f ' - I ..)J,' i Reproduced by DUOPAGE process in the United States of America MICRO PHOTO INC. Cleveland 12, Ohio JONATHAN SWIFT A BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY BY JOHN CHURTON COLLINS AUTHOR or 'BOLINGBROKl ; AN HISTORtCAt STUDV ' ETC. 'Eyj^ct r\ Anpi rf, ^tyaXoini re \tpfiaHni(nv, A NKw i:niTto.x LONDON ; . . s. ^^^ \ ^U .76/ PMNTBD BV SrOTTISWOODX AND CO. LTD., NXW •STRUT SQUA8C LONDON Ml TO MY MOTHER I INSCRIBE THIS VOLUME 747 PREFACE During the last hundred years, and particularly durmg the last twenty years, so much has been written about Swift that some apology may seem necessary for the appearance of another volume on the subject. But to apologise for a very deliberate act would be affectation. Those who may do me the honour to read this book will, I think, find that, however open to question my views of the actions and character of this extraordinary man may be, they are at least the result of very careful study, and that if I have added little, I have added at all events something, to our knowledge of the details of his biography. I hold no brief for Swift, but I have endeavoured to do him justice where justice has been either with- held or too grudgingly allowed. I have endeavoured to vindicate the consistency of his political principles, his character in all that related to practice and duty as a churchman, the purity of his motives as well as his wisdom as an Irish Agitator, and his conduct with regard to Stella and Vanessa. In analysing his temper and his peculiarities I viii JONATHAN SWIFT have laid great stress upon one point. Ten years ago, when I first began to study Swift, I felt con- vinced that not only was he never insane in the proper acceptation of the term, but that the maladies which he himself regarded as the germs and symp- toms of gradually developing disease, and which had been so regarded by all his biographers, had in truth no connection with the state into which he latterly sank, I accordingly wrote to Dr. Bucknill and placed Swift's case fully before him, and he replied in a letter corroborating my conjecture, and that letter ho has kindly allowed me to print. It remains for me to thank Mr. Murray for allowing me to draw very largely on two articles contributed by me some years ago to the Quarterly Revieiv, and Mr. Percy Wallace for his valuable assistance in help- ing me to see this volume through the press. And I should like also to take this opportunity of thank- ing the officials of the British Museum and the super- intendent of the Dyce and Forster Library for the more than courtesy with which they have always re- sponded on this and on other occasions to my many requests for assistance. London : A^^ril 30, 1893. CONTENTS CHAPTER I BIOORAPHICAL SOURCES AND BIOQRAPHERS TAiiZ Swift better known to us than any other writer of his age , . 1 His autobiographical writings . ' . , . . . , 1 His biographers— their merits and defects ;— Orrery . . 2 Delany H Dcane Swift 4 Sheridan J 4 Monck-Berkeley 4 Barrett 5 Scott . 5 Monck Mason . . . . fi Forster 7 Mr. Henry Craik 10' CHAPTER II INJUSTICE OP THE POPULAR ESTIMATE OF SWIFT Swift a greatly maligned man . . . . . . .11 Absence of excuse for this false estimate 11 His benevolence and kindliness ....... 12 His real attitude towards religion . (l^ The prevalent false view of his character due to four bril- liant and bitter assailants— Jeffrey, Macaulay, Stanhope, Thackeray 15 X JONATHAN SWIFT CHAPTER III THE EARLY LIFE OF SWIFT fACi E His ancestry and parentage — purely English . . « . . 17 His birth . . .18 His boyhood . . . 20 His career at Trinity College, Dublin— his irregularities — their cause . . .21 His flight to England 24 His mother— her character . . 25 His first resid(}nce at Moor Park— his position in Temple's house . 20 His miserable disposition 2U His tutorship to Esther Johnson 30 His early poems— their extreme badness 30 His departure from Moor Park . . . . . . . 31 His ordination 32 His potiition as a churchman 32 His championship of the Church of England— his services to his order 32 His character and deportment (^ His life at Kilroot . . .30 The episode of ' Varina ' (Miss Waryng) 30 His second residence at Moor Park 38 His stiuliiius industry— his favourite authors . . . . 38 The riiuUii: Guilt roversy 40 The i>ai7/i . in^. Books — the importance of this work . . . 41 The TaL aj u i'u6- its purpose, methods, and characteristics . 43 Its probable indebtedness to a sornion by Archbishop Sharp . 47 Deatli of Temple 48 Swift's second depuiture from Moor i'aik 4U CHAPTER IV LIFE BETWEEN 1700 AND 1710 Degraded position of men of letters at this time . . . .60 Swift's chaplaincy to Berkeley . . . . . . . 51 His return to England 53 His first entry into political controversy . . . . . 63 CONTENTS XI I'AOK His attack on the Bectarics . . . ... , . . 54 ' His eminent position in Whig literary circles . ... 55 His disappointment in the matter of preferment . . . Hft His ecclesiastical and political views and satires— his intolerance of Dissent 67 . Partridge's almanacks— 'Isaac Bickerstaff's' pamphlets . . 01 Death of Swift's mother . Ca His delegacy to England in connection with First Fruits and Tenths .04 His formal breach with the Whigs— the circumstances under which this step was taken— its justification , . . . 05 CHAPTER V DUUINO THK ADMINISTRATION OF HAULEY, 17 10-1 714 I Peculiar position of Swift during these years C'.> His haughtiness —his power of will and intellect—his personal appearance and manner .6'.) His renewed acquaintance with Esther Johnson— her personal appearance and character 72 Swift's attitude with regard to women . . . . .75 Esther .Tolmson's settlement near him in Ireland— the nature of their intercourse 76 The Journal to Stella 78 Political complications— the war with Franco , . . . 79 Swift editor of the Exnmifier- its importance in his hands— his great services to Harlcy . . . . . . . 80 . Minor pamphlets— negotiations for peace 85 The Condtu:t of the Allies— its immediate popularity and influence . . . . . 88 II The Brothers' Club- its members— Swift's pre-eminence among them. . : . . . ... . ... 80 Proposal for an Academy for fixing and correcting the English language— its failure 92 The Scriblerus Club— its members- Congreve, Pope, Atterbury, Gay, Parnell, Arbuthnot, Fortescue- their several charac- teristics . . . . . ... • ... 94 • Martinus Soriblerufl '—the joint satire of the Club . . .101 xii J ON A THAN SWIFT III PAUK Political factions— virulence of the struggle . . . . . 102 Meeting of Parliament— success of the Whiga . . . . 103 Swift's literary activity . . . . . .; . . 105 The Remarks oti the Barrier Treaty . , . . . . lOti Sonie Advice to the October C2ub 107 The Letter to a WhUj Lord lOU Miscellaneous lampoons and other works . . . < . 110 IV Immense influence of Swift at this time Ill His signal services to his party long unrewarded — his succes- sive disappointments 112 His appointment to the Deanery of St. Patrick's . . . . 115 His insulting reception in Dublin . . . . . .110 His return to London . . 110 His breach with Steele 110 His attack on liurnet . . . IIU The Public Spirit of the llVuVys ...... IIU Feud between Oxford and Bolingbroke Hi) Integrity of Swift during the crisis— his political views . . 120 Death of Queen Anne 122 Iteturn of Swift to Dublin— his miserable condition at this time 123 CHAPTEll VI BWIFT IN IRELAND, 1714-1720 I DifTicult position of Swift in Dublin 125 His loyalty to Oxford . . . 120 His anti-Jacobite views 128 Political pamphlets 120 The Memoirs of the Last Four Years of tlie Qiieen . . . 130 Swift's manner of life at this time 132 U The Vanhomrighs 183 Hester Vanhomrigh's passion for Swift 134 His conduct towards her . 135 CONTENTS xiii TAtlR Cadmus and Vanessa . . , , . . , . . 13ft Her settlement in Dublin . . . . . , . 137 ITcr departure from Dublin— her death . . . . . 130 Distortions of the story of their acquaintance— the accounts of Orrery, Sheridan, and Scott— the charges against Swift examined 130 The true character of hia relations towards her . ... 142 His alleged marriage with Esther Johnson— important bearing of this question on his whole career 146 Documents relative to this matter —their strong evidence against the marriage 147 External evidence equally conclusive to the same efifect . . 150 The evidence in its favour examined ...... 151 Summary of this question— no satisfactory evidence for the marriage— strong testimony against it— the general verdict of the world , . . .150 CHAPTER VII IRISH POLITICS I Swift and Irish affairs . . 158 Condition of Ireland at this time— her natural advantages— her treatment by England , . 150 Famine and pestilence 161 Feuds and enmities -the Middlemen— the provincial gentry . 163 Crushing statutes of the English Parliament— the degraded Protestant hierarchy , 165 Swift's indignation '. . . 167 His Proposal /or //w Universal Use of Irish Manufactures , 167 Arrest and trial of the printer 168 Swift's tact and sagacity 160 The proposed National Bank— the Essay on English Bubbles-^ the • Swearer's Bank ' . 170 Brigandism in Dublin -the Last Speech and Dying Words of Ebcnczcr Eiliston . . 171 Scorcity of copper coins— Wood's patent 172 The Drapier Letters— the first . 176 The second . . ... 178 XIV JONATHAN SWIFT PAOI The third . . . . . 181 Oreat excitement throughout Ireland . . ... . . 183 Grafton succeeded in the Lord-Lieutenancy by Carteret . .183 The fourth Drapier Letter . . . . . . . . IS-l The filth . . .186 The sixth 187 Withdrawal of the patent— wild excitement throughout Ireland —Swift the national idol . . . . , . .188 II Swift's ecclesiastical views— his violent attacks on the Whig Bishops 189 The Modus Bill— Swift's vehement hostility to the Noncon« formists 101 His scheme for the formation of an Irish National Church . . l'.»3 His endeavours to improve the condition of the inferior clergy. \\Y^ His personal misery his misanthropy ll>4 His friendship with Sheridan 105 CHAPTER VIII VISIT TO ENGLAND Swift's visit to England 197 His interview with Walpole ....... 199 / Qulliver's Travels— the elaborate propriety of the work—its ^<^~r) \ scrupulous accuracy ^2(>lu/ Its indebtedness to preceding works 204 Its object 208 Not a philosophic estimate of humanity or criticism of life . 208 Immediate success of the book in all circles 212 ■ Departure of Swift for Dublin— illness of Esther Johnson . 2H His return to England— literary and political activity . . . 215 Death of George I. . . 217 Last departure from England— diary written at Holyhead . . 217 Death of Esther Johnson— Swift's grief — the Memoir and CluxracUr of Esther Johnson 218 CONTENTS XV CHAPTEU IX LIFE IN IRELAND— LAST DAYS AND DEATH I PAOK Melancholy character of Swift's last years 220 Deplorable and hopeless condition of Ireland in 1729 . . 221 The Slwrt Viao of the State of Trcland—otheT Irish pamphlets. 223 The tithe question— the case of Throp- the Legion Club . . 226 II Swift's miscellaneous pamphlets of this period . . , . 227 His poems 220 His correspondence 2.30 His activity in benevolence— his immense popularity in Dublin . 231 His miserable condition— rapid failure of his mind— his irrita- bility and ferocity . . , , . . , . 233 His death 230 CHAPTER X CHARACTERISTICS I The problem of Swift's malady— false views on the subject— its symptoms 237 Views of Dr. Bcddoes— of Scott of Sir William Wilde- of Dr. 230 Bucknill , . 230 Swift's temper— his nervous organisation— his essential defects — his conception of human nature— of religion . . .241 His attitude towards Christianity apparent hopelessness of his creed - his reticence on this subject . . .... 245 His utter lack of sentiment - his reference of all qnestiona to pure intellect . 248 Comparison of Swift with Hobbes .251 /} Cynical character of the age in all its aspects— society, thought, '^ poetry, fiction . 262 Swift's colossal capacities . . ... . . . 265 xvi JONATHAN SWIFT PAUR Comparison of Swift with Napoleon . . . , . , 255 His constitutional pride . 257 His miserable circumstances 258 His indecency . * * 259 Swift's writings an exact reflection of his character . . • 2G0 His political pamphlets 261 His poems . . . . . 2G2 His humorous and satirical writings —their merits and defects . 2G2 His style . . . 204* His irony 264 His attitude towards life and mankind . . . . . . 265 General summary of his characteristics . . . . . 266 r APPENDICES I Dr. Bucknill's Letter • . . 