power, is " but a modern term of art : " were it ten times true, it would be inapplicable here. " Let who ever tliinks otlierwise,* I, M. B. Drapier, tlesire to be excepted: for I declare next under God, I depend only on the King my sovereign, and on the laws of my own country. And I am so far from dependinj; upon the people of England, that if they should ever rebel against my sovereign (which God forbid 1) I would be ready, at tlie first command from Ills Majesty, to take up arms against them, as some of my countrymen did * Expressions as faulty in point of in technical correctness : but in the grammar as this are not rare in Swift's Drapier's letter, ilaws hsd of course prose, the strength of wliich lies in its a special appropriateness which they clearness and flexibility rather than had not elsewhere. A A. 354 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1720—1725. against theirs at Preston. And if such a rebellion should prove so success- ful as to fix the Pretender on the throne of England, I would venture to transgress that Statute so far, as to lose every drop of my blood to hinder him from being King of Ireland." * He is sick to death of the cant that one English governor has repeated after another. We are to he told, eternally, "to think of some good hiUs for encouraging of trade, and setting the poor to work ; some further Acts against Fopery, and for uniting Protestants." "We all know the mixture of wheedling, flattery, and solemn promises, that would follow. But you can cormpt us no longer: you have wasted the wherewithal to bribe. You can betray us no longer: we must betray ourselves, if we be longer slaves. " But God be thanked, the best of them are only our fellow subjects, and not our masters." Are we in Ireland to be the victims of a strained prerogative, long forgotten in England? Are we to be at the mercj' of men ignorant of our wants, who " look upon us as a sort of savage Irish, whom our ancestors conquered several hundred years ago ? " "VVe need waste no words. The question is simply one of might against right, a question as old as human nature, but never brought into shorter compass. " The arguments on both sides are invincible : for, in reason, all Government with- out the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery : but, in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt." Force us then if you can : but so long as we have the power, we shall be free. "We will take your ■• The manoeuvre by ivhich Swift commit himself, howeTsr : he fears a managed to associate a. suspicion of " spiteful interpretation." In short, Jacobitism with his opponents, is one he places the English Cabinet on the peculiarly characteristic : and so is horns of a dilemma. " Am I to resist the skill with which, in the next Jacobitism 1 Then what becomes of letter, he meets the objections to this your doctrine of Ireland's depen- paragraph, by half offering an extent dency?" or, "Am I to become a of submission that might equally be Jacobite, if England bids me ? Then, embarrassing — a submission even to what becomes of your Protestant Jacobitism, if Jacobitism were to succession ? Must even that give way become strong enough. He does not to your desire to tyrannize ? " Chap. XIII.] SWIFT AS lEISH PATRIOT. 355 coin, when, as your patentee threatens, it is melted down, and poured into our throats : hut not till then. If the English Government found in this letter a note of open defiance, they had themselves to blame. Their scheme, whether in its first suggestion good or had for Ireland, had been carried out in a way to outrage all the decencies of government. Swift had at first poured his sarcasm on Wood : and the dangerous questions in the background might have been avoided by abandoning the scheme. Even after the report was issued, he had ascribed its mistakes to Wood and his accompHces. The Government had remained obstinate : and now they found themselves confronted by open defiance all along the line. Unable to retrace their steps, they saw no way open to them but prosecution. A proclamation was accordingly issued.* Harding, the printer of the letter, was thrown into prison, as if to shame the undoubted author into surrender. Ireland was now under a new rule. The Duke of Grafton, honest and well-inten- tioned, but proud and dull, had failed to solve the difficulty, and had indeed been little trusted by the English Cabinet, f He had been thwarted at every turn by Viscount Midleton, who had sought to provide for his popularity in Ireland, by opposing the coinage, although he had been careful to keep on good terms with AValpole. The Duke was now recalled, and in his place. Lord Carteret was sent from the Secretarj^ship of State, into what was to him little less than banishment. He was sent to manage a difficulty which he had perhaps done something to foment. Whatever his faults, he was at least free from those of Grafton. If Grafton failed from dulness and timiditj', it was his brilliant recklessness that prevented Carteret from reaching the highest pinnacle of success. He was versatile beyond all men of his day : and his versatility * See Api^endix VII. storm arose," are the words in wliich t " A fair-weather pilot, that knew Walpole describes him. not what he had to do, when the first 356 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1720—1725. bewildered duller men. He had a breadth of scholarly and literary sympathy that forbade his absorption in the sphere of politics, and those for whom that sphere was everything, looked askance on his aberrations. He had a keenness of insight that detected tricks and corruption wherever they prevailed : but he met them chiefly with the sneer of the cynic. He refused to believe a Tory to be necessarily a traitor, and conceived an administration possible, which should strengthen itself by alliances amongst all moderate men, and not confine itself to those who bound themselves by party ties founded as much on accident as reason. His talents ■enabled him to dispense with labour : his recklessness led him to despise it. Even when carrying out the behests of his own party, he refused to shut his eyes to their abuse of power, and neglected the maxims of orthodox Whiggism in the distribu- tion of his patronage. Such had been his administration, hitherto, in England : and, as such, in Ireland it gained him the regard of Swift, the suspicion of Walpole. The vice-royalty ■of Carteret became an epoch in the life of Swift. "When Carteret had been nominated as Lord-Lieutenant in April, 1724, Swift had used the privilege of an old friend to write to him very freely on the subj ect of the coinage. Such a letter would in itself dispel the notion that Swift's only •object was to find an excuse for a partizan attack upon the ■Government. For a month he awaited a reply : and then addressed Lord Carteret in a second letter, which is a master- piece in its kind. " I have been long out of the world," he writes, " but have not forgotten what used to pass among those I lived with while I was in it : and I can say that during the experience of many years, and many changes in affairs, your excellency, and one more,* who is not worthy to be compared to you, are the only great persons that ever refused to answer * This may have been the Duke of longed to a later date. (See Scott's Chandos, though the Dean's principal Swift, XVIII., 224.) complaint against that nobleman be- Chap. XIIL] SWIFT AS lEISH PATEIOT. 357 a letter from me, without regard to business, party, or great- ness : and if I had not a peculiar esteem for your personal qualities, I should think myseK to be acting a very inferior part, in making this complaint." Fortunately for both. Lord Carteret did not seek to pursue the quarrel. He wrote in terms that more than soothed the ruffled feelings of Swift : and their friendly relations were renewed before Carteret's actual administration of Ireland began.* Enraged at the proclamation. Swift met Carteret, soon after his arrival, t with angiy expostulations. Carteret excused himself by the Virgilian quotation — Ees diira, et regni novitas, me talia cogunt Moliri. On this or some such occasion, it may have been that Swift repUed by the not uncomplimentary outburst, " "What in God's name, do you here ? Get you gone, and send us our boobies again." The proclamation was issued on the 27th of October ; and Swift took a bold method of meeting it. This was a letter X addressed to Lord Midleton, the Lord Chancellor, defending the Drapier, and almost acknowledging himself the author of * The relations between the two f October 22nd. were those of sympathy, interrupted t This letter Scott prints out of the only by the occasional jars which cir- proper order, as the sixth letter. He cumstances forced on, and in which heads the letter, which in his edition each learned to respect the other's professes to be printed from the wit. On one occasion Swift was kept Dubhn edition of 1735, " Deanery waiting for an audience, and is said to House, Oct., 1724." The Dnblia have written on the window of the edition however dates it, at the end, waiting-room, the lines " Deanery House, Oct. 26, 172i." My very good lord, 'tis a very hard task, Swift may have known of the pro- For a man to wait here, who has nothing to clamation a day or two before its ^^' formal issue : or he may either in under which Carteret wrote the reply, error, or with some purpose, have My very good dean, there are few who come dated the letter a day or two before it ii6r6, WS/S writtsn But have something to ask, or something to fear. 358 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1720—1725. the letters. That the letter was actually sent there seems no reason to doubt, although it was not printed tiU more than ten years had passed. The fitness of its destination is clear. Midleton, although a Whig, had not concealed his dislike to the coinage. His office had however compelled him to be the first signatory to the Proclamation. For years Swift and he had stood aloof : but now a common sympathy had brought them together, even though Midleton's official duties made him the direct agent of the oppression he dislOied. In this letter Swift takes up two accusations against the Drapier. He had estranged, so it was said, the Irish and the English nations from one another : and he had spoken injuriously of the Royal Prerogative. The first he dismisses briefly. He fears that the estrangement had a foundation other than the Drapier's words. Ignorance, disregard, con- tempt — these were the only means by which, hitherto, England had sought to bind Ireland to herself. "As to Ireland, they know little more of it than they do of Mexico ; farther than that it is a country subject to the King of England, full of bogs, inhabited by wild Irish papists, -n-ho are kept in awe by mercenai-y troops sent from thence : and their general opinion is, that it were better for England if the whole island were sunk into the sea. * * I have seen the grossest suppositions passed upon them ; that the wild Irish were taken in toils : but that in some time they would grow so tame as to eat ■out of your hands." * * That this was not a mere rhe- Derriagliy man, who happened to be torioal exaggeration of the English- in London, came in the crowd, and man's belief , is shown by the following saw the wild Irislunan, a hideous passage from Burdy's Life of Skelton. figure, with a chain about him, cutting {Works I.,LXIII.) " When lie was in his capers before a gaping multitude. London, there was a man from the Yet notwithstanding his disguise, he parish of Derriaghy, he assured us, soon discovered, that this wild Irish- that passed there for a wild Irishman, man was a neighbour's son, a sober and was exhibited as a public show, civilised young man, wlio had left dressed up -ndth a false beard, artificial Derriaghy a little before him. When wings, and the like. Hundreds from the show was finished, he went behind all parts flocked to see a strange the scene, and cried out so as to be ispeotacle, which they had often heard heard by his countryman, ' Derriaghy, of before : and among others, a Derriaghy.' Upon this the seeming Chap. XIII.] SWIFT AS IRISH PATRIOT. 359 As for the prerogative, he is at a loss to see what crime the Drapier has committed. He will submit to be silent, if forced to be : but he wiU still " go and whisper among the reeds, not any reflection upon the wisdom of my countrymen, but only these few words, Beware of Wood's Halfpence."* The bill against Harding came before the Grand Jury early in the Michaelmas term. By a letter of " Seasonable Advice," on the 11th of November the Drapier warned them of what was expected of them. " Shall Jonathan die," ran the Scriptui'al quotation, now in every one's mouth, " who has wrought this great salvation in Israel ? God forbid : As the Lord Kveth, there shaU not one hair of his head fall to the ground : for he hath wrought with God this day." Whiteshed, the Chief Jus- tice, again attempted, as he had in Waters's case, to browbeat the jury. But it was in vain. The bill was thrown out : and "Whiteshed could only show his resentment by the questionable means of dissolving the Grand Jury. Another Grand Jury was formed : but its elements were the same. The vindication oi the Drapier was not enough : the war was carried into the enemj''s camp bj' a presentment against the halfpence. The City of Dublin was now fully roused. Authority was scouted : the agencies of the law had been made ridicalous by White- shed's impotent attempt to override the rules and customs of his office. It remained for Swift to follow up his triumph. wild Irishman, staring with surprise, tion, for the best of all reasons, that spoke aloud, ' I'll go any place for there was nothing to detect. His Derriaghy.' They had then a private authorship of the Drapier's letters was meeting when he told him, that being notorious ; and it is curious that Scott ■destitute of money, he took that should have repeated stories like these, method of gulling the English, and while on pages immediately following, succeeded far beyond his expeota- he gives abundant evidence that tlie tions." Dean was recognised as the Drapier * The stories repeated by Scott, of by every street boy in Dublin. The Swift'sfearof detection by his servant, question was only one of legal proof. Blakeley, and of his having visited Archbishop King all but told Lord Harding in prison in the disguise of a Carteret that Swift was the author, .clown, are foolish inventions. Swift and hinted that ho was about formally was absolutely secure against dcteo- to announce it. 360 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1720—1725. He could afford to assume an apologetic tone : he had no longer to create an impression, but to confirm one created. The mob was on his side. The addresses of more august assemblies were now supplemented by those of the sworn asso- ciations of butchers and brewers, by the " Flying stationers " or newsboys, and by the Black Guard. At every street comer broad-sheets and ballads in his honour, were sold. Every tavern had its club to celebrate the Drapier, and every con- vivial meeting rang with choruses in his honour. Some of the doggrel that was written in contempt of Wood, and in honour of the Patriot Drapier, was sony enough. But other writings than those avowed by the Drapier, either came from his hand, or passed under his revision. At the most critical juncture, lines of his own were addressed to the people, urging resistance to the tyranny closing in upon them, and concluding thus : — If yet to virtue you have some pretence, If yet ye are not lost to common sense, Assist your patriot in your own defence. That stupid cant, " he went too far," despise, And know that to be brave is to be wise : Think how he struggled for your liberty, And give him freedom, whilst yourselves are fi'ee. His friend Sheridan came to liis assistance with a piece called " Tom Punsibi's dream," which represented the suifer- ings of Ireland from her more powerful neighbour, and hinted in no verj'- obscure way at the parts played by the Duchess of Kendal and Walpole, in the aifair of "Wood. Other pieces held up "Whiteshed to ridicule with such success that the vexation is said to have shortened his life. It was in this full tide of triumph, that Swift published, on the 14th of December, 1724, his fifth letter, addressed to Viscount Molesworth,* closing the series for the present. Its tone is one of humble apology. "He is aware of his gross * Lord Molesworth was one of not prevent his sympathy with the those whose Whig connexions did Drapier. CitAr. XIII.] SWIFT AS IHISH PATBIOT. 361 presumption in attempting to viadicate liberty witli weapons so poor as lie has at command. He must have been misled by trustmg to the bad guidance of authors who fancied that the monarchy, either of England or of Ireland, was not quite a tyranny. But he is so deplorably ignorant, that he cannot even now withdraw the points found fault with." He is like " the dumb boy whose tongue found a passage for speech by the horror of seeing a dagger at his father's throat." " This," he goes on, " may lessen the wonder that a Tradesman, hid in privacy and silence, should cry out when the life and being of his political mother are attempted before his face, and by so infamous a hand." He can only promise that for the future he will bury at the bottom of his chest all the writings that treat of hberty : will never presume while in Ireland to bring them to the light of day : and will never forget the " climate I am in." Hitherto he has not shaken off the impression left by the works of Lord Molesworth himself, of Locke, and Moty- neux, and Sidney, who talked of liberty as a common blessing. But now he will " grow wiser, and learn to consider my driver, the road I am in, and with whom I am yoked." The Ministry were compelled to yield. As the contro- versy was closing for Swift, new pamphlets from his imitators continued to come forth. The description of the supposed execution of Wood was given, with his dying speech upon the scaffold. Dreary jokes. were played upon his name, and the street cries on the subject were repeated in pamphlets to suit the taste of the day.* Others took up a more dangerous line, and improved the triumph over the government in the interests * iScott has published (vol. VII.) those printed from p. oS to p. 92, several pamphlets, which cannot be some are certainly not by Swift, considered authentic and which pre- including the " Short Defence" (p. 58), sent no intrinsic evidence of Swift's " The true State of the Case" (p. 64), authorship. They not only repeat his the " Letter to Wood from his]] only arguments, and travel over ground Friend in Ireland " (p. 73), and the which he had covered, but they are " Letter to Wood from a Quaker." without any of his wit or humour. Of Others are doubtful. S62 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1720—1725, of the Jacobites. " Honest " Sliippen, the doughty champion of the cause, seems to have brought forward the affair of Wood in the EngUsh Parhament as a means of stirring ill-will against the government of Walpole. It was a use of his victory that Swift would scarcely have encouraged. He strove to make it yield other fruit: and for at least ten years after the end of the Drapier's fight, he stood foremost amongst those whose advice and whose labour were spent in striving to right the wrongs which weighed down Ireland from within and from without. The beginning of his work in this direction may be said to date from the Drapier's so-called seventh letter,* which although written about this time, did not appear till 1735. It is much more a start on a new course, than a continuation ■of the past struggle. Swift's future place and work in Ireland, belong, however, to another chapter. At present it is well to look to the state of English administration there, as it v^as shaped by the istruggle just ended. The fierceness of the attack on his administration, led by Swift, had made Walpole resolve on a new course in Irish politics. The attack had been on two points in which he was m.ost vitally concerned. One of these was the chief excellence, the other was the chief defect of his administration. There •was nothing in which his administration was more able than its finance : there was nothing by which it was more deeply stained than its corruption. Swift's onslaught attacked a point ■of pride, because it decried a scheme which was connected with finance. It attacked a point of disgrace, because it ex- posed the corruption which entwmed itself with the whole ;system of which Walpole was the head. Walpole disliked the exposure, but perhaps still more the financial defeat; and the dislike prompted his new scheme for the government of Ireland. It was a novel version of the system of " thorough " * It forms the seventh in the series, from the Deanery House, and not in ■only if we reckon the letter written the character of the Drapier, as sixth. Chap. 5III.] SWIFT AS lEISH rATEIOT. 363 familiarly associated with the names of Strafford and of Laud. Walpole's plan was soon laid. Lord Carteret, as Lord Lieutenant, was to be the governor of Ireland onlj^ in name. Some patronage might be exercised by him, though under the eye of criticism. The direction of the immediate steps to be taken, might be in his hands, though in obedience to the dictates of general policy from England. The settlement of matters calling for the exercise of delicate tact on the spot, might be left to him. But another influence was to be stronger. Carteret had really been dismissed from the Secretaryship of State, and Waljiole had found in his appomt- ment as Lord Lieutenant at once a refined revenge for Carteret's opposition, and a satisfactory means of providing for Irish government. Soon after Lord Carteret's appointment another vacancy occurred, that of the Primacy and the Archbishopric of Armagh. It had been held by Lindsay, who was appointed throvigh Swift's influence, shortly before the death of the Queen. He had brought to the office a rigid Toryism that was suspected even of a Jacobite stain. His successor was a man of another cast. This was Dr. Hugh Boiilter, before Bishop of Bristol and Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, who for nineteen years to come, is one of the most prominent figures in Irish liistorj'. He was a man of undoubted vigour, and of admirable business powers. No detail escaped him. His vigilance was incessant. He noted every symptom of failing health in the holder of any office, whether high or low, and was ready betimes to recommend to his masters in England some scheme for changing, settling, re-arranging all the placemen con- cerned, so as to lie more ready to his hand. He was in no way confined to the affairs natural to his calling, but sub- ordinated these to political considerations, with absolute callous- ness. He had a keen eye for what was expedient in matters of finance, or trade, or law. More than this, we are bomid to 364 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1720—1725. admit that he was a faithful, even a pertinacious, friend. If he took a man under his care, he never tired till he got him settled in some post. He never fretted -when his favourites were repulsed : but quietlj^ returned to the charge. He was without spiteful remembrance or ill-will. When anyone who had opposed him yielded — and not a few did so yield — he was ready to receive him into favour, and to burj' all grudges. Finallj', he had no ignobly selfish ends. For nearly nineteen years, he held the garrison in Ireland : and during that time he amassed no private fortune, and compassed no material advantage for himself. On the other hand, when we look at him as governor of Ireland, his whole attitude appears that of one who mocked at real justice. From first to last, through the correspondence in which for fourteen years he sets forth, with strildng perspi- cacity, his views on Irish politics for the benefit of his masters at St. James's, there is but one tone with respect to the country he is set to govern. ^He came without one grain of Irish sympathj^ and he never obfeined or sought to obtain it. To him, an Englishman who had struck root in Irish soil was on the same footing with an Irishman, who by race, language, and religion, was an alien. " The English Party ; " " the English interest;" " the friends of England," — these words are ever recurring : nothing is to be done for the good of Ire- land till it be shewn that the good of England is concerned the same waj'T^i If Ireland is to be pros]perous, it is only because Ireland prosperous is a benefit to England. He recognises perfectly what his own position is. " Many of our own original," he confesses at the outset, " esteem us Englishmen as intruders." He early discerns how widely spread is the notion of " the independency of this kingdom." He has few around him whom he can trust, and has to struggle almost single-handed. It was a bold though not a very noble struggle. It would not do to be too severe at first : and with some tact he has to urge that, good as the coinage was, it CHAr. XIII.] SWIFT AS lEISH PATRIOT. 365 might, on the whole, wisely be -withdrawn. When the with- drawal came, he had to help in givmg dignity to the retreat ; and it was with some difficulty that he obtained a vote, thank- ing the King, — not for the " ivisdom " of the act, as the Oppo- sition were desirous of having it, so as to express their sense of the foolishness of the original design, — but, in more courtly terms, for his " condescension." This first difficulty got over, the policy he advocated was that of increasing, at all hazards, the Enghsh interest. "All the great places must be fiUed with Englishmen, if we are to have quiet here." Over and over agam this is the theme he urges. Even dissent has at times to be encouraged, in order to prevent Irish churchmen from waxing independent. Set to govern Ireland, Boulter had clearness of vision enough to see that the task would be easier if Ireland were more prosperous. To accomplish this, he set himself, with the dogged determination of a man who has a work to do, not with the ardom^ of a reformer. He is instrumental in getting an Act passed enforcing the tillage of five acres out of every hundred.* He strives to meet the distress caused bj^ three successive bad harvests (1726, 1727, 1728), by charitable dis- tribution of bread and corn. He sees in the increasing emigra- tion of many of the most industrious classes of Ireland not only a danger to the English interest, but a source of misery to those who, under false expectations, were carried as slaves to the American plantations ; and, other means failing, he would fain stop it by the high hand of force. To counteract the spread at once of pauperism and of Roman Catholicism, he labours hard to strengthen the chartered schools, which sought to meet the difficulties by tearing asunder the natural bonds of the family, and dividing children from their parents. He was sincere so far as he went : but he handled even matters meant to benefit Ireland only from an English point of view. When a Bill essentially affecting the well-being of an Irish manu- * Letters, Vol. I. p. 221. 866 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1720—1725. facture is rejected by the English Council, he finds matter for thanks to the EngHsh Ministers in the fact " that the rejection was not based solely on disregard for Ireland, but also to some extent on the notion that rejection would benefit England ! "* And this he writes with no thought of sarcasm. Such was the man who, during the whole of Swift's remain- ing years of activity, and through the viceroyalty of three governors, virtually ruled Ireland. It was exactly the sort of rule — narrow, obstinate, blind to all merit but submission — which most irritated a man lilce Swift. But it was wise in its day and generation. Each year confirmed Boulter's hold. " For five years," he can write in 1729, "the Government has been in English hands." He gained his ends : and even when a new proposal was broached in reference to the coinage, in opposition to which Swift took a strong part. Boulter carried the day against the Drapier, and Swift could only shew his indignation by hanging out a black flag from his Cathedral for the benefit of the Kevin Bail ! f * Letters, Tol. II. p. C2. the mob of Swift's Liberty of St. •f Letters, Vol. II. p. 246. The Patrick's. The name survives in Kevin Bail was the name given to Kevin Street. CHAPTEE XIV. SWIFT AGAIN AMONG THE WITS. GULLIVEE'S TRAVELS. 1725—1727. JEtat. 57—59. Swift's attractions to England — Invitations from Bolingbroke, Gay, and Pope — The occupations of his friends — His visit in 1726 — Bolingbroke in later life — ^Arbuthnot — Pope — Gay — ^Atterbury and his banishment — Bathurst — Con- gi'eve — Peterborough — Swift and the Temple family — His reception by his friends — Dawley and Twickenham — Leicester House — Illness of Esther Johnson — Swift's anxiety — The recovery — Swift and Walpole — The Story of their dealings — Hopes of conciliation dispelled — Eeturn to barbarism — Swift's reception in Dublin — Gulliver's Travels — The stratagem about the manuscript — Conditions under which the book was written — Its motives — Comparison of the different parts — Swift back in England (1727) — Bathurst — Pulteney — Voltaire — Swift as ally of the Opposition — The death of George I. — Walpole's power maintained — Swift's anxieties for Esther Johnson — Her relapse — Back to his "lair" — The Jownal at Holyhead — Swift in solitude — His last sight of England. Even duriBg the early years of bis residence in Ireland, Swift had ever turned fondly to his associations in England : and as the fierceness of the Drapier struggle was wearing off, these associations were claiming a stronger hold upon him. His correspondence with one or other of the circle had never entirely ceased : and, during the recent years, that circle had come together again, had acquired additional strength in their literary position, and were not without hope of political influ- ence as well. They were now beginning to look forward to Swift's rejoining them : and he had himself never abandoned the hope of being back amongst those friends with whom the most brilliant period of his life had been spent. During his years of retirement, he had been occupied on a work for which 368 LIFE OF JOXATIIAN SWIFT. [1725—1727. due appreciation woulcl be found only in that circle, and the plan of which he had already imparted to some of them. As time goes on the correspondence increases : Swift looks forward to another visit to England : even though he feels that there is something in himself which may make the renewal of these old associations less pleasant. He know^s how moods that he would fain check are asserting their power over him. He dwells over, perhaps exaggerates, these moods, with something of a morbid severitj' of self-judgment. The reaction after the years of excitement in England, and the comparatively slight interest which he could take in the scenes around him now, even when they yielded to him the excitement of the fraj', had produced an increased inclhiation to dwell on trifles, to avoid exertion, to seek for the paltrj^ pleasure of worthless flattery. "Nothing has convinced me so much," he writes to Bolingbroke,* before he had dipped activelj"^ into Irish politics, " that I am of a little subaltern spirit, inojns atque pusilli aiiimi, as to reflect how I am forced into the most trifling friendships, to divert the vexation of former thoughts, and present objects." After he had begun his struggle for Irish independence, and was outwardly defjing the government, tins mood was exchanged for one equally morbid, and strangely in contrast with the bold attitude which Swift maintained to the world. "I, who am sunk under the prejudices of another education," so he wiites to Pope,! "and am every day persuading mj-self that a dagger is at my throat, a halter about my neck, or chains about my feet, all prepared by those in power, can never arrive at the serenity of mind you possess." He felt the encroachments of that undue occupation about money, which his friends also remarked, but which was much more the effect of an exaggerated rigidity of self-disciplme, than the product of avarice in the ordinary sense. He himself did not judge it tenderly. He confessed it nakedly to Bolingbroke : and received in return an edifying lecture on the subject from that spendthrift philosopher and * Dec. 19, 1719. + Sept. 20, 1723. Chap. XIV.] SWIFT REVISITS ENGLAND. 369 rakish moraliser.* His perception of these infirmities perhaps held him back for a time from the visit. But the attraction is too strong to be resisted. Everything calls him to England : " there " he says, " I made my friendships, there I left my desires." t In Ireland, "he had distributed his friendships in pennyworths to those about him that displeased him least : " but he had never ceased to consider it as a place of banish- ment, and the feeling did not diminish, or wear off, with time. Bolingbroke urged, as early as July, 1721, that Swift should come to him in France ; and the invitation of Bolingbroke was followed before long by invitations from others of the old circle. At the close of 1722, Gay renewed a correspondence long interrupted,! and impressed on Swift how his presence ■was desired. The letter stirred some feelings that Swift had perhaps tried to quell. " This humdrum way of life," he says, "would be passable enough, if you would let me alone." He is almost angry at the disturbance, which it will take him three months to get rid of, and to school himself again into apathetic dulness. But in 1723, the invitations become more persistent. His friends will take no refusal. In June of that year, Boling- broke returned from exile, to fill a position even more pro- minent in the circle than that vacated by Bishop Atterbury, whose banishment began at the same time that Bolingbroke's ceased. § Gay and Pope are occupied with new literary schemes, on which they seek Swift's advice. His old friends have again gathered round London, and if the hopes of snatching power from the hands of Walpole were not very great, at least the danger of molestation in their own pursuits was past. Before * JBolinghrolie to Smift, July 28, disposed to think that it might not be 1721. entirely without grounds, there seems •f Sivift to Gay, Jan. 8, 17||. scarcely to be such evidence as would t Gay to Swift, Dec. 22, 1722. warrant us either in fixing a new stain § According to Atterbury's belief, on Bolingbroke's character, or attri- Bolingbroke and he "were exchanged." buting to the English Government a The opinion was one he continued to singularly objectless and foolish bar- entertain : but, although Mr. Elwin is gain. B B ■370 LIFE OP JONATHAN SAVIFT. |;i725— 1727. Lord Oxford died, he seems to have been considered as the ■centre of considerable iDolitical influence.* His death came in May, 1724. By his son, the father's invitation to Swift ■was renewed: and Swift can only answer that the scene in England might be sadly changed, and that the subsequent return to Ireland would be still more hard, t But in spite of hesitation the visit draws nearer. "You are getting into our vortex," Pope tells him : and each of the circle paints, after his own fashion, the new scene that will meet Swift. " So much of the old world and the old man in each of us has been altered that scarce a single thought of the one, any more than a single atom of the other, remains just the same " — so says Pope. "They are to meet together as mariners after a storm" — says Arbuthnot. At length, at the close of 1725, Swift made up his mind to the vo5'age ; and in March 17|4 ^^ set out for London after an absence of twelve years. Of that company, into the midst of whom Svyift now retm-ned, •the most conspicuous member, Bohngbroke, was already aspiring, as the prospects of office became more dim, to fill that place, described ui his epitaph as " something more and better." I He never was more assiduous in cultivating that gift of in- sincere moralizing with which he attempted to deceive others, and perhaps even himself, as to his real character. In judging the moral standard of that Alcibiades of Queen Anne's age, there are many counts that we would have to add to the indict- ment which, by Swift, were either unnoticed or condoned. But * See a letter from Prior to S/vift, be a mortification hard to support." April 25, 1721. Zotter from Swift to tJie 2nd Lord t " I have many years frequently Oxford, Nov. 27, 1724. This letter is resolved to go for England, but was one of those amongst the Oxford discouraged by considering what a MSS., for copies of which I am in- scene I must expect to find by the debted to Mi'. Elwin. death and exile of my friends, and a J " Here lies Henry St. John, in thousand other disgusting circum- the reign of Queen Anne, Secretary of .stances : and after all, to return back War, Secretary of State, and Viscount .again into this enslaved country to Bolingbroke : in the days of George I. ■which I am condemned during exist- and George II., something more and ence — for I cannot call it life — would better." H^ntrqih in Sattcrsea Clivrcli. Chap. XIV.] SWIFT EEVISITS ENGLAND. 371 even setting aside all the stains which rest upon the record of his public life, there remains much in the character and utter- ances of BoUngbroke that must have jarred on Swift. Able as he was, Bolingbroke never could subdue that feeblest of aU vanities, that leads a man to assume airs of affectation towards one, who, as he knows, can detect the transparent folly of his deception. His pretentious philosophy went for nothing with Swift, who " doubted pretenders to retirement." His vanity led him to indulge his inclination for a thin and superficial ■scepticism even in writing to the Dean, who turned upon him with some vigour of rebuke, unwilling as he always was to ■speak to his friends " as a divine." Bolingbroke defended him- self in terms that can scarcely have been more palatable to Swift, whose orthodoxy, sound as he persuaded himself that it •was, at least required some management. The offence which BoUngbroke gave by the empty mouthings that only irritated and disturbed, without satisfying any human soul, was not likely to be wiped out by still more flimsy defences of his religious attitude, by contemptuous patronizings of Christianity, and by his coiidemnations of the higher philosophy whose principles he understood as little as he practised the dictates of religion.* In short he amused himself with a quasi-philosophical religion much as he did in devising inscriptions for his p;reenhouse, or decorations for Dawley Farm ; and his assumption of the part of theological amateur was little fitted to be pleasing to Swift. Arbuthnot still retained his old central place amidst the company of wits, chiefly by the moral qualities that made him the superior of the others. By them his humour was rated more highly than their own, although to the world at large it was almost an iinknown gift. Arbuthnot was forgetful of himself; he was mdifferent to the ambitions that prompted jealousy amongst the rest. He watched with the keenest interest the success of his brethren; he guided, suggested, helped : but he remained careless about his own * See Ms letter to Swift of Sept. 12, 1724, throughout. E B 2 372 LIFE OF JONATHAN SAYIFT. [1725-17-27. fame. Convinced that amid the crowd of dunces, the best genius of the age was concentred in his own friends, he yet must have seen, as clearly as their detractors, the flaws in the character of each. In the annals of our literature there are not a few men who have fiUed something of the part that he did : but none who has filled it with such complete success of self-abnegation. It is a part that earns no wide or high-sounding fame : but it is something in an age of such envenomed detrac- tion, and such vehemence of party hate, to have lived revered and cherished by its men of " light and leading : " to have trained their talents, and to have condoned their faults : to- have died without losing their esteem : and yet without one stain, in the midst of very general corruption, on which the heen eyes of political partizans could fasten. With Swift, however, Arbuthnot's influence was specially strong. He had the rare tact of balancing dangerous tenden- cies in a friend without having recourse to the certain irritation of rebuke. "With Swift's cynicism Arbuthnot had an under- lying sympathy. In both men their cynicism was connected closely with the most characteristic trait of their genius, and with then- peculiar humour, born of the age and its experiences. The dominion of religious hypocrisy was not yet forgotten : the loathing of the cant that had made religious fervour of all lands repulsive, was stUl strong upon men's minds. But they were nauseated j^et more b}^ what had suc- ceeded to that cant, by the folly of the "\Yit-woulds who fancied that they had crushed hj-pocrisy under their flaunting vice, and whose foppery seemed to themselves, wisdom. Between the two, men hke Swift and Arbuthnot took refuge in a peculiar humour that necessarily engendered cynicism. In Swift we know to what that cynicism led, and what havoc it -nTought : in Arbuthnot its fruit was only a quiet and ironic apath3\ He never let it eat into his soul with the corroding force from which Swift suffered. Full of affection, he knew how to bear trial with resignation, how to preserve his quiet gaiety even CiiAr. XIV.] S'^aFT REVISITS ENGLAJTD. 373 amid bodily torments. His very faults were those -which never lost any man a friend. "He is not without fault," says Swift:* " there is a passage in Bede liighly commending the piety and learning of the Irish in that age, where after abundance of praises, he overthrows them all, by lamenting that, alas ! they kept Easter at a wrong time of the year. So our doctor has €very quality and virtue that can make a man amiable or useful : but alas ! he hath a sort of slouch in his walk." No wonder, with a friend who knew his infirmities and his strength so well, that Swift held fast to the bond between them. " If there were a dozen Arbuthnots, I would burn my travels," he says, after telling how the main motive of Gulliver is deprecia- tion of mankind. To Arbuthnot, in turn. Swift's depth of feeling, cynical as it was, came as a relief after the superficial brilliancy of others in the circle. His own geniahty had no need to dread contact with the growing harshness of Swift's temper, and his own dignity was too well preserved to be in danger from the onslaughts of Swift's arrogance of manner. Passing to others in that circle, the mtimacy between Pope find Swift has unquestionably a far greater place in our literary history. It was now at its closest. Before Swift had left England in 1714, he had already befriended Pope. To Pope as a Pv,oman Catholic, the Whig party was naturally repugnant : and this feeling had been strengthened by the help and admira- tion of Swift, and increased by the suspicions which, rightly or wrongly, Pope had conceived against Addison. When Swift returned, it was to find Pope completely estranged from those literary alUes who belonged to the Whigs, and ready to join him in that natural infirmity of a literary clique, which flatters its own exclusiveness by banning the spirit of the times. For Swift, his friendship with Pope stands midway between that with Arbuthnot and with Bolingbroke. It is not so mixed with suspicion as is the latter, not so full of kindly sympathy as the former. Swift was not blind to the ingrained insincerity * Swift to PiijK, Sept. 29, 1725. o74 LIFE OF JONATHAlSr SWIFT. [1725—1727. which had taken deep root m Pope's nature, and he here and there hints a little ridicule of his affectations. But the full ex- tent of Pope's twists and contrivances was known to none of his contemporaries, and Swift was of all others the most likel}' to ignore or think hghtly of them. They jarred on none of his own moods : they were too far removed from him to let him follow all their ramifications, or trace their hidden motives. And, apart from them, there was much in Pope's character to attract Swift. His veiy weakness appealed to Swift's strength. His keenness of temperament, his combination of sensitive tenderness with sarcastic virulence, his unfailing tendency to impress on every dispute some personal aspect, to find ui his adherents personal friends, in his opponents personal enemies — all these had their counterpart in the more masculine charac- ter of Swift. Pope's eager attachment to the little circle amid which he moved, his violent condemnation of all that did not enter into their Ukes and dislUves — these, too, suited with the misanthropy of Swift, tempered as it was bj^ love for his own friends. Pope's literary models were just those that Swift admired, widely different as was the use each made of them. Pope's absolute mastery of literary form ; his strict limitation of subject : the unrivalled clearness and polish of his truisms, — all suited with Swift's preference for lucid and well-defined expression, for perfect common-sense, over cloudy abstraction, strained paradox, laboured intricac}', and their attendant absur- 'dities. But Pope accepted as a mere literary canon what was to Swift a deep-seated contempt for the limitations of human knowledge and of human power. The two were now to meet at what may be deemed, in some respects, the height of their fame : and it was perhaps well for both that the meeting was not more prolonged, and the intercourse not more constant. As it was they came together with the attraction of common tastes, common genius, common literary schemes; of gratitude on Pope's side for earlj' and helpful introductions : of admiration on Swift's side for a Chap. XIY.] SWIFT EEVISITS ENGLAIs^D. 375^ lightness and gracefulness of touch which he could appreciate^ but could not rival. There was another of the circle whose character wins from posterity, as it did from his contemporaries, the leniency due to childHkeness and simplicity. In early days, wheni Scriblerus was being planned. Swift saw in Gay the most likely assistant next to Arbuthnot, had he not been too yoimg. But. youth had passed without changing poor Gay, or weaning him from his carelessness, his imprudence, his want of self-respect.. Swift, however, never judged friends too hardly. Gay's slovenly sensuality, his frivoUty, his petty selfishness, his exaggerated self-importance, were all occasionally trying to his friends. Swift included. But he never upbraids Gay for his indecent complaints that patrons have not opened their purse- strings wide enough. He never grudges the poet the marvel- lous success that a year later made him the talk of the town. He only seeks to preserve for him, out of the clutches of his own thriftlessness, some of the solid fruits which that success brought. When Gay poses as a martyr. Swift admits his claim : perhaps all the more readUy that it helped him to deal a blow at political enemies. One other there was, now gone from the circle, and remem- bered only as a token of the persecution which genius was supposed wrongfully to have suffered at the hand of Walpole. Swift, at least, honestly believed that Atterbury was guiltless of Jacobite plottings. He ridiculed the episode of the dog Harlequin, through which the missing link in the proof of Atterbury's guUt was established : but ridiculed it in perfect good faith. There is no doubt now as to Atterbury's guilt : but it was then concealed from his friends by a process of Jesuitical prevarication, which leaves on Atterbury's character a worse stain even than that of treason, especially in a case where treason might be so far conscientious, and was at least not uncommon. But Jesuitical as he was in this episode of his life, insincerity was not Atterbury's common faiUng. He 376 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1725—1727. liad left amongst the circle a memory which was not without its lasting effect. From him they had imbibed that refusal to subscribe to the tenet of the Whigs which regarded the Eevo- lution as the beginning and end of the Constitution. From his whole character, his love of extremes, his anxiety to play a sensational part in some exciting drama, his resolute refusal to regard prudence or expediency in his bigoted attachment to a cause, even from his fiery vanity, the Bishop was fitted to make a deep and lasting impression upon those amongst whom his life had lain. Warm and loving in all his private relations, with the tenderness of a woman, and the courage, if not the calm judgment, of a man, he held his place in the hearts of his friends, and made it impossible for them to believe that his public acts could be stained by duplicity and treason : and not a little of their indignant protest against the Govern- ment of Walpole, not a little of their claim to be the assertors of liberty in an age which bowed before a political autocrat, is to be traced to the work, to the spirit, to the trial, and to the banishment of Atterbury. Others survived to remind Swift of the old brilKant days. Lord Bathurst was full of gaiety now, at fortj% as he re- mained when more than ninety years had passed over him, and had seen him the friend of Goldsmith and Sterne, as he had been of Pope and Swift. Congreve, for whom Swift had made Torjr powers propitious, when the stars were against Congreve's friends, the Whigs, was still as genial a companion as ever, in spite of increasing years, failing health, and the degrad- ing patronage with which the Duchess of Marlborough, the ■daughter and heiress of the great duke, had enveloped him. Peterborough was still one of the company : stiU as fond of roaming as ever, stUl as warm m his friendships, still as full of •eccentricities. Arriving in March 1726, Swift met with a reception that pleased and cheered him. There was one old tie, which had long been irksome, and which was finally broken, just before his Chap. XIV.] SWIFT REVISITS ENGLAND. 377 arrival in London. The family of Sii' 'William Temple had little of Swift's love. His relations with Lady Giffard, Tem- ple's sister, had been avowedly hostile. Swift now addressed a letter to another of the Temple family, Lord Palmerston, on a trumpery matter connected with the occupation of certain rooms in Trinity college, which Lord Palmerston could assign, and from which a friend of the Dean found himself likely to be removed. Swift's letter was undoubtedly written in terms not unlikely to be offensive to Lord Palmerston, although the want of courtesy in the manner of urging the claim was pro- bably caused only by Swift's morbid fear of being supposed to shew undue subserviency. Lord Palmerston resented the tone of the letter : and with still worse taste reminded Swift of the regai-d due " to a family he owed so much to." This was precisely the phrase most certain to revive the rankhng sore which early dependence had left in the mind of Swift: and in the state of Swift's mood at the time, it was sure to be re- sented. He turns upon his assailant in a letter which pro- fesses to be one of calm contempt, but which in reality shews in every line how deeply the shaft had wounded. Lord Palmerston's letter he describes, in terms of wild exaggeration, as " full of foul invectives, open reproaches, jesting flirts, and contumeHous terms." " I own myself indebted to Sir William Temple," he proceeds, " for recommending me to the late King, although without success, and for his choice of me to talie care of his posthumous writings. But I hope you will not charge my living in his family as an obligation, for I was educated to little purpose, if I retned to his house, on any other motives than the benefit of his conversation and advice, and the opportunity of pursuing my studies. For, being born to no fortune, I was at his death as far to seek as ever, and perhaps you will allow that I was of some use to him. This I will venture to say, that in the time when I had some little credit, I did fifty times more for fifty people, from whom I never received the least service or assistance." 378 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1125— im. Unquestionably Swift was not here so much resenting an actual injury as seizing on the opportunity offered him to pay off old scores. His relation to Sir William Temple had been — and no discussion of this or that phrase will get us beyond this — one in which poverty and genius had found themselves unwill- ing debtors to wealth, position, and complacent mediocrity. The results had been those which such relations always have had, and always will have. Swift paid his debt by attention, respect, and care for his patron's memory. But the family of Temple had abused him, and had dropped hints of the material advantage derived by Swift from the friendship, of his entire dependence on Sir William, and of base ingratitude on his part. This new offence was the spark which set the smouldering ashes ablaze. The episode closed that chapter in Swift's life, and left him free to dismiss it entirely from his mind. But otherwise his reception in England was pleasant. As one of his correspondents remarked to him, " he was like the man who had hung all night from a bush, and with the day- light found that his heels were only two inches from the ground." He had dreamed, or had imagined that he dreamed, of imprisonment and halters : but he found himself no longer shunned as a dangerous associate. The asperities of party had lessened in his absence. He writes on the 16th of April to Tickell : "I am here now a month picking up the rem- nant of my old acquaintance, and descending to take new ones. Your people {i.e. the adherents of the government) are very civil, and I meet a thousand times better usage from them than from that denomination in Ireland." Gracious, however, as was his reception in political cii'cles, it was elsewhere that his interest was centred. Bolingbroke's new house at Daw- ley * was open to him, Avhere the disappointed politician was. * Dawley House, n, remnant of Hayes. It still bears traces of the which yet stands amidst a dreary net- picturesque quaintness peculiar to the work of brickfield, and railway, and age when it was built ; but the cha- canal, lay between AVest Drayton and racteristio monument of Bolingbroke's Chap. XIV.] SWIFT EEVISITS EXGLAJS'^D. 379 in Pope's words, "labouring to be unambitious, but labouring in unwilling soil; " was fitfully striving to repair the ravages of debauchery by a fare of ostentatious frugality ; and was aping philosophy by a sort of stage idyllicism. Within a few miles was the villa at Twickenham, where Pope was busy with freaks of miniature landscape gardening. Swift lived at first with Gay in his lodgings at Whitehall : and then during June and July he stayed, along with Gay, at Pope's villa. During these months, the three "Yahoos," as Bolingbroke, borrowing from Gulliver's phraseology by anticipation, called them, were busy over literary projects. Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot, were planning the issue of their " Miscellanies." Gay, too, was busy over his Fables, which were to appear at Christmas. He was also worldng up the scheme suggested by Swift, of a New- gate pastoral, at length to take shape in the Beggar's Opera. Pope's genius was finding a new channel for itself in his " Dul- ness," which appeared two years later as the Dmiciad. Gul- liver's Travels, the frui t of Swift's years of retirement, were now receiving their finishing touches, and were canvassed and quoted amongst the company. At times, the friends rambled together through the country, renewing those memories of English life and scenery which Swift had gathered long ago. At other times Congreve and Bolingbroke joined them at Twickenham, or they passed to Arbuthnot's lodgings in town. Through Arbuthnot's influence. Swift opened a connection with the opposition court of the Prince and Princess of Wales, which seemed to offer new hopes of political influence, but led to passages in Swift's life which a biographer would fain omit. This visit, brightened as it was by friendships renewed, was darkened hj anxiety. Stella's health was breaking, and he occupation is the great Dawley wall, choose from, Swift's contemporaries with which the estate was girt, still should have selected just that part of testifying to the solidity of the ori- the neighbourhood of Loudon which ginal workmanship. What surprises seems least capable of attracting any us chiefly in this and other houses of whose lovo of the country was real and the time is, that with so much to not assumed. 380 LIFE OF JONATHAN S^VIFT. [1725—1727, soon received news of her that caused him much alai-m. Those round her strove to liide the truth from Swift. Mistress Dingley, blundering when blunders were possible, made Swift's anxiety ten times greater by suspense. He wrote to Sheridan and Worrall, begging for news, quick, frequent, and above all, trtLC. In his letters to them and to Dr. Stopford the same mood is shewn, eager to hide the truth from himself, yet determined to know the worst : un- manned by the thought of his possible loss, but ^--et forcing himself to look forwards, that he may arrange for the closing scene of that life, broken and tangled for his sake, in such a way as to keep scandal at a distance. " For my part," he writes to Stopford,* " as I value life very little, so the poor casual remains of it, after such a loss, would be a burden that I must heartity beg God Almighty to enable me to bear. * * * They have writ me deceiving letters ; but Mr. "Worrall has been so just and prudent as to tell me the truth : which, how- ever racking, is better than to be struck on a sudden. — Dear ■Jim, pardon me, I know not what I am saying : hut believe me that violent friendship is much more lasting, and as much ■engaging, as violent love." The attention on Swift's part, at such a crisis, to outside decorum, has been blamed as heart- less : " in case the matter should be desperate," he writes to Worrall,t " I would have j'ou advise, if they come to town, that they should be lodged in some aiiy, healthj' part, and not in the Deanery : which besides, you know, cannot but be a very improper thing for that house to breathe her last in." % Undoubtedly the words leave a grating sense of ill-timed and callous calculation : but we need not judge them too harshty. Into the secret of that long friendship we can never penetrate : but we know sufficiently its formal conditions. The letters * Smift to Stopford, July 20, 1726. damp and ill-drained. The atmo- + Strift to Worrall, July 15, 1726. Bphere in the Cathedral was dangerous % The Deanery was in the most un- to the health even of those who wor- liealthy district in Dublin, and was shipped there. Chap. XIY.] STVIFT EEVISITS ENGLAND. 381 shew clearly enough how Swift is distracted by his grief. At the same time he is penetrated by the fear that a wrong word or act may give a false aspect to a tie which is the most sacred in his life. He is in a state of nervous anxiety. As each sug- gestion presents itself, as each precaution occurs to him, it is put down without waiting to think of its effect. " Forgive the inconsistencies," he says to Worrall, knowing how contending^ feelings have distracted him while he wrote, and how strange must seem the attitude in which he stood to Stella. Not for the first time, but now more completely than ever, Swift's clear masculine perspicacity and his strong energy fail him, as the fibre of tenderness is touched in him.* " I look upon this to be the greatest event that can ever happen to me : but all my preparations will not suffice to let me bear it like a philosopher, nor altogether like a Christian." For the present, however, the blow which Swift dreaded, did not fall ; and for a time Stella regained some strength. Besides his literary and personal occupations, Swift had other thoughts during this visit. As regards politics, he was encouraged to hope that without loss either of honour or con- sistency, it was open to him to make terms with the new powers. In the end, the result proved that he either over-esti- mated his own capacity of surrendering his independence, or under-estimated the terms that would be exacted. His dealings during this visit, with Walpole, have been so much canvassed by opponents, that, for his justification, they demand a careful review. Fortunately we have evidence enough to dispose of all doubt in the matter, and to save us from resorting to the ill-natured stories of the gossips. t From this evidence it aj)pears, in the * Compare for similar but lesser + Our chief guides are : (1) a letter incidents in his life, the death of his from Swift to Lady Betty Germaine, mother (p. 192) ; of Mistress Long of 8th January, 173| ; (2) one from (p. 227) ; of young Harrison (p. 255) ; Pope to Swift of 3rd September, 1726 : of Lady Ashbumham (p. 254); and, (3) Letters between Lord Peterborough subsequently, of Gay (p. 458). and Swift in April, 1726 ; and (4) one 382 LIFE or JONATHAN SWIFT. [1725—1727. first place, that, whatever might be Swift's views with respect to Walpole, it was not Swift who first opened communications. "I was twice with the chief minister," he writes to Stopford on the 20th of July, " the first time by invitation ; the second time at my desire, for an hour." When the first invitation ■came, Swift saw no reason to decHne it. He had heen specially careful not to attack Walpole personallj^, during the Drapier controversy. He had spoken with respect of Wal- pole's abilities. He had been well received by many of Wal- pole's own party. The violent pique which his literary friends formed against Walpole had not yet affected Swift. He still claimed to be an adherent of true Whiggism. But, further, he desired to make representations on behalf of Ireland : and he had a friend to help in Gay. On the other hand Walpole had heard of Swift's proposed visit to England. Archbishop Boulter,* Walpole's special emissary in Ireland, had written to give warning of it, and to urge that due watch should be kept over his motions while in England. Walpole may well have thought that he could improve on the advice of his emissary, by changing a powerful foe uito a friend. Apparently the form which the first overtures took, was an invitation on the part of Walpole, to Swift and some of his friends, to dine with him at Chelsea, t The Dean accepted, and made a friendly re- monstrance on the Minister's suspicion of innocent persons. He alluded, in all but name, to Gay, whom Walpole suspected to be the author of a libel against him, and who was thus debarred from court favour. Walpole doubtless understood the allusion weU enough : but he was shrewd enough to treasure up this unde- fined application, for use at a future time. At a dinner of this sort, grave political questions could scarcely, with propriety, be touched upon : but Swift had grave poHtical questions to ui-ge ; from Swift to Dr. Stopford of 20tli t " He invited me and some of my July, 1726. friends to dine -with him at Chelsea," * See Boulter's Letters, Vol. I,, Sn-ift to Lady JBctty Germainc, Jan. p. 62. 8, 1733. Chap. XIV.]. S"WIFT REVISITS ENGLAND. 383 and for this, amongst other reasons, he pursued the acquaint- ance. At this moment the ill-government of Ireland was his strongest thought. He had even jDressed his views on the Princess of Wales, and had obtained her permission to renew liis complaints, if she should come to be Queen.* It was for this, then, that he sought, through Lord Peterborough, a formal interview with Walpole. It was granted with a readi- ness, and with a choice of days, that Prime Ministers do not, one would fancy, generally grant to men whom they under- stand to come as suitors for favours. t Swift had no personal request to make. He came as the representative of Ireland, to ask the redress of her grievances as a right, and feeling that the boldness of his advice would be the best claim on the grati- tude of the minister. Walpole received him, not because he thought these grievances should be redressed, but because he ■wished as a prudent minister to learn the nature of the charges, and, as a man of the world, to gain Swift. The interview led to nothing. " We differed," says Swift, " on every point." An account of the interview was sent to Lord Peterborough, the next day, by Swift, with a request that he would show it to Sir Kobert Walpole. + This version of the conversation must therefore be received as expressing the absolute truth. From it we learn that Swift, when the interview began, at once approached the subject of Ireland. Both he and Walpole seem to have been perfectly frank with one another : but they •quickly saw that there was no basis for agreement. Swift found that Walpole, as he says, ' ' had conceived opinions which I could not reconcile to the notions I had of liberty." There was nothing for it but to part : and in his letter to ■* Smift tn Zachj Suffolk, July 27, the reTiv.il of the order of the Bath 1731. The original in the British in June, 1725, referred to by Swift in Museum shews that Scott misprints his Ballad on Quadrille, the date slightly. „ j.j,, ,.;„„ ^j j^^^ ,,^.^^^ ^^^^ ,^.^ ^^^_.^ f Loo'd Ffterborotif/h to Sivift, un- (Thank God, 'twas not in wrath), dated letter of April, 1 726. -^"^ "^"'^ °f "^"y '>■ squire and lord ... irr 1 n u J i, 1 • i,i 1 An Unwashed Knight Of Bath," &c. J Walpole had been knighted, on " ' 384 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [1725—1727., Peterborongli Swift sums up, as in a last word, the grievances which he has so often urged elsewhere,* that they may be again laid before Walpole. There is something significant in the closing argument which Swift gives for consideration of these wrongs: "because they have been all brought upon that kingdom (Ireland) since the Revolution : which, however, is a blessing annually celebrated there with the greatest zeal and sincerity." These words, with their cynical hint, exhibit a feeling which was coming over others besides Swift, as time went on. Neither he nor they would formally admit that their adherence to the principles of the Revolution was one whit less strong than it had been. But the conviction was none the less surely making way, that these benefits had been, in Ireland above all, purchased at no small cost. It was this growing conviction, that first drew Swift more widely apart from Walpole and the Whigs than he was ready to confess even to himself ; and the divergence was quickly increased by association with the literary band, the first principle of whose creed was condemnation of all Walpole's acts. An interview so important and so widely Icnown as that of Swift and Walpole, was sure to breed a swarm of rumoui's. Swift, it was said, had been bought : the Drapier would be heard no more : some snug berth would be found where he could slumber in supreme content: and finally, it was said, the Bishopric of Cloyne had been given to him. Such rumours served Walpole's purpose admirably, and the spark of gossip was fanned into flame, by him and his under-strappers. Presently Swift found that his hint for Gay at the Chelsea dinner was represented as a mean attempt to crave pardon for himself.t Swift spared no pains to make the real cu-cum- • The [grievances, like almost all mass of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, those against which Swift wrote and Tlwir benefit was at most only iuci- spoke, are all put forward from the dental. point of view of the English and t Smift to Lady Betty Germai/ie, Protestant settlers, not of the great Jan. 8, 1733. Chap. SIV.] SWIFT REVISITS ENGLAND. 385 stances clear. Not only has he not sought promotion, but he will not, he says, accept it " except upon conditions that would not be granted."* The hope of reconciliation, never strong, was now completely dead. " I absolutely broke with the first minister," he says to Stopford, " and have never seen him since." The only result of the attempt was to estrange Swift from others indirectly connected with Walpole. Swift fancied that even with Lord Carteret, he could no longer be on friendly terms : " I am all to pieces," he says, " with the Lord Lieutenant." He is " weary of being among ministers whom he cannot govern, who are all rank Tories in Government, and worse than Whigs in Church."f But, strong as was Swift's conviction that the hopes of reconciliation were at an end, the overtures were renewed by Walpole. The renewal disposes, if need were, of anj suspicion of undue compliance on the part of Swift. Writing on the 3rd of September, soon after Swift's departure from London, Pope, who was still on fairly good terms with Walpole, reported a conversation with him, in which the Minister had regretted Swift's premature departure, and had hinted at a possible remove to England, j It was then too late. Swift was already in communication with Pulteney, Walpole's most relentless foe. Thus end the dealings between the two. It would be a speculation, not without an odd interest, to attempt to trace the possible resrdts in our literature and in our politics of a closer union between the Drajjier and the all-powerful minister. It was perhaps fortunate for both that the scheme ended so soon as it did. When Swift was on the eve of another journey to London, next year, he alludes almost jocu- larly to Walpole, and threatens that, failing better treat- ment, vengeance eccUsiastique will be his. § It is reasonable to * Sii'ift to Stopford, July 20, 1726. § See Sivift to Mrs. Honard, Nov. + Sivift to Ticltell, July 7, 1726, 17, 1726 ; also Sm'ift to Mrs. Howard, X Pope to Sirift, Sept. 3, 1726. Feb. 1, 17g. S86 LIFE OP JOlfATHAN SWIFT. [1725—1727. interpret this as the expression of a broken amnesty : but €ven if we take it as a hint for renewing overtures of peace, it is scarcely such a renewal as would be hinted by a compliant and yet repulsed petitioner for the crumbs of Ministerial favour. Such are the plain facts of an important episode in Swift's career. They have been distorted by his enemies so as to bear an aspect to which nothing in Swift's conduct is akin. Proud, overbearing, prejudiced, in certain ways ambitious, and not seldom unjust — aU these epithets no fair biographer can deny to be applicable to Swift. But wealdy compliant he could not be, without ceasing to be himself. Distortion has been helped out by gossip. Chesterfield told a college tutor that he laiew Swift had made an offer of his pen to Walpole as the price of preferment. The foundation of his knowledge was the report of Colonel Chartres, the man whose battered and noisome debauchery was of all things vilest in Swift's eyes. The story shews its own baselessness at every step, even were it not disproved by what we know. Other legends of the same kind copy one another so as to betray the unity of their ficti- tious origin. One of these tells of Walpole answering Swift's request for a change to England by pointing to a tree which transplantation had destroyed. Another puts the metaphor of the tree in the mouth of Swift : and this time it is a falling tree to which Swift compares himself, meeting with rebuke from Walpole for having imitated the tree by leaning on a falHng wall. Leaving politics and literature behind, Swift faced the journey tack to Ireland, with better hopes of Stella. Bolingbroke urged him to winter at Montpelier, and had it not been for anxieties at home, and for the gloomy warnings of his own life- long malady which excitement aggravated, Swift might have agreed. He left London on the 15th of August, and after a journey of only seven days found himself in a scene " as un- known as the antipodes," where he could only dream of those ■Chap. SIV.] SWIFT REVISITS ENGLAND. 387 lie had left beliind.* His departure was lamented by Pope in a letter whicli, strained as it is, shows clearly enough how Pope's feminine weakness clung for support to the stronger and more masculine intellect that was now dominating his own, ■and making his genius work according to its will. On his return to Dublin Swift had striking evidence of the •estimation in which he was held in the country whose love and Teverence he held so lightly. A qtdck journey had carried him, as he deemed, from civilization to barbarism. "When his ship was signalled in Dublin B&j, the citizens turned out to do him honour. The Corporation met the ship in wherries : the quays were decked with bunting : the bells were rung : and the city received, in gala fashion, her most beloved citizen. The contrast was strange, to the time when he had taken pos- session of his deanery amidst insults, and had been avoided in the streets as a dangerous, because a fallen, man. But the most pleasing circumstance to Swift was the fact that his absence from England was not to be long. He was to return in spring, and meanwhile he keeps up a brisk inter- course by letter with Gay, Pope, and Bolingbroke ; with Arbuthnot, Mrs. Howard, and Mr. Pulteney. The first were the partners in his literary schemes : Mrs. Howard gave him a hold on the centre of opposition in Leicester House : t and Pulteney was cultivating his friendship, as the champion whose aid might best compass the organization of Walpole's foes. But something of more lively interest to us connects itself with this visit to England. Swift left on the 15th of August : and early in November, Gulliver's Travels appeared. In regard to no one of Swift's works was there, even from the first, so little real secrecy, as about this. For years before they were published, the Travels had been talked about, as familiarly known, amongst his friends. J Vanessa had read them: * STvift to Pope, Aug. 30, 1726, t The residence of the Prince of ■wrongly dated Oct. 30, 1727, in the Wales. Dublin quarto, and in Scott. % Miss Vanhomrigh refers to an 2 388 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1723—1727. Bolingbroke, Gay, Pope, and Arbuthnot had joked on their episodes without reserve : and even Mrs. Howard writes to Swift as she could not have Avritten without knowing that his authorship was an open secret. About the Travels of Gulliver ahnost the onl}' mystery is the fact that the manuscript was con- veyed to the printer by a secret channel. Swift felt some mis- givings as to the efi'ect of the book upon the political powers- that were. He was little disposed to recoil from their avowed enmity : but neither did he wish, unnecessarily, to make the breach irreparable. The hesitation, on political grounds, was strengthened by another cause. Swift entertained doubts a& to the vigour of his own powers. He never felt himself fitted to criticize his own works. Age had crept over him, and his anxietj^ lest age should bring mental decay, was morbid in its- intensity. The publication of Gulliver roused in him these misgivings. He paused before giving it to the world. When it was launched, he looked with nervous interest for tlie criticisms of his friends. He had, by the stratagem about the manuscript, left himself free to change and recast what might be condemned. This literary bashfulness, then, combined with political caution, su.pplied a reason for some slight con- cealment : but both arguments soon lost their strength. He had soon no terms to keep with the Government : fears ceased to distm'b him as to the merits of the book. Swift made no secret of his motive. He wrote Gulliver, as he ssljs, " to vex the world, rather than to divert it." * He ""hated and detested that animal called man." As age grew on him. Swift's love of individuals had increased, but his general misanthropy had also deepened. ^ " 1 love only in- dividuals," he says. No one saw more clearly than himself, incident in the TravtU in a letter in a Letter to Pope of Sept. 29, 1725. written about 1721 or 1722 : Boling- As the time of their appearance .ip- broke speaks of them in a Letter to proaohes, the references become even Swift of Jan. 1, 17|5 : again in a Letter more frequent in the correspondence uf July 2-t, 1725 : Pope in a Letter of Swift and his friends, of Sept. H, 1725 : and S-n-ift himself * Sn-ift to Prpr, Sept. 29, 1725. €i£AP. XIV.] SWIFT EEVISITS ENGLAND. 389 the ravages of that disease, misanthropy. He knew how ignohle it was. He was vexed with himself for the contempt he wasted on the poor Irish, whose sufferings and degradation he saw, and whose vindicator he had been. He envied those whose minds were free from the " fierce indignation that lace- rated his heart." * Bitter against mankind, he could neither ■confine, nor master, his liatred. Thus upon the " foundation of misanthropj'," to use Swift's own words, the " whole buildmg of his travels was erected." But plainly as he has told us the leading motive of the book, powerfully as that motive is stamped ■on it as a whole, vivid as is the impression which it leaves, our best means of gathering its full significance, of fixing its place in Swift's biography, is to compare one part with another. To trace the possible soiuces of suggestion, to estimate the indebted- ness of Swift to his predecessors in the same line of allegory, is the business of a commentary and not of a biogi-aphy. But the book itself must be examined, if we are to master an un- poiiant chapter in the story of Swift's life. The scheme was one of those which took bu-th in the councils •of Scriblerus, and many of its outlines must have been drawn even before Swift ceased to form one of that congenial circle. In the earlier and more aimless years of his banishment, these ■outlines were filled in : and the book received its finishing touches after that fierce struggle, which stirred Swift's energy once more, but Avhitli left him face to face with approaching ■old age, with the fire of his consuming indignation burnmg more fiercely than before. As we might expect each of these moods is reflected in the book. * '• A friend of his found him in. - you help it, how can you avoid it ? this condition (weary of life) one day : His friend calmly repUed, Because I and Swift, putting the question to am commanded to the contrary, ' Fret him, whether corruptions and Tillanies not thyself because of the ungodly.' of men in power, did not eat his flesh This raised a smile and changed the and exhaust his spirits ? he answered, conversation to something less severe that in truth they did not : he then and sour." Delany's Observations on asked in a fury, Why — why — how can Lord Orrery's liemarlts, p. l-tS. 390 LIFE OF JOKATHAN SWIFT. [1725—1727. It is in Lilliput that the original conception of the book is most apparent. It was intended to parody the style in -vvhicli travels were dressed out for the public by the Uterary hacks of the daj^ : and though it was not in Swift's nature to confine himself entirely to such an aim, he adheres to it with some- fidelity. He carefully maintains the circumstantiality of the narrative : and preserves, with elaborate accm-acy, the due pro- portion between the pigmies and their surroundings. He can- not refrain altogether from references to contemporary affairs : but his side strokes at Walpole, at the French wars, at the divisions of party and of sect, are occasional only, and not sj'stematic. Mankind are ridiculed hj the travesty of their works and ways in the court of LiUiput : but there is nothing unkindlj" in the laughter : and the humoiu- with which Gulliver is made to accept in all good faith the honours and precedence which the pigmies of Lilliput confer, is much more apparent than anj' satiric bitterness. It is only towards the close that Swift's words reveal the vehemence of anger against party divisions, bred in him during these wearj' years of banishment. In Brobdingnag, the humoiu: is not less, but the satire is far more bitter and mtense. Brobdingnag is not merely LilHput seen, as Scott puts it, through the other end of the telescope. To ridicule mankind by comparing them with pigmies was one thing : to make them contemptible by using them as a means of ridiculing a superior order of beings, was quite another. In Lilliput the humour is on the surface : the satire is onlj' occasional : in Brobdingnag the satbe never allows itself to be forgotten long. Human natm'e seemed to Swift contemptible chiefly for its infinite pettiness and triviality, for its endless and futile restlessness : for its pigmy strainings to create difficulties, for the blind folly with which it entangled itself in labom's beyond its strength. In the natives of Brobdingnag the lead- ing featiu'e is that massive simplicitj'' after which Swift's soul longed. Political science they deem a waste of tune. They have ceased to multiply books. Of philosophj' thej' ai'e Chap. XIV.] SWIFT REVISITS ENGLAND. 391 fortunate in having no conception. To pursue legal niceties is, vdth them, a capital crime. They are wise enough to see their own counterpart in creatures so contemptible as human beings, and are not blind to their own faults, reflected in these, "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin, that nature ever suffered to crawl ui^on the smface of the earth." But human nature, in Gulliver, is content " to wink at its own littleness," and to forget the gulf between itself and the giants by which it is surrounded. Yet bitter as is the drift of the sath-e in Brobdingnag, it is not without relief. We are carried on by the story, and in amusement at the mishaps of Gulliver we forget that we are laughing at om'selves. But in Laputa, and the Houyhnhnms, we advance a step further. The spirit of the allegory is changed. We miss the nicely adjusted proportions, and the careful con- struction of the preceding voyages. It is not without purpose, that GuUiver is made to return from LUliput and Brobdingnag, by vaguely described and almost mii-aculous means ; while from Laputa he sails to the allied empke of Japan, and from the Houyhnhnms prepares for his voj'age as he would have done in starting from Eotherhithe. In the latter region, we are no longer in realms of pure fancj^, but only in places where the ordinarj' laws of natiu'e are confounded in a bewildering jumble. Fancy and reality ai-e constantly intermingled. As the Academy of Lagado comes nearer to the type of human crotchet - mongers, and as the Yahoo t3'pifies more closely humanity, so the construction of the allegory fails, but so also the dh'ectness of the satire is increased. In Lagado we are in the midst of our familiar wits and Greshamites : in Glubb- dubdrib, we see the falsities of our own history exposed : in the Struldbrugs of Luggnagg, we see the hideousness that human natirre would present, were it but permitted to ripen to full maturity. So in the Yahoos we see a counterpart of human nature, free only from the dangerous ingredient of " a little reason," which makes humanity more detestable. Swift speaks 392 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1725—1727. no longer with the mouth of Scriblerus, biit with a voice whose reality falsifies the original scheme, and from a heart torn by that fierce anger that he vented on his kind. The voyage to Lapnta is especially full of faults of construc- tion. Its strokes are constantly delivered, not with the im- partiality of fable, but with the directness of personal spleen. The flaws in Atterbury's indictment might have served to give point to a political pamphlet,* but had no place in a satire on humanity. No medium of parable was necessary to prove that crazy and self-absorbed projectors were contemptible : but if, on the other hand, Swift meant to satirize anything else than the abuse of human powers of scientific investigation, his satire stands condemned by the logic of facts. But, notwithstanding, this third voyage tells us much both of Swift's opinions and of his mood. It is there that he "is filled with melancholy " to find one class of projectors without repute — those who sought to make the public weal prevail. It is there that the confessions of those summoned from the grave repeat for us Swift's views on the notabihties of the past. Above aU it is there that Gulliver finds the Struldbrugs, the unmitigated gloom of whose existence reflects the morbid despair with which Swift awaited old age. If it is the voj'ages to Lilliput and to Brobdingnag, in which no thought of the satire they contain mingles with the interest of the stoiy, that have proved most attractive to children, it is the voyage to the Houyhnhnms which is lilcely to excite most interest amongst men. On its coarseness we need not dwell. But beyond that fault, we may admit that the fable is clumsy : that the comparison between the Houyhnhnms and theii- counter- parts is often mere verbal quibbling : that in the fancy of horses ruling men, there is no great depth of satiric force. We * As a fact, the incident of the dog Laputans as worthy of theii- atten- sent over to Atterbury, which -w-as tion, has been since proved to have made much of in his trial, and which suggested to the prosecution a correct Swift makes Gulliver suggest to the train of evidence. Chap. XIV.] SWIFT EEVISITS ENGLAND. 393 may admit fm-tlier that Swift deiserts matter of general concern, and here also attacks particular classes from motives of personal irritation. But all tliis fails to affect the real interest of the satire. Its central featm'e is contrast between the Houyhn- hnm, representing, in himself, and as the negation of all human attributes, the tj^pe of Stoical and impassive dignity ; and the Yahoo, as the picture of degradation, the points of distinction between whom and human beings gradually drop away, leaving humanity without one shred of defence for its own self-respect. Step by step the force of the contrast gains upon us : from a picture full of warning, it changes into a sentence of despair : with ruthless hand it tlu-ows down the fancied dignity of humanitj'-, strips off the trappings and disguises with which we deceive ourselves, and leaves us face to face with the stern realities of our natm-e and our lot. We feel how scathing must have been the contempt for his kind, how unrelenting the clear- ness of vision, that had to seek relief from smooth convention- alities by pitiless delineation such as this. But a further question still remains. We can scarcely doubt that Swift summed up the book in this contrast between Houyhnhnm and Yahoo. But did he satisfy liimself with the ideal Houyhnhnm ? Was the formal Stoicism, typified in the ruling caste. Swift's conception of the highest morality? Was that absence of ]3assion and emotion, that negation of natural affection, that level and unloveable monotony, what Swift most admu-ed ? If it was so, then his ideals were shaped in a mould strangely different from anything in his own consciousness. If it was not so, was this picture but another ply of the satire on humanity, whose best ideals could be attained only by elimina- ting all that made life worth living, but whose passions and emotions, when ripened to full maturity, ended only in the loathsomeness of the Yahoo ? There was no long doubt as to the reception of the book. It was quickly in the mouths of all. By the highest and the lowest it was read, from the Cabmet Council to the nursery. 394 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1725—1727. Even the Duchess of Marlborough confesses that she has made a life-long mistake in treating its author as her foe.* If he is supposed to he the author, Gay tells him, he is not much injured b_Y the belief. So Pope tells him, "he needed not have been so secret." f With what is clearly nothing more than an affected ignorance, Pope repeats the story of the publication. " Motte received his copj', he tells me, he knew not from whence nor from whom, dropped at his house in the dark from a hackney coach : by computing the time, I find it was after you left England : so, for my part, I suspend my judgment." I Before the month was oiit Lord Peterborough and Mrs. Howard had written to Swift as to the author, the last signing herself by the name given to a maid of honour by Gulliver, as "Sieve Yahoo." § Swift answered her letter in a disguise that was pretty plainly an assumed one. || The reception of the book pretty clearlj'- proved that there were in Swift no signs of failing originality. And as for danger. Swift had followed his own maxim too well to be troubled on that head. " In the Attic Commonwealth," he says * Gay to Sn'ift, Nov. 17, 1726. enough for a pirated edition : and we + jPopa to Sjvift, Not. 16, 1726. are almost forced to conclude that J It is surely not unreasonable to Swift maj' have given help to the suppose that Pope himself may have speedy issue of the book in Dublin, been the friend who dropped the § The names are inconsistent, one manuBoript from the coach, and who belonging to the thu-d voyage, the takes this means of informing Swift other to the fourth, how he had carried out his commission. || Swift's answer is amongst the From the Dublin IVceldy Journal, it Suffolk MSS. in the British Museum : is possible to fix exactly the date when and enables us to correct the form the first Dublin Edition appeared. which it bears in Scott's Edition. The The Journal of Nov. 26, 1726, contains date, not doubtful as Scott represents an advertisement of the book, as " in it, is Nov. 28, 1726 : the letter is writ- the press, and will be published next ten in a character much larger than week." The Journal of Dec. 3 repeats Swift ordinarily used, and with some the advertisement, with the heading slight pretence of disguise, which could •' Just published." According to Gay's deceive no one accustomed to his letter of Nov. 17, the London Edition handwriting : and lastly, it is signed, was issued about the 7th or 8th Nov. not " Jon. Swift," as Scott's edition The intervening period is scarcely long represents, but " Lemuel Gulliver." Chap. XIV.] SWIFX REVISITS ENGLAIS^D. 395 elsewhere,* " it -was the privilege and birthright of every citizen and poet to rail aloud and in public, or to expose upon the stage by name any person they pleased, though of the greatest figure, whether aCreon, an Hyperbolus, an Alcibiades, or a Demosthenes : but, on the other side, the least reflecting: word let fall against the people in general, was immediately caught up and revenged upon the authors, however consider- able for their quality or their merits. Whereas in England, it. is just the reverse of all this." Obedience to the maxim saved the complacency and avoided the anger of individuals. " None accuse it of particular reflections," say Pope and Gay, using,, curiously enough, the very same words. Some, no doubt, like the Lord , of whom Gay speaks ironically, were offended that humanity, so honoured in having produced them, should be scurvHy treated by GulUver. Others, like the dapper critic Lord Orrery at a later dnj, were shocked that any man shotdd be able to find in himself the material for such a picture. But for the most part men were amused, not hurt. The cap fitted so well in general, that it was assumed by none in par- ticular, and hung upon its pole to the delectation of the passers-by. Some of his friends offered criticism on this or that passage i a few thought Laputa duU : but all read : and what pleased Swift even more, some readers were persuaded of the actual truth of the story. Arbuthnot had an acquaintance who sought, for Lilliput on the map. Another told him that he had fallen in with a ship-master who knew Gulliver well, but found that the printer had made a mistake : he lived in Wappmg, not in Eotherhithe. An Irish Bishop, Swift heard, thought the book fuU of hes, and piqued himself on the discernment that "hardly believed a word of it." Arbuthnot expects a run for the book as great as that of Bunyan : Gulliver, he thinks, is a happy man that at his age can write such a merry book. As a merry book, it has been in gi-eat measui-e accepted : and what was. * The Author's Preface to the Tale of a Ihib. :396 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1725—1727. •written to vex mankind, has been largely read to amuse children. When Giollivcr had already taken the world by storm, and was passing rapidly through new editions ; * when the Miscellanies of Swift and Pope were almost ready for issue, f Swift returned to England on the 9th of April, 1727. He was to be absent from Dublin for six months, and meant to try the waters of Aix-la-Chapelle. Arriving, he was seized on by his friends as men seize a recovered treasure. Pope longed to renew their rambles, to wander over Lord Bathurst's woods at Cirencester, to linger with him in the Grotto, and to plan new literary ventures. Pulteney and Bolingbroke were eager to brace him for new political struggles. Peterborough was bent ■on patching up the broken communications with Walpole. Arbuthnot sought him for pure friendship, Chesterfield for wit, and a greater than anj', Voltaire, was now to cultivate the acquaintance of Gulliver, bj' delicate flattery. Leicester House was open to him, and hj the ladies there he was encouraged to renew something of those habits of brow-beating that had been his privilege in the Court of Queen Anne. To the world. Swift's fame stood at its height. To himself, he was a prisoner who had but for a moment broken his prison bars to tantalize Ms eyes with a vision of freedom. He was a lonely old man, with affections all tangled, hope all gone, despair mastering him, the cloud of a great dread hanging over him, and bring- ing its gloom ever more closely over his life. For the politics of the opposition. Swift had little mchnation. * Even in France, parts of the book volume," in which he and Swift were liad already been dramatized, and ap- " to walk liand in hand down to pos- peared in the theatres. Zadi/ Holing- terity." It was one of an issue of .Irolic to Swift, about February, 172J. three volumes, which Ford, when after- As to the editions of GiilUtcr, see wai-ds writing to Swift, and pressing Appendix VIII. the need of a collected edition of his t Pope announces to Swift (letter works, calls " that jumble with Pope, .of March 8, 17§) that the " Miscel- &c., in three volumes, wliich put me lany is now quite printed." Pope in a rage whenever I meet them." was " prodigiously pleased with the {Ford to Sn-ift, Nov. 6, 1733.) Chap. XIV.] SWIFT EEVISITS ENGLAND. 397 He was too old for the struggle, and it was only occasionally that he could rouse himself to it. But in the hopes and fears excited by the sudden death of George I. on the 11th of June,. Swift did so far share. Leicester House was now the Court of St. James's. For the moment Walpole's power seemed to- be at an end. Mrs. Howard, George the Second's mistress, so long cultivated by the wits, was now to be the dispenser of court favour. Sir Spencer Compton became Minister, apparently for no other reason than that the Minister of George I. could scarcely be the Minister of his son. Walpole had, however, but a short time to wait. Compton was soon thrown aside for incapacity. Mrs. Howard soon showed how little real influence was hers. The Queen and Walpole became the real possessors of all power. The hopes of the opposition dwindled away more quickly than they had grown. To Swift the disappointment was not much. Harder blows were falling on him. His malady recurred with a fierceness it had never shown before. He felt his memory dulled, his brain benumbed, his reason threatened. And to add to this, news came to him in August, that Stella's health was again declming. Her strength was completely undermined : the momentary flicker had died away, and her end was near. To Sheridan and "VVorrall, Swift writes in language of even more bitter anguish than that of the year before. He cannot face the blow : he cannot come to see her die. Let them tell him only the bare fact, with no circumstances : these he could not bear to read. "Why should he struggle against his own malady ? Was he to live only that he might lose all that made life worth having? "What "he cries, "am I to do in this world ? I am able to hold up my sorry head no longer." The blow lingers yet before it falls. His. own malad}' lightens. But his hopes and interest in English politics were ended. All called him to Dublin, where his home was, where he may be near, if not present at, Stella's death-bed, where he may creep to his own lair when reason fails. Even the society 398 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1725—1727. of those he most prized in England became irksome, and he abruptly quitted Pope's house at Twickenham, where he had been stajdng, for London. About the middle of September, with grief and foreboding at his heart, he quits, for the last ■time, the circles that he loved so well. By a curious chance there has turned up a memorial of Swift, on this sad journey homewards, which gives us a picture, drawn for no eye but his own, of his state of mind in this gloomiest moment of a gloomy life. It is rarely that we 'Can get any utterances of a man's mind so completely natural — casual stones, as it were, cast aside, that might have gone to the construction of something greater : the wayward freaks ■of fancy that show us how Swift's pen was moved by each passing whim.* Reaching Holj^head on the 24th of September, (1727), he found that the packet had left; and stress of weather as well as the want of passengers prevented his crossing for more than a week. During that week, he wrote, in a Httle notebook that he had picked up from George Dodington's desk, and that is now preserved at South Kensington, an account of his lonely thoughts from day to day. Here and there, he cannot avoid recurring " to the suspense he is in about his dearest friend ; " but, for the most part, the notebook, where it does not bear upon his own doings during these dismal days, is occupied with the woes of the country to which he is doomed, and reflections on the literary topics which he has discussed with his friends at Dawley, and Twickenham, and Whitehall. It is thus he breaks out in regard to Ireland ; — " Remove me from this land of slaves, Where all are fools, and all are knaves. Where every fool and knave is bought, Yet kindly sells himself for nought. Where Whig and Tory fiercely fight MTio's in the wrong, who in the right, And when their country lies at stake They only fight for fighting's sake ; * For the contents of the Notebook, see Appendix IX. Chap. XIV.] SWIFT EEVISITS ENGLAND. 399 While English sharpers take the pay, And then stand by to see fair play. Meantime the Whig is always winner, And for his courage gets — a dinner." Reflection over tlie literary scliemes which occupied the mind of Pope, and which had doubtless formed the subject of much earnest discussion in the evenings at the Twickenham villa, leads Swift in his solitude to pen these memorable lines, as a testament to posterity : " I do hereby give notice to posterity, that having been the author of •several writings, both in prose and verse, which have passed with good siiccess, it hath drawn upon me the censure of innumerable attempters and imitators and censurers, many of whose names I Icnow, but shall in this be wiser than Virgil and Horace, by not delivering their names down to future ages ; and at the same time disappoint that tribe of ^vriters whose chief end next to that of getting bread, was an ambition of getting their names upon record, by answering or retorting their scurrilities : and would slily have made use of my resentment to let the future world know that there were such persons now in beirtg. I do therefore charge my successors in fame, by virtue of being an Ancient two hundred years hence, to follow the same method. Dennis, Blackinore, Bentley, and several others, will reap great advantage by those who have not observed my rule. And Heaven forgive jMr. Pope, who hath so grievously transgressed it, by transmitting so many names of forgotten memory, full at length, to be known by readers in suc- ceeding times, who perhaps may be seduced to Duck Lane and Grub Street, and there find some of the very treatises he mentions in his Satires. I heartily applaud my own innocency and prudence upon this occasion, who never named above six authors of remarkable worthlessness. Let the fame of the rest be upon Mr. Pope and his children. Mr. Gay, although more sparingly, hath gone upon the same mistake.'' The Journal itself, with its minute record of these days, is a curious proof of self-inspection. We see even in this glimpse of his inner mood how utterly impossible it was for him to rest. The minutest circumstance is tortured into an occupation. He discusses his own relations to the homely figures round him : he sees them moving like ghosts about him, as strange and as insignificant to him, as he is to them. "By my con- science," he says, "I believe even Ctesar would be the same 400 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1725—1727. without his army at his back."* Powerful as was the weapon he wielded in his satire, he is forced to confess it powerless here. He amuses himself by planning how he would act, were it always thus with him. His dreams carry him back to Pope and Bolingbroke, strangely jumbled up with anticipations of his Dublin Hfe. He sees them in his cathedi-al, where nothing was as it ought to be, where no servants were at hand, and all the surplices were locked up, and the pews broken. To crown all, Bolingbroke was preaching from his pulpit ; and vexing Swift by quoting Wycherley by name. Amidst such phantoms of those that cherished him, and to whom his thoughts were so ready to turn back : amidst such gloomy anticipations of the home that awaited him for what remained of his life; in anxiety, in restlessness, in gloom ; Swift passed for the last time out of the brilliant circle in England, and came again to take his place at the head of the small band that were struggUng against the wrongs of Ireland. * There is a curious parallel to these his solitude amidst the giants, " the words of the Journal, to be found in King of Great Britain himself," Gul- the Toyage to Brobdingnag. Speaking liver says, " in my condition, must of an indignity he had to suffer in have undergone the same distress." CHAPTEE XV. THE LAST CHAPTBE IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC WOEK. 1727—1737. ^TAT. 60—70. Swift's autumn in Ireland — Stella's approaching end — Their relations in the last scene — Stella's Will — Her death — The funeral — The blank in Swift's life — " Only a woman's hair " — Swift on Irish Politics — Statement of Irish wrongs — The remedies proposed by others than Swift— Lord Molesworth — Thomas Prior — Arthur Dobbs — Swift's place in these discussions — Answer to a Memorial &c. — Maxims controlled in Ireland— A Short view of the State of Ireland — A Modest Proposal &c. — Ansmer to the Craftsman — Swift and the Corporation — Traulus — Swift's speech at the Guildhall — Advice to the Freeman of Dullin — Swift and the defence of the Church — The Bills for resi- dence and for division of benefices — Swift's anger with the Bishops — Modus for the Tithe on Hemp — The tithe on Agistment — Swift and the Legion Club — Swift and English politics — Sympathy with the professions of Bolingbroke and Pulteney — Swift's Proposal for virtue. Swift had quitted Pope's house at Twickenham with a haste that looked like flight. He had bui'ied himself for a short time in London and then left England for ever. A cloud was hanging over him, under the gloom of which he must suffer alone. The brilliant affectations of Dawlej', the keen and self- absorbed satire of Twickenham, were no medicines fit for his disease. Disappointments had now brought their last, and hj far their worst, result, in deep-rooted misanthropy, strengthening its grasp upon his whole nature year by year. Ill-health and infirmities were forcing him to feel that he was a drag upon the society of the wits. Lastly, and more than all, he feared that his maladies might have results for which he could not ask their sympathy without possibly provoking their sneers. Dreary as it was, there was no place for him but home. 402 IIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. Ill his lonely deanery-house Swift passed an autumn that must have been sad enough. The blow that had been lifted for a short time, was now surely descending on her to whom his heart clung most earnestly of all on earth. There could be no ending but one to the consumption that had laid its grasp on her : and for these few months Swift waited, with what torturing grief we know by the letters he had written when absent in London.* Of the last scene of that life, whose faithful love and ■devotion have won for themselves immortalitj', we know but little. Stories have been told of what passed between Esther Johnson and the Dean, so inconsistent that we are left to •choose between them, on the best grounds that we may.t What seems in some respects a fairly well authenticated story, represents their parting to have had some added bitterness from the harshness of Swift. It is Sheridan who tells us that, ■on the approach of death, Stella besought Swift to acknowledge their marriage before the world : that his only answer was to turn on his heel, and quit her presence for ever : and that her last hours were spent in inveighing against the cruelty of him on whom all her life's devotion had been spent. If the evidence, however, has been satisfactorily dealt with, in its own place, we are entitled to set aside a story which would reflect on Swift more hardly than any other recorded incident. * It is curious how little of reference taking the journey" (to England), there is to Esther Johnson, in Swift's With still more gross vulgarity, he correspondence with his literary sends (in Feh. 1 72J) some fans which friends. Only Bolingbroke, wliose Swift is to " dispose of to the present taste was none of the most fastidious, Stella, whoever she may be. " Esther mentions the name of Stella two or Johnson had then just escaped an three times ; and then with words of almost fatal illness, so we may guess fashionable cant, entirely incongruous how Swift received such jests. In no in the circumstances. In Sept. 172i, letter to Bolingbroke does Swift he desires to hear Swift mention her name. Even Addison knew her only in Ireland, t These are dealt with, in detail, Tour Star" he writes in July 172.5, and the evidence for each is examined, ' Inter vmafttgam Stettce mxrcrc pi-otcrvcn." Yom- Star," he writes in July 172.5 ' will probably hinder you from in Appendix No. V, Chap. XV.] LAST CHAPTER m SWIFT'S PUBLIC 'WORK. 403 Without repeating here the details of argument, it is enough to sum up the impression which the various traditions give us of the general features of Stella's last daj's. The final scene in what had been a long mystery, whose full meaning was perhaps not clear even to the chief actors themselves, was now approach- ing. Stella had been content to fulfil her part of the bond by unquestioning and unfailing love. Swift had paid her by an affection, which, severe and abnormal as was the restraint he placed on it, was the warmest feeling of his life. That bond had been sealed by a formal union, kept secret from the world. The refusal to announce it came, originally, from Swift : and Tvhether or not he made anj^ offer of an avowal, as time went on, and as the way seemed open for it, this would not affect the painful impression which the original refusal must have left on "Stella. In her last hours, this impression may have recurred with peculiar bitterness : and not from resentment, or from unwillingness to accede to her djing request, but only from the pain that her regrets would cause, Swift may have withdrawn from a death-bed, whose pangs he could do nothing to allevi- ate. That he watched the com'se of the last struggle, that he longed passionately for any gleam of hope, and that when the end came, he looked back on the past with no feeling but the bitterest sorrow, on the future with no prospect but of loneli- ness and gloom, we believe to be as certain as anjr fact recorded in Swift's biography. But with all his sensitivity, and amid all his gloom, Swift's later words never once reveal remorse, or suggest that different action of his own might have broken through, or even lightened, the decree of fate. The end did not come very rapidly. Pain and asthmatic oppression slowly did their work. On the 30th of December, Esther Johnson made a Will,* in which she bequeathed the interest of her fortune to her mother, Mrs. Mose, still living at Farnham, and to her sister Ann, now Mrs. Filby : after the death of both to go towards the stipend of a chaplain in * See Appendix 5.. D D 2 404 LIFE OF JONATHAN S-^IFT. [1727—1737. Dr. Steevens's Hospital in Dublin. The Will contains but little reference to Swift, save as it leaves to him certain papers, which we may presume included his own letters : and entrusts him with the duty of acting as trustee for his own cousin, Mrs. Honoria Swanson, in respect of a small legacy which Esther" Johnson left her. But on the other hand, this very trust seems- to preclude the idea of anger on Stella's part ; and the provi- sions of the Will are precisely those with which Swift indicated his agreement in a letter written from London more than a year before.* If any inference is to be drawn from the "Will itself,, it is certainly not that Esther Johnson wrote it when moved by resentment against Swift : but rather that she faithfully fulfilled his directions, both as to its main provisions, and aS' to those minor points, with which his name is connected. At six o'clock on the evening of Sunday, the 28th of January, 17-|f) the end came. It appears from the paper which Swift began to write the same night, that he had some compan}' with him at dinner, according to his usual custom, f A note was brought to him at eight in the evening : but it was only at eleven o'clock that he found himself alone with his grief, with no solace but to think on what he had lost — " the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend, that I, or perhaps any other per- son, was ever blessed with."| In words that were perhaps never meant for any eye but his own, he wrote down his feel- ings, and the record of her character, beginning that night, and continuing from daj^ to day, save when " his headaches, and he can write no more." On the evening of Tuesday, the 30tli of January, Stella was ' uried in St. Patrick's, according to the directions of her "Will. * Sivift to Worrall, July 15, 1726. entertained at DelTille. See Mrs. t The entertainments of Dublin Delany's Autobiography, society seem to have been apportioned J Character of Mrs. Johnson. Pee -vrith a certain regularity. The dinners Appendix XI. Born on the 13th of at the Deanery took place on Sundays : March, 16|=, Stella had not completed and Thursdays were the regular nights her forty-sixth year at the time of her on which Dr. Helsham and Dr. Delany death. Chap. XV.] LAST CHAPTER IN SWIFT'S TUBLIC "WOEK. 405 Following the custom of the time, the funeral took place late at night : and from the situation of the grave, near the southern door of the Cathedral, the lights of the attendants at the last ceremonjf gleamed through the window opposite the Deanery. Swift, though he had her body placed where her ashes might one day lie side bj' side with his own,* was too ill to be present at the funeral, and could not bear even the ordeal of seeing the lights which told of the work going on within the Church. They " removed him uito another apartment," that he might not see the gleam that lighted that grave in which was laid the long and faithful devotion of a lifetime, and in whose silence reposes that secret of Swift's life which, whether for compassion or for indignant blame, has roused so much of human interest, t Henceforward he must strive and suffer alone. The tender- ness, of which his attachment to Stella had been the strongest •KjTnptom, deeply as it had struck its roots into his nature, withered into cj'nicism. But a lock of Stella's hair is said to have been fomid in Swift's desk, when his own fight was ended, and on the paper in which it was wrapt were written words that have become proverbial for the burden of jpathos that their forced brevity seems to hide — " Only a woman's hair." To comment on them, would be inept and futile : it is for each reader to read his own meaning into them. But can they cover only the cold sneer of heartless cynicism? Was it cynicism that conjured up in his loneUness the ghosts of the love, and tenderness, and devotion, that had come like raj'S of light across the tragedy of his life ? Was it a sneer that prompted the passionate confession of helplessness to utter all the mean- ing that lay in that little lock of hair ? Lonely, suffering, and comfortless, in the great Deanery house, that seemed a tj'pe of the gloom that lay before him, * Quite recently a fresh excavation. f The epitaph on the tablet, which in the Cathedral revealed a coffin now hangs near that of Swift, is poor, ■which contained the bones both of the and the work of an unknown hand Dean and Stella. later than Swift's day. 406 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. Swift felt with morbid bitterness, the blank that had fallen on his life. All that was good was leaving him : his interests were dying out : his letters are filled with reflections on himself : his hatred of those amongst whom his lot was cast, became more and more irrepressible, although he admits how mnreason- able it was. All his harshness, all his prejudices, all his im- patience of contradiction, all his love of money, increased ten- fold. But crushed, as we know he was. Swift seems' to have shown but little of his inner feelings to the world. Through- out his life he bore his burdens with much secrec3\ He allowed his friends to speak of that malady that filled him with such ghastly forebodings, in the tone of light comment, that suited their own passing ailments. Dark as his future was to himself, he did not show its full gloom to his friends. He stUl amused himself with their affairs : he still sought to have a bright place in their regard : he continued, even, to give hopes of coming back to them some day : and meanwhile he affected an interest in the success of the hterary schemes on which they were busy, and from which they were gathering new renown. For himself, he tui'ns again, with some concentration, to the work of an Irish patriot. The Drapier letters had achieved for him a position of commanding authority : he had now to- drive that authority home. Both the evils and the proposed remedies had reached a new development since we glanced at them in the years that pre- ceded the Drapier's letters. Few, even amongst the narrow clique that ruled her, doubted that the state of Ireland was utterly wrong, and called imperiouslj' for a remedy : and we have already seen how the need of reform had been urged even before the Drapier's Letters appeared. These letters had lifted the struggle on to a new platform ; but they had been only the beginning of the later struggle. Bold assertions of Ireland's independence had been made : one victory, at least, over the tyranny of the official clique had been won. It remained to Chap. 2V.] LAST CHAPTEE IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC WOEK. 407 guide that victory in the right direction, and to show its effects, all along the hne. Others than Swift saw the evils and brought forward pro- posals of reform. Foremost amongst these was Viscount Moles- worth, who, in 1723, had discussed the radical ills of Ireland drastically enough* The "'whole economy of agriculture," he says, " is neglected." He sees the first blot in the land system, in the rack-renting, which made it impossible for the tenant to improve, knowing as he did, that every penny laid out on the land was not only lost, but would ultimately go to increase his. rent, or the fine for renewal of his lease, when the lease expired. Not ventm'ing to appeal to the stringent remedy of law, he would bring a powerful pubHc opinion to tell upon an unreasonable landlord. " If," he says, " a landlord turns out a good, old, im- proving tenant, let him. suffer under the obloquy of his country."! He denounces the conduct of the landlords in destroying roads ; in taking advantage of the disabilities of Eoman Catholic tenants : in failing to make themselves, in any waj"-, the guides or leaders of the classes dependent on them. But for the tenants, too, he has reforms to propose. Large farms of three or fom* hundred acres were commonly taken by the tenants only from motives of a mistaken pride ; and, unable to stock or work them, the tenants sublet to others lower than themselves — those " cottagers," whose rent was drained from their life's blood, and who could keep themselves alive only by being thieves or the harbourers of thieves. Hence had arisen those curses of the land, the land-jobbers, who ground the tenants more hardly than the landlords themselves. The holdings. Lord Molesworth main- tains, must be strictly limited ; they must be for definite terms ; and aU subletting must be forbidden. He would extend stiU further a sort of paternal government. Instead of himting * Some Considerations for tlw posal of Viscount Molesworth, the Promoting of Agriculture and Employ' germs of a custom which has so ing the Poor, by E(obert) L(ord) developed in our own day, as to have V(isoouiit) M(olesworth), 1723. acquired a name which will puzzle + It is curious to note, in this pro- future etymologists. 408 LIFE OF JONATUAN S-ft^IFT. [1727—1737. down the Eoman Catholic priest, and compelling him. to subsist on precarious ahns extorted from a starving peasantry, he boldly proposes that government should undertake the pay- ment of the priests, and thus provide for their loyaltj' more surely than by a hundred penal acts. He would establish a school of agriculture in each comity : and would teach the rudiments of the ai't to children instead of their primer. The custom of gleaning, or "leasing," as it was called, had spread so far as to be a real burden on the farmer, who found one-tenth or more of his crops carried oS by the hordes of thieving mendicants, who plundered before his eyes, and who were only to be driven away by main force. They were a pest, like that of the Egyptian locusts, and their idle sorning called for the severe action of the law. The too niunerous holidays of the Eoman Catholic church, must be limited. The crowds of hedgers and vagabonds must be shipped off by compulsory emigration. Fisheries must be fostered : all restrictive monopolies removed : and encouragement given to Irish trade. And finally, parliamentary representation must be improved by giving the suffrage to the leaseholders, instead of confining it to the freeholders, who were often men of inferior wealth and station. The tract of Lord Molesworth was answered by one who bore more hardly on the landlords, and stated with greater energj' of invective the sufferings of the tenants.* Others took a lower tone. They spoke with bated breath, and with humble apology, of the wrongs of Ireland. They found the sole hope of remedy in proving that her weal might benefit England, and craved for her the liberty to exist, because her existence might be good for the mother country. But Lord Molesworth's lead was followed by others of a better type, and amongst these were Thomas Prior, the author of the List of Absentees, and Arthur Dobbs, whoVrote an Essay on the Trade of Ireland, in 1729. The specific which the latter urges above all, is to create a * Consideratioiis vpoa Considerations for promoting of Agriculture. 1724. Chap. XV.] LAST CHArTER IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC "WOEK. 409 yeomaniy by means of fixed tenui-es. "Would the landlords," lie says, " fix the tenures and possessions of their tenants upon a lasting and certain foundation, by leases of lives renewable or fee-farms, I would not doubt to find our people soon become industrious, and frugal to the utmost." He knows that the nobility and genti-y will object : but if the land is to be im- proved, if pauperism is to be checked, if landlords ai-e to be anything else than recldess squu-eens gi-inding an uncertain income out of a starving tenantry, if the vampires of middlemen are to be stamped out, thus, and thus only, can it be done. But with fixed tenures imposed on the landlords, he would have restrictions for tenants too. Farms must be neither less than forty, nor more than one hundred and sixty acres. They are not to be divisible. Each is to have but one farmhouse. Subletting is to be illegal. Tlie scheme was bold enough : but it still presupposed a national energy, to rouse which something more than theoretic proposals was needed. Alongside of these there were a crowd of lesser proposals. Some urged the use of tormentil for bark in tanning, so as to preserve an industry which was dying out for lack of timber.* Others xu'ged the use of Kilkenny coal, so as to stop the importation from Whitehaven. + Others again urged the establishment of "Lombards" or money-lending offices, secured by the public credit, and mider government inspection. All these schemes showed rather the ferment in men's minds, than the existence of any settled plan of reform, or any confidence in the resom'ces of national energy and independence. In all those appeals for reform, one thing must not be for- gotten. They were spoken, not from the heart of Ireland, but from those who were in great measm-e mere outsiders. The mass of the Roman Catholic population was slipping, past all hope of reclamation, out of the hands of the ruling class. Here and there, moderate schemes of toleration were * The metliod of Tanning without + Tlie case of many thovsand poor harh. Dublin, 1729. inhabitants of Dublin. Dublin, 1729. 410 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. proj)osed *, which might enlist the sjinpathies and loyalty of Boman Catholics. But such proposals were rare : and for the most part, the dense mass behind the smaller divisions, and sects, and parties of the English minority, is unheeded and unknown, except by the few, like Swift, whose view reached out beyond the little intricacies of party struggles, into the dark- ness bej'ond. On almost every one of the proposals that we have mentioned, Swift had something to say. By the Drapier's letters he had roused a feeling that all the other reformers together could not have kindled. Theories, and nostrums, and fancied remedies were all well in their way : Swift had given the one thing needful in the motive power that had galvanized into life the dead national feeling; and this new energy it was his object to keep alive. Swift's tracts themselves best explain their purpose. In one bearing the title, A71 ansiver to a paper called a Memorial of the poor inhabitants, tradesmen, and labourers of the Kingdom of Ireland, t he states broadly the evils which had their founda- tion in the very necessity of things. What now meets his view, is — " The fair issue of things hegrni upon party rage, while some sacrificed the public to fury, ancl others to ambition : while a spirit of faction and oppression reigned in every part of the country, where gentlemen, instead of consulting the ease of their tenants, or cultivating their lands, were worrying one another upon points of Whig and Tory, of High Church and Low Church : which no more concerned them than the long and famous controversy of strops for razors : while agriculture was wholly discouraged, and consequently half the farmers and labourers, and poorer tradesmen, * As by Edward Synge, who as pamphlets then in almost any other Prebendary of St. Patrick's preached point, this is dated 1738 ; instead of a sermon in October, 1725, (on the 1728. The date is correct in the anniversary of the Irish Kebellion) Dublin edition of 1735 : and it is urging a modified toleration, as a step further proved by the reference, which towards proselytizing. the Answer contains, to the " lately t In Scott's edition, which is more produced" paper on The State of faulty in regard to these Irish Ireland, which was printed in 1727. Chap. XV.] LAST CHAPTEE IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC WOEK. 411 forced to beggary or banislimeiit. ' Wisdom crietli in the streets : Because I have called on you : I have stretched out my hand and no man regarded :. but ye have set at nought all my counsels, and would none of my reproof i I also will laugh at your calamity, and mock when your fear cometh.' " "With these words he casts aside their ptuiy theories : " I have done with j'our memorial," * he says, " you have spoken as a stranger, and as of a coimtry which is left at liberty to enjoy the benefits of nature, and to make the best of those advantages which God has given it, in soil, climate and situa- tion." On such an assumption they cannot but be wrong, for nO' such privilege belongs to Ireland : it is not hers to enjoy the " benefits of nature." Only utter ignorance could have assumed it : and on the ground that this privilege is denied her,. Swift takes up the battle in her name. With absolute calmness of logic, but with unrelenting force of sarcasm, he lays bare her wrongs. There is no mincing of matters : no softening of the stern reality. " Every squire, almost to a man, is an oppressor of the clergj', a racker of his. tenants, a jobber of all public works, very proud, and generally ilhterate." Thus he begins a page of description : and it may be taken as a specimen of his tone. The absentees are not only wrong : he absolutely overwhelms in sarcasm their craven abnegation of their birthright, their servile imitation of English fashions. They go to England, "to be preceded by thousands, and neglected by millions." No hope, then, may be looked for from the landed gentry. But still, slaves as we- Irish are, we may stand together. "Nature has instructed even a brood of gosHngs to stick together, while the Kite is * The memorial was wi'itton by the memorial : then Swift's answer John Browne, who tm-us up in printed by Scott : then, lastly, the various guises in all these Irish apology of Browne, which Scott prints disputes : and the confusion into before Swift's answer to the Memorial, which the editor, who acted in Scott's although it is dated ten days after,, name, has fallen, is nowhere more and is intelligible only as a reply to conspicuous than here. First came Swift. 412 LIFE OP JONATHAN S\S^IFT. [1727—1737. hovering over their heads." Ireland must be her own Savioiu* and must work out her own redemption. Let us only have the brute instinct, to be true to our own kind. Swift's insistance on Irish grievances was neither that of the poHtical agitator, nor that of the theorist, who entered into the •details of possible improvements. His purpose was too sincere, his knowledge of Irish wrongs too real, to allow him to become an agitator ; his sarcasm was too fierce, to allow him to become a theoretical reformer. What strikes us most in all these tracts is the dehberate incisiveness of their irony, the despairing bitterness that gives them finish and completeness. In another tract, published as early as 1724,* he shows, one by one, how the ordinary rules that guide us in regard to other nations are utterly fallacious when applied to Ireland. In a third, t he catalogues in regular order the possible adjuncts and conditions of prosperity and shows how the very negative of each is present in Ireland. "If we flourish, it is against everj- law of nature and of reason : Uke the thorn of Glastonbiuy, which blossoms in the midst of winter." He draws a fanciful picture of what Ireland might seem to a stranger, favom-ed as she is by nature : but he breaks from it in despair. " My heart is too heavy to continue this irony longer : for it is mani- fest, that whatever stranger took such a journey, would he apt to think him- .self travelling in Lapland or Iceland, rather than in a country so favoured by nature as ours, hoth in fruitfulness of soil, and temperature of climate. The miserable dens, and diet, and dwelling of the people : the general deso- lation in most parts of the Kingdom : the old seats of the nobility and gentry all in ruins, and no new ones in their stead : the families of farmers, who pay great rents, living in filth and nastiness upon butter-milk and potatoes, ■\vithout a shoe or stocking to their feet, or a house as convenient as an English hogsty, to receive them. These may indeed be comfortable .sights to an English spectator, who comes for a short time, only to learn the language, and returns back to his own country, whither he finds all his wealth transmitted. Nostra miseria magna est." * Maxims controlled in Ireland, application to Ireland." In modem language, this might well f A sho7-t View of tTie State of have been entitled, " The theories of Ireland 1727. political economy proved to have no Chap. XV.] LAST CHAPTEE IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC WOEK. 41S Nothing shows Swift's genius in these Irish tracts more con- clusively than the marvellously simple materials with which he maintains their force. He enters into the questions with no intricacy, he treats them with no variety of view. Setting aside all those tracts which careful scrutiny shows to he falsely as- crihed to Swift, it is surprising how small is the range amongst the rest.* They have all one end and one aim : " Be independent." Law cannot help : theory is futile : English selfishness has left us little. But if we can gain anything we can gain it hy self-assertion, and by that alone. Swift is quite well acquainted with the current nostrums. He names almost all of them. He speaks of Prior witli approbation, t He deals out a patronizing nod to this or that scheme. But he never lingers long over any one. He saw that the evil lay deeper, and that it could be cured only by giving to Ireland the motive power of independence, by kindling her energy through wither- ing sarcasm, derisive scorn, and fiercest indignation. The sarcasm and the indignation are for the Enghsh selfishness : the scorn for Irish imbecility and weakness. He repeats over and over again the same advice. " Quit yourselves like men, be strong. Curb your follies, and resist the fantastic taste for foreign luxuries. Know that your strength is in the plough and not in the depopulated pasture lands." "Ajax was mad, when he mistook a flock of sheep for his enemies : but we shall never be sober until we have the same way of thinking." Perhaps the greatest, certainly the most characteristic, of Swift's efforts in tliis direction, is his " Modest Proposal for j^re- • This is a. matter which could be of that odd pedant, Dr. Barrett, fully dealt frith only in re-editing the tracts are accepted by Scott's amanu- works. But again it must be pointed ensis, which are often inconsistent out, that we should err widely in with Swift's views, feeble travesties accepting all the tracts as genuine of his style, and which scarcely pre- which Scott's edition attributes to tend even to imitate his wit. Swift. The descriptive notes, which f Proposal that the Ladies wear preface the tracts in that edition, Irish Slanvfactxires. See Scott's are frequently contradicted by the Swift, (2nd edit.) vol. VII. p. 2C0. tracts themselves. On the authority 414 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. venting the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a burden to their Parents or the Country." It was published in 1729, when, ■even from Archbishop Boulter's letters, we learn that people were starving in hundreds through the famine, and that the dead were left unburied before their own doors. English civilization was shamed by the sight, and to Swift at least it seemed no moment to be silent. His sarcasm was never ajjplied with more deadlj'- seriousness of purpose. With the grave and decent self-respect of a reformer, who knows the value of the proposal he has to make, Swift propounds his scheme. There is no strain in the language with which the state of matters is de- scribed : but the very simplicity and matter-of-fact tone that are assumed, make the description all the more telling. Of a m.illion and a half inhabitants, about two hundred thousand may be the number of those who are bringing children into the world : of these about thirtj' thousand can provide for their ■children. There remain one hundred and seventy thousand whose case has to be met : and the pamphlet assumes as an ad- mitted truth, that no method yet proposed can meet that case. Agriculture and handicrafts, we have not : and though stealing offers an employment, yet complete proficiency in that calling is not often attained under the age of six. What then has to be done ? With the calm deliberation of a statistician calculating the food supply of the country. Swift brings forward his suggestion. He has inquired into the facts : and finds that a well-grown child of a year old, is a most delicious, nourishing, and whole- some food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled : and he makes no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout. The charge for nourishing such a child, in the present scale, will be about two shilhngs per annum, " rags included : " and " he believes no gentleman will repine to give ten shillings for the carcase of a good fat child." The mother will have eight shillings net profit. In the same tone, he dilates upon the advantages of the Chap. SV.] LAST CHAPTEE IN SWIFT'S PUBLIC WOIIK. 415 scheme. Eefinements have been suggested to him. The flesh of young lads and maidens, too, might, it is thought, he put to the same use. But with all respect, he sees difficulties : and ■chiefly because " some scrupulous persons might he apt to •censure such a practice (though indeed veryimjustly) as a little bordering upon cruelty : which, I confess, has always been with me the strongest objection against any project, how well soever intended." As he concludes with an earnest, but modest enforcement of his scheme, he is careful to add that he has no personal motive ; his own children are all past the age when he could make a profit of them. No work of Swift's has been more canvassed : none more -variously estimated : and none more grievously misunderstood. Some have esteemed it a heartless piece of ridicule, a caUous laugh raised out of abject misery. Men who might have been expected to see more clearly, have shuddered in well-simulated horror, at a cynicism which they have found too strong for their nerves. So to interpret it, is to misread it as entirely as the Frenchman did, who took it as a grave and practical suggestion, and who fancied that Swift in sober earnest proposed that infants in Ireland should be iised for food. In truth, the ridicule is but a thin disguise. From beginning to end, it is laden with grave and torturing bitterness. Each touch of calm and ghastly humour, is added with the gravity of the surgeon who probes a wound to the quick. Swift's clearness of vision laid the woes of Ireland bare to him ; he has left them on record for all time. Molesworth, and Dobbs, and Prior, and Browne, ai-e all forgotten : can England ever forget what lies on her conscience, while Swift's Modest Proposal continues to be read? Alongside of the Modest Proposal we may read another tract which has much the same character, though with appli- cation more restricted. In 1730, the Craftsman had made some strong remarks on the facilities recently given for the recruiting of the French army in Ireland. The incident, as we 416 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. see from Archbishop Boulter's letters,* had caused some alarm amongst the Government adherents, who found their own transaction wearing an ixntoward aspect. The Craftsman had seized the opportunitj' : and Swift, whose sj'mpathies were with the Craftsman, added to the agitation by his ironical replj'. " Why hinder the recruitmg ? " he asks, in all simphcity. " Do you not know how the loss of these recruits will benefit Ireland? Elsewhere, no doubt, men are the sinews of a nation : but this is a maxim ' controlled ' in Ireland. What we want is depopulation. Make Ireland a desert, and all will be weU. Have a grazier and his family for every 2000 acres, and then we shall be as England wishes us to be. If the army is idle, let it find employment in gathering taxes. If we still need more depletion, take our surplus to the colonies and employ them as a screen between his Majesty's subjects and their savage neighbours. When our island is a desert, we will send all our raw material to England, and receive from her all our manufactured articles. A leather coinage will be all we want, separated, as we shall then be, from all human kind. We shall have lost all : but we may be left in peace, as we shall have no more to tempt the plunderer." The Modest Proposal has had thousands of readers for one that this Answer to the Craftsman has had. The former needs no such knowledge of Irish affair's for its apprehension: but, special as is its object, the ironj- of the Answer is as perfect in its way. With one or two other leaders of what was so far a National Party in Ireland, Swift became an oracle in all matters aifect- ing the public weal. AVhatever differences might before have divided them. Swift and Ai'chbishop King were now entii-ely united as Irish patriots.! Disputes and perplexities were sub- * See Boulter's Lettcm, vol. II. p. lie regarded the Irish authorities. A 30. young nobleman, ivho had just taken t King's bitterness, in his old age, hisdegree,wasbroughttobeintroduced ■was almost equal to that of Swift to the Archbishop, who sat propt up himself. Burdy, in his ij7« n/,S'7.'6'Zfo«, with pillows. " One piece of advice I tells a story of King, which shows how have to give you, my Lord," said he : Chap. XV.] LAST CHAPTER IiST SVIFT'S PUBLIC TfORE. 417 mitted to their decision, and to Swift, above all, an unstinted reverence was paid. A reference to some incidents in which he is concerned, may help to give us an idea of the position that he held in these later years. In 1729, he received the freedom of the City from the Corporation. Permanently settled in Ireland for life, he began to accept, with a pretence of gratifica- tion, the homage of praise so lavishly offered to him. The days of prosecution were ended: but instead, the snarling of opponents fretted him, and he seems to have resolved, by the acceptance of proifered honour, and hj ostensibly assuming the place which general report assigned to him as Irish Patriot, to check their backbiting and slanders. The freedom of the city was an honour conferred rarely, and only on men high in place and power : in the case of Swift, it was the spontaneous offering of Ireland to the Drapier. In his speech of thanks * he accepted the authorship of the Drapier's Letters. He shewed in what he claimed to have deserved well of the State. He repudiated with indignation the assertion that he was a Jacobite, or false to the Protestant succession, although he claimed the right, "with many wise and good men," to dislike some things in the public proceedings in both kingdoms. An ill-advised and crack-brained Irish peer, named Lord Allen, who had sought Swift's friendship in and out of season, had been rash enough to upbraid the Corporation with their treason- able extravagance, in conferring such an honour on the enemy of King George. This gave Swift the opportmiity he desired. In a public advertisement he gave the lie to Lord Allen: he held him up to public indignation in the speech of thanks : and not content with this, he gibbets him to an unenviable immor- tality, as " Traulus." He invents for him the excuse of madness, '■ be as unlike the rest of the Lords of tJie Lord Mayor and some of the Ireland as you can, and you'll do very Aldermen of the city of Dublin., well." (Burdy's Zife of Skelton : when his ZordsJtip came to present Workfs, Vol. I. p. 118). the said Dean with Ms freedom in * See The substance of mhat mas a gold hex. (Scott's Swift, Vol. VII. said by the Dean of St, Patrick's to. p. 275.) E B -il8 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. but oiily to disallow its sufSciencj' to cover his misdeeds. His madness is " but the pimp to his rices." " Positive and overbearing, Changing still, and still adhering : Spiteful, peevish, rude, untoward, Fierce iu tongue, in heart a coward ; Reputation ever tearing, Ever dearest friendship swearing : Judgment weak and passion strong, Always various, always wrong ; Provocation never waits. Where he loves, or where he hates : Talks whatever comes in his head : Wishes it were all unsaid." He traces other vices from his father's line : " Hence the mean and sordid soul Like his body, rank and foul : Hence that wild suspicions peep Like a rogue that steals a sheep : Hence he learnt the butcher's guile. How to cut your throat and smile : Like a butcher, doomed for life. In his month to wear a knife : Hence he draws his daily food, From his tenants' vital blood. " Six years later, Swift uttered a few words in public, which have come down to us, and which show us how he viewed Irish affairs, when the struggle was passing from his hands, and when, in old age and decrepitude, he was forced to give it up to others. On the 24th of April, 1736, an assembly of mer- chants met at the Guildhall to draw up a petition to the Lord Lieutenant on the lowering of the com : and Swift addressed them in the following words : * * The speech is referred to in a freemen of Bublin (Scott's Swift, Letter from Mrs. Whiteway to Dr. Vol. VII. p. 364) ; but it has not been Sheridan, of the same day, telling how printed in any edition of Swift's the Drapier had been to a meeting and works. I was fortunate enough to made a long speech, " for which he find it on the fly-leaf of one of the will be reckoned u, Jacobite." It is Ti-acts bound iu Vol. 126 of the .also referred to in the Advice to tJte Collection in the Royal Irish Academy. Chap. XV.] LAST CHAPTER IN SWIFT'S PTJBLIC "WOEK. 419 " Gentlemen, " I beg you ■vrill consider and very well weigli in your hearts what I am going to say and what I have often said before. There are several todies of men, among whom the power of this kingdom is divided — 1st, The Lord Lieutenant, Lords Justices and Council, next to these, my Lords the Bishops ; there is likewise my Lord Chancellor, and my Lords the Judges of the Land — with other eminent persons in the land, who have employ- ments and great salaries annexed. To these must be added the Commis- sioners of the Revenue, with all their under officers : and lastly, their honours of the Army, of all degrees. " Now, Gentlemen, I beg you again to consider that none of these persons .above named, can ever suffer the loss of one farthing by all the miseries ■Tinder which the kingdom groans at pre.sent. For, first, until the kingdom be entirely ruined, the Lord Lieutenant and Lords Justices must have their salaries. My Lords the Bishops, whose lands are set at a fourth part value, will be sure of their rents and their fines. My Lords the Judges .and those of other employments in the country must likewise have their salaries. The gentlemen of the revenue will pay themselves ; and as to the officers of the army, the consequence of not paying them is obvious enough. Nay, so far will those persons I have already mentioned be from suffering, that, on the contrary, their revenues being no way lessened by the fall of money, and the price of all commodities considerably sunk thereby, tliey must be great gainers. Therefore, Gentlemen, I do entreat you that as long as you live, you will look on all persons who are for lowering the gold, or any other coin, as no friends to this poor kingdom, but such, who find their private account in what will be most detrimental to Ireland. And as the absentees are, in the strongest view, our greatest enemies, first by consum- ing above one-half of the rents of this nation abroad, and secondly by turn- ing the weight, by their absence, so much on the Popish side, by weakening the Protestant interest, can there be a greater folly than to pave a bridge of gold at your own expense, to .support them in their luxury and vanity abroad, while hundreds of thousands are starving at home for want of employment." * * The occasion of the agitation in my finger," the Dean is reported to which Swift thus took part was an have answered, " they would tear you intention on the part of Archbi.shop to pieces." When the order was Boulter to take steps for the lowering actually given, Swift showed his of the gold coin. The speech was anger by hoisting a black flag over the uttered in anticipation of the procla- Cathedral. (Boulter's Letters, Vol. mation, and Swift was accused by the II. p. 246). Side by side with this Archbisnop of being the author of the there was a new introduction of popular excitement, and was threatened £2000 worth of copper coin, which, perhaps with the displeasure of the trifling as was the amount, served \n Government. " If I were but to hft rouse Swift's old indignation from its E £ 2 420 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737, Only a few da_ys later, Swift published one of the last, if not the veiy last, of his tracts on Irish pohtics. It was an Advice to the Freemen of Duhlin in the choice of a Member to represent them in Parliament. He urges upon them the absolute necessity of choosing theii- own Lord Mayor, in preference to- another candidate, who held office under the Government. No one, he says, who holds such office can be independent. Is he to displease those to whose good will he owes his bread?' "Believe me," says Swift, "these are not times to expect such an exalted degree of virtue from mortal men. Blazing stars are much more freqiiently seen than such heroical virtues." " Count upon it as a truth next to your creed, that no one person in office, of which he is master for life, whether' born here or in England, wiU ever hazai'd that office for the good of his country." Swift speaks as a sort of ci^dc Nestor :" and whatever hopes of conciliation there may once have been between him and Walpole, these last words are a plain trumpet- note of defiance to those who made themselves the tools of Walpole's Irish policy. Such are specimens of Swift's work in Irish politics. Doubtless he began with little thought of Ireland, imjielled by a hatred for the Whig domination, b}' his own exclusion from the scenes he cared for, by the disapipointment tliat som'ed himself, and by the cloud that weighed upon his friends. But he kindled to the work as it went on. The luxury of moving masses of men roused the only appetite that was verj' strong in Swift. The reality of Irish wrongs became more vivid to him, and his honest indignation more intense. His claims, indeed, were for the English born in Ireland as against the freshly likeness to the famous patent of "Wood. published a protest from Swift, was There was little reason in his protest. summoned hefore the Council : and Indeed, he avows to Lord Orrery (MS. Swift himself thought he had so much Letter, 31st March, 1737), "I quarrel cause to fear prosecution, that he sent not with the coin, but with the in- away his papers (same MS. Letter), dignity of its not being coined here." The alarm was probably due to the Strange to say, Faulkner, who had nervousness of old age and ill-health. Chap. XV.] LAST CHAPTER IjST SWIFT'S PUBLIC 'WOEK:. 421 imported emissaiies of Walpole ; and not for the native Irish themselve.s. But in spite of the narrow standpoint of his time, Swift reached out farther, and he coukl not be blind to the misery of the Irish Catholics. " Nostra miseria magna est : " simple and full of meaning as the words are, they derive their force chiefly from the thought, not of comparatively well-to-do English settlers who failed to gain Government posts, but of starving Irish, to whom were denied the very rights of men. But the freedom and privileges of his Chm'ch : its inde- pendence of Bishops who were little else than paid political -agents of Walpole : the maintenance of its property against the ■selfish encroachments of the gxeedj^ Irish squirearchy — these, too, were objects which lay close to Swift's heart, and seemed to him a part of the fight against Irish wrongs. In 1731 two Bills were brought forwai'd relating to the ■Church, one enforcing residence on the clergy, along with the hurden of building houses : the other uitended to promote the ■subdividing of large benefices. Swift was unsparing in his Chap. XVI.] PEESONAL LIFE AND SUEEOUNDINGS. 439' piirsTied by parodies of the jingling and meaningless rhjTnes; with which he flattered those in power — parodies to which Swift may have lent his aid — " Let your little verses flow, Gently, sweetly, row by row, Let the Terse the subject fit. Little subject, little wit." Almost out of the dark, as it were, there comes to us a curious- indication of the attitude Swift presented to an outsider during, these years. Thomas Amorj'jthe Unitarian, the author of that half-insane medley called the Life of John Buncle, wrote a volume called " Memoirs of Ladies." In the preface he tells, us that in a future publication he is to give an account of Dean. Swift and (another Dubhn celebrity) Mrs. Constantia Grierson. The promised publication never came : but a few of the words in which he anticipates it, ai-e not without interest. " I know the Dean well," says Amory, " though I never was within-sid& of Hs house, because I could not flatter, cringe, or meanly humour the extravagances of any man. * * * I had him often to myself in his rides- and walks, and have studied his soul when he little thought what I was- about. As I lodged for a year within a few doors of him, I knew his time of going out to a minute, and generally nicked the opportunity. He was- fond of company on these occasions, and glad to have any rational man to talk to ; for whatever was the meaning of it, lie rarely had any of his friends attending him at his exercises. * * * What gave me the easier access to- him was my being tolerably well acquainted with our politics and history and knowing many places, &o., of his beloved England * * * We talked generally of factions and religion, states, revolutions, leaders and parties : sometimes we had other subjects. Who I was he never knew. Nor did I seem to know he was Dean for a long time, not till one Sunday evening that his verger put me into his seat at St. Patrick's prayers, without my laiow- ing the Doctor sat there. * * * The Dean was proud beyond all other- mortals that I have seen, and q^uite another man when he was known." Few readers are likely to believe the whole of Amorj''s storj^ : but it is not needful to do so, in order to extract some interest out of what he says. It is by gathering such stray glimpses, that we are able to fiU in the outlines of Swift's life during 440 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. these years, and to picture him as he was, moving out and in amongst that motley Dublin society ; in the plenitude of fame and influence, holding all who came near him under the thraldom of his will, but yet, to all intents and purposes, a lonely and a disappointed man. The oracle of Dublin tradesmen, the organizer of poor law arrangements, the dispenser of a charity upon which those who could interest few others, had learned to depend,* Swift was also an encourager of the literai'y aspii-ants of Dublin. These were not a few; and in the number there were comprised three learned ladies, whose fame, such as it was, extended beyond the bounds of their own island. One of these was a Mrs. Sican,t a sprightly lady for whom Swift had some kiadly feeling, and in whose lively, if somewhat restless wit, he found a subject of half-bantering compliment. More notable stiU was 3'oung Mrs. Grierson, who seems to have been possessed of more real learning than the exaggerations of her friends would lead us to suppose. Born in 1706, she died when only 27 yeai-s of age : and in spite of adverse fates in her earlier years, she had managed, so it was said, to become a perfect adept in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Mathematics, History, Philosophy, and Divinity. The cycle of her knowledge was large enough to malie us fancj' the whole to be fabulous : but she gave evidence of the pai*tial truth of the reports in editions of Tacitus and Terence, by means of which she secured the patronage of Lord Carteret and the friendship of Swift. The last of the three, whose fame cast a lustre on Dublin, was Mrs. Barber : and in her, too, absurd as were the praises lavished on her, we are bound to * A number of old women, afflicted Orrery ascribes to Iiim. with various ailments, and pursuing + Swift wrote a letter introducing such chance vocations as were open to Mrs. Sican (or Sykins, as it is some- them, were in receipt of regular aid times spelt) to Pope. " She has," he from Swift. Cancerina, Stumpa- says, " a very good taste of poetry, has nympha, Fritterilla, and the like, read much, and, 'ATHAN SWIFT. [1727-1737. time. An invitation from lier had some piquancy ; and Swift played with it, even though he never was able to acceiDt it. When Gay makes an attempt of a new Idnd in the Fables, Swift's interest in it is gi-eater than in the proscribed Polly. He sees in it exactly what suited the genius of his friend, and can- didly confesses that his own attempts in the same kind had failed. * But it was destined to be Gay's last effort. In the following December (1732) he was suddenly cut off by a fever. It was Pope who sent the news to Swift : and with a presage of the ill-tidings, Swift could not bear to open the letter for five days. "He was indeed the most amiable by far, his qualities were the gentlest," says Pope. In the midst of his last agony, Gay had asked for Swift. No two men could have been more unlike. Yet their love was such as made Pope see that one of Swift's " principal calls to England is at an end." The blow involved, for Swift, the loss of one more ray of the fast- receding brightness that was left in his life. He receives it almost with an attempt at callousness. " I am only concerned," he says, " that long living has not hardened me." A calmer spirit, and one whose sj'mpathy with Swift was more deeply rooted, in opinion, in humom-, perhaps also in associa- tion, thair that of any contemporary, was also nearing his end. This was Arbuthnot. Conscious of then- mutual love, the two friends sometimes remained silent to one another for yeai-s. When Gay died Arbuthnot wrote to Swift, f and received a reply in the old tone, but with added sadness. Arbuthnot was bowed down by bereavements and ill-health. Like Swift, he feels the world to be out of joint. The two friends ai-e ready to enter into the efforts and aims of then- younger contemporaries : but it is with a sense of being spectators rather than actors. The ■* He explains his own method. f It is in this letter that Arbuthnot " I found a moral first, and studied for applies to Curll, the biographical bird a fable, but could do nothing that of prey, a phrase whose authorship is pleasedme.andsoleftofi that scheme often -nrongly attributed to others, for ever." Sivift to Gay, July 10, "that he has added u, new terror to 1732. death." H. XVII.] LATER LITERARY WORK AND CORRESPONDENCE. 459 banter, the sarcasm, the glimmer of aifectation so visible in the letters of Bolingbroke and Pope, and in which Swift sometimes instinctively follows them, drop away when he and Arbuthnot speak to one another. In a letter written after a period of silence,* Swift, as it were, gxeets Arbuthnot on the very threshold of death. He explains, with a confidence he would have used to no other, the various reasons of health that jjre- vent his coming over : and adds with something of mild sarcasm, " I could not live with Lord Bolingbroke, or Mr. Pope : they are both too temperate and too wise for me, and too profound and too poor." There is doubtless much overdrawn gloom in the later letters of Swift and Ai-buthnot. Swift suffers from a disease of sadness. He despises his fellows in Ireland, he saj's, yet he cannot live without them. Arbuthnot thinks the world is going apace to destruction. Ireland may be bad ; but it is better than England: "for religion may exist over there for some twenty or thirtj^ years longer ; here it is dead and gone." All this was morbid, narrow, and doubtless false in feeling. But we cannot forget that it was only what others, younger, brighter, and with more of life before them than either Swift or Arbuthnot, also felt. The last letter which Swift received from Arbuthnot was in October, 1734. He had sought a little health in the breezes of Hampstead : but the hand of death, as he knew well, was upon him. " I am going out of this troublesome woiid," he says, "and you amongst the rest of my friends shall have my last prayers and good wishes. * * * I most earnestly desired and begged of God (in a recent severe attack) that he would take me. * * * I am in the case of a man almost in harbour and then blown back to sea. * * * I am afraid, my dear friend, we shall never see one another more, in this world." In such a spirit Arbuthnot waited for death, which released * Printed first from the MS. in the it conjecturally 1733 ; but it seems to British Museum, by Mr. Cunningham have been written at the close of in his edition of the Lives of the 1732,inreply to Arbuthuot's postscript Poets {\&M). Mr Cunningham dates to Pope's letter of 5th Dec, 1732. 460 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. liim in the following spring, liis piety mingled to the end with much of his half-hmTaorous, half-philosop>hical, apathy, which suggests to old Alderman Barber the saying of Garth, as applicable to Ai-buthnot, "that he was glad to die, being weary of having his shoes pulled off and on."* The news of his death "struck me," says Swift, "to the heart." The kindly moderator of bitterness, the eas}^ spu-it that had brightened so many lives, whose insight was so keen though his chaiity was so large, was gone from amongst them. " If the world had but a dozen Ai'buthnots," Swift had written long before,! "Iw'ould bmrn my Travels." Ai-buth- not had been raised above the envy of othe;rs by his carelessness of ambitious aims, as much as Swift bj' his surpassing power. Other friends lived on. Lord Bathurst, whose peerage was a memorial of the crisis which had cost Swift so much anxiety in 1711, when the Ministrj- had been saved only bj' a desperate expedient, was now, with Bolingbroke, Pope's chief literary friend ; and the sprightly wit and gaiety that delighted three generations of literarj'' men brought not a little brightness also to Swift. Bathurst's letters ai'e perhaps somewhat forced in their style of lavish compliment, but they pleased Swift so far as to bring him to copy something of their style in his replies. After a long silence, Batliurst renewed their correspon- dence in 1729, by some lively banter on Swift's Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor from heing a Burden. Swift's answer seems to have been drawn in the same vein : and writing again in September, 1730, Bathm-st threatens to take revenge by shewing that Swift has borrowed his numbers from Dryden and Waller, his thoughts from Virgil and Horace, and his humom- from Cervantes and Eabelais. He is sm-e, at least, that he has seen something Hlie them all in Swift's books. By seeming depreciation, he emphasizes Swift's claims to praise. As to Swift's power of writing English — well, that was onty a matter of style. If Swift is a patriot, there have * Barber to Sivift, April 22, 1730. f Sivift to Pope, Sept. 29, 172C. Ch. xvil] later liteeart ■work and correspondence. 461 been patriots before. He can doubtless Idnclle men's passions. But surely he, a clergyman, can have little cause for boasting if, by an hour's work in his study, he has often made three kingdoms drunk at once. To this banter, livety enough in its way, Swift replies in much the same tone. From the kingdom " whither Lord Bathurst and his crew sent liim sixteen years before," and where, since then, he has been " studying as well as practising revenge, malice, envy, and hatred, and all uncharitableness," he reports some of the puny efforts by which "they strive to keep up their spirits " — Sheridan's Collection of Jests, Pilldngton's complimentary poems, Mrs. Barber's literarj^ ambitions : and he repays Lord Bathurst's ironj' thiis : — * "When Sir William Temple writ an essay preferring the ancient learning to the modern, it was said that what he writ showed he was mistaken ; because he discovered more learning in that essay than the ancients could pretend to. This, I think, was too great a compliment, but it is none to tell you that I would give the best thing I ever was supposed to publish in exchange to be author of your letters. I pretend to have been an improver of the irony on the subject of satire and j)raise : but I will surrender up my title to your Lordship. Your injustice extends further. You accuse me of endeavouring to break off all correspondence with you, and at the same time demonstrate that the accusation is against yourself; you threaten to pester me with letters if I will not write. If I were sure that my silence would force you to one letter in a quarter of a year, I would be wise enough never to write to you as long as I live. I swear your Lordship is the fii'st person alive that ever made me lean upon my elbow when I was writing to him, and by conse- quence this will be the worst letter I ever writ. I have never been so severely attacked, nor in so tender a point, nor by weapons against which I am so ill able to defend myself, nor by a person from whom I so little deserved so cruel a treatment, and who in his own conscience is so well convinced of my innocence upon every article. I have endorsed your letter with your name and the date, and shall leave it to my executors to be * The letter is from an unpublished Temple, especially with the reserve as MS. amongst the Bathurst papers at to the exaggerated compliment, is not Longleat. It is undated, but is clearly without interest, as evidence of Swift's a reply to Lord Bathurst's of 9 Sept., real opinion of his early patron. 