2G9 II Writ 'De Ldnatico Inqdibbndo' and Hepobt or tbi Oou- MISSION . . . 271 Index * 375 JONATHAN SWIFT CHAPTER I BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES AND RIOORArilERS We know Swift as we know no other of those eminent men who have made the first four decades of the eighteenth century memorahle in Hterary history. A iiKTC f:;lance at the materials to which his hiographers hiive had access will suffice to show that our informa- tion regarding him is of such a kind as to leave scarcely anything to be desired. In the first place, we have his own voluminous correspondence — a correspondence which is, from a biographical point of view, of peculiar value. For, as the majority of his letters are addressed to intimate friends, and were intended only for the eyes of those friends, they exhibit him at times when the mask falls off, even from the most guarded. They were, moreover, written in all moods, without premeditation, without reserve, with the simple object of unburdening his mind, in no case with a view either to publication or to display. * When I sit down to write a letter,' he used to say, * I never lean upon my elbow till I have tinished it.' Again, in the Journal to Stella he has B 2 JONATHAN SWIFT not only left a minute record of his daily life during a space of nearly three years, but he has with unrestrained garrulity given expression to what- ever happened at the moment to be passing through Jiis thoughts. Nor is this all. He appears, like JJohnson and Coleridge, to have found an eccentric jl)leasure in communing with himself on paper. !Many of these soliloquies accident has preserved. They throw the fullest light on his innermost thoughts and feelings. They enable us to determine how far as a Churchman he was honest, how far as a politician he was consistent. His Memoir of himself remains unfortunately a fragment, but enough was completed to illustrate that portion of his career during which his correspondence is most scanty. If to this mass of autobiographical matter be added the innumerable passages in his public writings which elucidate his personal history, the evidence which is of all evidence the least open to suspicion may be regarded as ample even to superabundance. But, if we owe much to the communicativeness of Swift himself, we owe much also to the communica- tiveness of his friends. Seven years after his death appeared the famous Letters by John, Lord Orrery. The indignation which this work excited among Swift's admirers is well known. The picture which Orrery drew of the Dean was certainly not a pleasing one, and he was accused of having malignantly endeavoured to indemnify himself for the long and not very successful court he paid to Swift when alive by a series of calumnious attacks upon him when dead. Orrery is not entitled to much respect either as a writer or as a man, but he may probably be BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES AND BIOGRAPHERS 3 acquitted of any such intention. Careful study of the letters must satisfy anyone that they are on the whole what they profess to ho. Orrery was, as we learn from other sources, no favourite with Swift. He saw him, therefore, not as he presented himself to the fascinated eye of friendship, hut as he presented him- self to the impartial eye of critical curiosity. It should he remembered, too, that he knew him only in his decadence. Had Orrery's object been detraction, he would have withheld praise where praise was due, and when direct censure was hazardous he would have resorted to misrepresentation. There is nothing of this spirit discernible. He fully admits the greatness, he fully admits the many virtues, of the man whose portrait he has delineated in such harsh and dis- agreeable colours. What he painted was what he saw, and what he saw were those features in Swift's character which Delany and Deane Swift have piously done their best to soften or conceal. The truth is that the Swift of Orrery is the Swift of the Voyage to the Houyhuhnms, and of the Verses to the Lerfion Chih. The Letters of Orrery elicited two years afterwards the Observations of Delany. Few men were better qualified to speak of Swift than Delany. lie had been on terms of intimacy with him for upwards of a quarter of a century. He had been his companion in business and recreation. He had been acquainted with those who had known him from early youth. But Delany's object was eulogy, and for this due allowance must be made. He is, however, one of those witnesses whose loquacity forms a per- petual corrective to their prejudice, and his observa- tions are so rich in reminiscence and anecdote that B 2 4 JONATHAN SWIFT a flhrewd reader is in little danger of being misled. On the whole, we are inclined to think him the most trustworthy and valuable of all the original authori- ties. Delany's Observations were succeeded, at an interval of a year, by Deane Swift's Essay. This is a very disappointing book, though, as the writer was the son-in-law of Mrs. Wiiteway, and had as a young man frequently conversed with Swift, what he says of the Dean's character and habits is of import- ance, and we are moreover indebted to him for many interesting particulars not preserved elsewhere. In Mrs. Pilkington, whose reckless indifference to truth was notorious among all who knew her, and in the compiler of the Siriftiana, no one could place any conlidence. Hawkesworth's ^femoiry which was pub- lished in 1755, and Johnson's Life, which was published in 1781, added little or nothing to what was already known. But in 1781 came out the Memoir by Thomas Sheridan — not, of course, the Thomas Sheridan who was the friend of Swift, but the son of Swift's friend. As Sheridan professed to have derived information from his father, and has on the authority of his father, and on the authority also of his own reminiscences as a boy, contributed new biographical matter, his name stands high, and, in spite of tlie wretched arrangement of his material, deservedly high, among Swift's biographers. With Monck-Berkeley's Eiujuirtj inh the Life of Dean Swifts prefixed to his Literanj llclies, published in 1780, we have the last contribution to Swift's biography made by persons intimately acquainted with members of the Dean's circle. But, with the exception of an interestmg account of Esther Johnson, obtained from BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES AHD BIOGRAPHERS 5 her niece, !Monck-Berkeley lias added little to what was already known. Then came the era of original research. This may be said to date from Dr. Barrett's Essa?/ o?? the Earlier /Vn7 f)/" //<vithout much difficiilty be reconciled. Macaulay was no doubt right in assert- ing that the years passed by Swift under Temple's roof a8 JONATHAN SWJFT were years during which his haughty and restless spirit suffered cruel mortiiication. Mr. Forster is no doubt right in denying that Temple regarded him as a mere parasite. The truth probably is that he entered Moor Park as Temple's amanuensis and secretary ; that in return for these services he was boarded and paid ; that his patron at lirst treated him not hideed with indignity, but with the reserve and indifference which a man of the world would naturally maintain towards a raw and inexperienced youth of twenty-three. But as his genius developed, and as his extraordinary powers began to display themselves — neither of which would be likely to escape so acute an observer as Temple — his relations with bis employer assumed a new cha- racter. Temple grew every day more condescending and gracious. He discoursed freely with him on public affairs ; he gave him the benefit of his own great ex- perience as a diplomatist and as a courlier ; and he en- trusted him with business with which he would assur- edly have entrusted nobody hi whose tact and parts he had not full confidence. It was not in Temple's nature to feel or assume that frank cordiality which puts de- pendents at their ease and lightens the burden of ob- ligation, for his constitution was cold, his humour reserved. Partly also owing to ill-health, and partly to congenital infirmity, bis temper was often moody and capricious. Of his substantial kindness to Swift there can, however, be no question. Indeed, it seems clear that Temple behaved from first to last with a generosity which has never been sufficiently appreci- ated. When, for example, in the spring of IGUO, the state of the young secretary's health rendered a change to Ireland necessary, Temple at once exercised his h)- THE EARLY LIFE OF SWIFT 29 fliicncG to procure employment for him in Dublin. Two years afterwards he helped him to obtain an ad evndcm degree in Arts at Oxford, and in 1604 he offered him a post — the only post it was in his power to bestow — in Ireland. He had already recommended him to the notice of the King, who had, as early as 1G92, promised to assist him. ; But, unhappily, the mind and body of the youth on whom those favours had been bestowed were so diseased that what was intended to benefit served only to irritate and distress him ; the more indul- gence he received the more exacting and querulous he became ; the brighter appeared the prospect without, the deeper and blacker grew the gloom within. All that had haunted his solitude at Dublin with unrest and wretchedness now returned to torment him in scenes of less sordid misery. His pride amounted almost to monomania. Fancied slights and ima- ginary wrongs ulcerated his soul with rage and grief. No kindness availed either to soothe or to cheer him. AVhat would in gentler spirits have awaked the sense of gratitude, awoke liothijig in him but a galling sense of obligation. In an honourable employment his jaundiced vision discerned only derogatory servitude. The acute sensibility which had been his bane from childhood kept him constantly on the rack. A hasty word or even a cold look sufficed to trouble him during many days, and the inequalities of his patron's temper caused him pain so exquisite that it vibrated in his memory for years.* and 1700 it is certain that his application was intense. In one year, for example, in addition to several English and French works, he had perused the whole of Virgil twice, Lucretius and Elorus three times, tlie whole of the Iliad and the OdijHsey^ the whole of Horace and Petronius, the Characters of Theo- j phrastus, the Epistles of Cicero, much of /Elian ; and THE EARLY LIFE OF SWIFT 39 had not only read but analysed Diodorus Siculus, Cyprian, and Irenjeus. His classical attainments wore never, we suspect, either exact or profound. Of his acquirements in Greek scholarship he has, it is true, given us no opportunity of judging ; but of his acquirements in Latin we can only say that, if they are to be estimated by his compositions, they were not BUtli as to give him a place among scholars. His Latin prose is, as a rule, ostentatiously unclassical, and his verses harsh and lumbering. The Carberiae liiipcs is indeed written with great vigour, and is not inferior in point of Latinity to Johnson's verses on completing his Lexicon, but it is not a poem which Addison or Gray would have cared to own. But, whatever may have been his deficiency in the niceties of scholarship, his general acquaintance with the writers of antiquity was undoubtedly considerable. Of his familiarity with Homer there can bo no ques- tion. He was his favourite poet, and he once said of him that he had more genius than all the rest of the world put together.