1730. The reference to Sir William 462 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. publislxed at tlie head of all tlie libels that have been writ against me, to be printed in five volumes in folio after my death ; and among the rest a very scrub one in verses lately written by myself. For having some months ago much and often offended the ruling jiarty, and often -worried by libellers, I was at the pains of writing one in their style and manner, and sent it by an imknown hand to a Whig printer, who very faithfully published it. I took special care to accuse myself but of one fault of which I am really guilty, and so shall continue, as I have done these sixteen years, till I see cause to reform ; but in the rest of the satire I chose to abuse myseK with the direct reverse of my character, or at least in direct opposition to one part of what you are pleased to give me." Bathurst writes again in April, 1731, in a series of rather forced epigrams based on the irony so cultivated by the circle amongst whom he moved, and the wit of which is so aj)t to pall from repetition. The tone of the whole letter is summed up in the words with which it closes : "In this farce of life, wise men pass their time in mirth, while fools only are serious. Adieu. Continue to be merry and wise : but never turn serious, or cunning." To witticisms such as these. Swift, with all his gloom, is always readj^ to make a happy reply. As in his earher friend- ship with Prior, so now with Lord Bathurst, he accepted the cai-eless cynicism that called itself a philosophy of life, as a relief from heavier thoughts. He allowed it to tm-n his mind from disappointment, from the thought perhaps of wasted opportunity ; from the loneliness of his present life, and from the fear of calamity to come. We dwell on the record of friendships lilce these, with men so different, because it helps us to define to om'selves some- what more clearly Swift's attitude during these later years. Side by side with the almost despairing struggle for Ireland, and beyond the narrow circle of Dublin society, that mter- course gave Swift a wider outlook. It helped him to live in the past, and afforded him an escape from the gloom of the present. Literary history, as has been said, assigns a larger place to the later friendship of Swift, Bolingbroke, and Pope. These Ch. XVII.] LATER LITERAET WOEK AND COEEESPONDENCE. 463 three stood, alone, at a height wliich none of their con- temporaries reached. More than all others, they had chosen parts which gradually drew them out of harmony with their age, which placed them in sharp antagonism to the powers that now prevailed, and which made them look on one another as the leaders of a forlorn hoj)e. Somethmg of the same spirit that spoke in the Dissertations upon Parties spoke also in Gulliver, in the Dunciad, and in the Epistles. But, after all, the bond was an intellectual more than a personal one. Swift had no doubt been attracted by the early brilliancy of St. John. But even in old days their personal sj'mpathy had not been strong. Swift had been repelled by St. John's caprices, by his un- abashed debaucheries, above all bj'' the affectation which was the canker-worm to his genius. He had repudiated with indig- nation the Jacobite leanings ascribed to himself and to the Ministry whom he served : but a few years had shewn him how deeply BoHngbroke was involved with the Pretender. Over all that episode Swift was obliged to drop a veil ; and when he accepted Bolingbroke's later view of his own lot, as that of a persecuted patriot. Swift must have been content to ignore all in Bolingbroke's action that had given warrant to the most bitter accusers of the Queen's last Ministry. The same flaw has aheady been noticed in his relations with Pope. He had become the patron of Pope in the days when his patronage could earn for the poet the attention of the gi-eat. By his influence Pope had at first refrained from joining the triumphant Whigs, and latterly had cultivated the Tories. Swift had sjonpathized Avith Pope in his dislike of the monied classes. He had sjanpathized with him still more in his indig- nation against Walpole's encom'agement of the dunces. Then* political position, their literaiy sympathies, the chcle of their friends, their intellectual partnership, had all brought them near to one another. But there were always some grains of dissatisfaction in their friendship. Swift was alive to the petti- ness, the vanitj', the lack of generosity, in Pope. He was 464 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. ready to greet the Dunciad with applause, and to accept Pope's heralding of its approach with the words, Cedite, Eomani scriptores, cedite Graii, Nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade. But it was no real sympathy of nature which bound together Pope and Swift. Pope borrowed or imitated the mood of Swift, just as he did that of the friend of each season of his life. But a shrewd observer thought it was well that their later inter- course became no closer than it was. The sudden breaking awaj'' from Pope's house in 1727 may have had some motive more deep than that which Swift assigned. Swift very probably never fully admitted to himself any real distrust of Bolingbroke and Pope. It is to them that he owed the keenest incitement to renewed endeavours on a greater stage. At times, from their prompting, he was ready to break from his banishment, to come back to the old scenes, to set the world stuTing again. He is wearied of the " smaller game : " he will return to England and " send for the Dictator from the plough."* Again he would fain be assisting Pope in his literary schemes, or riding between Twickenham and Dawley, or discussing Polybius over his wine. He would like to take part " in a new entertainment " — to crush Walj)ole's Ministry : and by their help he would get into a better world before he has done with it, and " not die here, like a poisoned rat in a hole." But the mood is short. He soon relapses into listlessness, and feels how unjfit he is, broken in health, to ask these younger friends to bear -nith his infirmities. Their nearer intercom'se implied an effort and a strain for which he felt himself unequal. To the last, indeed, he addresses them in language of warm affection. But he could not avoid seeing their affectation, and the insincerity of manj'- of their boasts. " I renounce yom- whole philosophy," he says, " be- cause it is not yom- practice." They have adopted their maxims * Sifift to BolinglroVi', March 21, Scott, is corrected by Mr. El win in his 17jg. Tlio date, vrrongly given by oditionof Pope's Lettern, Vol. II. p.l88. Ch. XVII.] LATER LITERAEY "WORK AND CORRESPONDENCE. 465 of " contemptus mundi " too easily and too j-oung. The gloom that he felt eating into his own heart and poisoning his life, the misanthropy for which he sometimes despised himself, but from which he could not escape, was in Pope's mouth, as Smft well knew, nothing but an affectation. The poet's dislikes were of those who hm-t him, or who came athwart his path : those of Swift were of human natiu-e as a whole. But it was no unkindly trait in Swift that none of the weaknesses he saw in Pope, lessened his feeling of habitual regard. " Farewell, my dearest friend," are the words with which he closes almost every letter, even as the gloom was becoming more settled, and the shadow of coming calamity lengthening before him. There was nothing inconsistent with Swift's dignity, in the desire he expresses more than once to find a place in the creations of his friends. The fame that his own works had earned, was cast aside by him with something of contempt. Any profits that they might have brought him, he had uniformlj' neglected : and, with some cj'nicism, he declares that his object in cultivating literature had been to gain that social distinction which was not his by birth. But the honour which his friends might bring him, he did not desj)ise. " Orna me," he says to Pope in 1735, " I have the ambition, and it is very earnest as well as in haste, to have one Epistle inscribed to me while I am alive, and you just in the time when wit and wisdom are in the height." So he had before said to Gaj', " I sometimes reproach j'ou for not honoiuring me by letting the world know we are friends." Aiad so again, as late as 1738, he begs of Bolingbroke, if he wiites a history of his own time, "that my name maj' be squeezed in amongst the few subalterns, quorum jyars parva fui." If the desu'e is faultj', it is, at least, not on the side of insufficient modesty, or of undue depreciation of his friends' powers of assigning immortality. Amongst the less famous correspondents of Swift's later years, it would be unjust to omit one whose frank and outspoken advice served him in better stead, perhaps, than the elaborate 466 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. affectations of his more brilliant literary compeers. This was Lady Bettj' Germaine, a daughter, of Lord Berkelej', and the friend of Swift in the eai'ly days of Dublin Castle and of Cran- ford. Lady Betty had, if we are to believe the story told by the Duchess of Marlborough, got into some trouble in her youth. But these irregularities had been covered by a subsequent marriage with Sir John Germaine, who had left her a wealthy widow in 1718. She now lived at Draji^on in Northampton- shire : and the scandals that were caused by early errors did not prevent her mixing with the best society of England down to a ripe old age. Of all Swift's later con-espondents, she shews the most integrity, the most outspoken condemnation of his faults, the most of that sincerity of friendship, which eschews flattery. She sought to soothe his misanthropy ; but when her efforts fail, she is not slow to rebuke his petu- lance : and it might have been well for Swift if he had more often heard words as plain as these from Lady Betty : — " As to your creed in politics, I will heartily and sincerely subsorilDe to it, (that I detest avarice in courts, corruption in ministers, scliisms in religion, illiterate fawning betrayers of the Church in mitres). But at the same time, I prodigiously want an infallible judge to determine when it is really so : for, as I have lived longer in the world, and seenmany changes, I know those out of power and place always see the faults of those in, with dreadful large spectacles. * * * So e.\perience has taught me how wrong, unjust, and senseless, party factions are ; therefore, I am determined never wholly to believe any side or jiarty against tire other : and to show that I will not, as my friends are in and out of all sides, so my house receives them altogether : and those people meet here, who have, and would fight in any other place."* It was one of the symptoms of Swift's fretfulness during these years, that comparatively small annoyances told on his spirits in a degree that to a healthy man would have been impossible. One of these sources of annoyance arose from Lady Betty's friend, the Countess of Suffolk. In common with the opposition faction, Swift had, in the later days of George Lady Betty Oermaine to Swift, Feb. 28, 17^|. Ch. XVII] later IITERART "WORK AND CORRESPONDENCE. 467 the First, cultivated the friendship of Mrs. Howard (as she then was) as a probable counterpoise to the influence of Walpole. The favour which Mrs. Howard enjoyed, however, was under- mined by the tactics of the Princess of Wales — tactics so strange in the domestic annals even of royalty that shrewd observers may well have been blind to them until the clue to the secret was obtained. The Princess, even after she became Queen, ruled her husband by means of a favourite who was at once the instrument of her dishonour and of her ambition. Through the Queen, Walpole's influence continued : and that of Mrs. Howard, created Countess of Suff'olk, was absolutely set at nought. Upon her therefore fell the brunt of the opposi- tion anger. By her they felt themselves deceived, disappointed, and misled. Her insincerity, her courtier-lOie promises, her indifference to friendship — all these became their theme ; and Swift was not the least prominent in the denunciation, refusing to Ksten to the apologies of Ladj^ Betty Germaine. He had wrongs of his own — partly owing to the non-payment of the thousand pounds, which had waited since the days of Lord Oxford, and which he had hoped might now have been secm-ed. Still worse. Swift fancied that she had misled him by a suggestion of a settlement in England. The advice seems to have been as honestly given by Mrs. Howard as she herself avers. " If I cannot justify the advice I gave J'ou," she writes in answer to his reproaches,* "from the success of it, I gave you my reasons for it : and it was your business to have judged of my capacity from the solidity of my arguments. If the principle was false, you ought not to have acted upon it." The retort is unanswerable : and nothing but the irritation of dis- appointment and ill-health could have led Swift to charge his mistake upon another rather than himself. A more worthy, if not a more reasonable ground of ill-will, was'due to^^the fancied neglect of Gay. Gay had written his Fables for one of the royal children: and the appointment of Gentleman-Usher, which * The Countess of Suffolk to Smift, Sept. 25, 1731. H H 2 468 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. was offered as his reward, was deemed by himself and his friends — Swift amongst the rest — unequal to his deserts. All these causes served to feed Swift's anger. Even as early as 1727 he had written a character of Mrs. Howard, which, with some flattering phrases, contains sarcasm in much gi-eater quantity. The key-note of it is her excellence as a courtier. " In all other offices of life she acts with justice, generosity, and truth." "If she had never seen a Court, it is not impossible that she might have been a friend." " Her talents as a courtier will spread, enlarge, and multiply to such a degree, that her private virtues, for want of room and time to operate, will be laid up clean (like clothes in a chest), to be used and put on whenever satiety, or some reverse of fortune, or increase of ill-health (to which last she is subject) will dispose her to retire." That Swift was not without his suspicions, when he wrote these words, is clear. But they were probably intended, and read, as a warning of possible failings rather than as an actual picture of the reality. In 1730 and 1731, however, then- antici- pations seem to Swift to be realized : and he tm'ns upon the false promises of the favourite with an anger which she did not deserve, and which Swift had earned no right to shew. It is some satisfaction that the indignation shewed itself chiefly in letters to Ladj^ Suffolk herself, and that although it cooled, it did not end, their friendship.* A trifling occasion still further complicated his relations to the Court. In 1731, a counterfeit letter was sent to the Queen, pm'porting to be from Swift, and praising, in terms so lavish as to be absm'd, the Irish poetess, Mrs. Barber, whom Swift had taken under his patronage and who was now in London, seeking to extend her literary fame. The letter seems to assume that the neglect of Mrs. Barber was a new instance of that disregard * From certain expressions it lias to the Countess herself. Swift was sometimes been supposed that Swift peevisli from disappointment, age and changed from open Ilattery to some- ill-healtli : to be deceitful, either in thing of concealed abuse. But nothing praise or blame, was to him im- is more bitter than the letters addressed possible. Ch. XVIL] later IITEEAET WOEK AND COEEESPONDENCE. 469 for Irish claims whicli distinguished England. Such a travesty of his work as Drapier was enough to irritate Swift: but still more was he annoyed at the supposition that he had sought for anyone the patronage of the Queen. Both through Pope and the Countess of Suifolk, he hastens, with almost needless eagerness, to disavow the authorship of the obnoxious letter. Its concoction still remains a mystery. Of all possible solu- tions that is most unlikely which would ascribe it to Swift : that most likely which would suppose it to be the work of some foolish or indiscreet admirer of Mrs. Barber. Even the poor authoress herself, much as her genius was overrated even in Swift's estimate, was scarcely capable of conduct so damaging to her own reputation as this. Another annoyance of these later j^ears was the result, not of Swift's proneness to irritation, but of his helpfulness to those who sought his aid. We have seen how the curate, Matthew Pilkington, and his wife, another of the aspiring authoresses of Dublin, had managed to push themselves into his favour. Over-estimating their literar}"- pretensions, and deceived as to their honesty, Swift had pressed Matthew Pilkington on the notice of his London friends. Alderman Barber,* whom Swift had helped to fortune in the days of his power, was in 1732 on the eve of his mayoralty; and Swift, who had brought Pilkington to the notice of Pope and Gay and Arbuthnot, now begs Barber to make him Chaplain dm-ing his year of office. The request was granted ; but Swift soon found cause to repent of his recom- mendation, when Pilkington shewed himself in his true colours, as a coxcomb and a knave, t * Mrs. Pilkington (^Memoirs, 1. p. his eyes, which were very black and 159), gives us a description of Barber sparkling." from the life. " On account of his + Barber was obliged to reveal to opposition to the Excise Act, he was Swift the knavery of his proUije : and then the darling of the people. He Bolingbroke, with even more blunt- was but indifferent as to his person, or ness, remonstrates : " Pray, Mr. Dean, rather homely than otherwise ; but he be a little more cautious in your had an excellent understanding, and recommendations." (BoUnglroke to the liveliness of his genius shone in Smft, April 12, 1734). 470 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. In these later j^ears Swift's melancholy found relief nowhere more easily than in those literary occupations that in earlier days he had striven to thrust into the background, amongst the stin-ing scenes of political activity. In literary fame, too, which he had before neglected and despised. Swift now found a solace amid his gloom. The tribute of that fame was offered from strange sources, and it brought to Swift a content not unmixed with something of irony. In one of his latest letters to her. Swift tells Lady Suffollc that he is resolved to have a hand " in state scribble no more." The words referred to that angry fight that was now being waged against Walpole's Ministrj^ under the guidance of Bolingbroke, Wyndham, and Pulteney ; and it was well for Swift's fame and for his comfort that in the main he refrained. The anger against the Minister had lost even the dignity of a party struggle, and had dwindled into the attacks of a selfish faction, backed up by the exaggerated anathemas of a literary clique. Swift's combats were now fought on Irish soil ; and the time he could spai'e from his struggles there, was given to work in which his genius found a miich more fitting channel. " I have been several months," he writes to Gay,* with probable exaggeration of his aversion to sustained effort, " \mting near five hundred lines on a pleasant subject, only to tell what my friends and enemies will say of me after I am dead." " My poetical fountain is drained," he tells Pope ; t but it contmiied nevertheless to flow copiously enough. The words to Gay de- scribed one of his most characteristic pieces — the Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift. Never attempting to rise into great heights of poetry — studiouslj^ keeping himself to the note of ironical humour which he has chosen, and which admits hints of bitter cj'nicism, though it never allows these to break its equanimity — Swift has here achieved a success which more elaborate * Smift to Gay, Dec. 1, 1731. Scott Again the date is -wroDgly giyen by- has misdated the letter. Scott. t Smift to Pope, June 12, 1732. Cii. XVII.] LATER LITERARY "WORK ANB CORRESPONDENCE. 471 poetry would have missed. Keen observation, subtle irony, and bitter cynicism, never took a lighter or an easier di'ess. Here shift the scene, to represent How those I love my death lament ; Poor Pope would grieve a mouth, and Gay A week, and Arbuthnot a day ; St. John himself will scarce forhear To bite his pen, and drop a tear. The rest will give a shrug, and cry, " I'm sorry — hut we all must die I " IndifEerence, clad in wisdom's guise, All fortitude of mind supplies : For how can stony bowels melt, In those who never pity felt 1 When we are lashed, they kiss the rod Resigning to the will of God." The defence of his own political attitude, which the piece contains, is bold enough ; but, as giving his own conception of his task in satire, the lines that follow have even more of interest, and that interest is all the deeper when we contrast their sincerity with the pompous vapomings of Pope, at such times as he is in the humour of advancing his frequent claims to magnanimity : " Perhaps I may allow the Dean Had too much satire in his vein ; And seem'd determined not to starve it. Because no age could more deserve it. Yet malice never was his aim ; He lash'd the vice, but spared the name : No individual could resent. Where thousands equally were meant ; His satire points at no defect, But what all mortals may correct ; For he abhorr'd that senseless tribe Who call it humour when they gibe : He spared a hump, or crooked nose. Whose owners set not up for beaux. True genuine dulness moved his pity, Unless it ofEer'd to be witty. Those who their ignorance confest, He ne'er offended with a jest ; But laugh'd to hear an idiot quote A verse from Horace learn'd by rote.'' 472 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. Shorter poetical pieces followed one another profusely during these years, each telling us something of the restless and fierce misanthropy and contempt that were extending their thraldom day by day. The Beasts' Confession pictures the transparent affectations of humanitj', by simihtudes of brutes. He duly apologises for a comparison only too com- plimentary to men ; but he has done his best by giving onty the lowest orders of brutes — in describing the ass, who blames nature that " he is a wit both born and bred ; " the swine, who feels it needful to ask pardon if he " in diet was perhaps too nice ; " the ape, who " Found his virtues too severe For our corrupted times to bear ; " and the goat, whose vow of chastity must excuse his prudish nicety. In 1731, the stiiTing lines on the Place of the Damned, appeared, as a Broadsheet, in Dublin. Hell, he says, is where the damned do mostly congregate. A catalogue, too clearly embracing the very plagues of Irish society, so often satirised by Swift, is given, and he closes thus : — " Then let us no longer by Parsons be flammed, For we know by these marks the place of the damned ; And Hell to be sure is at Paris or Borne : How happy for us that it is not at home." To the same period most probably belong those verses. On the Day of Judgment, which have come down to us only through Lord Chesterfield's quotation of them in a letter to Voltaire.* Short as they are, and although we may perhaps accept the reason at which Chesterfield hints, as that of their suppression * Cliesterfield to Voltaire, Aug. 27, it would be hard to produce another 1752. "La piece," says Chesterfield, passageinwhichSwiftis,i«!!e«i;io«aZZ)/, " n'a jamais 6t6 imprimie, tous en so outspoken in his ridicule of a devinerez bien la raison, mais elle est common belief as he is here. The authentique. J'en ai I'original terit effect of what be says is often the de sa propre main." The reason we are same ; but he is unconscious of the meant to divine, is clearly the sarcasm bearing of his vrords. Here the ridicule on an accepted dogma : and certainly is conscious and avowed. Ch. XVII.] LATEE LITEEARY "WOEK AND COEEESPONDENCE. 473 by Swift himself, they yet serve as a condensed specimen of Swift's skill of grim liumom- at its highest pitch : " With a whirl of thought oppress'd, I sunk from reverie to rest. An horrid vision seiz'd my head ; I saw the graves give up their dead ! Jove, arm'd with terrors, burst the skies, And thunder roars, and lightning flies 1 Amaz'd, confus'd, its fate unknown. The world stands trembling at his throne I "While each pale sinner hung his head, Jove, nodding, shook the heavens, and said : ' Offending race, of human kind, By nature, reason, learning, blind, You who through frailty step'd aside. And you who never fell — through pride ; You who in different sects were shamm'd, And come to see each other damn'd ; (So some folks told you, but they knew No more of Jove's designs than you), — The world's mad business now is o'er, And I resent these pranks no more. — I to such blockheads set my wit ! I damn such fools ! — Go, go, you're lit.' " The year 1733 saw the Rhapsody on Poetry,* which stands side by side with Pope's Epistle to Augustus, and transcends the latter in its force of sweeping sarcasm. Comparing the two poems, Pope's with all its marvellous skill, all its command of metre and language, all the subtlety of its satire, yet falls short of the other in variety. There is in the poem a reminis- cence of Gulliver, in its contempt of humanity ; a reminiscence of the Drapier, in its obstinate independence ; a reminiscence of the Tale of a Tub, in the grasp and yet the simplicity of its metaphor. As poetry, perhaps as a pure literary effort, it is inferior to Pope ; but its power and resistless force of sarcasm hold us in a gi'asp compai'ed with which Pope's highest efforts * It was published anonymously in read of, who hides his head in a hole, London in 1733. " Your method of while all Ms feathers and tail stick concealing yourself," says Pope, " puts out." Pope to Sivi/t, Jan. 6, 173|. me in mind of the Indian bird I have ^74 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. seem weals: and almost tame. Quotation would mai* tlie force of the satire. But, looking back to the days of the Pindaric odes, and to the dread with which Swift once regarded his muse, there is not a little of biographical interest in the two maxims that follow : " Not empire to the risicg sun By valour, conduct, fortune won ; Not highest wisdom in debates, For framing laws to govern states ; Not skill in sciences profound So large to grasp the circle round ; Such heavenly influence require As how to strike the Muses' lyre. Not beggar's brat on buUc begot Not bastard of a pedlar Scot ; Not boy brought up to cleaning shoes The spawn of Bridewell or the stews Not infants dropped, the spurious pledges Of gypsies litter'd under hedges, Are so disqualified by fate To rise in Church, or law, or state, As he whom Phffibus in his ire, Has blasted with poetic fire." Besides these, he tells Gay in 1731,* that he has " two great works in hand — one to reduce the whole politeness, wit, humom', and stj'le of England into a short system, for the use of all persons of quality, and particularly of all maids of honour. The other is of almost equal importance : I may call it the Avhole duty of servants, in aboiit twenty several stations, fi'om the steward and waiting woman, down to the scullion and pantry boy." These two were the Polite Conversations, and the Directions to Servants. The first of these has a special bio- graphical interest. Swift was now interested, more than he ever had been, in the fate of his books. Keenly striving to increase his store of savings, he was perhaps more readj' now than before to make them yield some gain. But poor Mrs. Barber wrote to him, in extreme distress. Her literary projects had failed, her health was broken, and debt was * Swift to Gay, Aug. 28, 1731. Ch. XTII.] LATEE LITERAET WOEK and COEEESPOlsDENCE. 475 accumulating. Kindly as she had been received by Swift's friends, the kindness did not feed her. To help her in these straits, Swift, in one of the last years of his activity, sends her the manuscript of the Polite Conversations, that she may make of it what she can. The avaiice, the mercenary aims, the cynical selfishness of Swift had, at least, the quality of singular inconsistency. The other " great work," the Directions to Servants, has had to stand the brmit of much severe criticism, from the days of Orrery down to om- own. Orrery found it trifling : others have dilated upon its grovelling view of human nature, and the coarseness with which it is stained. Any discussion of these traits must be reserved for our general estunate of Swift's genius. To almost every part of that genius, doubtless, some- tliing of the same coarseness clings ; but without the keen insight, without the deliberate and relentless dissection, without the plain and homely humour, without the contempt for con- ventional grades of dignity, which are so distinctive of the Directions to Servants, that genius could not exist.* ♦ Though imprinted during Swift's sible harm his book may do, by a prin- life, the Directions to Servants was ciple not flattering to human morals : handed about and discussed ; and this Omnia quse possunt soribi, plerique ma- may have procured for Swiftthe doubt- gistro ^ ,, _e j.1. J J- J.- £ s Txirpia jam nullo facta docente tenent. f ul honour of the dedication of a trans- lation of a coarse Latin poem written From the name (taken from Saxon in Germany, which seems not to have Grab') the title of the Grobians, for been without suggestion for Swift's coarse, dirty fellows, became common, own book. The Latin version was There was an English verse translation entitled " F. DedeUndi Ludus Satyri- in 1739 which was dedicated to Swift, cus de tiiorvm simpUcitate et rustici- and it had been preceded by another tate, vulffo dictiis Groiianus ; " and is in 1605. On the whole this later dated 1552. The purpose of this book English version, which is free, bears may be gathered from the author's ofE the palm from the Latin for filth, own description : There is a superficial similarity to his Quae fuerant facienda veto, fugiendaqne own satire which makes it almost mando certain that Swift knew the work : but Ut doceam gestus fceda per acta bones ; ^^^ deeper meaning of his sarcasm, and Forsitan haec aliquis jooularia scripta re- '^ ° , . , volvens ^'^^ lessons on human nature that it His specnlnm vitae cemet incs«e suae. contains are, of course, wanting in the He defends himself against the pos- verses of Dedekindus. 476 LIFE OP JOXATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. Efforts so vigorous as these told of the old power, that for thirty years had "inflamed Bations," and that could on occasion be re-awakened and shake off its lethargy. But Swift felt that the end of his activity was near. The thought was none the more welcome because he knew that his genius had not always been turned to the best account — that it had often, indeed, been wofully wasted. Now it was less in his power than ever to guide his work into the proper channel, to concen- trate his energies, or to keep himself from straying into trifles. "His imagination," he tells Pope, "was ever at fisticuffs with his judgment." At one time he would be stmig to com- punction at the trifles on which he was engaged ; at another, he flung all such prudence to the winds, and diverted his gloom by trivialities which he knew would live only to damage his reputation. It was perhaps this very sense of waning powers that led him to busy himself now in putting into shape some fragments that lay by him, and in revising with something of jjersonal care the new edition of his works which Faulkner began to issue in 1735. Swift's part in that edition has been doubted and even denied ; but there can be little hesitation, in spite of his natm-al disclaimers, in holding it to be that which received most of his own revision.* The state of the copjTight law between England and Ireland, was such, that Faulkner, had he been so minded, might have published the edition without the leave of Swift ; and some of Swift's own expressions would lead us to suj)pose that this was done.t "When Motte, his * This is indeed distinctly stated in sequent editors, a note by Deane Swift to a letter of f A'?!'(/'i to Motte, Nov. 1, 1735, Lord Oxford (Aug. 8, 1734). " These " Mr. Faulkner in printing these were the first four volumes in octavo volumes did what I much disliked which were actually revised and and yet what was not in my power to corrected by Swift himself, as indeed hinder ; and all my friends pressed were afterwards the two subsequent him to print them, and gave him what volumes, printed by Faulkner in manuscript copies they had occa- 1738." This is confirmed by internal sionally gotten from me." evidence, though denied by some sub- Ch.xvii.] later literaet work and correspondence. 477 London bookseller, remonstrated, Swift disclaimed all re- sponsibility. It may well be, that lie bad some unwillingness to let an edition appear under his auspices, when he had enjoyed the freedom of anonymity so long. But when the publication was resolved upon, he probably thought it best to acquiesce, and to do what he could, at least through his friends, to secure its correctness. It did not, certainly, forfeit, for Faulkner, the friendship of the Dean ; and not long after we find him using a letter of introduction from Swift to Pope and Bai'ber. A year later we find Swift defending Faulkner's action to Motte, as a fair reprisal on the oppressive trade policy of England, and as an offence " neither against the laws of God, nor of the country he lives in," and therefore no sin. It is tolerably certam, then, that the edition is Swift's own. He even wi-ote for it Gulliver's introductory letter to Sjmipson. To him was probably due the omission of the Tale of a Tub, which was notoriously his own, but about which it pleased him to keep up a mystery more comjDlete than about any of his other works. During this same year a cmious, though trifling, literary trouble came to annoy Swift. Perhaps with some further thought of her necessities, he had sent over to Mrs. Barber the manuscript of his Rhapsody on Poetry and of his Poem to a Lady who had asked him to write on her in the heroic style. The latter poem defended his method of scom'ging vice by hiunour and ridicule, rather than by the weight of serious denunciation. He refused to pitch his wit in a higher strain, and shewed how well fitted his looser style had been to scourge the vices of a corrupt Ministry. Like the red rag to the bull, the mere thought of the Ministry had roused Swift's indignation. As he makes his interlocutor in the poem say : Mention courts, you'll ne'er be quiet On corruptions running riot. To point his description of his own satiric method. Swift di'ags in a reference to Walpole, under the transparent nick- 478 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1727—1737. name of Sir Robert Brass. Strangely enough, for one usually so hardened against attack, Walpole seems to have thought the poem worthy of prosecution ; and though the matter was soon dropped, both Mrs. Barber, as the person responsible for the lines, and Motte and Lawton Gilliver, as concerned in the publication, were subjected to examination before the Privy Council. If we may gather anything from an obscure reference to the cii'cumstances in Mr. Pilkington's Memoirs,* Matthew Pilk- ington seems to have been concerned in betraying the Dean's authorship to the Grovernment. This ill-judged show of iiTi- tation did not tend to reconcile the Dean to Walpole's dealing ■with literature, which, to indifference, seemed thus inclined to add repression. Oppressed hj deep-rooted discontent with the state of affairs, strickeii by the loss of friends and b}^ his own ill-health, ■conscious that his powers were passing with their harvest not fully reaped, Swift sank from apathy to complete silence. Another of his old friends passes away in Peterborough, the ■" hangdog whom Swift loved dearly." A new election only confirms Walpole's power. Eveiy circumstance was tortured by Swift into a new reason for despair. " You are to look upon me," he says to Pope, " as one going very fast out of the world." He seemed to himself stranded in a world where cori'uption was to rule, where liberty was dead, and where even personal independence was gone. In 1736, Bolingbroke retired to France ; and his retirement, the mixed effect of bafHed intrigue, diminished resources, and possible appre- hension of prosecution, was magnified by his friends, and by Swift amongst them, into a dignified scorn for the miry ways of English pohtics. Swift and Pope seemed to themselves to be left alone, to struggle against the universal decay around them. Very few of the old circle remained. Erasmus Lewis was still lingering in his former haunts, nursing a mfe who was sink- • Vol. I. p. 171. Ch. xyii.] later literaey work and correspondence, 479 ing into the grave. Lord Masham was now obscure in station : lie had buried, in 1734, the wife of whose health Swift had once spoken as a thing on which the fate of empires hinged: and his son was vexing his old age by misconduct. It would have been but a melancholy journey for Swift even had his health now permitted the attempt, to have come back to London to find the very shadows of the past forgotten. Through his kinsman, Deane Swift, who was now at Oxford, Swift renewed his acquaintance with William King, the witty Principal of St. Mary Hall.* It was through Eng that he endeavoured to arrange for the publication of the History of the Four Last Years of the Queen. By the aid of the Journal to Stella, Swift had revised the history, which he had wi'itten at Windsor in 1712, and its publication may have seemed to him a means of reviving scenes whose memory was so pleasant. The project excited alarm amongst all those concerned. Lewis, the old official, dreaded the revelations which the history might make. Lord Oxford, who, as the son of Swift's old patron, had a right to be heard, eagerly pressed him to refrain from pubH- cation. Bolingbroke had read it, but was not favourable. King endeavoured to temporize and dissuade, and ultimately Swift abandoned the intention for a time. But he did so with some ill-will. It is easy to see why, m old age and ill-health, he should have been anxious to tell the story of those times, when " he was a part of all that he had known." But, with something of disgust, he threw aside the scheme, and left the publication for a later hand, t * Not to be confounded with the Gazetteer. ■William King of Swift's younger days. f For arguments establishing the whose rough criticisms Swift had re- authenticity of the work published in paid by procuring for him the post of 1758, see Appendix III. CHAPTEE XVIII. THE CLOSING SCENE. 1738—1745. .(Etat. 71— 7S. Added gloom and loneliness of Swift's later years- Removal and death of Sheridan — Increase of disease — Waste of bodily strength — Longing for death — Swift and Samuel Johnson — A fi-uitless request — Swift's interest in his last literary ventures — ^A final struggle for his Church — Clouds and thick darkness — Pope's dishonesty to Swift — The publication of the letters — ThelastgKmmerings of reason — Outbursts of violence — Curators appointed — Wilson and his insults — The crisis of the disease — The long struggle over — The repose of apathy — Death in life — The final seizure — The end — The nation's grief — Estimate of Swift's character and genius. AiEEADY Swift had lost almost all his old associates, and loneliness was now added to his other burdens. Revered by the Dublin mob, who were ready to obey his orders as those of a dictator ; regarded, if not with liking, at least with awe and respect, even by the governing class in Ireland ; troubled no longer by the gnawing cares of povertj^ — Swift yet wanted, now more than at any other time of his life, the solace of a friend. Delany, with whom he had much pleasant intercourse, and between whom and Swift there were many sympathies in common, was drawn away from Swift by his keen worldly wisdom, and by his prudent inclination to make friends of the powers that were. The truest, the kindliest, the easiest of Swift's later friends had been Sheridan; but Sheridan, too, was soon lost to him. The story of the breach tells us something of Swift's later mood. Much as he was attracted by Sheridan's careless bonhomie, Swift had seen its dangers, and warned him of them Chap. XVIII.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 481 ■with more sincerity than was used by kindlier-seeming friends. When the endowed school of Armagh fell vacant, Swift not only procured the offer of the appointment for Sheridan, but also strongly urged him, trying as the parting would have been to Swift himself, to accept a post which would secm-e a safer pro- vision than that of his Dublin school, and which was removed from the temptations of Dublin life. Other friends, more prone to flattery, and more careless of Sheridan's future, persuaded him to refuse an offer which would have removed from their midst one whose extravagant hospitality they en- joyed : and the result was that Sheridan waited on, to find his income lessening, his family and his expenses increasing ; and was at length obliged to accept the much less j>rofitable post of master of Cavan School. When he left DubHn, the Dean, to use his own words, found "his right hand gone." The two had fitted one another in all those lesser offices of friendship that do so mucli to make life run smooth. Sheridan changed the bright society of Dublin, the comforts of an ample income, the close intimacy of Swift, for the dreariness of Cavan, the drudgery of a smaller post, the burden of debt, and the torment of a shrewish wife. The Dean was left without the friend who might best have soothed his passage through old age, to death. The loneliness became more marked, the gloom more abiding and more deep. Diuing the few years that followed, there had been some attempt at intercourse between the friends. The Dean went to Cavan ; and Sheridan spent his vacations at the Deanery. But a friendship such as theirs could only subsist if constant. All the little allowances that had to be made, all the conces- sions to the temper, the caprices, or the weaknesses of one another, ceased to be endurable when the soothing aid of habit was removed. The younger Sheridan, then only a boy of four- teen or fifteen, professes to remember some incidents of the Dean's last visit to his father at Cavan. He was fretful, morose and capricious : his iDarsimony was exaggerated : his pride was ■482 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1738—1745. offended by a jesting repartee : and the proffered compliments ■of Cavan lie rejected with disdain. Disease, and loneliness, and gloom, had told heavily on Swift : and without accepting implicitly all that the younger Sheridan tells us of his morose i;emper, and capricious anger, we may yet believe that the old friends found that a few months of absence had made each less fitted for the other. The " fierce indignation," that had torn so many of Swift's enemies in the past, was rending his own soul now. On the other hand, Sheridan, seeing the decaj' that was taking hold of Swift, seemed inclined to act as his Mentor, and doubtless from kindly motives, to assume the office which is, •of all others, most lilcely to strain the bonds of friendship. Years before. Swift had begged Sheridan to warn him when he might seem to fall under the sway of that avarice that often •comes, or increases, with old age. Sheridan fulfilled the re- •quest with more fidelity than tact. Swift Listened to the recital •of his own weaknesses. He knew their reality : but the time was past when he might look with boldness on the pictm-e, or feel the gratitude due for the advice. " Did you never read Gil Bias ? " he asked Sheridan. The words were significant ■of what Swift felt : that he was rightly rebulced, but that the rebuke came too late to do aught but brealv their fiiendship. They saw one another no more ; and a few months removed for ever the friend whose kindliness had not been proof against the bitterness which age, ill-health, and disappointment had Tbred in Swift. The year which followed was one, not of gi-adual, but of rapid, decay. Disease had long been there : but old age was now opening tlie way for its fiercer inroads. The sti'ong brain that had so long resisted the attack, was now too weak to maintain the struggle : memory was going : the tenacity of liis ■clear logic had dwindled into the loose and broken peevishness of senility. The decline into absolute ruin was quick and striking : but we can, nevertheless, trace with some certainty the separate stages in tliat downward com'se. Even when Chap. XVIIL] THE CLOSIXG SCENE. 483 ■worsted in the fight, Swift yet retains that which is the greatest of his characteristics in his prime, his grim earnestness : even when the struggle is over, and the strong man hes defeated, he yet preserves his dignity, in absohite decay. In the j'ears 1738 and 1739, he still struggles against his fate. This is the time of the direst and most prolonged torture. The body suffers first. As if to tame the indomitable will, to drive into submission the passion of anger that was too •strong for him, he strove to pui'sue a regimen that only aggravated the disease. He was restless in j)hj'sical exercise. He wore his body to skin and bone, and even when he could not -venture beyond Ids own house, he sought for violent exercise by hurrying up and down the stairs of the Deanery, or pacing through his empty rooms. He refused, Delany tells us, to use spectacles : and so wore out his sight as to lose the solace of reading. He seemed above all things afi'aid of sinking into the feebleness of old age : determined, as it were, to wear out quickly, by strained effort, the vital energies whose gradual decay might be prolonged and pitiful. " There is no such thing," said he to a friend, who had praised an old man, " as a fine old gentleman : if the man had a mind or body worth a farthing, they would have worn him out long ago." His efforts were hopeless, and in the struggle, the mind suffered with the body. His misanthropy was exaggerated into a disease. His anger with his Idnd, his indignation at wrong, burned in upon him with the tortiu'e of physical pain; and doubtless it magnified, by imagination, that on which it fed. The only desire now left to Swift was for death. When he parted from a friend it was with the expressed hope that they might never meet again.* When a large pier-glass fell one day on the spot where the Dean had been speaking to a friend a few minutes before, he met the congratulations on Ms escape only by a regret — " I wish the glass had fallen upon me." For years he had marked the anniversary of liis birth by reading the * Deane Swift's Essay, p. 217. I I a 484 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1738—1745. third chapter of the book of Job, praj'ing that the clay whereon he ■was born might be darkness : that he might have lain still and been quiet: " then had I been at rest." The anniversary, so- sad for him, was kept with rejoicing by the mob of Dublin. The shouts of the Kevin Bail echoed through the lonely rooms- of the deanery : but it was an incense that he now refused : " 'Tis all folly," he said, when told of the rejoicings : "better let it all alone." Tortm'ed in mind and body, Swift still maintained a firm front against the inevitable encroachments of decay. His final insanity was of a jieculiar kind. According to the most recent and most careful medical analysis, it was no slowh' developing" disease of the brain itself, gi-adually deepening from partial into confirmed insanity. Until the actual injury came to the- brain. Swift, however morbid his mood, however bitter his cynicism, and however unmeasured his anger, was as far from insanity as could be conceived. Structm'al malfomiation was there, affecting the nerves of the ear, and producing' giddiness and deafness, which often rendered life a torture. It was not, however, till his waning strength left his brain at the mercy of physical disease, and not till a paralj'tic stroke had supervened, that the eclipse of reason, which he had long dreaded, actually came. Plis enemies were planted too near the citadel of reason to permit him to forget the probable end of then- attack : but till that citadel fell, the reason itself was unimpaired. Even yet, although decaj' was akeady brealdng down his defences, he still strove to hold his place among men : still gathered round him the mtimates who yet remained, and carried on, as best he might, some fragments of conversation with them. But the conversation was broken and tangled: the memory had failed, the iierception was confused and blunted.* He still continued to transact busi- * In one of the unpublished letters and September, 1739, Ms memory -(vas in Loid Cork's MSS. -we have a de- still in such a condition that by ihe tailed account of this. " In Augirst assistance of au intimate friend, who €hap. XVIII.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 485 ness : after the last of these years he revised his will : and he did not forget the small offices of kindly interference for his friends which are like bright spots amid the gloom of his misanthropy. But he felt himself, and expressed, even at times with a sort of melancholy humour, the decay that was creeping over him. "I have been many months," he writes to Lord Orrer}',* "the shadow of the shadow of the shadow of etc. etc. of Dr. Swift. Age, giddiness, deafness, loss of memory, rage, and rancom* against persons and proceedings — I have not recounted the twentieth part — I nunc et versus tecum mecUtare canoros." It was in the year 1738, when his friend Pope, at the height of his fame, was still following up the Dunciad and the Epistles with new efforts, and when Swift, weary and worn with the fight, was sinldng to his rest, that an incident, interesting rather for what it might have been, than for what it was, occurred. A new genius, not unUlse Swift in mood, not far removed either from Swift or Pope, in political sj-mpathy, was rising in our literary horizon. After a youth of hardshij), of self-distrust, of angrj"- discontent, of almost hopeless struggle, Samuel Johnson had now achieved a success of a kind with his London. It had brought him some little fame : but it had not given him the wherewithal to rise above poverty : and now at twenty -nine, he was tied hand and foot as a bookseller's drudge, holding nobly to his work, and withal, not unwilHng to profit by such patronage as might fall to his lot ; ignorant as yet how ill his own spu'it was to suit the conditions on which such was acquainted with the current of ing him with a seeming carelessness, his politics and conversation, so far as ' What was I going to say? ' he would, they regarded his own times, he could upon the least hint, recollect his ideas. ' ' have entertained with pleasure any (Transcript of letter from Deane Swift stranger whatever, but not without to Lord Orrery, amongst Lord Cork's the help of such an assistant ; for, in MSS.) the rapidity of his discourse, his * Sivift to Xard Orrery, February memory would frequently fail him : 2nd, 173f (Lord Coi'k's MSS.). jet by turning to his friend, and ask- 486 LIFJE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1738—1745. patronage was granted. He had fixed his thoughts on a very- humble ambition : and strangely enough it seemed either to himself or a friend that Smft might help him to realize his object. The letter which was TM'itten so as to reach Swift must tell its own tale : — LORD GOWER TO A FRIEND OF DEAN SWIFT. TEENTHAil, Aug. 1, 1738. Sir, Mr. Samuel Jolmson (autlior of London, a satire, and some other poetical pieces) is a native of this country, and much respected by some worthy gentlemen in this neighbourhood, who are trustees of a charity school now vacant : the certain salary is £60 a year, of which they are desirous to make him master ; but, imfortunately he is not capable of receiving their bounty, which would malce him happy for life, by not being a Master of Arts : which, by the statutes of the school, the master of it must be. Now these gentlemen do me the honour to think that I have interest enough with you, to prevail upon you to write to Dean Swift, to persuade the University of Dublin to send a diploma to me, constituting this poor man Master of Arts in their University. They highly extol the man's learning and probity : and will not be persuaded that the University will make any difficulty of conferring such a favour upon a stranger, if he is- recommended by the Dean. They say he is not afraid of the strictest examination, though he is off so long a journey : and will venture it, if the Dean thinks it necessary : choosing rather to die upon the road, than he starved to death in translating for looksellers, which has been his only sub- sistence for some time past. I fear there is mure difficulty in this affair than these good-natured gentlemen apprehend, especially as their election cannot be delayed longer than the 11th of n'jxt month. If you see this matter in the same light as it appears to me, I hope you will burn this, and pardon me for giving yoii so much trouble about an impracticable thing ; but, if you think there is a probability of obtaining the favour asked, I am sure your humanity, anci propensity to relieve merit in distress, will incline j'ou to serve the poor man, without my adding more to the trouble I have already given you, than assuring you that I am, with great truth, sir. Your faithful servant, GowER. The application came to nothing : and the fears that Lord Gower expresses of its hopelessness were probabty well- founded. Even had such a grant been possible, it seems un- Chap. XVIII] THE CLOSING SCENE. 