* It would seem, too, that he must have studied Demosthenes with great diligence. It may sound paradoxical, but assuredly there is no- thing in our literature more Demosthenean, in diction, colour, and method at least, than the Drapicr Letters and such pamphlets as the Conduct of the Allies and the Public Sinrit of the Whigs,^ Lucretius was always ' Deane Swift's Essay, p. 237. ' Dr. Jowett, in the Introduction to his translation of Plato's He- jmblic, says that there are no traces of a knowledge of Plato in Swift. This is not correct. In the Sentiments of a Church of England Man there is an allusion to a passage in the Apology ;. in his Blst Examiner the substance of Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium is given (the anknown correspondent being a common fiction) ; there is a 40 JONATHAN SWIFT a favourite with him, and the Roman satirists he knew intimately. Indeed, he was so sensible of the value of such studies, that, when political duties had for a while suspended them, his first care, on becoming master of his time, was to betake himself to the History of the Persian Wars and to the Dc lie rum NatunU While he was thus storing his mind with the treasures of Temple's library, an incident occurred which gave birth to the first characteristic production of his ;. ^ '^ - . For some years a moat idle controversy as to the relative merits of ancient and modern writers lijid been agitating literary circles both in England and on the Continent ; and in 1(j1)2 Temple had, in an elegantly written but silly and flimsy dissertation, taken up the gauntlet in favour of the ancients. In this dissertation he had selected for special eulogy a series of impudent forgeries which some late sophist had attempted to palm off on the world as the Ejustlcs of Phalaris of AiirUjcntnin. Competent scholars had long treated them with the contempt they deserved. But Temple, with a dogmatism which was the more ludicrous as he was probably unable to construe a line of the language in which they were written, not only pronounced them to be genuine, but cited them as proofs of the superiority of the ancients in epis- tolary literature. Nothing which bore Temple's name on the title-page could fail to command attention, and reference to the RcjmbUc in the Advice to a Young Poet ; Plato is quoted in the sermon on the Wisdom of this World; in Gulliver'a Travels^ Part IV., he is quoted on the subject of conjectural know- ledge ; and the account of the principle on which selections for marriage are made in the Commonwealth of the Houyhnhnms is plainly taken from the fifth book of the Republic. THE EARLY LIFE OF SWIFT 41 the treatise speedily became popular. The general piil)lic, who knew little more about Phalaris than that lie roasted people in a brazen bull and was afterwards roasted himself, grew curious about these wonderful litters. As there was no accessible edition, Aldrich, the Dean of Christ Church, induced his favourite pupil, Charles Boyle, a younger son of the Earl of Orrery, to undertake one, and in 1605 the volume appeared. The book was as bad as bad could be, and would have been forgotten in a fortnight, but it chanced that in the preface the young editor had taken occasion to sneer at Richard Bentley, then fast risking to pre-eminence among scholars. Bentley, in revenge, proved the letters to be what in truth they were, the worthless fabrication of a late age. To the public expression of this opinion he had been urged by his friend Wotton, who had already broken a lance with Temple in defence of the moderns, and was only too glad to find so weak a point in his opponent's armour. Temple, naturally angry at the aspersion thus cast on his taste and sagacity, and the digni- taries of Christ Church, feeling that the reputation of their College was at f?take, made common cause. Temple prepared a reply, which he had the good H( use to suppress. Boyle, or rather Boyle's coadjutors, Atterbury and Smalridge, united to produce a work now only memorable for having elicited Bentley's immortal treatise. Some months, however, before the Christ Church wits were in the field. Swift had come to his patron's assistance. The Battle of the Hooks is surely the most original and pleasing of Swift's minor satires. The humour is in his finesty vein, austiere and bitter, but without any of that 43 JONATHAN SWIFT malignity which in later years so often flavoured it. Every clause is pregnant with sense and meaning. The occasional parodies of the Homeric style are feli- citous in the extreme. The allegory throughout is admu'ahly conducted, full of significance even in its minutest details. Nothing could be happier than the Apologue of the Spider and the Bee, nothing more amusing than the portrait of Bentley, and assuredly nothing more exquisitely ludicrous than the episode of Bentley and AVotton. Historically the work is of great interest. It initiated a new style of satire. It opened out a new field for satire. It sounded the first note of the famous war waged by Wit and Humour and Good Sense against Pedantry and the Abuse of Learning — a war in which so many of the foremost men of the eighteenth century were to engage. Out of the hanle of the Boohs grew the dissertations in the Tale <>/ a Tub, and out of those dissertations grew the great Scriblerus Satire and the Fourth Book of the Dtinciad.^ For the idea, but for the idea only, of this work, Swift was perhaps indebted to l)e Callieres, a French writer, whose llistoire poctique ile hi Guerre iiouceUemeni declaree entre les Aneiens et les ModerueH appeared in 1088, and is now one of the rarest volumes known to bibliographers.'* • It is perhaps worth noticing that the Battle of the Books sup- plied Matthew Arnold with the phrase which has since become so popular, ' Sweetness and Light ' ; and Gray with the hint of his sub- limest couplet — ' Amazement in his van, with Flight combin'd. And Sorrow's faded form, and Solitude behind.' Cf. where Swift says of Bentley, ' On he went, and in his van Confu- sion and Amaze, while Horror and Affright brought up the rear.* ■'' The authorship of this work Aas formerly attributed to an apo- THE EARLY LIFE OF SWIFT 45 Swift soon discovered where his strength Ifiy. His genius developed itself with astonishing rapidity. In IGOG he had not, so far as is known, produced a line which indicated the possession of powers in any ^vay superior to those of ordinary men. In the fol- lowing year he suddenly appeared as the author of a satire of which the least that can be said is that it would have added to the reputation of Lucian or Erasmus ; and before the year was out he had written the greater part of a work which is allowed to be one of the first prose satires in the world. The Talc of a _ Tub was composed immediately after the Battle of the BookSf and it forms, as Mr. Forster rightly observes, part of the same satirical design. In the Battle of the BooliH he had satirised, in the person of the Moderns, the abuses of learning ; in the Talc of a Tub ho satirises in the body of the narrative the abuses of religion, and in the digressions he returns to his former theme. It is scarcely necessary to say that the immediate object of the Apologue of the Three Brothers was* to trace the gradual corruption of primitive Christianity, to ridicule the tenets and the economy of the Church of Rome, to pour contempt on the Presbyterians and Nonconformists, and to vindicate the superiority of that section of the Re- formed Church to which ho himself belonged. But, though the Apologue of the Three Brothers is the most celebrated portion of the satire, and forms, so to speak, the nucleus of the work, it is not here that the key is to be found. If we would seek the key we may find it in the ninth section : — cryphal Coutray. It was reserved for Mr. Craik to assign it to its proper author. See his interesting note, Life of Swift, p. 71. 44 JONATHAN SWIFT How fading and insipid do all objects accost us that are not conveyed in the vehicle of delusion I How shrunk is everything as it appears in the ^'lass of nature I So that, if it were not for the asBistonce of artificial mediums, false liglits, refracted angles, varnish and tinsel, there would be a uiighty level in the feUcity and enjoyments of mortal men. . , , In the proportion that cre- dulity is a more peaceful possession of the mind than curiosity, so far preferable is that wisdom which converses about the surface to tliat pretended philosophy which enters into the depth of things. He tells us in the Apology that he had endea- voured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could — in other words, not to he the dupe of illusions ; and in this temper the work is composed. The satire rests on the same foundation as Gulliver's Travels — a deep-seated and intense conviction of the hollowness and nothingness of life, a profound con- tempt for all the ohjects to which the energies of mankind are usually directed, and a profound con- tempt for all that is supposed to constitute human eminence. That the satire falls chiefly on * those strange heasts which in all tongues are called fools * is true, hut the mockery, as in Gulliver, knows no distinc- tion. The very dedication is ironical, and could scarcely have heen agreeahle to Somers. Martin is every whit as ridiculous as his hrethren, and, whatever Swift may himself have thought or designed — and that he was the last man in the world to he guilty of intentional (profanity is certain — the effect of the work is un- douhtedly to place all ceremonial religion in a ludicrous light. Against the charge of profanity he anxiously defended himself in an elahorate Apology prefixed to an edition of the work which appeared in 1710. After frankly admitting that he * had given a liherty to his pen which might not suit with maturer years or THE EARLY LIFE OF SWIFT 45 graver characters ' — for he was * a young gentleman * when he wrote the work — he yet maintains that nothing can he fairly deduced from it which is contrary to religion and morality. He is, he says, at a loss to understand why any clergyman of the English Church should he angry to see the follies of fanaticism and superstition exposed, though in the most ridiculous manner. So far from the satire containing anything to provoke them, *it celehrates the Church of England as the most perfect of all others in discipline and doctrine ; it advances no opinion they reject, nor condemns any they receive.* Religion, it is true, ought not to be ridiculed, but surely, he continues, its corruptions are proper subjects for satire, ' II y a bien de la difiference,' he might, indeed, have said with Pascal, * entre rire de la religion et rire de ceux qui la profanent par leurs opinions extravagantes. Co Rcrait une impiete de manquer de respect pour les vcritcs que I'esprit de Dieu a revelces ; mais cc sorait une autre impiete de manquer de mepris pour le faussetes que I'esprit de I'homme leur oppose.' ' But, though he argued thus, and contended that what was reprehensible in the w^ork could have been easily corrected with a very few blots, those very few blots were never made. He was, no doubt, perfectly aware that the removal of what pious people might with justice take exception to as profane would be as dis- astrous to the fabric of his work as his own Jack's removal of the gold lace and embroidery from the primitive coat. He adopted, therefore, in the inter- ests of his work, the policy of Martin, but in his own professional interests he compromised the matter by ' Lettres Provinciates, xi. 46 JONATHAN SWIFT never acknowledging the authorship of the satire. To this day the authorship of the Tale of a Tub rests only on presumptive evidence. No other of his satires is so essentially Rahekiaiaii* but it is Rabelaisian in the best sense of the word. In the phrase of Voltaire, it is Rabelais in his senses ; in the still happier phrase of Coleridge, it is the soul of Rabelais in a dry place. Without the good canon's buffoonery and mysticism, it has all his inexhaustible fertility of imagination and fancy, all his humour, all his wit. But it has them with a difference. The humour of Rabelais is that of a man drunk with animal spirits ; the humour of Swift is that of a reflective cynic. The essence of Rabelais's wit is grotesque extravagance ; the wit of Swift is the perfec- tion of refined ingenuity. The one revels without restraint in licentious drollery ; the other, sobered and measured, delights most in dry and bitter irony. In the History of Gargantiia and Pantar/nu'l there is no attempt at condensation ; the ideas are, as a rule, pursued with wearisome prolixity to their utmost ramifications. But the power manifested in the Tale of a Tub is not merely power expressed, but power latent. Its force is the force of reserve. Every paragraph is pregnant with innuendo; every page teems with suggestion. There is much in Rabelais which conveyed, we suspect, as little meaning to Du Bellay and Marot as it conveys to us. There is nothing in Swift's allegory which would puzzle a schoolboy who has Scott's notes, brief though they are, in his hand. The Tale of a Tub is, in the opinion of many of Swift's critics, his master- piece. * It exhibits,' says Johnson, * a vehemence and THE EARLY LIFE OF SWIFT 47 vapidity of mind, a copiousness and vivacity of diction, such as ho never afterwards possessed, or never