487 likely that Swift would either have been a suitor to the authorities of Dubhn Universitj', or that his recommendation would have been very favourably accepted by them. That the failure of a request, conveyed so indirectly as this, formed any part of the ground for Johnson's prejudice against Swift, is absolutely without foundation. A far more hkely, and, indeed, a far more worthy cause of that prejudice was the very similarity of temperament. Genius is not prone to make allowances. Its possessors are not drawn to one another because they are alike in their haughtiness, in their cynicism, in their intolerance. Johnson knew, and shrank from, the bitterness, that was bred in Swift as it was in himself, of hardshij), of early poverty, of disappointed hopes, and of the ceaseless bm'den of ill-health. He had struggled too long against the fatal in- fluences, not to know and dread their strength ; and just in proportion as the effort to school himself was painful, so his judgment on another suffering from the same enemy, was severe. Even if Swift neglected to afford aid which it was in his power to bestow, the neglect was one entirely impersonal to- Johnson. Swift knew nothing of him : he could not have read his poem : he could have borne no gi'udge against its author. Had the benefit been confen'ed, it might have constrained Johnson to a more lenient judgment : that it was not, could scarcely have given to his judgment its severity. While the power to work, and even to think, is passing away from him, it is strange to find Swift dwelling, with something of senile weakness, on the fate of the latest products of his pen. More than once he asks after the manuscript of the Polite Con- versations. He is vexed about the repression of his History. He is eager about the small addition that might, by this or that work of his old age, be brought to his fame, and how they might swell his store of savings.* We have Swift's own word for it that * He -writes, as he tells Lord Orrery, by some honest means " (Swift to- " to increase my reputation : and Zord Orrery, February 2nd, 173f . besides I should have been glad to Lord Cork's MSS.). have seen my small fortune increased 488 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1738—1745. never, except on one- occasion, when Pope arranged matters for him,* had he been a gainer by his writmgs. When, on another occasion, one of his pieces was deliberately pubHshed for gain, it was only that he might thereby aid poor Mrs. Barber, in poverty and ill-health. Now, in old age and decay, when his posses- sions were far greater than his utmost needs, he sought by this unwonted means, to increase them; partly, it may be, from the mere obstinate tenacity with which old age pursues an object on which it has concentrated all its energy: but we are surely entitled to say, partly from the not unworthy motive of making greater his last gift to the country for which he had toiled so bravel}', even under the tragic gloom of his own life. Before his life's work closed, it is characteristic of Swift, ihat one of his latest struggles was for his Chiuch. The fidelity with which he had clmig to her cause, did not desert him at the last. A contest for the representation of Dublin University was impending in the smnmer of 1739 : and the issue lay between one who supported the dominant faction, and one who, as a Tory, was believed to be more friendly to the Chmxh. Swift was convinced that the majority of the Irish House of Commons, if they had then- way, would strip his Church of her privileges, and his feUow-clergy of their livelihood. In the Legion Club he had she^vn what he thought of that House : it was now his object to deal one more blow at their power. The Chm'ch candidate was a certain Macaulay : and for him Swift •did his utmost. He strove to enlist on his side the Duke of Devonshu'e, who was then Lord-Lieutenant. His old friend, Eichardson, the agent of the Londonderry Society, was ■employed to prosecute the same object in London. Pope was appealed to on behalf of Macaulay : and finally, through Lyttleton, then " the rising genius of his age," Swift sought to enlist in the cause the sympathies even of the Prince of Wales, who was then Chancellor of the University. Swift's last struggle fails : but it is interesting, not only for the glimpse it * Probably the case was that of GulUvei-'s Travels. Chap. XVIII.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 489 gives us of liis fidelity to his Church, but also as it brings him in old age into contact with the central hope of the band that ■was to be the hai-binger of better things, whose youthful patriotism was to crush out the noisome pollutions of the age : that band, of whom Pope wrote that "with them he would never fear to hold out against the corruption of the world." A few more friends aided : a few more charities done : a few more groans against the degeneracy of mankind indulged in — and Swift's work was over. Clouds and thick darkness were coming on, and in their midst he descended into the valley of death. Before we pass to the closing scene, there is one episode of these last years, that gives no pleasing pictm-e of Swift's treat- ment hj professing friends. He was akeady losing all grasp upon the past, his sense even of the present was as the blm-red vision of one whose sight is failing, when his name was dragged into a degrading squabble, pushed on by Pope in one of those freaks of deceitful vanity to which he was so prone. Pope's passion for giving to the world every scrap of his literary work, led him to desire that even the frigid conceits of which his letters were composed,* should not be allowed to perish. The desire was a capricious and morbid one : but still more morbid was the chicanery by which more than once he sought to attain this end. Editions of these letters were con- cocted, in order to be afterwards indignantly disavowed, at the same time that they served as an excuse for the issue of authorized versions, only, it was to be understood, in self- defence. At a plan of this kind Pope was now working with * It is scarcely possible, without affectionaftercertainfashionablerules. special study of it, to credit the con- Thus Lord Orrery, in his careful temptible artificiality that was current transcripts of his own letters, in Lord in the so-called friendly letters of Cork's MSS., often adds chapter and Pope's day. These unburdenings of verse for his model, and points out the the heart were performed on certain elegance of his own conceits. In models, embraced certain stock con- this, as in much else, Swift was unlike ceits, and turned their expressions of his age. 490 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1738—1745. even more than his usual trickeiy. The correspondence be- tween him and Swift had been published with his own conni- vance in England.* Through his agency a copy found its way to Ireland. Having thus laid the train, he began to scream out against the -v^Tong abeady done him, and the greater wrong that would be done if a new Irish edition should appear. The Dean, he hinted, careless as to his own fame, indifferent as to his acts, sunk in hopeless imbecilitj', was being mis- led by treachery into authorizing what would injm'e both him- self and his friends. All this was meant only to hide Pope's own stratagems to secm-e publication, and at the same time to give him an oj)portunity of correcting the letters as he pleased, and of completing the collection. But, meanwhile. Pope pro- fessed profound alarm. His affection for the Dean : his fear of the freedom of remark which the letters contained ; his pretended ignorance of the printed matter — all were called in aid of this well-simulated panic. But one deceit involves another. Faulkner, who was about to reissue the letters, agTees to abide by Pope's own decision, whatever that might be. "With singular deliberation, so as not to interfere with any intention on the part of Faulkner, Pope writes to refuse. In spite of the delay, Faiilkner, to Pope's disappointment, sub- mits readily to the refusal. A new ground has then to be chosen. Pope does not believe that sui^pression is now pos- sible. The folly of the Dean, so he professes to think, the mercenary motives of Mrs. Whiteway, the dishonesty of S^^dft's friends, have exposed Pope to serious danger. But he will be magnanimous. He is ready to forgive. There is no help for publication : but as the volume must come out, it had better be revised, and the letters still in the Dean's possession had better be added to it. As he goes on, he gets entangled more deeply in the deceit. At one time he -writes with strained civility to Mrs. AVhiteway : at another time, he accuses her to ♦ The series of letters which estab- by Mr. Elwin from the MSS. of Lord Ijsh Pope's fraud, has been published Cork, (Pope's 'Works: i;e«era,Vol. III.). Chap. XTIII.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 491 Lord Orrery of absolute theft. Wliile lie is lavishing on Swift expressions of the most endearing friendship, he is bestowing on him, to others, the contemptuous pity which we reserve only for idiocy. He enhsts on his own behalf, Lord Orrerj% whose chief ambition was for the regard of genius, and who for that reward was ready to lend Imnself to Pope's dishonesties. The treachery drags on, with all its infinite littleness, for many months, while Orrery and Pope were plying Mrs. Whiteway with alternate threats and promises. The key to the decep- tion has been fui-nished by Mr. Elwin : and now that it stands exposed before us in all its naked deformity, the only result of the correspondence is to prove the hollow pretences of Pope's friendship, the despicable vanity of the man, and the sincerity of Swift's latest guardian, his cousin Mrs. Whiteway, whose honesty was so unscrupulously attacked. We are glad to turn from the episode, even though it be to the closing scene that now awaits us. Whatever may be the correct medical theorj' of Swift's malady,* the story of these last years stands out, in its main features, clearly enough. During 1738 and 1739, as we have seen, the irritation greatly increased : in 1740, it rendered him scarcely capable of seeing strangers ; and to his morbid gloom was now added either loss, or absolute confusion, of memory. It was during this year that the miserable wrangle about the con-espondence, bred of Pope's vanity and deceit, was dragging on its course : and Swift was as unheeded and unheeding in the midst of the attacks upon him, as if he had been dead. In Julj' of that j'ear, he wrote thus to Mrs. Whiteway, in tones that sound as if uttered on the brink of the grave : " 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 under both in body and mind. All I can say is, that I am not in torture : hut I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know * For some discussion of the latest theories as to this, see Appendix, XIII. 492 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1738—1745. 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, 'Jon. Swift. " If I do not blunder, it is Saturday, July 26, 1740." With broken accents such as these, heard painfully, as it were, through a thick ciu-tain of pain, disease, and baffled memoiy. Swift's voice drops into silence. The years that foUovf have little incident : and such as they have, is soon told. During 1741, the declme was rapid : each month made him less fit for the society of his fellows. To the last he sought to carry on his religious exercises : and even when his memory was a blank to all else, his faithful servant, Pdchard Brennan, told how he still repeated the only part of them he could remember — the Lord's Prayer. Another prayer was also over- heard, when he cried in his agonj^ "to be taken away from the evil to come."* In Januarj', 17-|-j-, his behaviour, we are told, " was grown perfectly intolerable."! Even poor Mrs. White- way, who in the midst of troubles and ill-health of her own, "bore gently mth the racked spirit longing for rest, but finding none, — even she was forced to visit the Deanery by stealth in order to see that he was cared for. Unseen by him, she watched the Dean, as in his restless agony he paced the room, ceaselessly walking, as she tells us, for ten hours a day. He would eat only when alone : and even after it had been left in his room for hom-s, his food was often taken away untouched.]: In March, 17-4T, guardiaais were appointed for him, by the Court of Chancery. It was feared that he might lay violent hands upon himself. On one occasion, it was said, he was found threatening his o^Yn image in a mirror. When * Lyon's MS. notes on Hawkes- already quoted, which gives the dates worth's I/ife. of Swift's decline with somewhat more •)■ The expression is taken from the detail than other narratives, ■unpublished letter of Deane Swift to t Mrs. Whitcniay to Lord Orrery, Lord Orrery, of March 23rd, 1750, November 22nd, 1742. Chap. XVIII.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 493 liis kinsman, Deane Swift, caUed, he was met only by the words " Go, go ! " and yet with the ineffectual relenting of baffled reason, the Dean strove again to speak, and then pointing to his head, could only utter the words, " My best understanding — " and then sink into apathy. During the summer of 1742, he was subjected to gross indignity by a scoundrel who had secm-ed a place in the cathedral, and who attempted to extort from Swift the post of sub- dean, by insults at least, if not by actual violence.* In this state of absolute gloom, shunning the company of his fellows, escaping from pain only by frenzied physical exertion, and at times breaking out into actual violence, Swift lingered through the summer. In September, 1742, his iUness came to an acute crisis. The pressure on the brain produced, or was itself increased by, violent inflammation, which at first extended over his body, and finally settled into a painful abscess in the eye. For weeks his agony was so great that it sometimes requu-ed the strength of five men to prevent this enfeebled old man of seventy-three from tearing his eyeball from his head. At length the tortm-e did its work. The swelHng in the eyeball sank, and the pain ceased. The last struggle of the long combat was over : and the strong man, so long invinci- ble even in decay, saiik into apathy and silence for ever. In this * The story is told by Faulkner, of from Eiohard Brennan, Swift's servant, this miscreant Wilson having rendered which gives some countenance to this the Dean intoxicated, and then en- version, without, however, lessening deavoured by actual blows, while they "Wilson's barbarity. Brennan says he were driving together, to extort the was riding behind the carriage, when promise of the place. This story is he heard Wilson demand the sub- confirmed by an unpublished letter deanship. Swift refused : when Wil- f rom Deane Swift to Lord Orrery of son began to curse, and in loud tones 19th December, 17i2 (in Lord Cork's swore that "no man should strike MSS.). So serious was the indignation him." Brennan interfered, and res- aroused in Dublin that Wilson found cued his master by force from the it needful to make an aflEtdavit scoundrel's abuse. Even if Wilson's (published by Scott) which ascribed abuse was in answer to some violence the actual violence to Swift. In Lord offered by old age and imbecility, it Cork's MSS., there is afurther afiB.davit scarcely alters the case. ^94 LIFE OF JONATHAN S"WIFT. [1738—1745. state he spent three j^ears of living death. There was no longer any frenzied resistance to the mental deca}'. The fierce exercise by which he had striven to defy his torture was now over : he could scarcely be persuaded to move from his chair; and his bodj', which had shrunk to skin and bone, now recovered its plumpness : the wrinkles left his face, which now, in spite of the thick snow-white hair that overhung it, had an aspect of almost childhke gentleness.* Still, his state was one where the controlling and guiding power was wanting, rather than one of ordinarj"^ insanity. He "never tallied nonsense nor said a foolish thing." t He was very " quiet and peaceful." He seemed to know old friends — Deane Swift, Mrs. Whiteway, and his house- keeper, Mrs. Ridgway. At times there was some sign of irrita- tion : after a vain attempt to express his meaning, he broke off with the words "I am a fool." Looking at himself in the glass, he was said to have exclaimed in pity, " Poor old man ! " When a knife was removed from his reach, he shook his head as if to deprecate the caution, and whispered " I am what I am." On the whole, so far as comfort could be associated with such a state. Swift's last days were peaceful, and even if the story is true, which finds support from the experience of Scott's friend. Lord Kineddar, that the servants aclnutted strangers to see the living wreck of former gTeatness, this probably had little effect upon the listless apathy of the Dean. But it is vain to attempt to gauge his state too exactly : we cannot peneti-ate be- hind the veil of that mysterious, and withal not midignified silence, nor tell how much of the man's reason was stiU living, though cut off from all his fellow-men. * Soitisdescribedbj'Mrs.Pendarves. the Bense of them." Swift seems to \ Deane. Sirift to Lord Orrf'Tij, A.-pri\ have suffered from that form of ■ith, 17ii. Deane Swift adds in aphasia, the result of paralysis, which another unpublished letter (23rd does not prevent the clear utterance of March, 1750, Lord Cork's MSS.) : words, but breaks the connexion be- " Sometimes, perhaps once or twice in tween the brain and the organs of a week, he would say two or three speech so far, as to make the words no words which, as far as could be longer answer to the meaning in- observed, always carried meaning in tended. Chap. XVIlI.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 495 Before the close came, there seems to have been another short l)ut sharp agony. The epileptic tendency to which so many of the Dean's symptoms point, appears to have broken out fiercely at the last. For thirty-six hom-s, we are told, he lay in strong convulsive fits. But these passed away : and the final exhaus- tion came on. The cup of miser}^, that had been drained to the last dregs, was now taken from his lips. The long struggle, the tortm'e, the morbid restlessness, all he had suffered from himself and from the world were now ended. Death that had lingered so mercilessly, had come at last as if in answer to his prayers. He died on the 19th of October, 1745. The passion and the earnestness : the cynicism and the tenderness : the strength, the pride, and the prejudice: the stern enmity and the faithful friendship : the stinging sarcasm and the far-reaching humoiu- : the hatred of cant, and the hatred of tyranny — all were hushed for ever. They had made manj- suffer : but none more dhety than then- possessor. He had spent his power lavishly : had despised the efforts of lesser men in their thrifty economy of strength : and now he found rest where the bitterness of anger might tear that torn heart no more. "When it became known that the Dean had breathed his last, the nation's love and veneration, hushed to silence during these years of living death, broke out once more. The people crowded to the Deanery, to take a last look of him who had been their idol for five-and-twenty years, to " beg a hair of him for memory," and to pay to him in death that tribute of enthusiastic worship which, living, he had accepted with half-pitying disdain. According to the precise instructions of his will, Swift was buried privately,* on the 22nd of October, at twelve o'clock at night : and, likewise by his own instructions, on a tablet of black marble * In a letter to the executors, Swift's' instructions might be too lite- written on the morning of the 22ud, rally interpreted. But they could Mrs. Whiteway expressed her fear that scarcely^have been more express. 496 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1738—1745. over his grave in the cathedral, in " large letters, deeply cut, and strongly gilded," there were inscribed the words — HIC DEPOSITTJM EST COEPUS JONATHAN SWIFT, S.T.P. HUJUS ECCLESI.a: CATHEDBALIS DECANI : UBI S^VA INDIQNATIO TJLTERIUS COB LACEEAEE NEQUIT. ABI VIATOR ET IMITAEE, SI POTEEIS STEBNUUM PEO VIEILI LIBEETATIS VINDICEM. OBIIT ANNO (1745) MENSIS (OCTOBEIS) DIE (19) JETATIS ANNO (78). The amount of his bequest for the Hospital for Lunatics and Incurables was between ten and eleven thousand pounds. By subsequent gifts from others, the endowment was greatlj' increased : and from 1757, when it was opened, St. Patrick's, or Swift's Hospital, as it was called, continued long to do a work which national effort did not then recognise as its own. To the vicars of Laracor he leaves the tithes of Effernock, " so long as the present Episcopal religion shall continue to be the national established faith and profession in this king- dom." " Whenever a.iij other form of Christian religion shall become the established faith in this kingdom," then the pro- ceeds are to go to the poor of Laracor, always excepting Jews, atheists, and infidels ; and even this destination is to be maintained only so long as " Christianitjr in any shape shall be tolerated among us." Mistress Dingley was to have an annuity of twenty pounds out of the Hospital funds ; * pecu- niary bequests were made to Mrs. Whiteway, and her sons, and to Mrs. Eidgway, tlie daughter of his old housekeeper ; and other friends, such as Pope,t Delanj^ the Grattans, Lord Orreiy, and Macaulay, were remembered by gifts to which * Mrs. Dingley did not survive Swift, -f Pope had died during the Dean's dying in 1743. Her will, of which the imconscious state, on the 30th of May, executor was Swift's friend, Mr. Lyon, 1744. left nothing to Swift. Chap. XVIII. THE CLOSING SCENE. 497 something of interest or of whimsical meaning was attached. Bolingbroke is not named in the will. Looking back over the record of Swift's life, the task remains of forming some estimate of the man and of his genius. Very early in his career, Swift wrote two letters, which have only recently become accessible, and which for the first time appear in his biography. The following extracts throw a emulous light upon his later life. The first is dated 3rd May, 1692.* " I esteem the time ot studying poetry to be two hoiu's in a morning (and that only when the humour fits), which I esteem to be the flower of the whole day, and truly I make bold to employ them that way, and yet I seldom write above two stanzas in a week. I mean such as are to any Pindaric ode ; and yet I have known myself to be in so good a humour as to make two in a day, but it may be no more in a week after ; and when all done, I alter them a hundred times, and yet I do not believe myself to be a laborious writer : because if the fit comes not immediately I never heed, but think of something else. I have a sort of vanity or foibless, I do not know what to call it, and which I would fain know if you partake of. It is (not to be circumstantial) that I am overfond of my own writings (I would not have the world think so), and I find when I write what pleases me, I am Cowley to myself, and can read a hundred times over. I know 'tis a desperate weakness, and has nothing to defend it but it.s secrecy, and I Imow I am wholly in the wrong, and have the same pretence the baboon had to praise her own children." The second is dated 6th December, 1693.t " I myself was never very miserable while my thoughts were in a fer- ment, for I imagine a dead calm is the troublesomest part of our vnyage through the world." The letters from which these are extracts were written to his cousin Thomas Swift, whom the Dean afterwards found *ItispTintedinthcHist.MSS.Com- t Also printed by the Hist. MSS. missioners' Eeport, Vol. VII,, p. 680. Commissioners. 498 LIFE OP JONATHAN' S"WIFT. [1738—1745. reason to despise and ridicule : and it is odd that he, of all men, should have been the recipient of confidences contrasting, at first sight, so strongly with the traits most marked in Swift's later career. The youth, uncertain of his own power, ashamed of, jret morbidly alive to, his own vanity, nervous as to the verdict of others on his work, became the one author of his day whose indifference to the fame which his genius might have brought him was most marked : the aspirant after " ferment," sank into his grave wearied out with many a long fight, and seeking there a calm which his own life had never yielded to him. But strange as the words at first appear from the pen of Swift, they throw such light on his biographj^ as to make us long for more of these early confidences. They show how soon the power of self-inspection came, and how pitiless it was ; they explain the anxiety Avith which each work was thrown out, under such disguise as was possible ; they testify to that inherent restlessness which, even in old age, made him feel " a dead calm " more irksome than the fiercest strife. But these hints of early doubt, and effort, and satisfied achieve- ment, tell us something more. Was there not, in the original bent of that genius, something which the accomplished work of Swift does not contain? We cannot claim for any of his verses the qualities of real poetry. We find in them no flights of imagination : no grandeur either of emotion or of form : and even the deftness of his rhythmical skill never attains to the harmony of poetic utterance. But when we search through the tangled mazes of the Pindaric odes : when we watch their tensity and earnestness in the light of these early confidences : when we place side by side with them the fierce energy of the later verses, — evident as is the severe repression therein of any poetic fancy, — we feel that Swift, though he never attained to true poetic utterance, had a temperament, which in his own words, was "blasted with poetic fire." The fire was indeed checked by untoward experiences, smothered under a burden of contending faculties, and done to death. But how much of Chap. XVIII.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 499 Swift's cynicism, how much of his waste of power, how much of his apparent indifference to fame, was due to the withering of those early aspirations, and to the repression of a tempera- ment of surpassing keenness, forced to utter itself only in the language of satii-e, and not of poetry ? We must not forget this early impulse in judging of Swift's later work, with its union of contrasting qualities. By nothing did he affect men more than by his marvellous combination of the grimmest earnestness mth the most mocking humour. The two are ever at combat, but the combat is maintained on almost equal terms. The mocking laugh never sounds without telliiag of the earnestness behind ; the fury of denunciation never speaks but as the humour rules it, and with such sense of re- pression as doubles its effect. In himself Swift seems to sum up the two instinctive tendencies ever striving for the mastery in the thoughts of humanity — the tendencies which seem to make of life what he has called it, " a ridiculous tragedj'." Such is the ruling feature of Swift's work. It repeats itself in an idiom which, to use his own words, is "his own English" as no man's ever was. Free from all tricks and peculiarities, it holds to its purpose with absolute directness and lucidity. It has no balanced periods ; no ornaments ; even grammatical regularity is sometimes wanting. But with dramatic nicety it suits the character in which he speaks, and he bends it to his purpose with the unconscious skill with which a well-trained fencer turns his foil. Besides his strength of idiom, besides his combined earnest- ness and hmnom', Swift has another power as rare. It is that of presenting thought in lucid metaphor or allegory sustained through a long tram of imphcit reasoning. It is by such travesty of metaphj^sics that he avenged himself on what seemed to him the wordy triflings of philosophy ; and it is this which gives at once its chief subtlety, and much of its interest, to his most characteristic work. In the verse of Swift's mature years we strike upon a veui K K 2 500 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [1738—1745. quite different from his prose. It astonishes us by its varying range, from the lightness of sportive fancies to the grim earnest- ness of the Rhapsody en Poetry ; by the combined perfection and simplicity of its workmanship ; by the acciu-acy with which it hits its mark. But only in isolated passages does it show Swift's power at its highest. For the rest, it seems to be thrown to the world not as the best product of its author's genius, but as all that his cynicism would permit him to give, as the utmost freedom with which his poetic faculty could be indulged. From the salient features of Swift's genius, we pass natiu-ally to the marked traits in his character. Here, too, we find the same contradiction. It is built upon a double foundation of keen sensitivity and fierce indignation, that give to his life at once its interest and its mystery. Others might smooth down contending forces by conventional rules ; in Swift the forces were too keen to be held in check, the combat too lasting to permit of words of peace. Two sets of conditions affected the development of a character thus strangely framed. Born to poverty, nm'sed in dependence on a grudging charity, entering upon the world under ungenial and chilling patronage. Swift's experience was the worst possible for such a character as his. And he lived a slave to strange physical conditions. With a physique so powerful as to prompt him to ceaseless exertion ; with a disease that caused hfe-long torture and threatened an end still worse ; with an intellectual fierceness that made liis physical tempera- ment seem cold, — Swift could feel only that he was not as other men. This made him above all things a lonely man. Partly he misunderstood his fellow-beings; partly, with the abnormal dis- tinctness of vision of the sohtarj^ he saw cleai'ly what to other men was hidden, by social habit, in a healthy and convenient blurredness of perception. The infinite littleness of humanity ; the endless and hopeless reign of disorder and injustice : the Chap. XVIIL] THE CLOSING SCENE. 501 ludicrous incongruity between principle and practice — all lay exposed before him as a night-mare from which he found no escape. The degrading conditions of physical existence obtruded themselves before him with disgvisting plainness. He could not save himself from seeing with an unveiled accuracy: but the vision was for aU practical purposes as unhealthy and as unsjonpathetic as that of one whose gaze has been too long fixed upon a microscopic lens. It was this lonehness that produced his harsh and yet un- conscious trampling upon feelings which he did not share. The abnormal coarseness that stains his work, and on which it would be waste of time to dwell, has its root m this apathetic callousness. Not once is he guilty of the deliberate pandering to lewdness which stains the pages of Pope : the noisomeness has for him no attraction : he dwells upon it only because it is one side of the pictivre that makes humanity loathsome in his eyes. The same absence of sj^mpathy with his feUow-men explains the unconscious UTeverence with which he often treats religion. Strict as was the discipline that Swift imposed on himself, yet the greater part of the world of ordinaiy rehgious ideas was a region where there was no resting-place for hun. Un- questionably Swift's was a natm-e, in the highest sense, religious : and in the passionate earnestness with which he forces himself to conform to the conventional religious creed, there is something of a longing to escape from his loneliness and solitude to the kindly ways of men. Behind the veil of that inner religion, of which Swift, like all men who are framed after his tj'pe, bore the secret in his own heart, we cannot hope to penetrate. But his inabihty to appreciate the religious feelings which his own words might irritate, in no way rendered him the less strict in his avowed adherence to his Church and its creed. What that creed involved to him, we cannot know. But that he held to it v?ith rigid firmness, that he permitted himself no conscious relaxa- 502 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1738—1745. tion from it, that he would have repelled anj' suggestion tending to diminish its authority, is as certain as anything can be. He had, indeed, a curious dread of exposing his religious exercises to the M'orld. He read prayers to the servants of his household, but concealed this from his visitors : he attended early services in London, in order that he might escape the observation of the world on his devotions.* He concealed this, much as he would have concealed an act of charity. On the other hand, he made no secret of his creed : and the very fact of its open avowal shews us that he con- sidered such orthodoxy not as a positive merit, but as the natural result of his mental bias, and as harmonizing with the political attitude which he had assumed. Swift was scrupulous about entering the Church as a mere means of livelihood. His scruples may have proceeded as much from pride as from conscience : but, be that as it may, when he did adopt her orders, he boimd himself to practise the discipline of a sentinel at his post. According to Delany, Swift was wont to speak of his early hopes of attaining such ecclesiastical eminence as might prompt men occasionally to ask the sexton on a Sunday mornuig, " Pray, does the doctor preach to-day? " The reminiscence had more of sarcasm in it than Delany seems to perceive : but it was with all earnest- ness that Swift strove to fulfil his clerical duties, and with real regret that he found how his political battling had tm-ned his sermons into pamphlets. If he felt doubts as to the dogmas of the Church, he never permitted himself to utter them. " The want of a belief," he saj's, " is a defect which ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome." In what way he held that dogma, what it really represented to his inmost soul, how far its acceptance was a part of that refusal to follow the mazes of metaphysical speculation to which he steadfastly adhered, were questions which Swift probably never asked himself, and to which the world can find no answer. The * Delanifs Ohscrratlons, p. 44. Chap. XVIII.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 503 self -repression was the easier because it suited tvitli his con- tempt for the affectations of current scepticism, with his impatience of the claims to free thought advanced by those ■who " could no more think than fly." For theii- complacent rationalism he had no tolerance : the creed that would shape itself to suit what they called their reason would only lose his sympathy. The same t;^Tanny which he imposed on them he would impose upon himself; unconscious, perhaps, of the independence which his own pride kept in reserve. Much the same motives penetrated into the political con- victions of Swift. By political convictions we understand, of course, something different from the mere phases of his party allegiance. His pohtical creed was built upon the same founda- tion as his creed in religion, his hatred of abstract reasoning. In his contempt for the metaphysics of politics he anticipated Bm'ke. The expedient was the only rule for the government of men. To dogmatise upon abstract rights, to frame con- stitutions upon a basis of theoretic justice, was to him only so much solemn trifling, worthy of the sages of Laputa. But the expedient he judged not according to the catch-words of any party, not with any of the limitations of conventional habit. Piercing straight to the heart of a question, impatient of the labom-ed methods of political platitude and common- place, he had notlring but contempt for the more timid intellects that refused to accept his conclusions, or to keep pace with Iris reasoning. Purblind and narrow, they seemed to him steeped to the lips in dishonesty, and he drove home the more keenly against them that tjTannical supremacy that it was his to wield. This was the central point of his political creed, and in the main it determined his political attitude amid the accidents of party. The point at which he aimed was seldom selected with impartial judgment. Pride, prejudice, anger, or misanthropy too often stepped in and made him choose his line of action in very derision of the opinion of his fellow-men. But once 504 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1738—1745. chosen, no power on earth could bring anything of shiftiness or dishonesty into Swift's piu'suit of it. When he first joined the Whigs he did so from the natural bias that his connexion with Su' William Temple and his association with the leading members of the Whig party, together with the virulent factious- ness of the Tories, gave to him. But from the first liis mouth refused to shape itself to their Shibboleths. The Eevolution was not to him valuable as an assertion of the hypothetical terms of the Original Contract. To him it was no ei^och in politics, and marked the establishment of no ideal constitution. It was simply an episode, necessary at the moment, shaped by the accidental conditions of the time, and liable to revision whenever that seemed expedient. He believed in no divine mission of the Whigs, and credited them with no monopoly of political prescience. The very care with which he searches for reasons to support the Eevolution settlement, proves that its advantages were to him no matter of political axiom, as they were to the orthodox Whig. He never ceased to judge his party, not by their professed principles, but by then- acts. A breach was, from the first, not unlikely : and we admit no imputation against the honesty of Swift, in allowing that personal offence first suggested its occasion. But this would have carried him only a little way had not more cogent argu- ments come to clinch the change. The Whigs neglected his efforts m the mission with which he had been entrusted. But he soon found that their neglect extended to the Church, whose sworn defender he was. Once begun, the breach became rapidly wider. Swift could not rest half-way. In escaping from the bonds of one pai-ty, he seemed to be breaking down what had long been to him an irrational and artificial fiction which it suited the exigencies of professional politicians to preserve. The change did not precede, it lagged after, his inclination. But once it was made, he found new vices in his former associates day by day. He saw, or fancied he saw, the insincerity of then* specious claims to be the maintainers of Chap. XVIII.J THE CLOSING SCENE. 505 toleration and of liberty : he saw their encouragement of the latitudinarianism wliich his soul abhorred — partly because it satisfied those whom he despised, partly, perhaps, because it did not satisfj' iineasy doubts which he strove to hide from him- self : he saw the oligarchical monopoty that the Whigs had drawn out of the Eevolution. The Tories had been violent, factious, and forgetful of all judgment in the maintenance of impossible extremes : but Swift forgot or condoned their faults for the support they gave his Chmxh, for the opposition they maintained to the abstract political theories on which the Whigs based their claim to virtue. When he broke Ms long silence to speak on behalf of Ireland, the keynote of all his denunciations was the repudiation of those specious " maxims " by which it was sought to experiment upon her woes — "maxims" which his knowledge of Ireland told him, were there " controlled." Great as his influence must necessarily have been, this pre- dominant bias in his opinions enhanced it. It gave directness and force to his arguments : it made his convictions for the time part and p.arcel of himself, held with the tenacity of personal traits, of which he seemed no more able to divest himself than to cast off his own being. Cavil and paradox have sought to minimize the hold which Swift had upon men of his own time. He exaggerated, it has been said, his own influence with the government of Harley : he was never really trusted in the conduct of affairs : he mistook the fair speeches by which his help as a government hack was conciliated, for confidences and deference paid to an adviser and a guide. To such fancies history gives the lie. It was not merely help that his so-called patrons sought from Swift : it was to him they looked to shape their policy, to write out their credentials to the people, to interpret for them the history of their time. More than this, no man in England had before appealed to such a constituency as that aroused by Swift : for the first time a mass of opinion beyond the purview of Court and 506 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [1738—1745. Parliament was asked to judge between the merits of parties. In Ireland he stirred a feeling which not even the red hand of rebellion has been able to awaken either before or since. He anticipated the force of democracy: and he was the first to put into shape that political ideal which has never since failed to find an hereditary line of supporters, that of so-called Tory principles resting upon popular support. The secret of his after-influence is akin to this. Of all the writers of last century, there is none that remains so much of a living force and personality as Swift. The questions agitated in his day are forgotten ; its party struggles and its political theories have passed away : but his genius is for us no mere historic memory. Some reasons for this lie on the surface. We are attracted by the commanding calmness of his humour, with its back-ground of grim earnestness. The mystery and the romance of his life, the story of its love and of its anger, of its pride and of its ruin, can never lose their hold on human interest. Even in the gloom, in the loneliness of one " dwelling in the wilderness," he is intensely English to the very centre of his being. But beyond and above all this, he commands our attention by the stem earnestness with which he has dealt with problems that are as living for us, as when he wrote. Others have dwelt upon the same problems, have expressed something of the same cynicism, have attempted to denounce in something of his tone. The theme is an old and an inexhaustible one ; the " ludihrium rerum Immanarum" with its tragedy behmd, the thought of which makes hixmour strive to be something more than mockery or laughter, and which gives another aspect to the cynic's sneer. But Smft stands on a different level from all these others, in that, while his liiunom- is never forced or thin, his earnestness never forgets the supreme quality of self-command. He is never, but by implication, a preacher. But were we to choose a name for the one cliief topic of his denunciation, it would be that given by Johnson Chap. XVIIL] THE CLOSING SCENE. 507 to the object of his hatred, which he called Cant. A preacher of our own day, with a misanthropy less scathing, but more fretful, than that of Swift, has chosen what might appear a kindred topic in the energy of his invective against Shams. But the Sham is soon fathomed and exposed. Its shell is easily x^ierced, and the nickname is left to suggest to weak imaginations the depreciation of all that we do not understand. The Shams of one generation are forgotten by the next, or remembered only as the dress in which it pleased our pre- decessors to masquerade. But who can place bounds to the domiuion of Cant ? "Who can say into what specious theories it does not enter, over what sphere it fails to leave its trail ? And yet, though the preacher cannot rid us of it, it must still blanch in all time coming, before the calm irony of Swift's humour, before the relentless tragedy of the picture that his genius has drawn. If his pride was boundless, if his anger was consuming, they have at least left to us a rich inheritance, in the discomfiture which that ever-present foe suffered at his hands. APPENDICES I. Fkagmbnt of Autobiography II. Note on ,1 Tale of a Tub III. AuTHOESHip OP Four Last Yea.rs op the Queeh IV. The Markiage op Swift and Stella "V. Swift's offer to announce the Marriage VI. Wood's Halfpence VII. Proclamation against the Deapiee VIII. Editions op Gulliver's Travels IX. Journal op 1727 X. The Will op Esther Johnson XI. Character of Mrs. Johsson XII. Letters prom the MSS. op the Earl of Cork XIII. Swift's Disease APPENDICES APPENDIX I. FRAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY [This fragment, written about 1727, and first printed by Deane Swift, from a copy now in Trinity College Library, is reproduced here with the alterations, which are apparently authoritative, contained in a copy of the MS. to which Mr. Forster had access.] The family of the Swifts are ancient in Yorkshire. From them de- scended a noted person, who passed under the name of Cavaliero Swift, a man of wit and humour. He was created an Irish Peer by King Charles the First, 20 March 1627, with the title of Viscount of Carlingford, but never was in that kingdom. Many traditional pleasant stories are related of him, which the family planted in Ireland hath received from their parents. This lord died without issue male ; and his heiress, whether of the first or second descent, was married to Robert Fielding, Esquire, commonly called handsome Fielding. She brought him a considerable estate in Yorkshire, which he squandered away, but had no children. The Earl of Bglinton married another co-heiress of the same family. Another of the same famUy was Sir Edward Swift, well known iia the times of the great Rebellion and Usurpation, but I am ignorant whether he left heirs or no. Of the other branch, whereof the greatest part settled in Ireland, the founder was William Swift, prebendary of Canterbury, towards the last years of Queen Elizabeth, and during the reign of King James the First. He was a divine of some distinction. There is a sermon of his extant, and the title is to be seen in the catalogue of the Bodleian Library, but I never could get a copy, and I suppose it would now be of little value. This William married the heiress of Philpot, I suppose a Yorkshire 510 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix I gentleman, by whom he got a very considerable estate, which however she kept in her own power, I know not by what artifice. She was a capricious iUnatured and passionate woman, of which there have been told several instances. And it hath been a continual tradition in the family, that she absolutely disinherited her only son Thomas, for no greater crime than that of robbing an orchard when he was a boy. And thus much is certain, that Thomas never enjoyed more than one htmdred pounds a year, which was all at Goodrich, in Herefordshire, whereof not above one half is now in the possession of a great great grandson, except a church or chapter lease which was not renewed. His original picture was in the hands of Godwin Swift, of Dublin, Esq. his great grandson ; as well as that of his wife, who seems to have a good deal of the shrew in her countenance ; whose arms as an heiress are joined with his own ; and by the last he seems to have been a person somewhat fantastic ; for he altered the family coat of arms and gives as his own device, a Dolphin (in those days called a Swift) twisted about an anchor, with this motto, Festina lente. There is liliewise a seal with the same coat of arms (his, not joined with the wife's), which the said William commonly made use of ; and this was also in the possession of Godwin Swift above mentioned. His eldest son Thomas seems to have been a clergyman before his father's death. He was vicar of Goodrich, in Herefordshire, within a mUe or two of Eoss : he had likewise another church living, with about one hundred pounds a year in land (part whereof was by church leases), as I have already mentioned. He built a house on his own land in the village of Goodrich, which by the architecture denotes the builder to have been somewhat whimsical and singular, and very much towards a projector. The house is above an hundred years old and still in good repair, in- habited by a tenant of the female line ; but the landlord, a young gentle- man, lives upon his own estate in Ireland. This Thomas was much distinguished by liis courage, as well as his loyalty to King Charles the First, and the sufferings he underwent for that prince, more than any ijerson of his condition in England. Some historians of those times relate several particulars of what he acted, and what hardships he underwent for the person and cause of that martyr'd prince. He was plundered by the Roundheads six and thirty, some say above fifty, times. The author of Mercurius Busticus dates the beginning of his sufi'erings so early as October, 1C42. The earl of Stamford, who had the command of the Parliament army in those parts, loaded him at first with very heavy exactions ; and afterwards at difi'erent times robbed him of all liis books and household furniture, and took away from the family even their wearing apparel ; with some other circvimstances of cruelty too tedious to relate at large in this place. The Earl being asked why he committed these barbarities, my author says "he gave two reasons for it ; first. Appendix I.] FEAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGEAPHY. 511 "because he (Mr. Swift) had bought arms and conveyed them into "Monmouthshire, which, under his Lordship's good favour, was not so ; ' ' and secondly, because, not long before, he preached a sermon in Kos& "upon the text Give unto Cfesar the things that are Csesar's, in which his "lordship said he had spoken treason in endeavoiuring to give Ctesar "more than his due. These two crimes cost Mr. Swift no less than "£300." About that time he engaged his small estate, and having quilted all the money he could get in his waistcoat, got off to a town held for the king : where, being asked by the Governor, who knew him well, what he could do for his Majesty, Mr. Swift said he would give the KJing his coat, and stripping it off, presented ^it to the Governor ; who observing it to be worth little, Mr. S\vift said, Then take my waistcoat, and bid the Governor weigh it in his hand ; who, ordering it to be unripped, found it lined with three hundred broad pieces of gold, which as it proved a seasonable relief, must be allowed an extraordinary supply from a private clergyman of a small estate, so often plundered, and soon after turned out of his livings in the church. At another time being informed that three hundred horse of the rebel X^arty intended in a week to pass over a certain river, ujjon an attempt against the cavaliers, Mr. Swift having a head mechanically turned, he contrived certain pieces of iron with three spikes, whereof one must always be with the point upward ; he placed them over night in the ford, where he received notice that the rebels would jjass early the next morning, which they accordingly did, and lost two hundred of their men, who were drowned or trod to death by the falling of their horses, or torn by the spikes. His sons, whereof four were settled in Ireland (driven thither by their sufferings, and by the death of their father), related many other passages, which they learnt either from their father himself, or from what had been told them by the most credible persons of Herefordsliire, and some neighbourmg counties : and which some of those sons often told to their children ; many of which are still remembered, but many more forgot. In 1646 he was deprived of both his church livings sooner than most other loyal clergymen, upon account of his superior zeal for the King's cause, and his estate sequestered. His preferments, at least that of Goodrich, were given at first to one Giles Eawlins, and after to William Tringham, a fanatical saint, who scrupled not however to conform upon the Restoration, and lived many years, I think till after the Revolution. The Committees of Hereford had kept Thomas Swift a close prisoner for a long time in Ragland Castle before they ordered his ejectment for scandal and delinquency (as they termed it), and for being in actual service against the Parliament. On the 5th July 1646 they ordered the profits of Gotheridge (Goodrich) into the hands of Jonath : Dryden minister, until about Christmas following ; and on 24th March they 512 LIFE OF JONATHAN S"\VIFT. [Appendix I. inducted Giles Rawlms into this ijarish. : who in 1G54 was succeeded by Tringham. His other living of Bridstow underwent the same fate. For lie was ejected from this on 25tli Sept. 1646, and it was given to the curate, one Jonath : Smith, whom they liked better, and ordered to be inducted into his Rector's cure. What became of him afterwards I know not, but in 1654 one John Somers got this living. The Lord Treasurer Oxford told the Dean of St. Patrick's, the grand- son of this eminent sufferer, that he had among his father's (Sir Edward Harley's) papers, several letters from Mr. Thomas Swift writ in those times, which he promised to give to the Dean ; but never going to his house in Herefordshire while he was treasurer, and Queen Anne's death happening in three days after his removal, the Dean went to Ireland, and the Earl being tried for his life, and dying wliile the Dean was in Ireland, he could never get them. Mr. Thomas Swift died May 2nd 1658, and in the 63rd year of his age. His body lies under the altar at Goodrich, with a short inscription. He died before the return of King Charles the Second, who by the recom- mendations of some prelates had promised, if ever God should restore him, that he would promote Mr. Swift in the church, and other ways reward his family for his extraordinary services, zeal, and persecutions in the royal cause. But Mr. Swift's merit died with, himself. He left ten sons and three or four daughters, most of which lived to be men and women. His eldest son Godwin Swift, of Goodridge, Co. Hereford, Esq. one of the Society of Gray's Inn (so styled by Gmllym in his Heraldry) was called to the bar before the Restoration. He married -a relation of the old Marchioness of Ormond, and. upon that accoimt, as well as his father's loyalty, the old Duke of Ormond made him his Attorney General in the palatinate of Tipperary. He had four wives, one ■of which, to the great offence of his family, was co-heiress to Admiral Deane, who was one of the Regicides. She was Godwin's third wife. Her name was Hannah, daughter of Major Richard Deane, by whom he bad issue Deane Swift, and several other children. This Godwin left several children, who have all estates. He was an ill p)leader, but perhaps a little too dextrous in the subtle parts of the law. The second son of Mr. Thomas Swift was called by the same name, was bred at Oxford, and took orders. He married the daughter of Sir WilHam D'Avenant, but died young, and left only one son, who was also called Thomas, and is now rector of Putenham in Surrey. His widow lived long, was extremely poor, and in part supported by the famous Dr. South, who had been her husband's intimate friend. The rest of his sons, as far as I can call to mind, were Mr. Dryden Swift (called so after the name of his mother, who was a near relation to Mr. Dryden the Poet), William, Jonathan, and Adam, who all lived and died in Ireland. But none of them left male isstie, except Jonathan, who Appendix I.] FEAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGEAPHT. 