exerted/ It is curious that it should have escaped all Swift's biographers and critics that he was probably indebted for the hint of this famous work to a sermon written by Archbishop Sharp, the very prelate who succeeded a few years later in persuading Anne that, as the author of such a satire as the Talcy Swift was not a proper person for a bishopric. Sharp's sermon is entitled, A JMacimwn of the Qficstion ivhich the Roman Catholics much innist itpon with the Protcstavts, viz, in ivhich oj the different Communions in Christendom the only true Church of Christ is to he fomuL With a refutation of a certain Popish argument handed about in manuscript iu 1686. Now, as this sermon had attracted great attention, because it had given occasion to James II.'s mandatory letter to the Bishop of London to suspend .Sharp, then Rector of St. Giles' in the Fields, it is very likely indeed to have come under Swift's notice.' ' Sharp's allegory is this (he is disputing the claims of the Church of Rome to consider itself the primitive and Catholic Church) :— • A father hequeaths a large estate among his children and their children after them. They do for some generations quietly and peaceably enjoy their several shares without disturbance from each other. At last one branch of this family (and not of the eldest house neither) f^tarts up, and, being of greater power than the rest, and having got some of the same family to join with him, very impudently chal- Icngeth the whole estate to himself . . . and would dispossess all the rest of the descendants, accounting them no better than bastards, though they be far more in number than his own party. . . . Upon this they contest their own right against him, alleging their father's will and testament and their long possession, and that they are lawfully , descended from their first common ancestor. But this gentleman who would lord it over his brethren offers this Irrefragable argument for the juBtioe of his claim.' The argument is that they cannot show 48 JONATHAN SWIFT Swift's indifference to literary distinction, at an age when men are as a rule most eager for such dis- tinction, is curiously illustrated hy the fate of these works. For eight years they remained in manu- script, and, when they appeared, they appeared not only anonymously, hut without receiving his final corrections. At the beginning of 1699 Temple died. ^Hc expired,' writes Swift with mingled tenderness and cynicism, * at one o'clock this morning, January 27, 1699, and with him all that was good and amiable in human nature.' When the will was opened, be found that his patron's provision for him, though not liberal, was judicious. In addition to a small pecu- niary legacy, be bad appointed him bis literary executor, with the right to appropriate such sums as the publication of bis posthumous papers — and they were voluminous — might realise. These papers Swift published in three instalments, the first appearing in 1700 and the last in 1709. that any opposition was made to his claim by others of the family Betting up a claim of their own ; thcrefure he is lord of the inherit- ance. The reply is that they were at tirst all Hving in peace together, and that they did not opjjose his claim for the simple reason that ho never advanced it, but that they are perfectly prepared, now that ho has advanced it, to resist him. ' Tell us by what right or justice you can pretend to be sole lord of this inheritance. Let the will of our conmion parent be produced, and this will plainly show that we havt; as much a share in this estate as you have.' Sharp's Works, vii. U4. Nor is it at all unlikely that Bwift may have been indebted still further to Sharp. The sermon referred to is one of fourteen which are devoted to an elaborate exposure of the errors and corruptions of the Church of Rome, furnishing indeed, even to minute details, tho whole text for Swift's satire, which follows Sharp's commentary step by step. My attention was directed to this interesting parallel by a letter in the Gentleman's Magazine for July, 1814, signed ' Indagator.' THE EARLY LIFE OF SWIFT 49 It was probably with no regret that Swift turned his back on Moor Park. He was in the prime of youth, the world was before him, and he had as- suredly every reason to think that the removal of Kuch obstacles as lay in the road to success would not, to one equipped as he was equipped, prove a very arduous task. so JONATHAN SWIFT CHAPTER rV LIFE BETWEEN 1700 AND 1710 During the next fourteen years Swift's life was one long and fierce struggle for pre-eminence and dominion. ^0 obtain that homage which the world accords, and accords only, to rank and opulence, and to wrest from fortune what fortune had at his birth malig- nantly withheld, became the end and aim of all his efforts. * I will tell you,' he wrote many years after- wards to Pope, * that all my endeavours from a boy to distinguish myself were only for want of a great •title and fortune, that I might be used Hke a lord by those who have an opinion of my parts, whether right or wrong it is no great matter.' In those days literary distinction was not valued as it is valued in our time. If a man of letters found his way to the tables of the great, he was treated in a manner which offensively reminded him of the social dis- parity between himself and his host. The multitude regarded him, if he was poor, as was only too likely, with contempt; if he was well to do, with indifference. Hence men ambitious of worldly honour and worldly success shrank from identifying themselves with authorship, and employed their pens only as a means of obtaining Church preferment or political influence. It was so with some of the most distinguished writers LIFE BETWEEN 1700 AND 17 10 51 of those times — with Burnet, with Addison, with Sprat, with Rowe, with Price, with Parnell. 'I desire,' said Congreve to Voltaire, *to be considered not as an author, but as a gentleman.' This perhaps accounts for Swift's carelessness about the fate of his writings, and for the fact that, with two or three un- important exceptions, nothing that came from his hand appeared with his name. Indeed, on no body of men have the shafts of his terrible scorn fallen so frequently as on those whom we should descri])e as authors by profession. But, if distinction in literature was not his end, he knew well its value as a means. Many adventurers with resources far inferior to his had already fought their way into the chambers of royalty and to the Episcopal Bench. With what patience under disappointment, with what long-pro- tracted assiduity, with what tact and skill, with what tremendous energy, with what unscrupulous versa- tility, with what vast expenditure of genius and aVulity he pursued this object, is now matter of history. The death of his patron found him without pre- ferment and without a competency. As the King had, however, on the occasion of one of his visits to Moor Park, promised to confer on him a prebend cither of Canterbury or of Westminster, he was by no means inclined to despond ; and he hastened up to London to remind the King of his promise. His request took the form of a petition, which the Earl of Romney, one of the Lords of the Council, promised to present. This, however, he neglected to do, and Swift, weary of hanging about Kensington, and angry, no doubt, at the King's neglect, accepted an invitation 52 JONATHAN SWIFT from the Earl of Berkeley, then one of the Lords Justices of Ireland, to accompany him as chaplain and secretary to Duhlin. Berkeley, little knowing the character of the nian with whom he had to deal, attempted at first to treat him as superiors were in those days wont to treat dependents. Finding it convenient on his arrival in Ireland to bestow the private-secretaryship on a layman, he suddenly in- formed Swift that his services as a chaplain were all that would henceforth be expected from him. The deprivation of this office was, however, accompanied with a promise of ecclesiastical preferment. In a few montlis the rich deanery of Dcrry chanced to fall vacant. It was in the disposal of Berkeley, and Swift at once applied for it ; but the person, one Bushe, who had superseded him in the secretaryship, now j)revailed on Berkeley to confer the deanery on another candidate. Swift's rage knew no bounds. Bursting into Berkeley's room, and thundering out to the astonished secretary and his no less astonished prin- cipal * God confound you both for a couple of scoun- drels,' he abruptly quitted the Castle. Nor did his wrath end here. He gibbeted his patron in a lampoon distinguished even among his other lampoons by its scurrility and lilth. Whether this came to Berkeley's ears is not known. It probably did, and in that case Berkeley's subsequent conduct is in all likelihood to be attributed, not to a sense of justice, nor, as Mr. Forster supposes, to the influence of Lady Berkeley and her daughters, but to a sense of fear. He had probably the sagacity to see that no public man could afford to make an enemy of a writer so powerful and BO unscrui)ulou8 as Swift. "What is certain is that LIFE BETWEEN 1700 AND 1710 53 his Excellency lost little time in appeasing his in- furiated chaplain. In a short time Swift was again the inmate of the Castle, and in a few weeks he was in possession of preferment, not indeed equivalent in value to the deanery, hut sufficient to maintain him in decency and independence. In March, 1600, he was presented with the rectory of Agher and the vicarages of Laracor and Rathheggan, in the diocese of Meath. In the following year the prebend of Dun- lavin,in St. Patrick's Cathedral, was added to his other preferments. A few months later he took his Doctor's degree in the University of Dublin. For the present, however, he continued to reside as domestic chaplain at the Castle. In the spring of 1701 Berkeley was recalled, and Swift accompanied him to England. He found the country convulsed with civil discord ; the unpopularity of the King was at its height ; disgraceful feuds divided the two Houses ; a war with France was apparently imminent. This latter disaster the Tories attributed to the Partition Treaties, and, as the Tories had just won a great victory, they were determined to indemnify themselves for their recent depression by giving full scope to resentment and vengeance. With this object they were hurrying on impeachments against the four Whig Ministers, who were, it was supposed, responsible for the second of these obnoxious treaties. Swift was not the man to remain a mere spectator where he was so well qualified to enter the arena, and in the summer of 1701 appeared his first contribution to contemporary politics. It was a treatise in five chapters, entitled A Bhconne of the Contests and Dissensions bettveen the Nobles and the 54 JONATHAN SWIFT Commons m Athens and Rome; and it was written to vindicate the Whig Ministers, to defend the King's foreign policy, and to allay the intemperate fury of party. It points out that what ruined States in ancient times is quite as likely to ruin States in modern times, that political liberty can only be pre- served by the just equilibrium of power at home and power abroad, and that dissension between the ruling bodies in commonwealths must ultimately result either in anarchy or in despotism ; and it selects from the political history of Rome and Athens incidents ana- logous to the incidents then occurring in England. Orford has his analogue in Miltiades and Themistocles, Halifax in Pericles and Alcibiades, Somers in Aristides, and Portland in Phocion. The tone is calm and grave, the style simple, nervous, and clear, but some- what heavy. ^Yl)at distinguishes it from Swift's other political tracts is its ostentatious parade of classical learning, and the fact that it is purely didactic, that it is without humour and without satire. The work at once attracted attention. Some ascribed it to Burnet, others to Somers ; but Swift, for a time at least, kept his own secret and returned to Ireland. Next year, however, he acknowledged the authorship, and was received with open arms by the Whig leaders, who, confessing their obligations to him, promised to do all in their power to serve him. In 1704 appeared a volume which at once raised him to the highest place among contemporary prose writers. It contained the Tale of a Tub, the Battle of the Boohs, and the Dis- course on the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, a sin- gularly powerful satire, in which he returns again to the sectaries, or modern saints as he calls them, whom LIFE BETWEEN 1700 AND 1710 55 he had lashed so unmercifully in the Tah of a Tub. The contempt and loathing with which Swift regarded tliese fanatics are not difficult to explain. They were tlie enemies of the Church. They were republicans and levellers in politics. They were distinguished as a body by characteristics which are and always will be particularly odious to men of honesty and good Hcnse. With * enthusiasm,' even when it was not simulated, he had little sympathy, for he knew its jitrilous proximity to mere hysterics ; but enthusiasm deliberately afTected for disguising ignorance and masking lewdness or avarice, as by these people it habitually was, provoked him to fury. The Saints had long been the butts of wits and satirists. South had covered them with ridicule from the pulpit ; Butler and Dryden had lashed them in the press. But the vehement vituperation of the sermons on the Christian Pentecost and the Education of Youth, the caustic sarcasm of Hudihras and of the Hypocritical Nonconformist f and the trenchant raillery of the licUgio Laid and the Hind and Panthcvy are tame and merciful compared with the cataclysm of filth and . vitriol with which the scorn and contempt of Swift overwhelmed them. The volume containing these pieces was pubHshed anonymously. But it was probably soon known, or at least suspected, in literary circles that Swift was the author. From this moment he became a distinguished figure in what were then the favourite haunts of wits and poUticians. He renewed his acquaintance with his old schoolfellow Congreve. He grew very friendly with Addison. He did all in his power to ingratiate himself with the Whig leaders ; and not without 56 JONATHAN SWIFT Buccess. Somers, indeed, contented himself with being civil, but with the more genial Halifax acquaint- anceship soon ripened into intimacy. The very re- markable words in which Addison inscribed to him a copy of his Travels in J^a/^ sufficiently prove in what estimation the Vicar of Laracor was, even as early as 1705, held by those whose praise was best worth having. * To Dr. Jonathan Swift ' — so runs the inscription — * the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age.* / The next five years form perhaps the most un- J satisfactory period in Swift's life. They were spent U partly in Ireland, where he divided his time between /.' Laracor and Dublin, and partly in London, where he (/ passed his mornings in scribbling pamphlets whicli he never published, his afternoons in dancing attend- ance on the Whig Mmisters, and his evenings in gossiping with Addison and Addison's friends in coffee-houses. The preferment which his new patrons had promised never came, though it appeared to bo always on the way. At one moment it seemed prob- able that he would be promoted to the see of Water- ford, at another moment he had some hope of Cork. Then he exi)ressed his willingness to accompany Lord Berkeley as Secretary of the Embassy to Vienna, and at last talked half seriously of going out as a colonial bishop to Virginia. But nothing succeeded, and the fact that nothing succeeded he attributed neither to the cross accidents of fortune nor to the obstinate opposition of the Court, but to the treachery and / ingratitude of his friends. Though he still continued to jest and pun with Pembroke and the Berkeleys, to discuss the prospects of the Whigs with Somers, and LIFE BETWEEN 1700 AND 1710 57 to lend an additional charm to the splendid hospitality of Halifax at Hampton Court, his temper grew every (lay more soured ; every day he became more sus- picious and sore. In truth, a breach with the Whigs was inevitable. Even apart from motives of self-interest— and it would be doing Swift great injustice to suppose that motives of self-interest were the only, or indeed the chief, motives which at this time guided him — he had ample cause for dissatisfaction. If there was one thing dear to him, it was the Established Church. To preserve that Church intact, intact in its ritual,/ intact in its dogmas, intact in its rights, was in his eyes of inlinitely greater importance than the most momentous of those questions which divided party from party. As a politician, he found no difficulty in reconciling the creed of Halifax and Somers with the creed of St. John and Harcourt. He was at one with those who dethroned James and set up William ; he was tender with those who spoke respectfully of the doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance. He figures in history, indeed, as a furious partisan, but nothing is more remarkable than the moderation and tolerance which he always displays in discussing tlie principles of political opinion. In his own creed he shunned all extremes ; it was of the essence of compromise. * No man,' ho says in one of the most admirable of his minor tracts, *who has examined the conduct of both parties for some years past, can go to the extremes of either without offering some violence to his integrity or understanding.' ' Again he writes i ' SentimentB of a Church of Englan Man. / 58 JONATHAN SWIFT *In order to preserve the Constitution entire in Church and State, whoever has a true value for either would be sure to avoid the extremes of Whig for the sake of the former, and the extremes of Tory for the sake of the lattejf^'* But all traces of this moderate spirit disappear the moment the Church is in question. As an ecclesiastic, he was intolerant even to ferocity. The Reformed Protestant Church was in his eyes the only religious institution which civil authority should recognise ; its doctrines the only doctrines which should be held to constitute the faith of Christians. * The Church of England,' he says, and has said over and over again in almost the same words, should * be preserved entire in all her rights, power and privileges ; all doctrines relating to her govern- ment discouraged which she condemns ; all schisms, sects and heresies discountenanced.' ^ The depth and sincerity of his convictions on this point are strikingly illustrated by the fact that when, as leader of Irish opposition to England, it was plainly his interest to unite men of all religions against the Government, his hostility to such as lay outside the pale of the Protestant Church was as obstinate and uncompro- mising as ever. In his writings he makes no distinc- tion between Papists and Atheists, between Presby- terians and Free Thinkers. He was in favour of the Penal LawB* He upheld the cruellest of those statutes wliich excluded Nonconformists from the rights of citizens. On these points his opinion was at variance with that of the party to which he was politically attached, and entirely in harmony with that held by the ' Se7itime7its of a Church of England Man. ' Free Thoughts upon Present Affairs. LIFE BETWEEN 1700 AND 1710 59 party to whicli be was politically opposed. It was not, liowever, till 1708 that Swift began to see clearly that the interests of his order and the interests of his party wire irreconcilable. In that year it became evident tliat the Church was in danger. The Whigs were, in truth, more and more identifying themselves with her enemies. They had already agitated a repeal of the Ti'st Act in favour of the Protestant Dissenters in Ireland, and its repeal would probably soon be moved in England. The contempt in whicli many of them hold the religion of the State was notorious. Indeed, Cowper, the Chancellor, Somers, the President of the Council, and Wharton, the Viceroy of Ireland, were popularly regarded as little better than infidels. Nor was this all. In the Wliig ranks were to be found that odious clique — at the head of which were Toland, Tyndal, and Collins — a clique whose avowed object was the demolition of orthodoxy. Under these cir- cumstances Swift published, in 1708, his Scntimaits of a Church of E}\(jland Man, a pamphlet in his best manner, temperate in tone, forcible and luminous in style. He here defines his position, and here for the lirst time his dissatisfaction with his party is dis- cernible. This was succeeded by that inimitable satire on Free Thinkers, the Argument against Ahol- ishing Christianity, Never, perhaps, has the truth! of Horace's remark that pleasantry is, as a rule, far more efficacious than vehemence and severity' been more strikingly illustrated than in this short piece. But it was not as a satirist only that he designed to combat the enemies of Christianity. He had gathered materials for an elaborate refutation of one 6o JONATHAN SWIFT of the most obnoxious of Tyndal's publications, an interesting fragment of which may be found in the eighth volume of his collected writings.' Meanwhile, the Whigs in Ireland were pushing on the repeal of the Test Act, and in December appeared Swift's famous letter concerning the Sacramental Test. The defeat of the Bill followed. It was believed that Swift's pamphlet had turned the scale against Repeal ; and from this moment all cordiality between himself and his party was at an end. In his next treatise, A Project for the Advancement of Uelic/ion, there was, no doubt, as much policy as piety. It appears to have been written partly to ingratiate him- self with the Queen, partly to insinuate that Whig dominion was inimical alike to morality and religion, and partly to contirm the reaction which was now beginning to take the turn in favour of the Church party. No man who knew the world as the author of this work knew it could have seriously entertained many of the schemes which he here gravely propounds. To iind Swift in Utopia is to find him where we never found him before and where we shall never find him again. It is not unlikely that he suspected, or had perhaps been informed, that the Tale of a Tub might injure his prospects of preferment, and that this tract was written to remove any unfavourable impression which this work may have made on the Queen and other orthodox people. What is certain is that the work is designed to show that the writer is an enthu- siast in the cause of religion and orthodoxy, and that ' licmarks upon a Book entitled The Right of the Christian Church, dtc. LIFE BETWEEN 1700 AND 1710 61 religion and orthodoxy should be necessary qualifica- tions for favour and preferment.' While he was busy with these works, his humour and drollery were convulsing all London with laughter. Though astrological quackery had long been on the decline, it still found credit with the multitude. Its most distinguished professor at this time was John Partridge, a charlatan who was in the habit of pub- lishing each year an almanack, in which he predicted, with judicious ambiguity, what events were in the course of the year destined to take place. In February, 1708, appeared a pamphlet of a few pages, informing the public that Partridge was an impostor, that a rival prophet was in the field, and that it was the intention of that rival prophet to issue an opposition almanack. The writer then proceeded with great gravity to unfold the future. He scorned, he said, to fence himself, like Partridge, with vagueness and goneraUties ; he should be particular in everything he foretold ; he should in all cases name the day ; he should often be enabled to name the very hour. * My first prediction,' he goes on to say, * is but a trifle ; ' it relates to Partridge, the almanack maker. * I have consulted the star of his nativity by my own rules, ' This conjecture as to Swift's object in the tract is, it may be aililcd, rendered the more probable by the remarkable notice of the work inserted by Steele, then on friendly terms with him, in the fifth number of the Tatlcr. Compare these sentences : * It is written with the spirit of one who has seen the world enough to undervalue it with good breeding. The author must certainly be a man of wisdom as well as piety and have spent much time in the exercise of both. . . . The whole air of the book, as to the language, the sent!- ments, and the reasonings, shows it was written by one whose virtue sits easy about him, and to whom vice is thoroughly contemptible.