513 besides a daugliter left one son, bom seven months after Ms father's death ; of whose hfe I intend to write a few memorials. Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Divinity, and Dean of St. Patrick's, was the only son of Jonathan Swift, who was the seventh or eighth son of Mr. Thomas Swift above-mentioned, so eminent for his loyalty and his sufferings. His father died young, about two years after his marriage : he had some employments and agencies ; his death was much lamented on account of his reputation for integrity, with a tolerable good understand- ing. He married Mrs. Abigail Erick, of Leicestershire, descended from the most ancient family of the Erioks, who derive their lineage from Erick the forester, a great commander, who raised an army to oppose the invasion of "William the Conqueror, by whom he was vanquished, but afterward employed to command that prince's forces ; and in his old age retired to his house in Leicestershire, where his family hath continued ever since, but declining every age, and are now in the condition of very private gentlemen. This marriage was on both sides very indiscreet ; for his wife brought her husband little or no fortune, and his death hapjpening so suddenly before he could make a sufficient establishment for his famUy, his son (not then bom) hath often been heard to say, that ha felt the conse- quences of that marriage not only through the whole course of his educa- tion, but during the greatest part of his life. He was bom in Dublin, on St. Andrew's day, in the year 1667 ; and when he was a year old, an event happened to him that seems very un- usual ; for his nurse who was a woman of Whitehaven, being under an absolute necessity of seeing one of her relations, who was then extremely sick, and from whom she expected a legacy, and being at the same time extremely fond of the infant, she stole him on shipboard unknown to his mother and uncle, and carried him with her to Whitehaven, where he continued for almost three years. For, when the matter was discovered, his mother sent orders by all means not to hazard a second voyage, till he could be better able to bear it. The mirse was so careful of him, that before he returned he had learnt to spell ; and by the time that he was three years old he could read any chapter in the Bible. After his return to Ireland, he was sent at six years old to the school of Kilkenny, from whence at fourteen he was admitted into the University of Dublin, a pensioner, on the 24th April, 1682 ; where by the ill treatment of his nearest relations, he was so discom-aged 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, and turned himself to reading liistory and poetry : so that when the time came for taking his degree of bachelor of arts, although he had lived with great regularity and due observance of the statutes, he was stopped of his degree for dulness and insufficiency ; and at last hardly admitted in a manner little to his credit, which is 514 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix I. called in that college sptckdi gratia, on the 15th February 1G85, with four more on the same footing : and this discreditable mark, as I am told, stands upon record in their college registry. The troubles then breaking out, he went to liis mother, who lived in Leicester ; and after continuing there some months, he was received by Sir William Temple, whose father had been a great friend to the family, and who was now retired to his house called Moor Park, near Famham in Surrey ; where he continued for abffut two years. For he hapjiened before twenty years old, by a surfeit of fruit, to contract a giddiness -and coldness of stomach that almost brought him to his grave ; and this dis- order pursued him with intermissions of two or three years to the end of his life. Upon this occasion he returned to Ireland in 1690, by advice of physicians, who weakly imagined that his native air might be of some use to recover his health : but growing worse, he soon went back to Sir William Temple ; with whom growing into some confidence, he was often trusted with matters of great importance. King William had a high esteem for Sir William Temple, by a long acquaintance, while that gentleman was ambassador and mediator of a general peace at Nimeguen. The King, soon after his expedition to England, visited his old friend often at Sheen, and took his advice in affairs of greatest consequence. But Sir William Temple weary of living so near London, and resolving to retire to a more private scene, bought an estate near Famham in Sun-ey, of about £100 a year, where IVIi'. Swift accompanied him. About that time a bill was brought into the House of Commons for triennial parliaments ; agamst which the King, who was a stranger to our constitution, was very averse, by the advice of some weak people, who per- suaded the Earl of Portland that King Charles the First lost his crown and life by consenting to pass such a bill. The Earl, who was a weak man, came down to Moor Park by his majesty's orders to have Sir William Temple's advice, who said much to show him the mistake. But he continued still to advise the Bang against passing the bill. Whereupon Mr. Swift was sent to Kensington with the whole account of the matter in writing to convince the King and the Earl how ill they were informed. He told the Earl, to whom he was referred by his majesty (and gave it in writing), that the ruin of King Charles the First was not owing to his passing the triennial bill, which did not hinder him from dissolving any i^arliament, but to the passing of another bill, which put it out of his power to dis- solve the parliament then in being, without the consent of the house. Mr. Swift, who was well versed in English history, although he was under twenty-one years old, gave the King a short account of the matter, but a more large one to the Earl of Portland : but all in vain. For the King by ill advisers was prevailed upon to refuse passing the bill. Tliis wa? the first time that Mr. Swift had ever any converse with courts, and he told his friends it was the first incident that helped to cure him of vanity APPENDIX I.] FEAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 515 Tlie consequence of tliis wi-ong step in his majesty was very tmhappy ; for it put that prince under a necessity of introducing those peoiDle called "Whigs into power and employments, in order to pacify them. For, al- though it be held a part of the King's prerogative to refuse passing a bill, yet the learned in the law think otherwise, from that expression used at the coronation, wherein the prince obligeth himself to consent to all laws, qitas vulyus elegcfit. Mr. Swift having lived with Sir William Temple some time, and resolv- ing to settle himself in some way of living, was inclined to take orders. But first commenced M.A. in Oxford as a student of Hart Hall on 5th July, 1692. However, although his fortmie was very small, he had a scruple of entering into the church merely for support, and Sir William, then being Master of the Rolls in Ireland, offered him an employ of about £120 a-year in that office ; whereupon Mr. Swift told him, that since he had now an opportunity of living without being driven into the church for a maintenance, he was resolved to go to Ireland, and take holy orders. In the year 1094 he was admitted into deacon's and priest's orders by Dr. WUliam Moreton, bishop of Kildare, who ordained him priest at Christ Church the 13th January that year. He was recom- mended to the Lord Capel, then Lord Deputy, who gave him a prebend in the north worth about £100 a-year, called the Prebend of Kilroot in the Cathedral of Connor, of which growiaig weary in a few months he returned to England, resigned his living in favour of a friend who was reckoned a man of sense and piety, and was besides encumbered with a large family. After which he continued in Sir William Temple's house till the death of that great man, who beside a legacy left him the care, and trust, and advantage of publishing his posthumous writings. Upon this event Mr. Swift removed to London, and applied by petition to King William upon the claim of a promise his majesty had made to Sir WilHam Temple, that he would give Mr. Swift a prebend of Canterbury or Westminster. Col. Henry Sidney, lately created Earl of Romney, who professed much friendship for him, and was now in some credit at court, on account of his early services to the King in Holland before the Revolution, for which he was made Master-General of the Ordnance, Constable of Dover Castle, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and one of the Lords of the Council, piromised to second Mr. Swift's petition ; but said not a word to the king. And Mr. Swift, having totally relied on this lord's honour, and having neglected to use any other in- strument of reminding his majesty of the promise made to Sir William Temple, after long attendance in vain, thought it better to comply with an invitation, given him by the Earl of Berkeley, to attend him to Ireland, as liis chaplain and private secretary ; his lordship having been appointed one of the Lords Justices of that kingdom, with the Duke of Bolton and the Earl of Galwaj', on the 29th June, 1099. He attended nis lordshiiJ, who landed near Waterford ; and Mr. Swift acted as secre- SI 6 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix I. tary the whole journey to Dublin. But another person had so far insinuated himself into the earl's favour, by telling him that the post of secretary was not proper for a clergyman, nor wovild be of any advantage to one who aimed only at church preferments, that his lordship after a poor apology gave that office to the other. In some months the Deanery of Derry fell vacant ; and it was the Earl of Berkeley's turn to dispose of it. Yet things were so ordered that the Secretary having received a bribe, the Deanery was disposed of to another, and Mr. Swift was put off with some other church livings not worth above a third part of that rich Deanery ; and at this present time, not a sixth : namely, the Rectory of Agher, and the Yicarage of Laracor and Eathbeggan in the Diocese of Meath ; for which his letters patent bear date the 24th of February following. The excuse pretended was his being too young, although he were then thirty years old. The next year, in 1700, his grace Narcissus Lord Archbishop of Dublin was pleased to confer upon Mi-. Swift the Prebend of Dunlaven in the Cathedral of St. Patrick's, by an instrument of institution and collation dated the 28th of September. And on the 22nd of October after, he took his seat in the Chapter. From this time he continued in Ireland ; and on the 16th of February, 1701, he took his degree of Doctor of Divinity in the University of Dublin. After which he went to England about the beginning of April, and spent near a year there. He appeared at the Dean's visitation on the 11th of January, 1702 ; at a chapter held the 15th of April ; and at the visitation on the 10th of January, 1703. He attended a chapter on the 9th of August, and the visitation of 8th of January, 1704. He was at two chapters held the 2nd of February and the 2nd of March following, and at the visitation the 7th of January, 1705. Also in Aprd, August, and January, 1706 ; and in AprU, June, July, and August, 1707. Set sail for England 28th of November, 1707 ; landed at Darpool ; next day rode to Paxkgate ; and so went to Leicester first. He was excused at the visitation in 1707 and 1708 ; and on the 9th of January 1709 expected at the visitation, but did not come. He spent 1708 in England, and set sail from Darpool for Ireland 29th of June, 1709, and landed at Ringsend next day, and went straight to Laracor. Was often giddy and had fits this year. He attended a chapter held the 15th February, 1709 ; also at a chapter 29th July and 11 August, 1710. Excused at the visitation 8th of January, 1710. He was not in Ireland after this till liis instalment as Dean on the 13th of June, 1713. On the 27tli of August he nominated Dr. Edward Synge to act in his absence as sub-dean ; and came no more to Ireland initil after the Queen's death. He set out to Ireland from Letcombe in Berkshire August the 16th, 1714 ; landed in Dublin the 24th of the same month ; and held a chapter on the 15th of September, 1714. Appendix II.] KOTE OX THE TALE OF A TUB. 517 APPENDIX II. NOTE ON THE TALE OF A TUB The Tale of a Tnh was first issued in April or May, 1704. During that year three editions appeared (besides those that were pirated, or published in Ireland, where no English copyright was secured by law). In 1705, a fourth edition was issvied by John Nutt, who had been the authorized publisher from the first. The demand then fell ofi', or was met by un- authorized editions : and the next, or fifth, authorized edition was that issued, also by Nutt, in 1710, with the Author's Apology prefixed. After this the copyright seems to have passed into the hands of Benjamin Motte and Tooke. In 1711, I find an unauthorized version, without the Apology : but the sixth and seventh editions appear only in 1724 and 1727. In 1747, there appeared an eleventh edition, published by Batluu-st. The diff'erences between the editions are very slight, except for a few notes, taken from the adverse critiques of Wotton and others, introduced in the fotirth and later editions. A fact so well ascertained as Swift's authorship of the Tale, would not be worth discussion, were it not for the half paradoxical doubt cast on it by Johnson. That doubt clearly arose from Johnson's wish to disparage Swift, by denying the authenticity of his greatest work. But setting aside the overwhelming intrinsic evidence, it may be well to state shortly the proof positive. First, Swift's letter to Tooke (June 29, 1710) is only intelligible as written by the author of the Tale. Secondly, in a hst of those of his pieces that are suitable for a miscellany, written in his own hand, the Apology occurs ; and if he wrote the Apology, he necessarily wrote the Tale. Thirdly, in the Journal to Stella, he clearly refers to it as " i/o« /jjioto ly/iai " which might help him with his new Tory friends. Fourthly, he treasured amongst his papers a letter from a Quaker in Philadelphia, in which the writer thanked him — truly the strangest thanks that any of his sect ever gave — as the author of the Tale. So generally accepted did the authorship at length become, that Pulteney in a letter to Swift himself (June 3, 1740) actually names the book in some Latin verses, as one of the manifestations of his genius. Seu levis a vacuo fabula isnmpta caJo. Lastly, in the period of almost speechless apathy which preceded his death, Swift was heard by Mrs. Whiteway to mutter, as he turned over the leaves of the book, "Good God, what a genius I had when I wrote that book ! " 518 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix III. APPENDIX III. THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE IIISTOBY OF THE FOUB. LAST YEARS OF THE QUEEN As is the case witli several particulars in Swift's life, doubts, proceeding from what was at first a mere suspicion, have been cast on his authorship of this work : and these doubts have grown until they gave rise to a posi- tive denial. I must begin the discussion of the subject, by expressing my indebtedness to Mr. Elwin, for the evidence and arguments bearing on it which he has enabled me to adduce. We know for a certainty, from the published correspondence of Swift, that the work, written long before, was revised and sent to Dr. William King, the Principal of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, for publication in 1737. The bearer of the MS. was Lord Orrery. Swift -was deeply interested in the work : but miich to his vexation, it was strongly objected to by those who represented the very Ministry whose defence it undertook. Remon- strances came to him from Erasmus Lewis, the old ofhcial : from Lord Bolingbroke : and from Lord Oxford as representing his father, the special patron of Swift. This prevented its appearance at the time ; but, in 1758, what claimed to be this work was published by Dr. Lucas, into whose hands a tran- script had fallen, and who, while professing it worth publication from its interest and abihty, was cai-eful to disclaim any sympathy -ndth the opinions it professed ; and who, in particular, strives to exaggerate the dangerous interpretation which might be pjlaced on certain casual words in it.* The author's preface prefixed to some of the editions, tells us that the treatise was written at Windsor, and that he had resolved to publish it in 1713, but was kept back owing to the alterations desired by Lord Oxford, and Lord Bolingbroke, to which the avithor refused to submit. This supposes 1712, or early in 1713, as the date of its being written, the narrative begimiing in January 17jf. Now we know from the Journal, which was not published in 1758, that Swift was at Windsor in September 1712. The supposed forger thus hit upon the truth : and he is further corroborated by the account given in Swift's letter to Lord Oxford of June 14, 1737 — which was also unpublished in 1758. This so-called forgery was published in 1758, and received universally as genuine. It attracted much notice. Dr. King, to whom it had been * E.[/., tlie use of tlie plrase " abdi- against Swift, lie would have invented cated King " of James II. Had Lucas sometliing a little more conclusive of been forging a subject of accusation guilt tban this careless plurase. Appendix III.] FOTIR LAST TEAES OF THE QUEEX. 519 entrusted, lived till 1703 : he was a man of letters, yet lie isublished no denial : he was a man widely known, yet he said nothing against it, or we should certainly have had his doubts repeated. Lord Orrery had carried over the MS. : had read the work ; and was a man much inclined to literary talk. Yet he also lived till 17C2, and never allowed any denial to escape him. Deane Swift, who was at St. Mary's Hall, and intimate with King, tells us that his cousin handed the MS. about in Ireland. Yet no one amongst all these readers of the MS. ever convicted or accused the publi- cation of being a forgery. This evidence is in itself surely strong enough : and. the internal evidence of the piece tells the same way. It is not indeed equal to the great efforts of Swift : no genius is ever equal to himself throughout all his work. But it has conclusive and inimitable marks of Swift's manner in every page : and it has no real marks of forgery. Its resemblances to his style are natural : not of the pronounced and forced type which would certainly have appeared had the forger been at work. But Mr. Elwin has enabled me to adduce another and almost conclusive piece of evidence. It is the following abstract of the history by the historical collector, Dr. Birch, which is amongst his manuscriists in the British Museum. "June 30, 1742." " From y'' manuscript of Dr. Swift's History of the last Paiiiament of Queen Anne : written at Windsor in 1713. It begins with the characters of Lord Sommers, Lord Godolphin, Lord Sunderland, Lord Wharton, Lord Cowper, Duke and Duchess of Marl- boi-ough. Earl of Nottingham, and Duke of Somerset, and Prince Eugene. Lord Sommers — a man of strong passions, though a great master of them, he frequently discovered great rage in his countenance, at the same time that his words and the tone of his voice were full of softness — extremely civil in his whole behaviour, even in private conversation, though it ap- peared there like formality ; of excellent parts, well cultivated by polite learning, but had no great relish for conversation, spending his leisure hours in thinking and reading, except when he relaxed himself with an illiterate chaplain, an humble friend, or a favourite domestic. Lord Godolphin, said to be designed for a trade before he was a page at court ; faithful to his master King .lames II. to a degree beyond many j)ersons, who had much greater obligations ; corresponded with his queen, and made little presents to her, with the leave of K. William, though he concealed it from her lest she should be offended, and wrote to her in a style of duuble eideudre, between Love and Respect. Had a turn for gallantry, and would write songs to his mistress with a pencU on a card. Had a passion for the Duchess of Marlborough. Negligent of the public accounts, but not corrupt. Lord Sunderland received his religion, that is, his indifference for any S20 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix III. form of it, from his fatlier, and his politics from his tutor, Dr. Trimnell, afterwards Bishop of Winchester. A Republican in his notions, and so zealously so, -while liis father was living, that he refused often to be styled lord and chose to be called Charles Spencer, declaring that he hoped to see the time, when the name of a lord should be extinguished. Moderate in his parts, and no scholar either in reality or even in the opinion of the public, notwithstanding his vast library. Lord Wharton, perfectly indifferent to all real religion, though ex- clusive of this, in all other respects, a firm Presbyterian. Of great address in the management of elections, and bringing over young men of quality to his schemes by engaging them in his parties of pleasure, but of so prostitute a character, that it was infamous even to be seen with Mm. By his administration of Ireland liable to an impeachment, at least for high crime and misdemeanours. Lord Cowper, ignorant in all foreign affairs, as appeared in council, and brought into the high station of Chancellor, without any of the inter- mediate steps to it, by those who wanted a person in it, that would give no obstruction to any of their designs, though his character was blemished with such irregularities as rendered him by no means a fit keeper of her Majesty's conscience. A piece of a scholar, and a tolerable logical reasoner, but accustomed to disguise a cause by sophistry and false glosses. Duke of Marlborough, of good understanding, though absolutely tin- cultivated by education or study ; had a prodigious command of his passions upon all occasions, except after he was dismissed from being general : his character for personal courage doubted by many, though it might justly be supposed consistent with the prudence of a general. Avaricious, and resolved to continue the war for the immense profits he made of it. Duchess of Marlborough, a woman of unbounded avarice, infinite pride, and magovernable rage ; affecting the character of wit, though supporting it chiefly by the fashionable humour of ridiculing the doctrines of Christianity and religion in general. Earl of Nottingham declared at first against the Government of K. William, though he afterwards took a post under liim — a conduct to be excused only from his numerous family. Took great pains to run down Lord Godolpliin and the Junta, but being disobliged by the refusal of the j)ost of Lord President of the Council, became a zealous enemy of the new ministry. His countenance not at all hypocritical, nor unsuitable to his temper. Of very slender acquisitions in learning, and from his facility of speaking persuading himself that he was master of an extraordinary eloquence, and affecting to show it on all occasions. Duke of Somerset, of immeasurable pride, with a very bad judgment, though at first an enemy to the old ministry, soon quarrelling with the new, because they could not be governed by him ; and at last lost his favour with the Queen, which himself and liis duchess had gained by the Appendix III] FODE, LAST TEAES OP THE aUEEN. 521 respect which they showed her Majesty while she was Princess of Denmark. Prince Eugene, a lover of war, a Science in which alone he could make any figure ; cruel to a degree, that he would at any time have sacrificed 20,000 men to any point which he had in view ; and resolved, while he was in England, to have taken ofi' the Earl of Oxford a la iiegligencc, as he styled it, for which 'purpose he encouraged those parties who did so much mischief in the streets of London in the night. Lord Oxford's jsassion, ambition, without pride, cruelty or avarice, and though negligent of his friends' interests on some occasions, yet still more so of his own. Too patient under scandalous imputations, though thoroughly innocent of them. Those thoughts occurred at first to him which long deliberation alone suggests to others. Mr. Robert Walpole engaged to his party by his absolute indifference to any principles, and secured to them by the loss of his place ; whose firmness of countenance, which set him above that infirmity which makes men bashful, and readiness in speaking, made him esteemed by them one of their leaders of the second form. The history sets forth the reasons of the changes of the ministry, which were — I. Their had policies in refusing the terms ofiered by the King of France at Gertruydenberg, and imposing such upon him as neither that monarch nor his kingdom would submit to, and which, being published by him, united all his subjects in a resolution to support him at all hazards, and with the sacrifice of their whole property, and particularly the clergy, who offered to melt down their consecrated plate for that purpose. II. Their principles with regard to government and religion, which were extremely disagreeable to her Majesty. III. And the superior way in which they dictated to her upon all occasions, and the shocking treatment which she received from the Duchess of Marl- borough. IV. That among other instances of ill-conduct they were highly blameable in inviting over so vast a number of Palatines, an useless idle body of men, from whom we could expect no advantage : upon which occasion Dr. Swift examines in what sense a nation may be said to be richer for the nimiber of its inhabitants. That the Dutch were clandestinely treating with the French on theii' own separate account. Reflections on Buys the Dutch Minister, and the whole Dutch nation. Reflections on the French nation, with an invective against the injustice of their Salic Law. Abusive character of Count Botlunar, whos6 memorial he says in the first draught to have been unknown to his master, though in his correction of that pasage he seems to suppose it was known. The history ends with the peace of Utrecht." Now, in the fijst place, this abstract, which is in Dr. Birch's own hand- 522 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix III. ivriting, is dated in June, 1742, — nearly three years before the death of Swift. It was clearly taken from a manuscript suhstantially identical ■\rith that from which the book was published in 1758. We might, indeed, guess that the MS. which Lucas followed had received some altera- tions and additions as compared with that which Birch's abstract sums up. But this apparent discrepancy actually helps to establish the genuineness of the book : for Birch says his abstract was taken from tite manuscript, meaning thereby, as we must reasonably infer, the manuscript written by Swift himself. A man accustomed as he was to literary accuracy must otherwise have said that he followed a copy. On the other hand the publisher of the book in 1758, says that he followed " the last manuscript copy, corrected and enlarged by the author's own hand." If, then, we suppose the book to be a forgery, we must suppose also that so careful a collector as Dr. Birch accepted without question a forgery which he had every opportunity of detecting : we must suppose that the forger courted detection by allowing his work to get abroad while Swift was still alive : * and that he concocted a counterfeit work when the genuine MS. was certainly in existence and might at any time have appeared to confute him. It would clearly require powerful arguments to meet these jiroofs that the work is Swift's own. But the evidence to the contrary really amounts to nothing at all. The first doubt was raised by Dr. Johnson, in his "Life of Swift" (writtenmore thantwentyyearsafter Lucas'sbook was published). The History, he says, was ' ' after Swift's death in the hands of Lord Orrery and Dr. King.f A book under that title was published with Swift's name by Dr. Lucas, of which I can only say, that it seemed by no means to correspond with the notions that I had formed of it, from a conver- sation which I once heard between the Earl of Orrer}^ and old Mr. Lewis." The doubt, it is only fair to say, is hesitatingly expressed ; and Jolinson must have known how deceptive the memory as to such matters is, and how feeble a guide is the recollection of others' report of what they recollected. But even this hesitating doubt is completely dissipated as evidence when we find Johnson himself, twenty years before, fully accepting the book as genuine. In the Idler (No. C5, July 14, 1759) Johnson says, " with hopes like these, to the executors of Swift was committed the history of the last years of Qaeeu Anne, and to those of Pope, the works which remained unprinted in his closet. The perform- ances of Pope were burnt by those whom he had, perhaps, selected from all mankmd as most likely to publish them : and the history had likewise perished, had not a straggling transcript fallen into busy hands." * Doubtless his mind was gone : but hands for a certain time during Swift's the world could not know tbat recovery life. What became of it after his death was impossible. we have no means of knowing. t This is inaccurate. It was in their Appendix lY.] MARRIAGE OF SWIFT AND STELLA. 523 With Joliiison any doubt that is worth listening to, begins and ends. It -was revived again by Lord Stanliope,* wlio in the text of the History of the Reign of Queen Anne speaks of "great reason to doubt : " and in the index names the -work as " falsely ascribed to Swift." He tells us also that Macaiday had " more than once expressed (to Lord Stanhope) the conviction that it was not his.'' This is doiabtless confirmed by a note which Macaulay has placed opposite the title of the book in the copy of Lord Orrery's Eeinarks, annotated by him in pencil, which the British Museum possesses — "Wretched stuff; and, I firmly believe not Swift's." Btit Macaiday's casually expressed convictions are belied by the fact that he actually quotes a description given in the book, of Lord Somers's manner, as wTitten by one of his enemies, f But a forger, who was at work half a century later, was neither a good authority on the peculiaritie.'J of Lord Somers, nor could he be called one of his " enemies." So much for the growth of doubts which, once started, are apt to be pursued from mere love of parado.x. They were revived m 1873, when Mr. Disraeli, in ii, speech at Glasgow, referred to the work as Swift's, and for so doing was accused by a correspondent in the Times, of surprising ignorance. The controversy which ensued threw no new light whatever on the subject. APPENDIX IV. THE MARRIAGE OF SWIFT AND STELLA Bather than encumber the narrative of Swift's life with a discussion so long as this must be, I have deemed it best to state separately the arguments in favour of his marriage. I must again acknowledge the invaluable aid which I have received from Mr. Elwin in weighing the evidence and in arranging the arguments. Much of what follows I might attribiite entirely to him, were it not that by so doing I should impute to him, not only the merit of his own arguments, but the defects which may belong to my method of stating them. * 4tli Edition, II., 176. softest manner." Maoaulay writes, as "t" The words in the book are; "His the description of liis enemies, " Some- hreast has been seen to lieave, and his times while his voice was soft, and his eyes to sparkle with rage in those very words kind and courteous, his delicate moments when his words, and the cadence frame was almost convulsed by suppressed of his voice, were in the humblest and emotion." (History,IV., 448, Edit. 1855. ) 524 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix IV. For seventy years after tlie deatli of Swift, his maniage to Stella had come to be accepted, after the amount of doubt and discussion which was inseparable from a matter so mysterious, as a fact. But in 1820 Mr. Monck Mason published his ' ' History and x^jitiquities of the Cathe- dral Church of St. Patrick." A large part of that volume is devoted to the life of Swift : and the principal, if not the only, novelty in that life is its maintenance of the proposition that the marriage, so long accepted, had no foundation at all in fact. Mason's book was published between the first and second editions of Scott's Swift : and in the latter edition (1824), while Scott notices the arguments which Mason had brought against him, he refuses to change his view in deference to them. Mason's view, however, was accepted by the late Mr. Dilke : and Mr. Forster, although he did not reach the point in S^sift's life where a full discussion was possible, yet states ("Life of Swift," p. 140) that he "can find no evidence of a marriage that is at all reasonably sufficient." A recent ivriter in the QiMrterly llevieiu expresses, even more strongly, the same view. Now, undoubtedly, it must be admitted that the course of Swift's biography would run more smoothly, and that expressions used in his letters would be more naturally and simply brought into accord with the facts, were it possible to set aside this marriage as a fabrication. Were it not so, the matter would need no argument at all. It must be admitted, further, that some of the evidence adduced is absolutely worthless, depending upon no more than the idle stories of those who sought to gain attention by inventing gossip. The truth must be reached by test- ing the more valid evidence adduced, and the arguments with which Monck Mason attempts to set this evidence aside. To begin with the earliest in the order of time. Lord Orrery, in his JRcmarks on Swift, published in 1752, states (Letter II.), " Stella's real name was Johnson. She was the daughter of Sir William Temple's steward, and the concealed, but undouhted, wife of Dr. Swift I cannot tell how long she remained in England, or whether she made more journeys than one to Ireland after Sir William Temple's death, but, if my informations are right, she was married to Dr. Swift in the year 1716, by Dr. Ashe, then Bishop of Clogher." Next Dr. Delany, Swift's old and intimate friend, m his ObservatioTis on Lord Orrery's Remarks, published in 1754, writes (p. 52), " Your Lordship's accoimt of his marriage is, I am satisfied, true." He then turns to an explanation of Swift's conduct in a matter the truth of which he thinks beyond doubt : and tells, on the authority of an intimate friend of his own, whose informant was Stella herself, the story of her refusal, as "too late," of Swift's offer to own the marriage about six years after the ceremony had taken place. Before going into any further evidence, let us see how Mason deals with these two witnesses. "The first person," says Mason (p. 299), "that Appendix IV.] MAEEIAGE OF SWIFT AND STELLA. -525 mentions it is John, Earl of Orrery, who relates ' that they were married in the year 1710, by Dr. Ashe, then Bishop of Ologher.' This however he is far from, asserting positively : rather doubtingly he adds, ' if my informations are right ; ' so that this testimony, when we consider the temper and dispositioia of the narrator, the faltering manner in which it is advanced, and the weak arguments with which it is supported, becomes at length very feeble evidence indeed. The earl's account is, however, supported by that of Dr. Delany, who in his ' Observations on Lord Orrery's Remarlcs,' declares his opinion of its truth. That Dr. Delany's acquaintance with this matter should go no further than opinion, fur- nishes argument against rather than for it, and yet the belief of this intimate friend of Swift is the best evidence we have in favour of the marriage, and that which most deserves our attention." Mason adds the following note : "Dr. Delany does not, in his own work, give us any additional proof of the marriage ceremony having been performed, neither does he say that he received any direct communication upon the subject ; this would have been more to the purpose than all his reasoning, nor can we suppose, had he any such direct proof, that he would have recourse to such weak arguments as he employs.'' From these comments we can gather some idea of the dishonesty with which Mason conducts the controversy, and the flagrant misrepresenta- tion of evidence by which he imposes upon any one credulous enough to trust him. He q\iotes only the words in which Lord Orrery gives the detailed circumstances of the ceremony, the date and the person by whom it was performed He suppresses altogether the previous assertion of Orrery that Stella was "the concealed, but undmibiedwiie" of Swift. This assertion is positive enough : it contains no doubt or faltering, and Orrery applies a qualifying plu-ase only to the further information about the details. But by quoting only this last. Mason is able to misrepresent the statement and dishonestly to attach the qualification to the main and central fact. As to the " weak arguments by which Lord Orrery supports it,'' these are only invented by Mason to serve his purpose. Orrery adduces no arguments, either weak or strong. He simply states that the fact was undoubted : and the value we place upon his assertion depends upon our estimate of his competence to form an opinion, and of his honesty in stating the degree of certainty which attached to the evidence upon which he depended. Next as to Mason's description of Delany's evidence, which is just as dishonest. "The Earl's account,'' he says, " is supported by that of Delany, who declares his opinion of its truth." "Your account of the marriage is, I am satisfied, true," are Delany's actual words. The "account" referred clearly to the circumstances of the marriage: the fact was accepted ;as an undoubted truth. Delany does not express "an opinion " of its truth : he writes from first to last as if it were certain : and even as to the details, it is not an "opinion" of the truth of Lord 626 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix IT. Orrery's statement which he avows, but that "he is satisfied" of its truth. Having thus twisted the statements, Mason affirms that Delany's acquaintance with this matter goes no further than opinion ; that "he does not in his own work give us any additional proof of the marriage ceremony having been- performed ; " tliat " he does not say that he received any direct communication upon the subject :'' and that we cannot suppose ' ' had he any sucli direct proof, that lie would have recourse to such weak arguments as he employs." But Delany does tell us of the testimony of his own "well-known" friend, to whom Stella imparted her story, altliough Mason makes no reference to tlie fact. Just as in the case of Lord Orrery, Mason imputes to Delany arguments, to which Delany never has recourse. Delany accepts the evidence as sufficient, and then proceeds to suggest explanations of the conduct of Swift : but he does not even suggest that tliese exjilanations should be accepted as additional proofs : the evidenc3 was too strong, to his mind, to require them. To misx'epresent statements is the surest proof of being unable to meet them. By deliberately suppressing and twisting what Lord Orrery and Delany said. Mason virtually threw up his case. But to proceed to additional evidence. The next is that of George Monck Berkeley, in the Inquiry into the Life of Dean Swift, prefixed to his " Literary Relics," published in 1789. " In 1716," he says (p. xxxvi.), Swift and Stella "were married by the Bishop of Clogher, who himself related the circumstance to Bishop Berkeley, by whose relict the story was communicated to me." Of this Monck Mason says : "What has been adduced by Mr. Monck Berkeley, in his " Literary Relics," is cer- tainly without foundation, viz. : "that the Bishop of Clogher himself related the circumstance to Bishop Berkeley, by whose relict, he says, it was communicated to him." The Bishop of Clogher never could have had any communication with Berlceley upon the subject, for the former died in the year (1717) following that in which the marriage is reported to have been celebrated, and the latter was at that time in Italy, where he had resided diu-ing several preceding years." Now Berkeley was, no doubt, abroad at the time. But Slason does not state that he was abroad in the capacity of tutor to the Bishop of Cloclier's son, and that communications not only may, but must hare passed between the bishop and his son's tutor. The circumstance need not have been related by word of mouth, as Mason assumes. The essential fact, which was all that Monck Berkeley cared for, was that the communication took place : how it took place, is a matter of no moment. Berkeley was the respected friend both of the bishop and of Swift. To him, perhaps, sooner than to any other man, would the secret have been entrusted. So much for the intrinsic probability of the story. And who are the witnesses on whose authority we are to accept it 1 Not the Appendix IY.] MARRIAGE OF ST\^FT Al^iiD STELLA. 527 faintest suspicion could attach either to the Bishop of Clogher or to Berkeley. Could Berkeley's wife be mistaken ? The fact was a very simple one : that the Bishop of Clogher married Swift to Stella. How could she have misconceived, or misreported it, unless of set purpose I And is it likely that she would put into her husband's mouth, after his death, a, deliberate falsehood which she had invented herself, and in ■which she could have no sort of interest ? The same reasoning applies to the credibility of Monck Berkeley, who was a man of high in- tegrity and whose narrative is marked by a full sense of responsibility. Next there is the evidence of Thomas Sheridan in his " Life of Swift," published in 1784, in which he speaks (p. 311 of 2nd edition) of the story of Swift's refusal to acknowledge the marriage, even at Stella's dying request. From an examination of the evidence dealt with in the next appendix I am compelled to reject the authenticity of this anecdote. But although Sheridan might have been mistaken as to the particular course which the interview took, from an imperfect recollection of his father's narrative, yet I do not think it is possible that he could have been mistaken as to the main fact, attested by his father's testimony, that the marriage had actually taken place. And his evidence becomes all the more difficult to Get aside, from the fact that the elder Sheridan's authority is adduced by others as supporting their version of the story — a version which, while it differs from that of the younger Sheridan, is still based upon the same primary fact, that the marriage actually took place. Another proof of the marriage, which might not in itself be strong, but which, as corroborative of the others, acquires much weight, is the asser- tion of Dr. Madden as quoted by Johnson in his '■' Life of Swift," (" Lives of the Poets,'' Cunningham's edition, 3, 186). Johnson says that doubts have lately been throivn upon the marriage : " but alas ! " he goes on, ' ' poor Stella, as Dr. Madden told me, related her melancholy story to Dr. Sheridan when he attended her as a clergyman to prepare her for death." Johnson's information must have been received from Dr. Madden, most probably about 1745, when he was correcting and cutting down Madden's poem, called "Boulter's Monument," for which service Madden paid him ten pounds. The evidence was thus entirely indepen- dent of the testimony which the younger Sheridan gives at a later day of his father's knowledge of the story. We can scarcely believe that a man so masculine in intellect, and so conscientious in his adherence to strict accuracy as Johnson, would have quoted Madden's testimony as con- clusive evidence, had he not known that Madden had drawn his informa- tion from Sheridan himself. From Sheridan also, in all lorobability, was derived that further evidence which Johnson quotes on Madden's authority : " Soon after, in his forty-ninth year, he was privately married to Mrs. Johnson, by Dr. Ashe, Bishop of Clogher, as Dr. Madden told me, in the garden," (" Lives of the Poets," 3, 177.). Monck Mason dis- credits the idea that Sheridan could have been Madden's informant. 528 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix IV. because they were different in politics. When, however, we remember that thej' were both clergymen, both frequenting Dublin society, both much connected with Trinity College, both men of kindly and sociable habits, the balance of probability is very decidedly the other way. Such are the arguments in favour of the marriage. The witnesses all agree with one another, (though the sources of their information are clearly independent) both in regard to the date, and in the other details of the ceremony. Though the report was published almost immediately after Swift's death, and had long been accepted by his most intimate friends, it never was contradicted either by Swift or Stella, or by anyone whose authority would even be worth attention, except Dr. Lyon. As Dr. Lyon was only Swift's attendant in his later and feeble years, it may be questioned whether his evidence on the point would be of much value. But it is so vague in its character as to be even on this ground alone valueless. The story, Dr. Lyon says in his MS. notes in a copy of Hawkesworth's Life, now in the Forster Library at South Kensington, was " foimded only on hearsay " : and he adds a second-hand testimony to its falsity that proves how little he could trust to his own. knowledge. "It is certain," he goes on, "that the Dean told one of his friends whom he advised to marry, ' that he never wished to marry at the time that he ought to have entered into that state : for he counted it as the happiest condition, especially towards the decline of life, when a faitliful and tender friend is most wanted.' "While he was talking to this effect his friend expressed his wishes to have seen him married. The Dean asked ' Why 1 ' ' Because,' replied the other, " I should have had the pleasure of seeing your offspring. All the world would have been pleased to have seen the issue of such a genius.' The Dean smiled, and denied his being married in the same manner as before : and said ' he never saw the woman he wished to be married to.' The same gentleman, who was intimate with Mrs. Dingley for ten years before she died, in 1743, took occasion to tell her, that such a story was whispered of her friend Mrs. Johnson's marriage with the Dean ; but she only laughed at it, as an idle tale founded on suspicion." It is scarcely necessary to point out how small is the weight to be attached to this. Clearly Swift, even if the conversation occurred as stated, was speaking only in generalities. To any one on the distant terms in which the interlocutor clearly stood, it was certain that Swift would enter upon none of the secrets of his life. As to Mrs. Dingley, it is not likely that she would be entrusted with the secret at all. Her character and temper were troublesome, and her position was much more that of the companion, necessary for appearance, than that of the confidante. But if she had the secret in her keeping, she could choose no other way of turning aside an impertinent question than that which is reported. The whole paragraph could have been written only by one whose knowledge of Swift was based upon second-hand reports of his mere casual acquaintances. The utter Appendix IV.] MARRIAGE OF SWIFT AND STELLA. 529 baselessness of Lyon's testimony becomes even more evident when he adduces the disbelief of Swift's housekeeper, Mrs. Ridgway — an un- educated drudge — as an argument against the reality of an occurrence which, admittedly, was entrusted only to one or two of Swift's oldest and closest friends. As flimsy is the argument against the marriage, which Lyon and Monck Mason adduce, viz. , that Stella used her maiden name in her ordinary signatures and finally in her will. This was clearly only a part of the bargain : and after it had been finally settled between them, that no piibUcation of the marriage should take place beyond a very limited circle of friends, it remained for Stella, both oiit of fidelity to their original bargain, and out of a regard for her own dignity, to use that name, and to exercise those free testamentary powers with which she was quite con- fident that Swift would never, on the strength of his legal rights, seek to interfere. It is perhaps worth adding, as some confirmation of the stronger evidence given above, the testimony of Deane Swift. He had considerable oppor- tunities for reaching the truth, although not always the best judgment for testing it ; and while he acknowledged, in one of the letters written to Lord Orrery during the lifetime of Swift, and transcribed in a volume now in Lord Cork's possession, that to many the marriage seemed based only "on a buzz and rumours," yet in his own volume on the Dean, published in 1755, he unhesitatingly expresses his conviction of its truth. In connection with a point which afi'ects so nearly the relations between Swift and Stella, it may be well to say a word of what is the chief literary record of their love. This is the Journal to Stella, so-called, although the letters which make it up were addressed jointly to Esther Johnson and to Rebecca Dingley, and although the former did not yet bear to Swift the name of Stella. Of these letters the last twenty-five were published by Hawkesworth, and placed for reference in the British Museum : the earlier letters were published subsequently and less faith- fully by Deane Swift, and of them only one remains to aid in verification. One of the chief features of these letters is the so-called "little language' which occurs in them : a language partly made up of the kindly and easy tricks of phrase in which Swift gave his confidences to Stella ; partly of the childish and broken verbiage which recalled the jjrattle of her infancy, and in writing which Swift says "he makes up his mouth as if he was speaking it ; " and partly of certain tokens which they used in a cypher of their own, and which we can occasionally interpret with fair certainty. M.D. seems to stand for Esther Johnson and her friend : PDPR. for Swift : Ppt. for Stella alone, and so on. Mr. Forster has spent some care 530 LIFE OF JONATHAN SAVIFT. [Appendix V. not only in the useful labour of collating the letters which still exist, but in hazarding translations for such cyphers as these. Not a few may deem that such secrets lose in charm more than they yield of biographical interest, by a too painful nicety of interpretation. APPENDIX V. SWIFT'S OFFER TO ANNOUNCE THE MARRIAGE. The evidence which bears on the question of when, and by whom, any proposal to own the marriage, was made, is involved and inconsistent, and in one version tells more severely against Swift than any other in- cident of his life. On what basis rests a charge of callousness wliich, if true, would almost amount to barbarity ? Tliree stories have hitherto been given. Writing in 1754, Dr. Delany says : — " This (the Dean's increasing gloom of temper) gave Stella inexpressible uneasiness ; and I well knew a friend to whom she opened herself upon that head, declaring that the Dean's temper was so altered, and his at- tention to money so increased (probably increased by his solicitude to save for her sake) ; her own health at the same time gradually impaired : that she could not take upon herself the care of his house and economy : and therefore refused to be publicly owned for his wife, as he earnestly desired she should. It was then, she said, ' too late : and therefore better that they should live on, as they had hitherto done.' " This refers to the year 1722 or thereabouts : since the paragraph wliich follows speaks of her resolution as confirmed, iiot very long after, by the publication of " Cadenus and Vanessa," just after the death of Vanessa in 172.3. Next Sheridan, the son of Swift's intimate friend, writing in 1784, "A short time before her death a scene passed between the Dean and her, an account of which I had from my father, and which I shall relate with reluctance, as it seems to bear more hard on Swift's humanity than any other part of his conduct in life. As she found her final dissolution approach, a few days before it happened, in the jjresence of Dr. Sheridan, she addressed Swift in the most earnest and pathetic terms to grant her dying request. That as the ceremony of marriage had passed between them, though for sundry considerations they had not cohabited in that state, in order to put it out of the power of slander to be busy with her fame after Appendix V.] OFFER TO ANNOUNCE THE MARRIAGE. 