* 62 J ON A THAN S WIFT and find he will infallibly die upon the twenty-ninth of March next, about eleven o'clock at night, of a raging fever ; therefore I advise him to consider of it and settle his affairs in time.' The pamphlet was signed * Isaac Bickerstaff,' but it was soon known in literary circles that Isaac Bickerstaff was none other than Jonathan Swift. The thirtieth of March arrived, and out came The Accomplishment of the First Part of Bickerstaff* s Vredietions^ heiiKj an Account of thr Death of Mr. Partridje upon the 39th instant. Her*' we read how, towards the end of March, Mr. Partridj^c! was obHcrved to droop and lauf^uish j*^ how he thin grow ill and took to his bed; how, as the end drew near, his conscience smiting him, ho sorrowfully con- fessed that his prophecies were mere impositions, and that he himself was a rogue and a cheat ; how the unhappy man ' declared himself a Nonconformist and had a fanatical preaclier to bo his spiritual guide,' and how, linally, he breathed his last just as BickerstatV had predicted. To this, in his almanack for 170i», Partridge was fool enough to reply, ' thanking God that he was not only aUve, but well and hearty,' and unluckily adding that he was alive also on the day of his alleged demise. Upon that Bickerstaff, in an ex- quisitely humorous pamphlet, proceeded to assure Partridge that if he imagined himself alive he wan labouring under hallucination ; alive he may have been on March 20, for his death did not occur till the evening, but dead he most assuredly had been ever since, for he had himself candidly admitted it. * If,' added Bickerstaff, * an uninformed car- case still walks about, and is pleased to call itself Partridge, I do not think myself in any way answer- LIFE BETWEEN 1700 AND 1710 63 able for that.' The jest had now become general. The life of the unhappy almanack maker was a burden to him. At home facetious neighbours pes- tered him with questions as to whether he had left any orders for a funeral sermon, whether his grave ' was to be plain or bricked.' If he appeared in the street he was asked why he was sneaking about with- out his coffin, and why he had not paid his burial fees. So popular became the name assumed by Swift in this humorous controversy that when, in April, 1709, Steele published the first number of the Tailcr, it was as Isaac Bickerstaff that he sought to catch the public ear.' But controversies of another kind were now fast approaching. The latter half of 1709, and the greater part of 1710, Swift spent in sullen discontent in/ Ireland. And sorrow also was to visit him. In the spring of 1710 he received the news of his mother's death. * It was,' he writes with touching particularity, ' between seven and eight on the evening of May 10, 1710, that I received a letter in my chamber at Laracor . . . giving an account that my dear mother died that morning, Monday, April 24, 1710. ... I have now lost my barrier between me and death. God grant that I may be as well prepared for it as I confi- dently believe her to have been. If the way to Heaven be through piety, truth, justice, and charity, she is there.' He had the consolation of knowing that he ' See, for the whole controversy, Predictions for the Tear i70S : an answer to Bickerstaff. By a Person of Quality. Tlie Accmnplish- mcnt of the First Part of Bickerstaff's Predictions. Squire Bicker- staff Detected. A Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff t Esq. A Famous Prediction of UerXin. All printed in Scott's Swift, vol. ix. 64 JONATHAN SWIFT had been an affectionate aiid dutiful son, the best and perhaps the only solace in one of the bitterest of human afflictions. Meanwhile, every post was bring- ing important tidings from London. At the beginning of March had come the news of the impeachment of Sacheverell. In the summer arrived a report that the Ministry were to be turned out. By June 15 Sunderland had been dismissed. By August 23 Godolphin had resigned, the Treasury was in com- mission, and the ruin of the Whigs imminent. In less than a month — on September 7 — Swift was in London. The business which carried him thither was business which had for two years been occupying him. At the suggestion of Bishop Burnet, Anne had, shortly after her accession, consented to waive her claim to the First Fruits and Tenths. The remission extended only to the English clergy, but the Irish Convocation, thinking themselves entitled to the same favour, had petitioned the Lord Treasurer to lay their case before the Queen. With this object they had, in 1708, appointed Swift their delegate. Session after session he had pleaded and importuned, but he had been able to obtain nothing but evasive answers. It was now hoped that an application would be more successful, and this application Swift, in commission with the Bishops of Ossory and Killaloe, was directed to make. On his arrival in London he found everything in confusion. The Whigs were in panic, the Tories in perplexity. Harley was at the head of affairs, but on which of the two parties Harley intended to throw himself was as yet known to no man. Many believed that few further changes would be made. Others LIFE BETWEEN 1700 AM) 1710 65 were of opinion that a Coalition Ministry would bo formed. What seemed certain was that no Tory Government would have the smallest chance of stand- ing for a month. By the majority of the Whigs the appearance of Swift was hailed with joy. ' They were,' he writes to Esther Johnson, ' ravished to scti me, and would lay hold on me as a twig while they arc drowning.' ' But by Godolphin he was received ill a manner which bordered on rudeness, and when he called on Somers it was plain that all he had to L'xpect from the most eminent of the Whigs was cold civility. And now he took a step of which he probably little foresaw the cotisequences. With Ilarlcy he was already slightly acquainted, and at the beginning of Di'tober he called on him, explaining the business wliich had brought him to town, and requesting the favour of an interview. The interview was granted, Mud in less than a fortnight Swift was the friend and conlidant of the leader of the Tories, was assailing liis old allies, was fighting the battles of his former opponents. No action of his life has been so severely com- mented on as his defection from his party at a crisis when defection is justly regarded as least defensible. But what are the facts of the case ? In deserting tlie Whigs he deserted men from whom in truth he had long been alienated, .who were in league with the enemies of his order, who were for factious purposes pursuing a policy eminently disastrous and immoral, and who had treated him personally not merely with '4ros8 ingratitude but with unwarrantable disrespect, lie was bound to them neither by ties of duty nor by • Jledged. But to Occasional Conformity, and to all ntlicr attempts to relax, much more to rescind, the provisions of the Test Act, his attitude had, since ITOC), heen that of determined and uncompromising liostility. And he had made no secret of his opinions.' Fie had embarrassed his party by opposing tolera- tion in Ireland and by opposing it in Scotland. ' No prospect of making my fortune ' — such was his language to Archbishop King in 1708—* shall ever prevail on me to go against what becomes a man of conscience and truth, and an entire friend of the Established Church.' " Nor was this all. As the friend <^f the Church, he was the friend of the throne ; as a minister of religion and as a patriotic citizen, he was opposed to the super fluous sacrifice of life and money. The disrespect with which the Whigs habi- tually treated the Queen was as notorious as the fact that for party purposes they were protracting, and ' See particularly Memoirs relating to the Change in tlie Queen'* Miniitry, » Letter to King, Nov. 9, 1708. F 2 68 JONATHAN SWIFT unnecessarily, a sanguinary and ruinous war. To describe, therefore, as Macaulay and others have done, Swift's defection from the Whigs as the conduct of an interested and unscrupulous renegade, is as absurd as it is unjust. He went over to Harley, it is true, at a time when the Whigs were in trouble, but it ought in justice to be remembered that he went over to him at a time when there were probably not ten men in London who believed that the new Ministry would stand. But here apology must end. The rancour and malignity which mark his attacks on his old asso- ciates, many of them men to whose probity and dis- interestedness he had himself given eloquent testimony, admit of no justification. He had, we may be sure, honestly persuaded himself that it was his duty, botli in the interests of the State and in the interests ol the Church, to break with the Whigs, but it would !»» absurd to deny that his hostility on public grounds was sharpened by private animosity. 69 CHAPTER V DURING THE ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710-17H Xo other man of letters has ever occupied a position similar to that which Swift held during the Admini- stration of Harley. Ostensibly a mere dependent, the power which he virtually possessed was au^cratical. Without rank, without wealth, without olhce, riuil;, wealth, and authority were at his feet. The influence which he exercised on all with whom he came in con- tact resembled fascination. Men little accustomed to anything but the most deferential respect submitted nitekly to all the caprices of his ijisolent -temper. Noble ladies solicited in vain the honour of 'his ac- quaintance. The heads of princely houses .boife from him what they would have resented i»«an equal. Indeed, the hberties which he sometimes iX)6k with social superiors are such as to be scarcely credible. On one occasion, for example, he sent the Lord Treasurer to fetch the principal Secretary of State from the House of Commons, * For I desire,' he said, ' to inform him with my own lips, that if he dines hite I shall not dine with him.' On another occasion, when the Lord Treasurer at one of his levees asked him to present Parnell, Swift coolly replied : * A man 70 JONATHAN SWIFT of genius, my lord, is superior to a lord in high station, and it is becoming therefore that you should seek out Dr. Parnell and introduce yourself.' And so Lord Oxford, * in the height of his glory,* as Delany puts it, ' had to walk with his Treasurer's stafif from room to room through his own Levy enquiring whicli was Dr. Parnell.' ' On another occasion, when in- formed that the Duke of Buckinghamshire — a noble- man whose pride had passed into a proverb — was anxious to be introduced to him, he coolly replied : * It cannot be, for he has not made sufficient advances. * I use them like dogs,' he writes to Stella, * becausi I expect they will use me so.' By Harley anc St. John, the one the Lord Treasurer, the other tli' principal Secretary of State, ho was treated not mereh as an equal but as a brother. He was their com- panion at home and in business. They indulged him in all his whims. They bore with patience the sallies of his sarcastic humour. They allowed him a licenci', both of speech and of action, which they would never have tolerated in a kinaman. When we remember that at the time Swift attained this extraordinary dominion over his contemporaries he was known only as a country priest with a turn for letters, who had come to London partly as an ambassador from the Irish clergy and partly to look for preferment, it may well move our wonder. But it is not difficult to ex- plain. No one who is acquainted with the character of Swift, with his character as it appears in his own writings, as it has been illustrated in innumerabli anecdotes, and as it has been delineated by those who were familiar with him, can fail to see that he belonged ' Delany's Ohurvaiion^^ pp. 28-9. ADMINISTRATION OF HARLE\\ 1710-1714 71 to the kings of human kind. Like Innocent III. and like Chatham, he was one of those men to wliom the world pays instinctive homage. Everything al)Out liim indicated superiority. His will was a will of iuhimanl ; h^t. I .aii^^t v.ud an intellect the power and !