531 death, she adjured him by their friendship to let her have the satisfac- tion of dying at least, though she had not lived, his acknowledged wife. Swift made no reply, but turning on his heel, walked silently out of the room, nor ever saw her afterwards during the few days she lived. This behaviour threw Mrs. Johnson into unspeakable agonies, and for a time she sank under the weight of so cruel a disappointment. But soon after, roused by indignation, she inveighed against his cruelty in the bitterest terms ; and, sending for a lawyer, made her wiU, bequeathing her fortune, by her own name, to charitable uses." Lastly, on the authority of Theophilus Swift, the son of Deane Swift, Sir Walter Scott gives the following story, in which the words reported by Delany are transferred to the dying scene, but with a widely different purport from that of the story told by Sheridan. Theophilus Swift claimed to have his information from Mrs. Whiteway. " When SteUa was in her last weak state, and one day had come in a chair to the Deanery, she was with difficulty brought into the parlour. The Dean had prepared some muUed wine, and kept it by the fire for her refreshment. After tasting it she became very faint, but, having recovered a little by degrees, when her breath (for she was asthmatic) was allowed her, she desired to lie down. She was carried upstairs and laid on a bed ; the Dean sitting by her, held her hand, and addressed her in the most affectionate manner. She drooped, however, very much. Mrs. Whiteway was the only third person present. After a short time, her politeness induced her to withdraw to the adjoining room, but it was necessary, on account of air, that the door should not be closed : it was half shut — -the rooms were close adjoining. Mrs. Whiteway had too much honour to listen, but could not avoid observing that the Dean and Mrs. Johnson conversed together in a low tone : the latter, indeed, was too weak to raise her voice. Mrs. Whiteway paid no attention, having no idle curiosity, but at length she heard the Dean say, in an audible voice, "Well, my dear, if you wish it, it shall be owned ; '' to which Stella answered, with a sigh, "It is too late." With regard to these stories, tliis much may be said with confidence, that Delany is almost certain to be right, so far as his narrative goes : that Sheridan was at least honest, though the information he got from his father (who died in 1738) was too remote from the date when he ■wrote his book to let us acceist, without hesitation, all he says : while Theophilus Swift, the hair-brained son of a very foolish father, was almost certain to be wrong even when professing to report the words of so trustworthy an authority as Mrs. Whiteway. His story is clearly a mere garbled version of that told by Delany, except that Delany's belongs to 1722, when it was probable, and Theophilus Swift's to 1727, when it was scarcely possible. Delany's story we may therefore accept as true : Theo- philus Swift's we may pronounce false. With regard to Sheridan's story, we must first look at its intrinsic 532 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix V. probability. Swift, it may be allowed, had motives for refusing the acknowledgment in 1727, even though willing to propose it, according to Delany, in 1722. Since 1722 the story of his connection with Vanessa had come out by the publication of the poem "Cadenus and Vanessa." Had he acknowledged Stella as his wife in 1727, the precautions he had taken in their intercourse must have made him ridiculous ; we know, also, that in 1726 and 1727 he was exceedingly careful that no rumours should get abroad by Stella's dying at the Deanery. At that time he evidently avoided anything that could give the least confirmation to the report of their marriage. But when this is allowed, the story still remains improbable. Honest as he is, Sheridan is frequently absurdly circumstantial in his imputing of motives and describing of conversations. His story might, no doubt, be reconciled with that of Delany, by supposing that the Dean had changed his mind in the interval between 1722 and 1727. But had the incident happened as described at the later date, Swift would have felt a resent- ment against Stella, which might no doubt have passed away with time, but which would probably have prevented his writing as he did of her, in terms of the most earnest aflFection, immediately after her death. Lastly, if Stella was so roused by indignation, why should she have acted, with regard to her will, just as Swift had, more than a year before, suggested she should do?* Would it not have been a more complete revenge to have published to the world the evidence of her marriage which she doubtless possessed, rather than have acquiesced in the refusal by using her maiden name, in a legal document ? But here a new fragment of evidence helps us. Amongst the MSS. belonging to Lord Cork, I find a transcript of a letter from Deane Swift to Lord Orrery — one of a series written in the last years of the Dean's life, in which the following occurs : — "I must correct myself again. Wliat I writ of Stella from the best of my memory was not right exactly. Mrs. Whiteway says, he did not acknowledge her to be his wife in the presence of Dr. Sheridan, but that Stella told Dr. Sheridan he had ofi'ered to declare his marriage to the world, which she refused, alleging that it was then too late. " Here, then, is a fourth version of what probability would lead us to think was one and the same story at bottom. Deane Swift would not him- self be entitled to a great deal of weight : but here he is almost certain to be right. Mrs. Whiteway was strictly honest and had the best means of information. She was intimate Avith Sheridan. Deane Swift, as her son-in- law, was in constant communication with her : and both were trying to amass all the facts they could for Lord Orrery's book, which was already in preparation. The story was told even before the Dean's death. It is not a mere careless version, but is evidently carefully corrected after consul- * Letter to Mr. Worrall, July 15, 1726. Appendix VI.] WOOD'S HALFPEIfCE. 533 tation with Mrs. Whiteway. The corrected version would seem to make the story less important, since it made Sheridan's evidence less direct ; * and Deane Swift would not readily or lightly have stript his story of any importance that it seemed to possess. Now we have to see how it suits with the other versions. It is quite enough to account for, and dispose of, the flimsy superstructure th.it Theophilus Swift buUt on it, and that Sir Walter Scott accepted. But as the story brmgs in the elder Sheridan, it is absolutely inconsistent with the story told by Sheridan's son, attributing to his father an opposite version. We must believe one to be mistaken : and of the two, siirely the younger Sheridan was most liable to mistake. He— when a boy of seventeen, too young to understand the real bearing of the question — had discussed the matter with his father at least forty-sis years before he wrote. The discussion would necessarily involve the fact of Swift's original condition of secrecy. Is it impossible that this condition, imposed by Swift, may have led Sheridan to think that the refusal to remove it was Swift's also ? The story, finally, agrees perfectly with that of Delany, and it would fix the friend of whom Delany speaks as the elder Sheridan himself. The relations between Delany and Sheridan were not very cordial : and this fact may have prompted Delany's omission of the name. An apparent difficulty in the way of this theory arises from the fact that Delany's story refers to 1722, while both the younger Sheridan and Dr. Madden, as reported by Johnson, represent Sheridan's information as given him by Stella only on her death-bed. But the difficulty is only apparent ; although Delany's friend spoke of 3722, it does not follow that it was not on Stella's death-bed that he received the account of an occurrence which took place five years before. APPENDIX VI. WOOD'S HALFPENCE To attempt a complete explanation of this transaction is a hopeless task ; but there are certain misrepresentations of it which it is well to clear away. Scott, whose notes to the Drapier's Letters repeat the impressions of earlier editors who were more conversant with the facts, treats the * The statement which Deane Swift her to be his wife in the presence of Dr. corrects occurs previously in the same Sheridan, some little time before she etter. "It is said, he acknowledged died." 534 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix VI. whole affair, in his Life, as a sort of portentous joke on the part of Swift. But it is Lord Stanhope whose version of the affair is most unfair. He begins by describing the financial part of the patent as " directed by Walpole with his usual skill. " Unless the word is used in a sarcastic sense, it is hard to say wherein this skill was shewn. Lord Stanhope forgets to state that the proposed amount of copper coinage was from six to ten times more than independent and competent writers declared to be necessary. In what he calls " this clear and well-conducted transaction," Lord Stanhope finds only one, and that a trifling, flaw, which "could not materially affect the quantity or quality of the coin to be issued." This was the payment to the Duchess of Kendal of £10,000— or about 10 per cent, of the whole coinage — as a preliminary bribe. Lord Stanhope omits to state the further dedxictions, in payments to the Crown and the Comptroller, amounting to £1000 a year.* That Irish susceptibilities should have been aroused by the insulting manner of carrying out the transaction, seems to Lord Stanhope only a proof of the nation's folly. When the vote of the Parliament declares that the terms of the Patent had not been carried out, and that, even if they had been, the nation would have lost 150 per cent.. Lord Stanhope meets the statement by quoting the impartial authority of Walpole. But Walpole's words, so far as they are intelligible at all, do not toiich the fact that copper worth 12d. was to count for two shillings and sixpence in Ireland. His talk of the cost of coinage in the English mint, of the exchange, of " allowances," and so on, is all beside the question. England no doubt paid something for her copper coinage : Ireland was to pay a great deal more. The Report of the Committee of Privy Council, which Lord Stanhope thinks clear and conclusive, has already been shewn to be, in material points, fallacious. He praises Wood's conduct in consenting that 5id. should be the limit which any one could be compelled, in one payment, to receive : forgetting that in the multitude of petty payments in Ireland, this sufficiently ensured the speedy currency of the coin. By arguments so weak as these Lord Stanhope maintains that Swift, for the purposes of a simulated indignation, traded on a ^Dopular delusion, and he further believes that Swift attacked this " clear and well-conducted transaction " with no ulterior purpose : that he had no tyranny and no mis- government to expose, but only a childish love of mischief to indulge : and that, when the outcry against the halfpence was over, "the whole edifice of indignant patriotism crumbled to the ground ! " * This is the statement of the Govern- misstatement represents either further ment Report. The payment was ap- error or more intricate dishonesty, parently, as a fact, only £300. But the Appendix VII.] rEOCLAMATION AGAINST THE DKAPIEE. 535 APPENDIX VII. PROCLAMATION AGAINST THE DRAPIEB, Oct. 21th, 1724. A PROCLAMATION for discovering ye Author of ye Pamphlet intitled A Letter to ye whole people of Ireland, by M. B. Drapier, author of the Letter to the shopkeepers &c. £300 Reward. By the Lord Lieutenant and Council of Ireland. a ^arotlamatinn. Content : Whereas a wicked and malicious pamphlet, intituled A letter to the whole people of Ireland, by M. B. Drapier, author of the Letter to the shopkeepers &c., printed by John Harding, in Moles worth's Covu-t, in Fishamble Street, Dublin, in which are contained several seditious and scandalous paragraphs highly reflecting upon his Majesty and his ministers, tending to alienate the affections of his good subjects of England and Ireland from each other, and to promote sedition among the people, hath been lately printed and published in this kingdom : We, the Lord Lieutenant and Council do hereby publish and declare that, in order to discover the author of the said seditious pamphlet, we wiU give the necessary orders for the payment of three hundred pounds sterling, to such person or persons as shall within the specified six months from this date hereof, discover the author of the said pamphlet, so as he be apprehended and convicted thereby. Given at the council chamber in Dublin, this twenty-seventh day of October, one thousand seven hundred and twenty-four. (Signed) Midleton Ccmcer. Shannon; DonneraUl ; G. Fforbes ; H. Meath ; Santry ; Tyrawly ; Fferrars ; William Conolly ; Ralph Gore ; William Whitshed ; B. Hale ; Gust. Hume ; Ben Parry ; James Tynte ; R. Tighe ; T. Clutterbuok. God save the King. APPENDIX VIII. EDITIONS OF GULLIVER The bibliography of Gulliver's Travels belongs to the commentary on Swift's works, rather than to the account of his life. But there are one or two points regarding it, to which it may be well to refer. 536 LIFE OF JONATHAN' SVIFT. [Appendix VIII. The book was first published about the 7th of November, 1726. When the first edition was issued Swift got a large paper copy, in which he entered from time to time his MS. corrections. That large paper copy is now in South Kensington Museum, and it is of great importance in help- ing us to trace the comparative authority of each edition and the reasons for the later changes. Before the close of 1726 there was a re-issue of the first volume, along with a new edition of the second volume, the latter only being designated as a second edition. The first volume seems to have been re-issued as it stood, in consequence of the wish to consult Swift as to the so-caUed commendatory verses, which it was proposed to print before it in any new edition.* The second volume professes to be a second edition : but it contains none of the MS. changes of the large-paper copy. In 1727 there appeared the first new edition of both volumes • the first volume being designated "Second edition," and the second volume "Second edition, corrected." In spite of the different designation, an examination of all accessible copies makes it certain that they belong to the same issue. Now both volumes of this new edition embody, not all, but a certain number, of Swift's own MS. corrections. The changes are not very im- portant, but they are not merely typographical, and the printer must necessarily have had access to Swift's MS. corrections so far as these had been made at that date. But the edition which embodies the greatest number of these MS. corrections is Faulkner's Dublin edition of 1735. f It was in that edition, too, as has not been noticed by the editors, that the Letter from Gulliver to Ids cousin Sympson was for the first time printed. The letter is dated April 27, 1727 : but its date is only a part of the mystification which Swift intended that the letter should produce. This conclusively settles the question of Swift's watchful interest over the new editions. However much he allowed others to act for liim, to regulate the issue, and probably to draw the profits, he yet took care that such changes as he wished to make in the text should not be overlooked. It proves, further, the supervision which he gave to Faulkner's edition of his works. The changes were chiefly in Laputa, on which criticism had been least favourable ; and Swift seems even to have added further changes after those embodied in the edition of 1735. At p. 70 of Laputa, in the large- paper copy, he has inserted an addition of some length, which has never yet been printed. The reasons for the letter to Sympson are islain enough. Swift desired * Pope to Swift, 8 March, ]7i|. corrected " (1727) of the 2nd volume ;— t The folio-wing passages may be noted Laputa, pp. 42, 90, 101 ; HouyhnmlinrLis, where this edition embodies changes pp. 65, 69, 77, 97. ■which are not made in " the 2nd edition Appendix IX.] THE JOURNAL OF 1727. 537 to sit loosely to the responsibility of authorship. He suggests in 1726 that probably parts are garbled : and throughout he uses this loophole for dis- claiming what he or his friends might afterwards condemn. If he wished in 1735 to embody changes and yet to make them appear to be what he originally wrote, he could have chosen no better means to help the design than such a letter. In it he referred at once to material and to trifling changes. He speaks of them with the seriousness of a narrator who finds his veracious history confused and disturbed by the mistakes of the editor. To carry out the delusion, he dates the letter eight years before it was written.* Further, the letter helped to give circumstantiality to the whole book. Who would not be persuaded by a traveller, that showed himself anxious that there should be no mis-spelling of such veracious nomencla- ture as that of Brobdingrag, which has hitherto been wrongly printed Brobdingnag ? f A further proof of Swift's interest in GxilUver is supplied by an unpub- lished letter of his own to Benjamin Motte, of Dec. 28, 1727, (now in South Kensington Muse^im) in which he gives minute suggestions as to the engravings which may be selected for pictures in a new edition. The little men, he thmks, will bear illustration better than the great. In one sentence of some interest, he gives his opinion of the hold the book has gained and is likely to retain. " The world," he says, " glutted itself with that book at first, but now it will go off but soberly, but I suppose will not be soon worn out." APPENDIX IX. THE JOURNAL OF 1727 This Journal having come into the hands of the late Mr. Forster, was by him bequeathed to South Kensington Museum, where it now is. On the inside of the cover of the little book in which it is written, there is the following note : — " This Book I stole from the Right Honble. George Dodington, Esq., * One small fact sbows the date to be in 1727. a false one. Gulliver speaks of the book + The question has been raised as having appeared seven months before. whether Swift really intended that the But it hadappeared only five months before name should be Brobdingnag or (as April, 1727. Such a slip was very likely Gulliver insists in his letter) Brobding- n 1735 ; it would have been impossible rag. The point is not of much import- 538 LIFE OP JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix IX. one of the Lords of the Treasury, June, 1727. But the Soribblings are all my own. " Then follow some memoranda relating to commissions which Swift had to perform — the providing of a clock for the cathedral, the purchase of spectacles, investments, the care of his grandfather's tomb, &c. Next come the following fragments of verse. HoLYHEiD, Sepbr. 25, 1727. " Lo here I sit at holy head, With muddy ale and mouldy bread : I'm fastened (?) both by wind and tide, I see the ships at anchor ride. All Christain vittals stink of fish, I'm where my enemyes would wish. Convict of hes is every Sign, The Inn has not one drop of wine. The Captain swears the sea's too rough, He has not passengers enough. And thus the Dean is forc'd to stay TiU others come to help the pay. In Dublin they'd be glad to see A packet though it brings in me. They cannot say the winds are cross : Your Politicians at a loss For want of matter swears and f retts — Are forced to read the old Gazettes. I never was in haste before, To reach that slavish hateful shore. Before, I always found the wind. To me was most mahcious kind, But now the danger of a friend. On whom my fears and hopes depend, Absent from whom all Climes are curst. With whom I'm happy in the worst. With rage imi^atient makes me wait A passage to the Land I hate. ance, but we certainly need not make has not introduced it into the copy which the change on the authority of Gulliver, contains his own MS. alterations. He whose letter is quite sufficiently ac- makes it only in a mock letter addressed counted for as a device for giving addi- by himself in one character to himself in tional circumstantiality to the narrative. another. And, finally, the letter tells us Swift had, at least, allowed one edition that lie "cannot stand to the corrections,'' after another to appear, for eight years, but must leave the matter to his candid without suggesting an alteration. He readers, "to adjust it as they please." Appendix IX.] THE JOUllNAL OF 1727. 539 Else, rather on this bleaky shore, Where loudest winds incessant roar, Wliere neither herb nor tree will thrive, "Where Nature hardly seems alive, I'd go in freedom to my grave Than Rule yon Isle, and be a slave. Ireland. Remove me from this land of slaves. Where aU are fools, and all are knaves ; Where every knave and fool is bought. Yet kindly sells himself for nought ; Where Whig and Tory fiercely fight Who's in the wrong, who in the right ; And, when their country lies at stake, They only fight for fighting sake. While English sharpers take the pay. And then stand by to see fair play. Meantime the Whig is always winner. And for his courage gets — a dinner. His ExceUenoy, too, perhaps Spits in his mouth and stroaks his Chaps. The humble whelp gives ev'ry vote — To put the question strains his throat. His Excellency's condescension Win serve instead of place or pension. When to the window he's trepan' d — When my L'' shakes Mm by the hand, Or, in the presence of beholders. His arms upon the booby's shoulders — You quickly see the gudgeon bite. He tells his brother fools at night How well the Governor's inclined — So just, so gentle, and so kind. He heard I kept a pack of hounds. And longs to hunt upon my grounds, He s*" our Ladyes were so fair. The land had nothing to compare ; But that indeed which pleased me most, He call'd my Dol a perfect toast. He whispered public things at last, Asked me how our elections past. Some augmentation, Sir, you know, Would make at least a handsome show. 540 LIFE OF JONATHAN S^VIFT. [Appendix IX. Now kings a compliment expect ; I shall not offer to direct. There are some prating folks in town, But, Sir, we must support the Crown. Our letters say a Jes^iit boasts Of some invasion on your coasts. The king is ready, when you will, To pass another Popery bill ; And for dissenters, he intends To use them as his truest friends. ***** I think they justly ought to share In all employments we can spare. Next, for encouragement of spinning, A duty might be laid on linen. An act for laying down the plough — England will send yon com enough ; Another act that absentees For licences shall pay no fees. If England's friendship you would keep. Peed nothing on yoiu? lands but sheep ; But make an act, severe and full, To bring up all who smuggle wool. And then lie kindly gave me hints That all our wives should go in chintz. To-morrow I shall tell you more. For I'm to dine with him at four. Tliis was the speech, and here's the jest — His arguments convinced the rest. Away he runs, with zealous hotness. Exceeding all the fools of Totness, To move that all the nation round Should pay a guinea in the pound ; Yet should this blockhead beg a place. Either from Excellent or Grace, 'Tis pre-engaged, and in his room Townshend's cast page or Walpole's groom. On L'' Carteret's arms given, as the ciistom is, at every Inn where the L'' L' dines or lies, with all the bUls in a long parchment. 'Tis twenty to one, When Carteret is gone. Appendix IX.] THE JOURNAL OF 1727. 541 These praises we blot out ; The truth will be got out, And then we'll be smart on His Pship as Wharton ; Or Slirewsbury's duke, With many rebuke ; Or Bolton the wise, With his Spanish flyes ; Or Grafton the deep. Either drunk or asleep. These titles and arms Will then lose their charms. If somebody's grace Should come in his place. And thus it goes round — We praise and confound. They can do no good, Nor would if they could. To injure the nation Is recommendation ; And why should they save her By losing their favour ? Poor kingdom, thou woulds't be that governor's debtor. Who kindly would leave thee no worse nor no better. Then comes the Testament to Posterity, quoted on p. 339, and finally the Journal, as follows ; — Friday, at 11 in the morning I left Chester. It was Sept'. 22, 1727. I bated at a blind ale-house 7 miles from Chester. I thence rode to JRidland,"' in all, 22 miles. I lay there, had bad meat, and tolerable wine. I left Ridland at a quarter after 4 moi;n. on Saturday, slept on Penmenmawr, examined about my sign verses : the Inn is to be on t'other side, therefore the ver.ses to be changed. I baited at Conway, the Guide going to another Inn. The Maid of the old Inn saw me in the Street, and said that was any Horse, she knew me ; there I dined and send for Ned Holland, a Squire famous for being mentioned in Mr. Lyndsay's verses to Davy Morice. I there again saw Hook's Tomb, who was the 41st Child of his Mother, 'and had himself 27 Children ; he died iibout 1639. There is a nota bene that one of his posterity new furbished Tip the Inscription. I had read in A. B' William's Life that he was * I.e. Uhudlan. 542 LIFE OF JONATHAX SWIFT. [Appendix IX. buryecl in an obscure Church in North Wales. I enquired, and heard it was at * Church, within a mile of Bangor, whither I was going : I went to the Church, the Guide grumbling. I saw the Tomb with his Statue kneeling (in marble). It began thus :— [Hospes lege- et relege quod in hoc obscuro sacello non expectares. Hie jacet omnium jjroesulum celeberrimus]. I came to Bangor, and crossed the Ferry a mUe from it, where there is an Inn, which, if it be well kept,, will break Bangor. There I lay — it was 22 miles from Holyhead. I was on horseback at 4 in the monaing, resolving to be at Church at Holy- head, but to shew Wat Owen Tudor's Tomb at Penmarry. We passed the place (being a little out of the way) by the Guide's knavery, who- had no mind to stay. I was now so weary with riding, that I was forced to stop at Langueveny, 7 miles from the Ferry, and rest 2 hours. Then I went on very weary, but in a few miles more Watt's Horse lost his two fore-shoes, so the Horse was forced to limp after us. The Guide was less- concerned than I. In a few miles more, my Horse lost a fore-shoe, and could not go on the rocky ways. I walked above 2 miles to spare him. It was Sunday, and no Smith to be got. At last there was a Smith in th& way ; we left the Guide to shoe the Horses, and walked to a hedge Inn 3 miles from Holyhead. There I stay"! an hour, with no ale to be drunk, a Boat offered, and I went by Sea and sail in it to Holyhead. The Guide came about the same time. I dined with an old Inn-keeper, Mrs. Welch, about 3, on a loyn of mutton, very good, but the worst ale- in the world, and no wine, for the day before I came here, a vast number went to Ireld after having drunk out all the wine. There was stale beer, and I tryed a receit of Oyster shells, which I got powdered on purpose ; but it was good for nothing. I walked on the rocks in the evening, and then went to bed, and dreamt that I had got 20 falls from my Horse. Monday, Sept'. 25. The Captain talks of sailing at 12. The talk goes oflf ; the Wind is fair, but he says it is too fierce ; I believe he wants more company. I had a raw chicken for dinner, and Brandy with water for my drink. I walkt morning and afternoon among the rocks. This evening Watt teUs me that my Landlady whispered him that the Grafton packet boat, just come in, had brought her 18 bottles of Irish Claret. I secured one, and supped on part of a neat's tongue, which a friend at London had given Watt to put up for me — and drank a pint of the wine, which was bad enough. Not a soul is yet come to Holyhead, except a young fellow who smiles when he meets me, and would fain be my companion ;. but it is not come to that yet. I writ abundance of verses this day ; and several useful hints (tho' I say it). I went to bed at 10, and dreamt abundance of nonsense. Tues. 26tli. I am forced to wear a shirt three days, * * * * -****! Yfa,s sparing of them all the way. It was a mercy there * Blank left id MP. Appendix IX.] THE JOUENAL OF 1727. 543 were six clean when I left London ; otherwise Watt (whose blunders would bear an history) would have put them all in the great Box of goods which goes by the Carrier to Chester. He brought but one cravat, and the reason he gave was because the rest were foul, and he thought he should not put foul linnen into the Portmanteau. For he never dreamt it might be washed on the way. My shirts are all foul now, and by his rea- soning, I fear he will leave them at Holyhead when we go. I got anotli'' loin of mutton, but so tough I could not chew it, and drank my 2'' pint of wine. I walked this morning a good way among the rocks, and to a hole in one of them from whence at certain periods the water s^jurted up several foot high. It rain'd all night, and hath rained since dinner. Biit now the sun shines, and I will take my afternoon's walk. It was fairer and milder weather than yesterday, yet the Captain never dreams of sailing. To say the Truth Michaelmas is the worst season in the year. Is this strange stuff ? Why, what would you have me do ? I have writt verses, and put down hints till I am weary. I see no creature, I cannot read by candle-light. Sleeping makes me sick. I reckon my self fixed here : and have a mind like Marechall Tallard to take a house and garden. I wish you a merry Christmas, and expect to see you by Candle- mas. I have walked this evening again about 3 miles on the rocks ; my giddiness, God be thanked, is almost gone, and my hearing contmues ; I am now retired to my Chamber to scribble or sit hum-drum. The night is fair, and they pretend to have some hopes of going to-morrow. Sept'. 26tli. Thoughts upon being confined at Holyhead. If this were to be my settlement, during life, I could caress myself a while by forming some conveniences to be easy ; and should not be frighted either by the solitude, or the meanness of lodging, eating or drinking. I shall say nothing upon the suspense I am in about my dearest friend ; because that is a case extraordinary, and therefore by way of amusement, I will speak as if it were not in my thoughts, and only as a passenger who is in a scurvy unprovided comfortless place without one companion, and who therefore wants to be at home, where he hath all conveniences there jjroper for a gentleman of quality. I cannot read at night, and I have no books to read in the day. I have no subject in my head at present to write on. I dare not send my linnen to be washed, for fear of being called away at half an hour's warning, and then I must leave them beliind me, which is a serious point. I live at great expense, without one com- fortable bit or sup. lam afraid of joining with ijadsengers for fear of get- ting acquaintance with Irish. The days are short, and I have five hours at night to s]pend by myself before I go to bed. I should be glad to con- verse with farmers or shopkeepers, but none of them speak English. A dog is better company than the vicar, for I remember him of old. What can I do but write everything that comes into my head. Watt is a Booby of that species which I dare not suffer to be familiar with me, for he would ramp on my shoulders in half an hour. But the worst part is 544 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix IX. my half -hourly longing, and hopes and vain expectations of a wind ; so that I live in suspense, ■which is the worst circumstance of human nature. I am a little risky (?) from two scurvy disorders, and if I should relapse, there is not a Welsh house-cur that would not have more care taken of him than I, and whose loss would not be more lamented. I confine my- self to my narrow chamber in all unwalkable hours. The Master of the pacquet boat, one Jones, hath not treated me with the least civility, altho' Watt gave him my name. In short I come from being used like an Emperor to be used worse than a Dog at Holyhead. Yet my hat is worn to pieces by answering the civilities of the poor inhabitants as they pass by. The women might be safe enough, who all wear hats yet never pull them off, if the dirty streets did not foul their petticoats by courtse5dng so low. Look you ; be not impatient, for I only wait till my watch marks 10, and then I will give you ease, and myself sleep, if I can. On my conscience you may know a Welsh dog as well as a Welshman or woman by its peevish passionate way of barking. This paper shall serve to answer all yoiu: questions about my Journey ; * and I will have it printed to satisfy the Kingdom. Forsan et licec then is a damned lie, for I shall always fret at the remembrance of this imprisonment. Pray pity poor Wat, for he is called dunce, puppy, and liar 500 times an hour, and yet he means not ill, for he means nothing. Oh for a dozen bottles of deanery wino and a slice of bread and butter. The wine you sent us yesterday is a little upon the sour. I wish you had chosen better. I am going to bed at ten o'clock, because I am weary of being up. Wednesday. Last night I dreamt that L'' Bolingbroke and Mr. Pope were at my Cathedral in the Gallery, and that my L*" was to preach. I could not find my surplice ; the Church Servants were all out of the way ; the doors shiit. I sent to my L'' to come into my stall for more conveniency to get into the Pulpit. The Stall was all broken ; they s"" the Collegians had done it. I squeezed among the Rabble, saw my L'' in the Pulpit. I thought his Prayer was good, but I forget it. In liis sermon, I did not like his quoting Mr. Wycherley by name, and his Play. This is aU, and so I waked. To-day we were certainly to sail ; the mommg was calm. Wat and I walked up the monstrous mountain properly called Holyhead or Sacrum Promontorium by Ptolemy, 2 miles from this town. I took breath 59 times. I looked from the top to see the Wicklow hills, but the day was too hazy, which I felt to my sorrow ; for returning, we were overtaken with a furious shower. I got into a Welsh cabin, almost as bad as an Irish one. There was only an old Welshwoman sifting flour who understood no English, and a boy who fell a roaring for fear of me. Wat (otherwise called unfortunate Jack) ran home for my coat, but stay'' so long that I came home in worse rain without him, and he was so lucky to miss me, but took care to carry the key of my room where a fire was * Swift is addressing only an imaginary correspondent. Appendix IX.] THE JOURNAL OF 1727. 5'i5 ready for me. So I cooled my heels in the Parlor till he came, but called for a glass of Brandy. I have been cooking myself dry, and am now in my night gown ; and this moment comes a Letter to me from one Wlielden ■who tells me he hears I am a lover of the Mathematicks, that he has found out the Longitude, shewn his discourse to Dr. Dobbs of y' College, and sent Letters to all the Mathematicians in London 3 months ago, but received no answer, and desires I would read his discourse. I sent back liis Letter with my answer under it, too long to tell you, only I said I had too much of the Longitude already, by 2 projectors, whom. I encoiiraged, one of which was a cheat and the oth'' cut his own throat, and for him- self I thought he had a mind to deceive others, or was deceived himself. And so I wait for dinner. I shall dine like a King all alone, as I have done these 6 days. As it happened, if I had gone straight from Chester to Parkgate, 8 miles, I should have been in Dublin on Sunday last. Now Micli'lmas approaches, the worst time in the year for the Sea, and this rain has made these parts unwalkable, so that I must either write or doze. Bite ; when we was in the wild cabin, I order Wat to take a, cloth and wipe my wet gown and cassock — it happened to be a meal bag—' and as my Gown dryed, it was all daubed with flour well cemented with the rain. What do I, but see the Gown and cassock well dried in my room, and while Wat was at dinner, I was an hour rubbing the meal out of them, and did it excelly ; He is just come up, and I have gravely bid him take them down to rub them, and I wait whether he will find out what I have been doing. The Rogue is come up in six minutes with my gown, and says there were but few spots (tho' he saw a thousand at first) but neither wonders at it nor seems to suspect me who laboured like a horse to rub them out. The 3 Pacquet boats are now all on this side ; and the weather grows worse, and so much rain tliat there is an end of my walk- ing. I wish you would send me word how I shall dispose of my time. If the Vicar could but play at back-gammon I were an Emperor ; but I know him not. I am as insignificant here as Parson Brooke is in Dublin. By my conscience, I believe Ctesar would be the same without his army at his back. Well, the longer I stay here, the more you will murmur for want of packets. Whoever would wish to live long should live here, for a day is longer than a week, and if the weather be foul, as long as a fort- night. Yet here I could live with two or three friends, in a warm house, and good wine — much better than being a Slave in Ireld. But my misery is, that I am in the worst part of Wales under the very worst cir- cumstances ; afraid of a relapse, in utmost solitude ; impatient for the condition of our friend ; not a soul to converse with, hindered from exercise by rain, cooped up in a room not half so large as one of the Deanery Closets. My room smokes into the bargain, and the other is too cold and moist to be without a fire. There is or should be a Proverbo here, "When Mrs. Welsh's Chimney smokes, Tis a sign she'll keep her folks. But, when of smoke the room is clear. It is a sign we sha'nt 54G LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix X. stay here. '' All this is to divert thinking. Tell me, am not I in a com- fortable way ? The Yacht is to be here for L"" Carteret on the 14th of Ootb'. I fancy he and I shall come over together. I have open'd my door to let in the wind that it may drive out the smoke. I asked the wind why it is so cross, he assures me 'tis not his fault, but his cursed Master bolus's. Here is a young Jackanapes in the same Inn waiting for a wind, who would fain be my companion ; and if I stay here much longer, I am afraid all miy pride and grandeur will truckle to comply with him, espe- cially if I finish these leaves that remain ; but I will write close, and do as the Devil did at mass — puD the paper with my teeth to make it hold out. Thursday. 'Tis allowed that we learn patience by suffering. I have now not spirit enough left me to fret. I was so cunning these 3 last days, that whenever I began to rage and storm at the weather, I took special care to turn my face towards Ireland, in hopes by my breath to push the wind forward. But now I give up. However, when, upon asking how is the wind, the people answer. Full in y' teeth, I cannot help wishing, worse were in theirs. Well, it is now 3 afternoon. I have dined and invited the Master. The wind and tide serve, and I am just taking boat to go to the Ship : so adieu till I see you at the Deanery. Friday, Mich's day. You wOl now know something of what it is to be at sea. We had not been half an hour in the ship till a fierce wind rose directly against us. We tried a good while, but the storm still con- tinued. So we turned back, and it was eight at night, dark and rainy, before the ship got back, and at anchor. The other passengers went back in a boat to Holyhead, but to prevent accidents and broken shins I lay all night on board and came back this morning at 8 . am now in my Chamber, where I must stay, and get in a new stock of patience. You all know well enough where I am, for I wrote thrice after your Letters that desired my coming over. The last was from Coventry, 19th instant, but I brought it with me to Chester, and saw it put into the Post, on Thursday 21st, and the next day followed it myself, but the Pacquet boat was gone before I could get here, because I could not ride 70 miles a day. APPENDIX X. THE WILL OF ESTHER JOHNSON Esther Johnson's Will has been printed at full length by the late Sir W. Wilde in his " Closing Years of Dean Swift.'' It is only necessary here to notice some of its important points. It is dated December 30th, 1727, and begins thus :— "In the name of God. Amen. I, Esther Johnson, of the city of Dublin, spinster, being of tolerable health in body, and perfectly sound Appendix X.] THE WILL OF ESTHER JOHNSON. 547 in mind, do here make my last will and testament, revoking all former wills -whatsoever. First, I bequeath my soul to the infinite mercy of God with a most humble hope of everlasting salvation, and my body to the earth, to be buried in the great aisle of the Cathedral Church of St. Patrick's, Dublin, and I desire that a decent monument of plain white marble may be fixed in the wall, over the place of my burial, not ex" ceeding the value of twenty pounds sterling, and that the charges of my funeral may not exceed the said sum." She next provides for the investment of £1000 of her property in land, to be purchased, exactly according to the directions of Swift's own Will, in any province of Ireland, except Connaught. The proceeds of such in- vestment are to go, during their lives to her mother and sister, and there- after to the payment of a salary to a chaplain in Dr. Steevens's hospital.* The next stipulation of her Will again bears a striking resemblance to the Will of Swift. "If it shall happen," she says, "(which God for- bid) that at any time hereafter the present Established Episcopal Church of this kingdom shall come to be abolished, and be no longer the national Established Church of the said Kingdom, I do, in that case, declare wholly null and void the bequest above made * * * and my will is, that, in the case aforesaid, it devolves to my nearest relation then living." As in the will of Swift, there is a clause preventing rack-renting on the lands to be purchased and held in trust, imder her Will. After some specific legacies, the Will proceeds : — " Lastly I make and constitute the Eev. Dr. Thomas Sheridan, of the City of Dublin, the Rev. Mr. John Grattan, the Eev. Mr. Francis Corbet, and John Eochfort, Esq. , of the City of Dublin, executors of my last Will and testament. I desire likewise that my plate, books, furniture, and whatever other moveables I have, may be sold to discharge my debts : and that my strong box, and all the papers I have in it or elsewhere, may be given to the Eev. Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's. ' 'Item. I bequeath to the Eev. Dr. Jonathan Swift a bond of thirty pounds, due to me by Dr. Eussell, in trust for the use of Mrs. Honoria Swanson. " She designates herself as a "Spinster,'' and she signs herself "Esther Johnson." But this, as has already been pointed out, is no argument against the marriage : it was obviously a necessary part of the compact of secrecy ; and she had no reason to fear that Swift would use his legal powers as her husband, to interfere with, or to invalidate, the terms of a. Will, so made. * Tills was exactly the disposition of Mason conceives to be an argument ia her property which Swift had urged, in favour of his contention that she had not a letter from London, to Mr. Worrall, of herself gone through the ceremony. The 16 July, 1726, that she should make. cause is weak that rfiquires to be sup- She adds the condition that the chaplain ported by such a puerility, should be unmarried : and this Monck N N 2 St8 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix XI. APPENDIX XI. THE CHARACTER OF MRS. JOHNSON [STELLA] [This character gives us so clear a picture of the qualities which Swift found to admire in her whom he had chosen from amongst all women, that the bond between him and Stella is not to be ixnderstood without it : and it is printed here as essential to his own biography.] This day, being Sunday, January 28, 1727-8, about eight o'clock at night, a servant brought me a note, with an account of the death of the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend, that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with. She expired about six in the evening of this day ; and as soon as I am left alone, which is about eleven at night, I resolve, for my own satisfaction, to say something of her life and character. She was born at Richmond, in Surrey, on the 13th day of March, in the year 1681. Her father was a younger brother of a good family in Nottinghamshire, her mother of a lower degree ; and indeed she had little to boast of her birth. I knew her from six years old, and had some share in her education, by du-ecting 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 yoimg women in London, only a little too fat. Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection. She lived generally in the country, with a family where she contracted an intimate friendship with another lady of more advanced years. I was then, to my mortification, settled in Ireland ; and about n year after, going to visit my friends in England, I found she was a, little uneasy upon the death of a person on whom she had some dependance.* Her fortune, at that time, was in all not above fifteen hundred pounds, the interest of which was but a scanty maintenance. Under this consideration, and indeed very much for my own satisfaction, who had few friends or acquaintance in Ireland, I prevailed with her and her dear friend and companion, the other lady, to draw what money they had into Ireland, a great part of their fortune being in annuities upon funds. Money was then ten^ec cent, in Ireland, besides the advantage of returning it, and all necessaries of life at half * The omission of Sir W. Temple's relations with the family, name is clearly due to Swift's strained Appendix XI.] THE CHAEACTER OP MRS. JOHNSON. 549 the price. They complied with my advice, and soon after came over ; but I happening to continue some time longer in England, they were much discouraged to live in Dublin, where they were wholly strangers. She was at that time about nineteen years old, and her person was soon distinguished. But the adventure looked so like a frolic, the censure held for some time, as if there were a secret history in such a removal ; which, however, soon blew off by her excellent conduct. She came over with her friend on the in the year 170- ; and they both lived together until this day, when death removed her from. us. For some years past, she had been visited with continual ill health ; and several times, within these last two years, her life was despaired of. But, for this twelvemonth past, she never had a day's health ; and, properly speakirg, she has been dying six months, but kept alive, almost against nature, 1 y the generous kindness of two jjliysioians, and the care of her friends. Thus far I writ the same night between eleven and twelve. Never was any of her sex born with better gifts of the mind, or who more improved them by reading and conversation. Yet her memory was not of the best, and was impaired in the latter years of her life. But I cannot call to mind that I ever once heard her make a wrong judgment of persons, books, or affairs. Her advice was always the best, and with the greatest freedom, mixed with the greatest decency. She had a graceful- ness, somewhat more than human, in every motion, word, and action. Never was so happy a conjunction of civility, freedom, easiness, and sincerity. There seemed to be a combination among all that knew her, to treat her with a, dignity much beyond her rank ; yet people of all sorts were never more easy than in her company. Mr. Addison, when he was in Ireland, being introduced to her, immediately foimd her out ; and, if he had not soon after left the kingdom, assured me he 'vvould have used all endeavours to cultivate her friendship. A rude or conceited coxcomb passed his time very ill, upon the least breach of respect ; for, in such a case, she had no mercy, but was sure to expose him to the contempt of the standers-by, yet in such a. manner, as he was ashamed to complain, and durst not resent. All of us who had the happiness of her friendship agreed unanimously, that, iai an afternoon or evening's conversation, she never failed, before we parted, of delivering the best thing that was said in the company. Some of us have written down several of her sayings, or what the French call hons mots, wherein she excelled beyond belief. She never mistook the understanding of others ; nor ever said a, severe word, but where a much severer was deserved. Her servants loved, and almost adored her at the same time. She wordd, upon occasions, treat them with freedom ; yet her demeanour was so awful, that they durst not fail in the least point of respect. She chid them seldom, but it was with severitj', which had an effect on them for a long time after. January 29. My head aches, and I can write no more. 550 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appekdix XI. January 30. Tuesday. This is the night of the funeral, which my sickness will not suffer me to attend. It is now nine at night ; and I am removed into another apart- ment, that I may not see the light in the church, which is just over against the window of my bed-chamber. With all the softness of temper that became a lady, she had the personal courage of a hero. She and her friend having removed their lodgings to a new house, which stood solitary, a parcel of rogues, armed, attempted the house, where there was only one boy. She was then about four-and-twenty ; and having been warned to apprehend some such attempt, she learned the management of a pistol ; and the other women and servants being half dead with fear, she stole softly to her dining- room window, put on a black hood to prevent being seen, primed the pistol fresh, gently lifted up the sash, and taking her aim with the utmost presence of mind, discharged the pistol, loaden with bullets, into the body of one villain, who stood the fairest mark. The fellow, mortally wounded, was carried off by the rest, and died the next morning ; but his companions could not be found. The Duke of Ormond had often drunk her health to me upon that account, and had always a high esteem for her. She was indeed under some apprehensions of going in a boat, after some danger she had narrowly escaped by water, but she was reasoned thoroughly out of it. She was never known to cry out, or discover any fear, in a coach or on horseback ; or any uneasiness by those sudden acci- dents with which most of her sex, either by weakness or affectation, appear so much disordered. She never had the least absence of mind in conversation, or given to interruption, or appeared eager to put in her word, by waiting impatiently imtil another had done. She spoke in a most agreeable voice, in the plainest words, never hesitating, except out of modesty before new faces, where she was somewhat reserved ; nor, among her nearest friends, ever spoke much at a time. She was but little versed in the common topics of female chat ; scandal, censure, and detraction, never came out of her mouth ; yet, among a few friends, in private conversation, she made little ceremony in discovering her contempt of a coxcomb, and describing all his foUies to the life ; but the follies of her own sex she was rather inclined to extenuate or to pity. When she was once convinced, by open facts, of any breach of truth or honour in a person of high station, especially in the church, she could not conceal her indignation, nor hear them named without shewing her displeasure in her countenance ; particularly one or two of the latter sort, whom she had known and esteemed, but detested above all mankind, when it was manifest that they had sacrificed those two precious virtues to their ambition, and would much sooner have forgiven them the common immoralities of the laity. Her freqnent fits of sickness, in most parts of her life, had prevented Appendix XL] THE CHAEACTER OF MRS. JOHNSON. 551 her from making that progress in reading which she would otherwise have done. She was well versed in the Greek and Roman story, and was not unskilled in that of France and England. She spoke French perfectly, but forgot much of it by neglect and sickness. She had read carefully all the best books of travels, which serve to open and enlarge the mind. She understood the Platonic and Epicurean philosophy, and judged very well of the defects of the latter. She made very judicious abstracts of the best books she had read. She understood the nature of govermnent, and could point out all the errors of Hobbes, both in that and religion. She had a good insight into physic, and knew somewhat of anatomy ; in both which she was instructed in her younger days by an eminent physician, who had her long under his care, and bore the highest esteem for her person and understanding. She had a true taste of wit and good sense, both in poetry and prose, and was a perfect good critic of style neither was it easy to find a more proper or impartial judge, whose advice an author might better rely on, if he intended to send a thing into the world, provided it was on u, subject that came within the compass of her knowledge. Yet, perhaps, she was sometimes too severe, which is a safe and pardonable error. She preserved her wit, judgment, and vivacity, to the last, but often used to complain of her memory. Her fortune, with some accession, could not, as I have heard say, amount to much more than two thousand pounds, whereof a great part fell with her life, having been placed upon annuities in England, and one in Ireland. In a person so extraordinary, perhaps it may be pardonable to mention some particulars, although of little moment, farther than to set forth her character. Some presents of gold pieces being often made to her while she was a girl, by her mother and other friends, on promise to keep them she grew into such a spirit of thrift, that, in about three years, they amounted to above two hundred pounds. She used to shew them with boasting ; but her mother, apprehending she would be cheated of them, prevailed, in some months, and with great importunities, to have them put out to interest ; when the girl, losing the pleasure of seeing and counting her gold, which she never failed of doing many times in a day, and despairing of heaping up such another treasure, her humour took quite the contrary turn ; she grew careless and squandering of every new acquisition, and so continued till about two-and-twenty ; when, by advice of some friends, and the fright of paying large bills of tradesmen who en- ticed her into their debt, she began to reflect upon her own folly, and was never at rest until she had discharged all her shop bills, and refunded herself a considerable sum she had run out. After which, by the addition of a few years, and a superior understanding, she became, and continued all her life, a most prudent economist ; yet still with a stronger bent to the liberal side, wherein she gratified herself by avoiding all expense in clothes (which she ever despised) beyond what was merely decent. And, 552 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix XI. although her frequent returns of sickness were very chargeable, except fees to physicians, of which she met with several so generous, that she could force nothing on them, (and indeed she must otherwise have been undone,) yet she never was without a considerable sum of ready money. Insomuch, that, upon her death, when her nearest friends thought her very bare, her executors found in her strong box about one hundred and fifty pounds in gold. She lamented the narrowness of her fortune in nothing so niucli, as that it did not enable her to entertain her friends so often, and in so hospitable a manner, as she desired. Yet they were always welcome ; and while she was in health to direct, were treated with neatness and elegance, so that the revenues of her and her companion passed for much more considerable than they really were. They lived always in lodgings ; their domestics consisted of two maids and one man. She kept an accoimt of all the family expenses, from her arrival in Ireland to some months before her death ; and she would often repine, when looking back upon the annals of her household bills, that every- thing necessary for life was double the price, while interest of money was sunk almost to one half ; so that the addition made to her fortune was indeed grown absolutely necessary. [I since ^vrit as I f oimd time. ] But her charity to the poor was a duty not to be diminished, and there- fore became a tax upon those tradesmen who furnish the fopperies of other ladies. She bought clothes as seldom as possible, and those as plain and cheap as consisted with the situation she was in ; and wore no lace for many years. Either her judgment or fortune was extraordinary in the choice of those on whom she bestowed her charity, for it went farther in doing good than double the sum from any other hand. And I have heard her say, ' ' she always met with gratitude from the poor ; " which must be owing to her skill in distinguishing proper objects, as well as her gracious manner in relieving them. But she had another quality that much delighted her, although it might be thought a kind of check upon her bounty ; however, it was a pleasLTre she covild not resist : I mean that of making agreeable presents ; wherein I never knew her equal, although it be an affair of as deUcate ii, nature as most in the course of life. She used to define a present, "That it was a gift to a, friend of something he wanted, or was fond of, and which could not be easily gotten for money." I am confident, during my acquaintance with her, she has, in these and some other kinds of liberality, disposed of to the value of several hundred pounds. As to presents made to herself, she received them with great unwillingness, but especially from those to whom she had ever given any ; being, on aU occasions, the most disinterested mortal I ever knew or heard of. From her own disposition, at least as much as from the frequent want of health, she seldom made any visits ; but her own lodgings, from before twenty years old, were frequented by many persons of the graver sort, Appenbix XL] THE CHAEACTEE OF MRS. JOHNSOIf. 553^ ■who all respected her highly, vipon her good sense, good manners, and conversation. Among these were the late Primate Lindsay, Bishop Lloyd, Bishop Ashe, Bishop Brown, Bishop Sterne, Bishop Pulleyn, with some others of later date ; and indeed the greatest numher uf her acquain- tance was among the clergy. Honour, truth, liberality, good nature, and modesty, were the virtues she chiefly possessed, and most valued in her acquaintance ; and where she found them, would be ready to allow for some defects ; nor valued them less, although they did not shine in learn- ing or in wit : but would never give the least allowance for any failures in the former, even to those who made the greatest figure in either of the two latter. She had no use of any person's liberality, yet her detestation of covetous people made her uneasy if such a one was in her company ; xipon which occasion she would say many things very entertaining and humorous. She never interrupted any person who spoke ; she laughed at no mis- takes they made, but helped them out with modesty ; and if a good thing were sijoken, but neglected, she would not let it fall, but set it in the best light to those who were present. She listened to all that was said, and had never the least distraction or absence of thought. It was not safe, nor prudent, in her presence, to oflFend in the least word against modesty ; for she then gave full employment to her wit, her contempt, and resentment, under which even stupidity and brutality were forced to sink into confusion ; and the guilty person, by her future avoiding him like a bear or a satyr, was never in a way to transgress a second time. It happened, one single coxcomb, of the jiert kind, was in her companj-, among several other ladies ; and in his flippant way, began to deliver some double meanings ; the rest flapjied their fans, and used the other common expedients practised in such cases, of appearing not to mind or comprehend what was said. Her behaviour was very different, and lierhajDS may be censured. She said thus to the man : ' ' Sir, all these ladies and I understand your meaning very well, having, in spite of our care, too often met with those of your sex who wanted manners and good sense. But, believe me, neither virtuous nor even vicious women love snch kind of conversation. However, I will leave you, and report your behaviour : and whatever visit I make, I shall first inquire at the door whether you are in the house, that I may be sure to avoid you." I know not whether a majority of ladies would approve of such a. proceedmg ; but I believe the practice of it would soon put an end to that corrupt conversation, the worst effect of dullness, ignorance, impudence, and vulgarity ; and the highest afiront to the modesty and understanding of the female sex. By returning very few visits, she had not much company of her owai sex, except those whom she most loved for their easiness, or esteemed for their good sense : and those, not insisting on ceremony, came often to ^54 j^iFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix XI her. But alie rather chose men for her companions, the usual topics of ladies' discourse being such as she had little knowledge of, and less relish. Yet no man was upon the rack to entertain her, for she easily descended to anything that was innocent and diverting. News, politics, censure, family management, or town-talk, she always diverted to something else ; hut these indeed seldom happened, for she chose her company better : and therefore many, who mistook her and themselves, having solicited her acquaintance, and finding themselves disappointed, after a few visits dropped off ; and she was never known to inquire into the reason, nor ask what was become of them. She was never positive in arguing ; and she usually treated those who were so, in a manner which well enough gratified that unhappy disposi- "tion ; yet in such a sort as made it very contemptible, and at the same time did some hurt to the owners. "Whether this proceeded from her easiness in general, or from her indifference to persons, or from her des- pair of mending them, or from the same practice which she much Hked in Mr. Addison, I cannot determine ; but when she saw any of the com- pany very warm in a, wrong opinion, she was more inclined to confirm them in it than oppose them. The excuse she commonly gave, when her friends asked the reason, was, " That it prevented noise, and saved time." Yet I have known her very angry with some, whom she much esteemed, for sometimes falling into that infirmity. She loved Ireland much better than the generality of those who owe both their birth and riches to it ; and having brought over aU the fortune she had in money, left the reversion of the best x^art of it, one thousand pounds, to Dr. Steevens's Hospital. She detested the tyranny and in- justice of England, in their treatment of tliis kingdom. She had indeed reason to love a country, where she had the esteem and friendship of all who knew her, and the universal good report of all who ever heard of her, without one exception, if I am told the truth by those who keep general conversation. Which character is the more extraordinary, in fall- ing to a person of so much knowledge, wit, and vivacity, qualities that are used to create envy, and consequently censure ; and must be rather imputed to her great modesty, gentle behaviour, and inoffensiveness, than to her superior virtues. Although her knowledge, from books and company, was m\ioh more extensive than usually falls to the share of her sex ; yet she was so far from making a parade of it, that her female visitants, on their first acquaintance, who expected to discover it by what they call hard words and deep discourse, would be sometimes disappointed, and say, "They found she was like other women." But wise men, through all her modesty, whatever they discoursed on, could easily observe that she understood them very well, by the judgment shewn in her observations, as well as in her questions. Appendix XII.] LETTERS FEOM LOED CORK'S MSS. 555 APPENDIX XII. ORIGINAL LETTERS FROM THE MSS. IN THE POSSESSION OF THE EARL OP CORK These letters, for -which I am indebted to the kindness of the Earl of Cork, have been quoted frequently in the narrative of Swift's last years. But a few additional extracts will have interest, as throwing light on Swift's occupations and moods during these years. Every one of the letters expresses as strongly as possible his regard for Lord Orrery. The first extract is from a letter of March 22, ITf?. " I had this minute a letter from England telling nie that excise on tobacco is passed, 265 against 204, which was a greater number of sitters than I can remember. It is concluded they will go on in another session to farther articles, and then yoii will have the honor to be a slave in two kingdoms. Here is a pamphlet just come out in defence of the excise, it was reprinted here by a rascal from England, in a great office and at his own charge, to pave the way for the same proceeding here : but I hope our members will think they are slaves enough already : and perhaps somebody or other may be tempted to open folk's eyes. " I sent the Epitaph * on Mr. Gay to Mrs. B to be copied for your Lordshii^, and I think there are some lines that might and should be cor- rected. I am going to write to the author, and shall tell him my opinion. I agree with your Lordship that his imitation of Horace is one of the best things he hath lately writ : and he tells me himself, that he never took more pains than in his JPoem to Lord Bathurst upon the use of riches : nor less than in this, which however his friends call his chef d'ceuwe, although he writ it in two mornings, and this may happen when a poet lights upon a fruitful hint, and becomes fond of it. I have often thought that hints were owing as much to good fortune as to invention. And I have some- times chid poor Mr. Gay for dwelling too long upon a hint (as he did in the sequel of the Beggar's Opera, and this unlucky posthumous pro- duction.) t He hath likewise left a second part of fables, of which I prophesy no good. I have been told that few painters can copy their own originals to perfection. And I believe the first thoughts on a subject that occurs to a poet's imagination are usually the most natural * * * * A stupid beast in London, one Alexander Buinet (I suppose the Bishop's son) has parodied Mr. Pope's satirical imitation in a manner that makes * The epitaph by Pope in Westminster t The "sequel" was Folly: the Abbey, beginning "Of mauners gentle, "posthumous ijroduction," the opera of of affections mild." Achilles. 556 LIFE OF JOXATHAN SAYIFT. [Appekdix XIT. me envy Mr. Pope for haying snoh an adversary, than whose performance nothing can be more low and scnrrilous." The nest extract is from a letter of July 17th, 1T35. " Mt Lord, I am like a desperate debtor, who keeps out of the way as much as he can ; and want of health in my case is equal to want of money or of honesty in the other. I have been some months settling my perplexed affairs, like a dying man, and like the dying man, pestered with continual interruptions as well as difficulties. I liave now finished my will in form, wherein I have settled my whole fortune on the city, in trust for building and maintaining an Hospital for idiots and Imiatios, by which I save the expense of a chaplain, and almost of a physician, so that I now want only the circumstance of health to be very idle, and a constant correspondent, but no further than upon trifles. As to writing in verse or prose I am ii, real king, for I never had so many good suhjecU in my life ; and the more a king, because like all the rest of my rank (except K. George) I am so bad a governor of them, that I do not regard what becomes of them, nor hath any single one among them thrived under me these three years past. My greatest loss is that of my viceroy Trifler Sheri- dan. * * * Onr Bishop Eundle is not yet come over, and I believe his chaplain Philips is in a, reasonable fright that his patron may fall sooner than any living in the diocese ; I suppose it is Trim Tram betwixt both, for neither of them have three pennyworth of stamina. If there be any merry company in this town, I am an utter stranger to the persons and places, except when half a score come to sponge on me every Sunday evening. Dr. Helsham is as arrogant as ever, and Dr. Delany costs two tliiiieeas to be visited in wet weather, by which I should be oiit of pocket nine pence when I dine with him. — This moment (Wednesday, six o'clock evening, July IGth) Mr. Pliilips sent me word that lie landed with his bishop this morning, and hath sent me two volumes of poetry just reeking, by one John Hnghes, Esq. f * * * * I have been turning over Squire Hughes's poems, and his puppy publisher, one Duncomb's, preface and life of the author. This is all your fault. I am put out of all patience to the present set of vrhifHers, and their new- fangled politeness. Duncomb's preface is fifty pages upon celebrating a fellow I never once heard of in my life, though I lived in London most of the time that Duncomb makes him fioursh. Duncomb put a short note in loose paper to make mo a present of the two volumes, and desired my pardon for putting my name among the subscribers. I was in a, rage when I looked and found my name ; but was a little in countenance when I saw your Lordship's there too. The verses and prose are such as our t Whom Le speaks of, in a letter to Popo, ;is " too grave a poet for me." Appendix XII.] LETTERS FROM LORD CORK'S MSS. 557 Dublin third-rate rhymers might write just the same for nine hours a day till the coming of Anticlirist. I wish I could send them to you by post for your pxmisliment. Pray my Lord as you ride along compute how inuch the desolation and poverty of the people have increased since your last travels through your dominions. Although I fancy we suffer a great deal more twenty miles round Dublin, than in the remoter parts, except your city of Cork, who are starving (I hope) by their own villany. Since you left the town there hath not been one riot either in the University nor among the Cavan Bail,* which causeth a great dearth of news, nay not so much as a review, and but two or three bloody murders. * * * * I called at my Lady Acheson's, and in came Philips very hearty, and has some excellent stories piping hot from London, which I have entreated liim to send you. His Bishop is full of disease, but PliUips pronounces bim the best man alive, and he does not value the chaplainship the thousandth part so much as the agreeable manner that it was given. This you will agree to be a compliment perfectly new, as new as any of my Polite Conversation. I will hold you no longer, but remain. My dear Lord, with more expression than the remainder of this paper will hold. Ever your, etc., J. S." On Sept. 25th, 1735, he writes : " Sheridan staid here not above ten days, all which he passed abroad, and only lay at the Deanery. He boasts in every latter of the fine air and meat and ale of Cavan, and the honest merry neighbourhood. He writes me English Latinized, and Latin Engl3'"fied, but neither of them equal to mine, as my very enemies allow. It is true indeed, I am gone so far in this science that I can hardly write common English, I am so apt to mingle it with Latin. For instance, instead of writing, my enemies I was going to spell it mi en emis. * * * * I was to sign a report of a Committee at the Blue-Coat Hospital just now ; but wotild not do it till the words mob and hehave were altered to rahhle and behaved themselves. Curse on your new-fangled London wits, misti Us\ corrupted, and you, out of spite, will in your next letter torment me with sho'dn't, iL'o'dn't, be'ri't, canH, cu'dn't.'" On March 31st, 1737, he writes : ' ' My deae LoPwD : I am so busy a person in State affairs, that I cannot endure to read country letters. I have, indeed, some faint remembrance that I received a letter from you about four days ago, and another about as many days sooner. Confound that jade Fortune who did not make me a » The mob in St. Patrick's Liberty + I.e. "my stylo is." was called the Cavan or Kevin Bail. 558 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix XII. lord, although it were of llreland ; I should have been above the little embranglements into which I put myself. The thing was this. A great flood of halfpence from England hath rolled in upon us by the politics of the Primate.* I railed at them to Faulkner, who jDrinted an advertise- ment naming me, and my ill-will towards them ; for which he was called before the Council, was terribly abused, but not sent to prison, only left to the mercy of the common law for publishing a libel, for so they called his paragraph. I expected to have the same honour of attending their ships ; I sent off all my papers, as I have often done ; but their honours have not meddled further, and the halfpence must pass. I quarrel not at the coin, but at the indignity of not being coined here, and the loss of £12,000 in gold and silver to us, which, for aught I know, may be half our store. I am told by others as well as your Lordship that the city of Cork hath sent me my Silver bo.x and Freedom, but I know nothing of it.t I am sorry there are not fools enovigh in Cork to keep you out of the spleen. Have you got any money from your tenants ? Can you lend me a thousand pounds ? Are you forced to diet and lodge ? Or, if I visit you about two, can you give me a chicken and a pint of wine ? It was your pride to refuse £100 that I offered to lend you when I thought you were in want ; can you now do me the same civility ? But I scorn to accept it ! Mrs. Whiteway found £60 in my cabinet, besides some few (but very small) banker's bills. When I get my Cork box, I will certainly sell it for not being gold. * » * * I desire your Aldermen would begin with gold, and if any mischief should happen, let them send another eighteen times and 50 grains heavier in silver." He turns aside to send some civil messages from Mrs. Whiteway, and to ask Lord Orrery to come and see him, that lie may take ' ' an eternal farewell" of him: and thus describes his own state. " I am daily losing ground, both in health and spirits. I am plagued this month with a noise in my head which deafens me, and some touches of giddiness — my old disorders. I am fretting at universal public mismanagement.'' After some inquiries as to Lord Orrery's health, he goes on : — "My neighbour Prelate, who politicly makes his court to Sir R. W. by imitating that great minister in every minute piilling up of his breeches — this prelate, I say — as parsons say ' ' I say " — harangued my neighbours against me under the name of some wicked man about the new halfpence, but received no other answers than " God bless the X " He has no news, he says, nor can Mrs. Whiteway give him any. " It is now the last day of March, and I have not one scheme to make a * Archbishop Boulter. See p. 419. grounds of the presentation, and returned f Swift acknowledged the receipt of it accordingly. His anger was appeased the Freedom in a silver box, on the 15th by a suitable inscription being afterwards of August this year. But he was offended engraved upon the box. that there was no inscription stating the + Presumably the Drapier. Appendix XIL] LETTERS FEOM LOED CORK'S MSS. 559 hundred fools to morroTV.* Mrs. Whiteway is just gone down stairs, but I expect her every moment up : and that she is gathering materials at the street-door gate. I had yesterday a letter from my old friend Lord Carteret, who says not a syllable to confirm what we hear from England, that Walpole and Mr. Pulteney are become friends, and both to be made Lords : which I scarce believe : because the first might have been a Duke many years ago, if it had been possible to govern the Parliament without him." On the 2nd of July, 1737, Swift sends the Preface to the History of the Four Last Years to Lord Orrery, with this letter : " My deak Lokd : I have corrected the enclosed as well as my shattered head was able. I entreat your Lordship will please to alter whatever you have a mind, and jilease to deliver it, with your own hand, to Doctor King, at his Chambers in the Temple. If you sail on Monday, I fear you will not have time to see me, so I must bid you Farewell for ever. For although you should stay a day or two longer you will be in too great a hurry for me to expect you. May God protect you in h(appiness f) and the continuance in the Love and Esteem of {all good) men. I can hear something better, but my head is very ill, but in all conditions I will live and die with the truest Respect, Esteem, Love, and Attachment, Your most obedient and most Obliged Serv'. J. SWIFT." On Nov. '2Gth of the same year, he writes about some lawsuit in wluch a friend is interested, and closes thus : ' ' I am grown an entire Ghost of a Ghost of what I was, although you left me ill enough. Pray God bless you in every circumstance of your- self, your Family and Fortune. "I could tell you a Million things relating to this country : of the great plenty of money, by the Primate's scheme of the lowering of the Gold, which its younger brother silver hath followed, and neither have been seen since. I could be more large upon both Houses and all their good actions. Pray send me a silver sixpence by the first opiDortunity. Pray God preserve you and your family, my dear Lord, and may you live till Christian times. " On Feb. 2, 17|f, he writes again, and in the course of the letter, up- braids Lord Orrery with considerable warmth. "I complain of your Lordship upon one Article. Mrs. Whiteway assures me, that a correct copy of the History of the Four Last Years, &c., * The Journal to StDlla shows us uuobserveJ by Swift, tliat All Fools' Day was not always so t The paper is here torn. 660 LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT. [Appendix XIII. was put into yonr hands to be given to Doctor King of St. Mary Hall in Oxford, to be published as he could agree with some bookseller or printer : but I have never heard a word from the Doctor since. How will you answer this, my Dear Lord ? Tliis proceeding is directly against all the Rules of Justice, Honour, Friendship, and conscience. My chief design in that History was with the utmost truth and zeal to defend the Pro- ceedings of that blessed Queen and her Ministry, as well as myself, who had a greater share than usually falls to men of my level. I did thorough (sic) the whole treatise impartially adhere to Truth. I had some regard to increase my own Reputation, and besides I should have been glad to haye seen my small Fortune increased by an honest means. I therefore wish that (your) Lordship would please, if your time and leisure permit, to see Doctor King, and desire he would explain himself concerning his long silence, and his very slow, or no proceedings in a point which I have so much at heart for a hundred reasons. I believe you sometimes see my friend, Mr. Pope. Pray report to him the state of my health, aud the disposition of my mind, that I am become good for less than nothing. He is one of the oldest and dearest friends 1 have remaining. * -' * Do you know my old friend Erasmus Lewis 1 If so, I desire your Lordship wiU present him with my true Love and Esteem. And if my Lord Bathurst be one of your acquaintance let him know how grateful I desire to be for the continual marks of his Favour and Friendship. Thus I treat you, my Lord, in the phrase of Plautus, as one of my Fiieii Salutigeruli." There is not a little of pathos in the sorrow with which he sees the efforts of his old age neglected, aud in the eagerness with which he presses himself on the remembrance of his old friends. APPENDIX XIIL SWIFT'S DISEASE In the account which I have given of Swift's later years, and in my references to his disease, and to the eflFect which it had upon his character and ultimately upon his reason, it has been my object to deal with the question from what may be called the biographical, and not the medical, point of view. The most recent medical opinion clearly establishes the fact, which is of main interest in his biography, that Swift's disease was not a case of gradually developing insanity, which might have affected liis reason, even while its developement was proceeding ; but a case of specific malady, which tortured him during life, and which ultimately Appendix XIII.] SWIFT'S DISEASE. 561 Ijroduoed a definite injury to the brain, but wliich up to that point in no way obliterated his reason. It may be well to state very shortly one or two of the facts which medical science has proved. Sir "WilUam Wilde, in his " Closing Years of Dean Swift," gave the first careful analysis of Swift's symptoms : and successfully proved that the term insanity had been far too sweepingly applied to Swift. He showed that the Dean suflered throughout life from brain pressure^ aggravated by gastric attacks : and that congestion, to which he says the name of epileptic vertigo might be applied, was ultimately accompanied by paralysis, under which the brain sank into lethargy rather than insanity. Dr. Bucknill, F.R.S. in the number of Brain, which ap^Deared in January (1882), has carried further Su- William Wilde's inquiries, in the light of the recent discoveries of medical science. He proves that the two maladies of giddiness and deafness from wliich Swift sufiered, sometimes separately, and sometimes conjointly, and for which he himself assigned causes in a surfeit of fruit and in a cold, respectively, really had their common origin in a disease in the region of the ear, to which the name of Labyrinthine vertigo has been given. This physical malady, as Dr. Buck- nill shows, would have an increasingly depressing effect as years went on, or strength failed, and as other causes for melancholy came to ally them- selves with it. The Dean was, in short, reduced to the state of profound gloom, apathy,' and physical sufiering, which his own words repeatedly describe, and which he sums up with more force than metrical accuracy in the Latin line, Vertiffinosics, inops, sunlus, male gratus amicis. But nothing that could be called insanity came on, until this physical and local malady produced paralysis, a symptom of which was the not uncommon one of aphasia, or the automatic ujbteraaice of words, ungoverned by in- tention. As a consequence of that paralysis, but not before, the brain, already weakened by senile decay, at length gave way, and Swift sank into the dementia which preceded his death. INDEX. A. A Long History of a Slwrt Farlianicnl, in a Certain Kingdom, Delany, 305. Acheson, Sir Arthur and Lady, Swift's visit to, 428, and note. Addison, and Sivift, 131 ; 132 note; 137 ; his alterations in Baucis aiid Philemon, ib. and note ; TJnder-Secretary to Lord Sunderland, 148; 176; Swift's parting with,Sep. 1709,183; leaves Ireland Aug. 1710,194; 198; 203; 224; 262; 263; 299 ; 310; friendship with Stella, 549. "Addison's Walk," 183 note. Allen, Lord, 417. Amoi-y, Thomas, Memories nf Ladies, 439 ; account of Swift, 439. Anne, Queen, 95 ; construction of the Ministry under, 1702, 95 ; the ministry of 1703, 98 ; prejudice against Swift, 114 ; differences with the Duchess of Marlborough, 190 ; celebration of the anniversary of accession, 233 ; illness, 277, 279 ; last council and death, 293. Annesley, Dr. Samuel, marriage of daughter of, to John Dunton, 34. Arhuckle, James, 438. Arbuthnot, appointed Physician to Queen Anne, 127 ; 202 ; 224 ; to Swift, June 26, 1714, 284 ; Swift to, July 3. 1714, 285 ; letter from Pope to, '287 ; his place among the wits, 371 ; sympathy ■with Swift, 372 ; last letter to Swift, Oct. 1734, 459; death of, 460. Argyll, the Duke of, offer to take Marl- borough prisoner, 189 ; heads a peti- tion to the Cro\vn, against the Public Spirit of the Whigs, i!80 ; 293. Ashburnham, Lord, 249 note. BATHUEST. Ashburnham, Lady, daughter of tlic Duke of Ormond, 254. Ashe, Dilly, 143; 222. Ashe, Dr. St. George (afterwards Bishop of Clogher), 16 ; 143 ; 192 ; death, 1717, 309 note ; and Stella, 328, 329 ; 526. Athenian Society, the, 1689, Swift's address to, 32,; aims of, 33. Atterhury, Francis, Archdeacon of Totni?«, 69 ; as leader of the High Church party in Convocation, 97 ; Viiwlication, of the nights of Convocation, 97 ; charac- ter of, 98 ; his part in the church straggle, 1705, 129 ; and Sacheverell's Defence, 189, and note; (Dean of Car- lisle) elected Prolocutor of Convn- cation, 209 ; Swift's intimacy with, 221 ; appointed Bishop of Rochester and Dean of "Westminster, 271 ; Swift to, ib. ; Swift to, April 18, 1716, 303; 369 ')iotc, 375, 392 note. Autobiograxiliical Anecdotes, references to, 2 ; 5 ; 22 ; 26 ; 39 ; 48 ; Appendix ]. B. Baldwin, Dr., Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, 438. Bandbox Plot, The, 252. Barber, Alderman, 244, and note ; JBi) notes. Barber, Mrs., 440 ; Swift's assistance to, 474. Barrett, Dr., Essay on Swift, 14; 413. Barton, Mistress, niece of Sir Isaaj; Newton, 177. Bathurst, Lord, 221 ; 396 ; correspondence with Swift, 1730, 460; 461, note; 560. o o 2 564 INDEX. HE DELL. Bedell, Bishop, 48 ; death, 1641, 87 note. Beggar's Opera, Tlie, reception of, 452 ; attacked by Dr. Herring, 453 ; Swift's defence of, ib. ; its political bearing, 454. Bentley, and the Christ Church Society, 30 ; dispute with Charles Boyle, 68 ; attack on SirWilliam Temple's defence of Phalaris, 68 ; Dr. Bentley' s Disser- tations Examined, 69. Berkeley, Bishop, of Cloyne, with Judge Marshall, appoin ted A''anessa'sexecutor, 323 ; his reported evidence of Swift's mamage, 526. Berkeley, Lord, 77 ; Swift's satire on, 78 ; end of office, April, 1701, 79 ; 176, and note ; Lord Lieutenant of Glou- cestershii-e, 201 ; 515. Berkeley, Lady, 79. Berkeley, Lady Betty, 79. See also Gee- MAINE. Berkeley, Lady Mary, 79. Berkeley, Lady Penelope, 79. Berkeley, Mr. Monck, his evidence as to Swift's marriage, 526. Berwick, Mr., 323. Bettesworth, ("Serjeant Kite"), Swift's attacks on, 446 ; 447. Bickerstaff, Isaac, Swift as, attacks John Partridge, 171 ; The Tatler, 174. Pjindon, portrait of Swift by, at Howth Castle, 438. Birch, Dr., his abstract of the Four Last Years, 519. Blackmore, attack on the TaU of a Till, 115. Blenheim, Battle of, 122. Boileau, 64. Bolingbroke, Viscount, Treaty of Com- merce Bill defeated, 267 ; the Schism iMll, 289 ; dismissal, 293 ; joins the Pretender, 302 ; invitation to Swift, July, 1721, 369 ; character of, 370, and note ; retirement to France, 478. Sec also St. John. Bolingbroke, Lady, to Swift, 302. Bolton, Duke of, 77. Jiolton, Dr. Theophilus, appointed Dean of Derry, 77, and note. Bouchain, fall of, 230. Boulter, Dr. Hugh, (Archbishop,) 132 CA.STLEDURUOW. note ; Zetterf!, 339 iwte ; appointed Archbishop of Armagh, 363 ; character of, 364 ; opposition to emigration, 365 ; and Swift, 366 ; Letters, reference to, 416 note, 419 note. Boyer, Abel, Politieal State, 277. Boyle, Charles, afterwards Earlof GiTery, 67, and owte ; cause of quan'cl with Bentley, 68 ; 69. Boyle, Michael, Archbishop, 48. Brennan, Pilchard, 492. Brent, Mrs., 19, and note. Brobdingnag, or Brobdingrag, 537, and note. Brodrick, appointed Lord Chief Justice, 192, and note. Bromley, "William, elected Speaker, 209 ; defeated by Sir Thomas Hanmer, 279. Brook, Henry (the Fool of Quality), 427. Brounker, Lord, and Sir William Temple, 25. Browne, Dr., Bishop of Cork, 305, and note, 411 note. Browne, Sir John, Scheme of tJie 31mie'^ Matters of Irelaiul, 1729, ZiT note. Buckingham, Duke of, 95 ; Lord Steward, 200 ; 238. See Nokmanet. Burdy's Life of Skelton, reference to, 16 owte ; 416 note. Burgess, Dissentingpreacher, 190, and « ote. Burnet, Alexander, 555. Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of Sarum, 50 ; action in the Church difTerences, 1705, 129 ; Sistory of his Own Time, 190 note. Bush, Swift's attack on, 78. Butler, Lady Betty, and Swift, 254. C. CAEEMAETHEN",Marcliionessof, death. 276. Callieres, Fran9oisde, 70, 71 note, 72 note. Capel, Lord, 48. Carlyle, Dr. Alexander, 230, owte. Carteret, Lord, Secretary of State, and the Coinage (Question, 348 ; appointed Lord Lieutenant, April, 1724, 355 ; character of, ib. ; Swift's letter to, 356 ; intimacy with Swilt, 429 ; resignation. May, 1730, 430. Castledurrow, Lord, 40 note. , INDEX. 565 CHARLES r. Charles I., Bamam Swifte created Lord Carlingford by, 3. Charlton, Chiverton, letter to Swift, May 22, 1714, 282. Chartres, Colonel, 386. Chesterfield, Lord, 386 ; 472. Church, The ; in Tcdc of a Tub, 109 ; Memorial of, 126 ; the struggle of party in, 128 ; Sacheverell and the Church, 187 scq. ; favour to, 209; 219 ; Church and Schism Act, 289 ; Irish Church. See Ireland. Cleveland, Duchess of, 3 7ioic. Club, The, 221. Compton, Sir Spencer, 397. C'ongi-eve, William, with Swift at Kilkenny, 11 ; literary and di'amatic successes, 39 ; Swift's address to, ib. ; and the TaU of a Tub, 115; 132, and note; 176 ; 198 ; 202, and mote; death, 1728, 456, and note. Con oily, Speaker, Irish House of Com- mons, 349, and iwtc. Considerations for prmnoimg ilie Agri- culture of Irelaml, Viscount Moles- worth, 338 note. Considerations upon Considerations for promoting Agriculture, 1724, 408. Convocation, The Houses of, straggles in, 97 ; and Atterhury, 97. Copper Coinage, the, 346 ; the patent passed, July 12, 1722, 347 ; compara- tive value of, 349 ; Swiftis arguments against, 350 ; Report of the Committee on inquii-y on, 351. See Wood. Cowley's Pindaric odes, and their pop- ularity, 31 ; Swift's comparison of himself to, 497. Craggs, 290. Cranford, Seat of Lord Berkeley, 176. Curll, and the Tale of a Tub, 115, and note ; a "new ten'or to death," 458 note. D. Dartineuf, 212. Davenant, Dr., 113. Dawes, Sir William, 285 note. Dawley House, Lord Bolinghroke's scat, Swift at, 378, and note. ELIZABETH, QUEEN. Deane, Admiral, daughter of, married t^ Godwin Swift, 7. Defence of Eating and Drinhing in lle- inemhranee of the Dead, by the Bishop of Eaphoe, 305 note. Delany, Dr. Patrick, his account of Swift, 13, 137 note; Observations, 143 note, 148 note ; A Long History of a Sliort Parliament in a Certain Kingdom 305 ; Observations, 389 rwte ; 43.') 436. Delville, traditions of, 348 note, 435 noir. Denmark, Prince George of, Lord High Admiral, 144 ; his death, 151. Devonshire, Duke of. Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 488. Diaper, Swift's assistance to, 245. Dingley, Rebecca, with Stella in Dublin, 89 ; her death, 496 ; evidence as to the marriage of Swift and Stella, 528. Dobbs, Ai-thur, Essay on the Trade and Imxyrovement of Ireland, 1729, 338 note, 339 note, 408. " Dorinda," Lady Giffard, 41 note. "Dorothea," Lady Temple, 41 ivote, Dorset, Duke of, appointed Lord Lieu- tenant, 430. Drake, Dr., 126 iiote. Drapier, M. B., letters by, 348 ; 351, 352, 353 ; Proclamation against the Author, 357, and iwte ; iifth letter, 360 ; seventh letter, 363, and iiote. See Swift. Dryden, Elizabeth, married to Rev. Thomas Swift, Vicar of Goodrich, 4. Dryden, John, opinion of Swift's verse, 35. Duneiad, The, (May, 1728,) 454 ; Swift and, ib.; 464. Dunkin, WUliam, Swift's assistance to, 441. Dunkirk, Importa/iice of, Steele, 278. Dunton, John, originator of the Athenian Society, 33 ; account of, 34, and note. E. Edwtn, Sir Humphrey, 99 note. Eglinton, Lord, married to daughter of Barnam Swifte, 3. Elizabeth, Queen, celebration of birth of, 237. 566 INDEX. ERICK. Erick, Abigail, married to Jonathan Swift (the elder) 1665, 8; 513. See Swift, Abigail. Kismjs, Bivine, Moral and Political, Steele (?), 300, and note. Kismj on the Trade of Ireland, (DoMs, 1729,) 408. Engene, Prince, visit to England, Jan. , 1712, 245 ; his character, 521. E. F.^iiXHAM Castle, 22. Eanlkner, character of, 437 ; anecdote of Swift, and, 437; his edition of Swift, 536. Feuton — , husband of Jane Swift, 82. Fielding (" handsome Fielding") married to daughter of Barnam Swifte, 3, and note ib. Flying Post, the, 251, and note; Wood's defence of the Coinage in, 347. Fontenelle, 64. Ford, Charles, 436. Forster's Life of Swift, references to, 14, 15, 27, 47, 48, 509, 524, 529. I'^ountaine, Sir Andrew, 136 note ; intimacy with Swift, 143. Frcind, Dr., 202. G. I iAiAVAY, Lord, 77. tJai-th, Dr. (afterwards Sir Samuel), 198, and note. Ganlstown, Swift at, 427. Gay, John, 311 ; Swift's assistance to, 375 ; production of the Beggar'' s Opcra^ 452 ; Polly proscribed, 457 ; the Fables, 458 ; death, Dec. 1732, 458 ; epitaph on, 555. Gent, Thomas, 189 note. (ieorge, Prince, death, (Oct. 28th, 1708,) 151. Sec Denmakk. George I., death, (June 11, 1727,) 397. Gemiaine, Lady Betty, her influence with the Duke of Dorset in favour of Swift, 430 ; her friendship with Swift, 466. Sec also Berkeley, Lady Betty. Gery, Eevd. Mr., Swift's visit to, 283. HAllDIXG. Gery, Molly, 283. Giffard, Ladj', sister of Sir 'William Temple, 20 note ; her position at Moor Park, 25 ; and Swift, ib. Gloucester, the Duke of, death of, 83. Godolpliin, Lord, appointed Lord- Treasurer under Queen Anne, 95 ; Swift's intei-view with, 150 ; as " Val- pone " attacked by Sacheverell, 187 ; political opposition to, 191 ; dismissed, 195 ; Swift's lampoon on, 201 ; death, Sep. 1712, 243. Goodrich, 1 ; 4 ; 5 seq. ; 455 ; 510 seq. Grafton, Duke of, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, stops the action against "Waters, 343 ; and the inc[uii-y into the Coinage question, 348 ; recalled, 355 ; "Walpole's opinion of, 355 iwte. Granville, George, Secretary of War, 1710, 201. Granville, Maiy, (Mrs. Delany), 435 > friendship ivith Swift, 444. Greg, AVUliam, clerk to Robert Harley, charge of treason against, 146, and note. Grierson, Mrs. Constantia, 439, 440. " Grub Street," 106 ; 251. Gualtier, Abbe, negotiations with France through, 241. Guiscard, Marquis de, 214 ; quaiTel with St. John, 214 / attack on Harley, 215 ; death, 216, and notes. H. Halifax, Lord, proposed impeachment of, 84 ; 87 7iote; and Swift, 145 note; 160 ; 176 ; letters from Swift to, 182, and note; 198. Hamilton, Duke of. Lord Lieutenant of the County Palatine, 1710, 201 ; part in the Peace negotiations, 251 ; death, 253. Hamilton, Duchess of, and Swift, 253. Hanmer, Sir Thomas, elected Speaker, 279. Hannibal at our Gates, 247, and note. Harcomt, Sir Simon, Attorney-General, 95 ; resignation, 147 ; Lord Chan- cellor, 200. Harding, the Drapier's Second Letter to. INDEX. 567 HAPlE. 351 ; imprisoned, 355 ; throwing out of the bill against, 359. Hare, Dr., chaplain to the Duke of Marlborough, 230. Harley, Robert, 59 ; elected Speaker, 83 ; dismissed from office, 146, and note; 190 ; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 195 ; Guiscard's attack on, 215 ; illness and recovery, 217 ; made Earl of Oxford, and Lord Treasurer, 219 ; Swift's estimate of, ib. See Oxfoed. Harrison, 202 ; appointed secretary to Lord Baby's embassy, 212 ; death, 255. Hart Hall, or Hertford College, Oxford, 2Snote; Swift at, 515. Hartstong, Dr., Bishop of Ossory, 285 note. Heathcote, Su- Gilbert, 194. Helsham, Dr., 435 ; Swift's description of, ib. Henley, Anthony, 176. Hill, Abigail, 190. See Masham, Me.'!. Hoadley, Miss, letter from Swift to, 177 note. Hobbes, 169. Hort, Bishop of Kilmore, author of QuculriUc, 1735, 447, and iwte. Howard, Mrs., afterwards Countess of Suffolk, correspondence with Swift, D87 ; to the author of Gulliver's Travels, 394 ; 396 ; 466 ; 468, and note. Howe, Jack, joins the Ministry under Queen Anne, 94. Howth, Lord and Lady, 438. Howth Castle, Swift at, 437 ; portrait of Swift at, 438. Hudibi-as, Butler's, compared with Tale of a Tub, 107 ; reference to, 109. Hunter, Colonel, 177. Hj'de, Lady Catherine. See Queens- BEMiY, Duchess of. I. Intellirjenecr, The, Swift's defence of the Becjgar's Opera in, 453, and note. Ireland, the Parliament of 1705, 123 ; causes of trouble in, 336 ; forfeitiires of absentee landlords in, ib. ; life in, 337, 338 notes; restrictions on Exports, JOHNSON. 340 ; condition of lower classes in, 339 ; emigration from north of, ib. and note ; Swift's ridicule of the idea of a National Bank for, 345 ; Parliament of, presen- tation of a memorial against the copper coinage patent from, 347. Ireland, Cliurch of, the state of, when Swift entered it, 48 ; struggles of, ii. ; Swift's mission for, 144 seg., 154 ; defence of, 310 ; last struggle for, 421. Ireland, works on, List of Absentees, 337, 338 ; On the conduct of the Purse of Ireland, 1714, 338 note ; Scheme of the Proportion which the Protestants of Ireland may probably bear to the Papists, 338 note ; Swift's Proposal for Universal iise of Irish manufactures, 338 note ; Considerations for promoting the agriculture of Ireland, 338 ; Essay on tlie Trade and Impn-ovenwnt of Irela'iicl, Arthiir Dobbs, 338 note, 339 iiote; Essay on the trade of, 408, 409 note ; Proposals for meeting the evils of, 409 ; Swift's Tracts on, 412, 420. See also Swift. Irish Academy Pamphlets, referred to, 30.=;, 306. Irishman, Wild, exhibition of a, in London, 358 note. .1. James II., death of, Sep. 17, 1701, 86. Jervas, portrait of Swift hy, 178, 299. Johnson, Dr. Samuel, on Pindaric verse, 31 ; 35 note ; and the authorship of the Talc of a Tub, 114 and note ; on Swift's charity, 433 ; dawning fame, 485 ; London, ib. ; letter concerning, from Lord Gower, 436 ; his doubts as to Swift's authorship of the Tale of a Tub, 517 ; and Four Last Years of tlie Queen, 522 ; contradiction to doubts in Idler, 522. Johnson, Mrs., 25 ; 58 'iwte ; marriage with Mr. Mose, 89 note; 176 note; 403. Johnson, Ann (afterwards Mrs. Filby) 403. Johnson, Esther, ' ' Stella " (born Mar. 13, 1681), 25 ; sympathy with Swift, 61 ; 568 INDEX. JOUJIS-AL. in DnUin, 89 ; in London, 176 ; and Addison, 183; 184 notej Swift to, Sept. 9, 1710, 198 ; 224 ; marriage with Swift, 317; and nofc, 319 ; her love for Swift, 324 ; confidences to Bishop Aslxe, 328 ; devotion to Swift, 332 ; illness, 380 ; increasing illness, 397 ; Sheridan's story of Swift and, 402 ; Smft's reticence as to, 402 note ; her Will, 403; death of, Jan. 28, 1728, 404, and iiote ; evidences of her marriage to Swift, 523 ; character of, 548. Journal to Stella, references to, tlirouyli- out ; publication of, 529 ; Journal and Notebook of 1727, 537. Kelly, Miss, Swift's assistance to, 447. Kendal, Duchess of, 347, and note ; 534. Kendall, Rev. John, 20 notes ; 30. " Kevin Bail," 366, and note ; 557. Kilkenny, Swift at, 10, 513 ; civic divi- sion of, 11. King, AVilliam, Bishop of Deny, after- wards Archbishop of Dublin, 49 ; 92 note ; correspondence with Swift, 124, and note ; Swift's letter to, Dec. 6th, 1707, 144 ; 157 note ; advice to Swift, 228; Swift to, 258; letter to Swift, 265; appointed Lord Justice, 304; misrepre- sentations of Swift, 307; letter to Arch- bishop of Canterbury, opposition to the Presbyterian Toleration Bill, 309 ; 416 and note. King, Dr. 'William, 175 and note ; ap- pointed Gazetteer, 244 and note. King, Dr. William (Principal of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford), intercourse with Swift, 479 ; connection with Four Last Tears, 518. Kbnigsmark', Count, tried for the assas- sination of Thomas Thynne, 223 note. Laeacok, Swift at, and description of, 92, and note ; Swift's return to, 1704, 100; 270; 271; 301; 302. Leicester House, 387, and note. MAELLOEOUGH. Leicester, Mrs. Swift at, 18 ; 20 aofc / Swift at, 514. Lewis, Erasmus, 224 ; letter to Swift, 266; 478; 479; 560. Lille, siege of, 151. Lindsay, Archbishop of Armagh, 304 ; 363. List of Absentees, Prior, 403. "Little Language," the, 269; 529. Locke, 30 ; 141 ; 361. Long, Mistress Anne, 177 ; correspond- ence with Swift, 227 ; death, ib. Louis XIV. and the Pretender, 86. Lucas, Dr. publishes the Forir Last Years of the Queen, 518. Lyon, Dr., on Swift's Marriage, 528. M. M.VOAULAT, Lord, 45 note ; criticism of Temple's Ancient and Modern Lcarii- ing, 64 ; doubt of authenticity oi Four Last Years of the Queen, 523. Macaulay, Alexander, candidate for the representation of Dublin University, 488. Macky's &;marl-s on the Characters at the Court of Queen Anne, 76, and note. Mainwaring, conductor of the JloU,-)/, 251 note. Manley, Mrs. de la Eiviere, A Vhiclua- tion oftlic Dtilce of Marlboroiujh, 231, 244 and 9iofc; 245; 262. Mant's History of the Church in Ireland, reference to, 50 ; 266. Market Hill, (seat of Sir Arthur Acheson), Swift's life at, 428. Marlay Abbey, Vanessa at, 322, ill. aotc. Marley, Judge, 323. Marlborough, Duke of, 95 ; opposition to Bill against Occasional Conformity, 98 ; success at the Battle of Blenheim, 1704, 122 ; at the Hague, and victory of Eamillies, 140 ; letter to Queen Anne, 189 ; political opposition to, 191 ; Mrs. Manley's "Vindication," 231 ; iu London, Nov. 1711, 237 ; dismissed, 239 ; Swift and the dismissal of, 242 ; entry into London, Aug. 4, 1714, 294. INDEX. 569 MAELBOllOUGH; Marlborough, Duchess of, quits the Queen's service, 210 ; and Gulliver's Travels, 394 ; character of, 520. Marsh, Narcissus, Archhishop, 49 ; pre- sents Swift with the Prebend of Dun- lavan, (1700,) 79, 516. Marshall, Judge, with Bishop Berkeley, appointed Vanessa's executor, 323. Masham, Mrs., (afterwards Lady,) and Eobert Harley, 147, 194, and note; her death, 479. Mason, Monck, his argiunents to dis- prove Swift's marriage, 524. Medley, The, 251, and iwie. Memorial of tJie Clmrch of Englaiul, osal for correcting, Tinprovincj, and ascertaining the English tongue, 256, and iiotc; Dean of St. Patrick's, 261 ; quits London, June 1st, 1713, 264; reception in Dublin, 268 ; at Laracor with Stella, ib. ; to Vanessa, 270 ; summoned to London, Aug. 1713, 272 ; the Prolocutorship of Conrocation, 273 ; Whig attacks on, 277 ; Importance of the Guardian, Dec. 1713, 279 ; Tlio Public Spirit of the Whigs, 278 ; quits London for Let- combe, May 1714 ; news of Queen Anne's death, 294 ; his part in the "Wagstaffe volume, 295 ; effect of retire- ment, 298 ; satires on, 299 ; troubles in Dublin and at Laracor, 301 ; letter to Lord Oxford, 302 ; renewal of old friendships, 310 ; at work on Gulliver's Travels, 311 note ; to Bolingbroke, 312 ; Stella and Tanessa, 313 ; Cadenus and Vanessa, 318 ; last inter- view with Vanessa, 322 ; retires to the South of Ireland, 324 ; man-iage, 329 ; Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufactures, 1720, 338, 343 iwte ; the Irish troubles, 340, 342 note; letter to Pope, 1722, 343, and notes ; opinions of Government, 345, and notes ; views as to national Bank for Ireland, ib ; the copper coinage, 348, and note; arguments against the ^s■^VIFT. coinage, 350 ; the second Drapier' Letter, Aug. 4, 1724, 351 ; third Drapier Letter, Aug. 25, 1724, 352 ; fourth Drapier letter, Oct. 13, 1724, 353, and note ; letters to Lord Carteret, 356, 357 note; Proclama- tion against the author of the Dra- pier letters, 357, and note ; see also Appen. VII ; letter to Lord Midleton, ib. ; 359 note ; popularity of Drapier, 360 ; fifth Drapier letter, 360 ; seventh Drapier letter, 362 ; Swift and Archbp. Boulter, 366 ; longings for England, 367 ; invitations from Bol- ingbroke and Gay, 369 ; leaves Ire- land for London, March 1726, 370 ; reception in London, Mai-. 1726, 376 ; letter to Lord Palmerston, 377 ; to Tickell, 378 ; literary work and in- tercourse, 379 ; anxiety about Stella, 380, 381, and note; Swift and "Wal- pole, 381, and note; 382, 383, 385 ; return to Ireland, Aug. 15, 1726, 386 ; reception in Dublin, , 387 ; Gulliver's Travels, published Nov. 1726, 387 ; return to England, April 9, 1727, 396 ; news of Stella's second illness, 397 ; last of England, Sept. 1727, 398 ; Note-book and Journal of 1727, 399 ; reticence regarding Stella, 402 note ; Stella's death, 404, 405 notes ; the Irish Tracts, 410, 412, 413, and notes; The Modest Proposal, 1729, 414 ; Answer to the Craftsman, 1730, 415 ; later friend- ship with Archbishop King, 416 ; presented Avith the freedom of the City of DubUn, 1729, 417 ; reply to Lord Allen, 417 ; speech at the Guildhall, April 24, 1736, 418, 419 note; Advice to the Freemen of Dublin, &c., 420 ; The Legion Club, 1736, 422 ; Proposal for Virtue, 424 ; visit to the Ptochfort family, 427 ; visits to Dr. Sheridan, 427 ; with Sir Arthur Acheson, 428 ; retiu'n to Dublin, 1729, ib ; Swift and Lord Carteret, 429 ; Dublin surroundings, 433, 440, and note, 443 note ; monument to the Duke of Schomberg, 445 : attack on j74 INDEX. SWIFT. Betteswoi'th, 446 ; signs of weakness, 447 ; first Will, 1735, 449 ; second Will, May, 1740, 450, and note; literary correspondence with London friends, 451 ; defence of the Becjr/ar's Opera, 453 ; death of Congreve, 456 ; in- vitation from the Duchess of Queens- berry, 457 ; interest in Gay'.s Polly and the Fables, 458, and note; last letter from Arbuthnot to, 459 ; letter to Lord Bathurst, 461 ; to Bolingbroke, Mar. 21, 1730, 464, and iwte ; friendship with Lady Betty Gerraaine, 467 ; and Mrs. Howard, 468 ; interest in Matthew Pilldngton, 469 ; Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, 470 ; The BeasCs Con- fession, and other pieces, 472 ; engaged on new edition of his works, 476 ; to Motte, ib. note ; Poein to a Lady, &c., 477 ; Sistory of the Four Last Years of the Queen, publication postponed, 479 ; the parting with Sheridan, 482 ; the fight against disease, 483 ; failure of memory, 484, and note ; Swift and Johnson, 486 ; last efi'orts for the Church, 488 ; letter to Mrs. AVhite- way, 491 ; oblivion, 493 ; death, Oc- tober 19th, 1745, 495 ; bequests, 496 ; review of his life and work, 497 — 507. Works :— A Proposal for correcting,