(( enness of which impressed or awed everyone who ;il)proachcd him. And to that will and to that intel- lect was joined a temper singularly stern, dauntless, iind haughty. In all he did, as in all he said, these (juiilities were obtrusively, nay, often offensively, ai)purent, but nowhere were they written more legibly tlian in his deportment and countenance. Though his features had not at this time assumed the severity which they assume in the portrait by Bindon, they were, to judge from the picture painted about this time by Jervis, eminently dignified and striking. The portrait is a familiar one — the lofty forehead, the broad and massive temples, the shapely semi-aquihne nose, the full but compressed lips, the dimpled double chin, and the heavy-lidded, clear blue eyes, * with the very uncommon archness in them,' ' rendered pecu- liarly lustrous and expressive by the swarthy com- plexion and bushy black eyebrows which set them off. He was, we are told, never known to laugh ; his humour, even when most facetious, was without gaiety, and he would sit unmoved while his jest was convulsing the company round him. The expression of his face could never, even in his mildest moods, have been amiable, but when anger possessed him it was absolutely terrific. * It would,' says one who knew him well, *be impossible to imagine looks or features which carried in them more terror and ' Pope's description in Spence's Anecdotes, p. 119 (edit. Singer). 72 JONATHAN SWIFT auBterity.* * * He kept/ writes Delany, * every one in awe.' * His manner was imperious and abrupt ; to inferiors or to those whom he disUked, contemptuous or insolent. A harsh and unsympathetic voice corre- sponded with his manner and with his speech. His words— few, dry, and bitter — cut hke razors. In his conduct and in his speech lurked a mocking irony, which rendered it impossible even for those who were familiar witli him to be altogether easy in his society. AVhat he felt he seldom took pains to conceal, arid what he felt for the majority of his fellow-men was 1^ mingled pity and contempt. The biography of Swift between the winter ol 1710 and the summer of 171 1 is little less than the history of four of the most eventful years in English annals. For during the period which began with the triumph of Hiuley and ended with the discomliture of Boling- broke nothing of importance was done with which he is not associated. Ho fully, indeed, did be enter into the political life of those stirring times, that a minute history of the Administration of Oxford might without difficulty be constructed from his correspondence and pamphlets. To one portion of that correspondence a peculiar interest attaches itself. Twenty-one years had passed since Swift first saw Esther Johnson at Moor Park. She was then a child of seven, he a young man of twenty-two. In spite of this disparity in years the little maid and himself had soon grown intimate. Her innocent prattle served to while away many a sad and weary hour. He would babble to her in her own baby language. He would romp and play with her, ' Orrery's Ronarks, Letter ix. * Observations, p. 18. ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710-1714 ts and, as her mind expanded, he became her teacher. From his lips she first learned the principles which ( vcr afterwards guided her pure and blameless life. IJy him her tastes were formed, by him her intellect was moulded. For a while their intercourse was in- terrupted. Time rolled on. Temple died in 1G99. Esther had settled down with a female companion at Farnham. She was then on the eve of womanhood, and rarely has woman been more richly endowed than the young creature who was about to dedicate her life to Swift. Of her personal charms many accounts have survived. Her pale l)ut strikingly beautiful face beamed with amiability and intelligence. Neither sickness nor sorrow could dim the lustre of her fine dark eyes. Over her fair and open brow clustered hair blacker than a raven. Though her iigure inclined, perhaps, somewhat too much to tmhojqwint, it was characterised by the most perfect •;race. Iler voice was soft and musical, her air and manner those of a finished lady. But these were not the qualities which in the eyes of Swift elevated Esther Johnson above the rest of her sex. What he dv.clls on with most fondness, in the description which he has left of her, are her wit and vivacity, her unerring judgment, her manifold accompHshments, the sweetness and gentleness of her temper, her heroic courage,' her large-hearted charity. ' She ' It is curious that none of Swift's biographers should in the accounts they have given of Esther Johnson have referred to the very remarkable anecdote which he has recorded to illustrate her courage and presence of mind. '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 74 JONA THAN S WIFT excelled in every good quality that can possibly ac- complish a human creature,' wrote Swift to Stopford.' Delany tells us that he * had often heard a man of credit and a competent judge declare that he never passed a day in Stella's society wherein he did not hear her say something which he would wish to remember to the last day of his life.* Few men would have been proof against charms like these. But to Swift Esther Johnson was at eighteen what she had been at seven. To her personal beauty he was not, indeed, insensible, but it formed no Ihik in the chain which bound him to her. Many of the qualities which attracted him were qualities not peculiar to woman, and of the qualities peculiar to woman those which attracted him most were those which form no element in sexual love. Coleridge has conjectured with some plausibility that the name Stella, which is a man's name with a feminine ter- mination, was purposely selected by him to symbolihe the nature of his relation with Miss Johnson.^ That apprehend Bome such attempt, she leaiueil 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 dark robu to prevent being seen, primed tlie pistol afresh, gently lifted up the. sash, and taking her aim with the utmost presence of mind, dis- charged the pistol, loaded with bullets, into the body of one villain who stood the fairest mark. The fellow, mortally wounded, was carried oil by the rest, and died the next morning ; but his com- panions could not be found. The Duke of Orinond had often drunk her health to me upon that account.' Character of Mrs. Jolmson. So much for Thackeray's sentimental picture of ' the Saint of Eng- lish Story,' of the tender drooping victim of unrequited love. ' See Correspondence, letter dated July 20, 1720. See, too, Swift's Character of Mrs. Johnson {Works, Scott, ix. 48U). ■^ Delany's Observations, p. GO. • Table Talk, p. lOG. The name is, of course, merely the Latin- ised form of • J'^sther.' ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710-1714 75 lio was more attached to that lady than ho was to any other luiman being seems clear, but the love was purely platonic, and there is not the shadow of a reason for believing that a marriage was ever even formally solemnised between them. Of marriage, indeed, he scarcely ever speaks without expressions indicative either of horror or of contempt. He de- liglited in the society of women ; he even preferred tlieir society to that of men. The truth is that, with all his austerity and cynicism, no man was more dependent on human sympathy. That sympathy ho found in woman — he sought nothing more. To approach him nearer was to move his loathing. Of the poetry of passion he knew nothing. The grace and loveliness over which an artist or a lover would hang entranced presented themselves to him as they might present themselves to a thoughtful physician. Where the rest of his sex saw only the blooming cheek and the sparkling eye, he saw only the grinning skull behind. Where all else would be sensible of nothing but what was pleasing, he would be sensible of nothing but what was disagreeable. His imagina- tion grew not merely disenchanted but depraved. He appears, indeed, to have been drawn by some strange attraction to the contemplation of everything which is most offensive and most liumiHating in our comrhon humanity. But it was the fascination of repulsion. It was of the nature of that morbidity which tortured the existence of Rousseau.* • His fastidious delicacy • The Biibjcct is not a pleasing one, but if the reader will turn to the second volume of the Confcssioyis, Part 2, Book 7, p. 210 seqq., he will find a passage which seems curiously illustrative of Swift's peculiarities of temperament. Cf., too, Ovid, Itemed. Atnoris, 429-40 ; Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 3, Memb. C, Sect. 3 ; Browne's lieligio Mcdich Tart 1, Sect. 9. 76 JONATHAN SWIFT >vas such that the conditions of physical being seemed to him inexpressibly revolting, and his mind, by con- tinually dwelling on noisome images, became so pol- luted and diseased, that he looked upon his kind pretty much as the Houyhnhnms of his terrible fiction looked upon the Yahoos. It was probably with the understanding that she could never be more to him than a sister that, at the beginning of 1701, Miss Johnson consented to settle near him in Ireland. And now commenced that curious history the particulars of which have excited more interest and eUcited more comment than any other portion of Swift's biography. What he desired was to establish free and affectionate relations ^ with his young favourite, without compromising either her or himself. It was agreed, therefore, that she was to continue to reside with her companion Mrs. Dingley, and with Mrs. Dingley she continued to reside till her death. The rules which regulated their inter- course never varied. When Swift was in London, the two ladies occupied his lodgings in Dublin ; when he returned, they withdrew to their own. At Laracor the arrangements were similar : he never passed a night under the same roof with them. At all his interviews with Miss Johnson Mrs. Dingley was present. It would, says Orrery, be ditlicult if not im- possible to prove that he had ever conversed with her except in the presence of witnesses. With the same scrupulous propriety, what he wrote he wrote for the perusal of both. If Miss Johnson nursed hopes that she might some day become his wife, these hopes must have been speedily dispelled. As early as 1704 the nature of his affection was submitted to a crucial ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710-1714 -jj test. One of his friends, a Mr. Tisdall, sonpjht Esther iji marriage. He consulted Swift with the double object of ascertaining whether Swift had himself any idea of marrying her, and, in the event of that not being the case, of soliciting his assistance in further- ing his own suit. Swift replied that he had no intention at all of entering into such a relation with her, and, on being assured that Tisdall was in a position to support a wife, expressed his willingness to serve him. It is not unlikely that the whole of this transaction was a stratagem of Miss Johnson's. A bright and lively girl, in the bloom of youth and beauty, is scarcely likely to have adopted by choice the mode of life prescribed by Swift. She wished — who can doubt it ? — to be bound to him by dearer ties. If anything could win him, it would be the fear of losing her. If anything could induce him to make her his wife, it would be the prospect of her becoming the wife of another man. She now knew her fate. She accepted it ; and Swift was never again troubled with a rival. In Swift's conduct in this matter we fail to see anything disingenuous ; he appears to have acted throughout honourably and straightforwardly.' Each year drew the bonds of this eccentric connection closer. In Ireland the three friends were daily together, and though, as we have seen. Swift was frequently absent in England, it was always with reluctance that he set out, as it was always with impatience that he looked forward to returning. At last the friends were destined to be separated. From the time of Swift's arrival in ' See Swift's letter to Tisdall, Corresp. ; Scott's Swift, xv. 266 ; and Foster's remarks, Life of Swift, pp. 136-39. 78 JONA THAN SWIFT England at the beginning of September, 1710, till his return to Ireland as Dean of St. Patrick ^ in June , 1713, he saw nothing either of Esther or of her com- panion. But absence was not permitted to interrupt their communion. A correspondence was exchanged as voluminous as that which passed between Miss Byron and Miss Selby. Of this correspondence the portion contributed by Swift is extant, and consti- tutes, as everyone knows, the Journal to Stdla. Of the value of those letters, both as throwing light on the pohtical and social history of the early eighteenth century and as elucidating the character and con- duct of their writer, it would be superfluous to speak. There is, indeed, no other parallel to them but the parallel which immediately suggests itself— the Dianj of Pepys. Like Pepys, Swift writes with absolute unreserve. Like Pepys, he is not ashamed to exhibit himself in his weakest moments. Like Pepys, he records — and seems to delight in recording with ludicrous particularity — incidents trivial even to grotesqueness— how he dined and where he dined, what he ate and what he drank, what clothes he bought and what they cost him, what disorders he was suffering from and what disorders his friends were suffering from, what medicine he took and how that medicine affected him, what time he went to bed and on what side of the bed he lay. Side by side with these trivialities we find those vivid pictures of Court and City life in which, as in a living panorama, the London of Anne still moves before us. Nothing escaped his keen and curious glance, and nothing that he saw has he left unrecorded. Indeed, these delightful letters reflect as in a mirror all that was ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710 1714 79 passing before his eyes and all that was passing in his mind. On his accession to power, Harley found himself beset with difficulties. The war with France was raging. Little more than a year had passed since the bloodiest and most obstinate of ^larlborough's battles had appalled Europe by its carnage. Disaster after disaster had humbled France and shattered her power. Abjectly as she had sued for peace, her proposals had l)cen rejected, and her ruthless foes had broken up the Conference at Gcrtruydenberg to pursue their destruc- tive course. Mons had succumbed, and the capture of Mons had been succeeded by the fall of Douay and Bethune. In Spain fortune had equally favoured the Allies, and two disastrous defeats had for the moment appeared to render the cause of the Bourbons desper- ate. But the burden of a struggle in which the sole gainers were Austria and Holland fell on England, and the burden did not fall equally. To the moneyed classes, as they were then called, it was a source of profit, for it raised the value -of money; but the landed class suffered, for it depreciated the value of land. And, as the first belong as a rule to the Whig party and the second to the Tory, it is not surprising that this question linked itself inseparably with other articles in the creed of faction. Indeed, war had now become the touchstone of party feeling. The Tories were bent on bringing it with all expedition to anjjn.d ; the Whigs, in league with the Allies, were furious for its continuance. It w^as obvious that without a peace the Ministry must collapse. It was equally clear that to conclude a peace, except on terms highly advan- tageous to England, might cost Harley not his place 8o JONATHAN SWIFT merely but his head. The task before him was there- fore twofold. It was necessary to take measures to prosecute the war with vigour,^ that France might be induced to offer such terms as would satisfy the pride and cupidity of the English, and it was neces- sary at the same time to render the war and the war party unpopular. In this embarrassing position he was surrounded by colleagues in whom he could place little confidence, and who were divided among them- selves. Every day as it passed by increased his perplexity. A great schism had already torn his party into two sections. With the moderate Tories he knew how to deal, and could rely on their hearty co-operation. Over the extreme Tories — and the extreme Tories were in the majority — he had httle or no control. Nor was this all. The finances were hi deplorable confusion ; there was a panic in the City ; and so bad was the credit of the new Government that he found it impossible to negotiate a loan suf- ficient even for the pressing necessities of the moment. Such was the position of afiairs when, in the autumn of 1710, Swift joined the Tories. The secret of Ilarley's extraordinary civility to Swift soon became apparent. He had had the sagacity to discover what no English minister had discovered before — the power of the press as an engine of political influence ; and he had had also the sagacity to foresee that all that that engine could effect it would effect in the hands of his new ally. There was no time for delay. In November Swift undertook the editorship of the Ejcaminer. This famous periodical, which was the organ of the Tories, was published weekly. Thirteen numbers had already appeared. Though ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710-1714 81 written by men whose names stood high both in literature and in politics, none of the papers had made much impression on the public mind. In- directly, indeed, they had done more mischief than service to the Tory cause, for they had provoked the Whigs to set up an opposition journal, the Wh\(^ WxarnxncYy and the superiority of the papers in the \Vh\() Examiner was so striking that it was admitted ( ven by the Tories themselves. But in Swift's hands the Examiner rose to an importance without precedent ill journalism. It became a voice of power in every town and in every hamlet throughout England. It was an appeal made, not to the political cliques of the mttropolis, but to the whole kingdom, and to the wliolc kingdom it spoke. In a few months Swift had attained his purpose. He had turned the tide against tlie Whigs, he had made Harley popular, he had nndered the policy of the Ministry practicable. No (Hie who will take the trouble to glance at Swuft's I'ontributions to the Examiner will be surprised at their effect. They are masterpieces of polemical skill. Every sentence — every word — comes home. Their logic, adapted to the meanest capacity, smites like a hammer. Their statements, often a tissue of mere sophistry and assumption, appear so plausible, that it is difficult even for the cool historian to avoid being carried away by them." At a time when party siririt was running high, and few men stopped to weigh evidence, they must have been irresistible. To one part of his task it is evident that Swift applied himself with peculiar zest. He had now an opportu- nity for avenging the slights and disappointments of years, and he made, it must be admitted, the- best of o 83 JONATHAN SWIFT his opportunity. Nothing can exceed the malignity and bitterness of his attacks on his old allies. He assails them sometimes with irony, sometimes with damning innuendo, sometimes in the language of ribald scurrility, and sometimes in the language of fleering scorn. Descending to the grossest person- alities, he charges Somers with immorality and atheism ; he holds up to contempt the low tastes of Godolphin ; he taunts Cowper with libertinism and bigamy. Then, spurning meaner adversaries under his feet, disposing of one with an epithet, of another in a parenthesis, he strikes full at the towering crest of Marlborough. One paper dilates on his avarice, another on his unprincipled am])ition ; here he re- proaches him with being the slave of a harridan consort, there he lashes him as a traitor to William and an ingrate to Anne. But his onslaughts on these distinguished men are mercy compared with those terrible philippics in which he gave vent to his ragi* against Wharton. Of all the Whigs, Wiarton was the most odious to him. It was Wharton who had deprived him of his place at the Court of the Lord Lieutenant ; it was Wharton who had spoken lightly of his personal character ; it was Wharton who had agitated the repeal of the Test Act. In his second Examiner Swift was at the throat of his victim, and with each number his satire gathers animosity and venom. Every crime which can load a public man with obloquy, every vice and every folly which in private life sink men in contempt and shame, are described as uniting in this abandoned noble. He is the Verres of Ireland, with a front more brazen, with a nature fouler and more depraved, than that of the ADMINISTRATION OF IIARLEV, 1710 1714 83 ;irch-villain of Cicero ; he is a public robber, a pol- troon, a liar, an infidel, a libertine, a sot. The merci- 1( S3 satirist then goes on to accuse him of atrocities too horrible to specify. With these charges he dealt at length in a separate pamphlet ; for, not content with flaying his enemy in the Examiner, he published at the end of November, 1710, A Short Character of Thomas, Earl of Wharton, a satire absolutely appalling in its malignity and force. It was not likely that the Whigs would suffer tlieir leaders to be thus maltreated with impunity, riiough the Whip Examiner had died, the Medley and the Ohservator were in vigorous activity. The staff of lioth papers was a powerful one, and Swift soon found liiniself front to front with assailants as rancorous and as unscrupulous as himself. During seven months the paper war raged with a fury never before known in the history of political controversy, and hu'ing seven months Swift engaged single-handed with the whole force of the Whig press ; wielding, like Homer's Agamemnon, spear, sword, and boulder- stone — 6 rmv aWtav (TrfTrciXtlro OTixns Av^pStv, "Eyx** ''» "^P^ '■'» HfyaXoia-i re xfp^ahunmv. But, in spite of all the efforts of their indefatigable t'hampion, the Ministry appeared to be engaged in a losing battle, and were almost in despair. * They are,' wrote Swift to Stella,' 'upon a very narrow bottom, and stand like an isthmus between the Whigs on one side and the violent Tories on the other. They are able seamen, but the tempest is too great, the ship too • Journal, March 4, 1711. o 2 84 JONATHAN SWIFT rotten, and the crew all agiunst them.' Suddenly, however, an event occurred which gave a new turn to affairs. A French adventurer who had become acquainted with St. John had, on his friend's acces- sion to office, obtained from him the promise of SOO/. a year. This pension Harley had reduced, and had declined also to guarantee its permanence or its regular payment. The fellow, angry with the minis- ter, and desperate from poverty, had entered into treasonable correspondence with France. It was dis- covered. He was arrested and brought before a Committee of the Privy Council at the Cock-pit. In the course of his examination he had requested to be allowed to speak privately with St. John. The request was refused. Upon that he suddenly pro- duced a penknife, and stooping forward stabbed Harley, who was sitting near him, just above the heart. The blade broke against the breast-bone, and the wound was fortunately not fatal. There is not the smallest reason for supposing that Guiscard — for that was the assassin's name — had any other motive for what he did than rage and chagrin at what he conceived to be private wrongs. But Harley and Swift at once saw how much political capital could be made out of an incident which naturally enough caused immense public excitement. Swift at once set to work. He furnished Mrs. Manley with facts for A True Narrative of irhat passed at the Examination of the Marquis de Guiscard, instructing her how to treat them and how to colour them. The affair be- came his leading theme in four papers of the Ex- aminer, "With admirable skill he manages, without actually falsifying facts, to create a totally false im- ADMINISTRATION OF IIARLEY, 1710-1714 85 prcssion of the whole transaction. The grievance of a private man on private grounds was transformed into the hostiUty of a pubHc enemy. He had not iiuloed the audacity to state that Guiscard had been suborned by the Whigs, the Papists, and the French, l)ut he insinuates it. It was probably, he says, Guiscard's design to assassinate the Queen as it was ctrtainly his design to assassinate St. John, but, as these * enemies of France and Popery ' had not come within his reach, he had been obliged to content himself with a single victim. He then proceeds to enlarge on all that could intensify the sympathy naturally felt for Harley, on his heroism at the awful moment when he received, as he then thought, his death-blow, on his patriotism, on his loyalty, on his magnificent public services. Though Harley had escaped with his life, his sufferings were severe and liis recovery slow. When he reappeared in public it was at once apparent that the knife of Guiscard and the pen of Swift had done him yeoman's service. A reaction had set in in his favour. He found the Queen cordial, the people enthusiastic, his colleagues, with one exception, more tractable. On May 24 he was Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, on the 29th Lord Treasurer. In the middle of July, 1711, Swift's contributions to the Examiner ceased. A series of pamphlets now flowed from his pen in rapid succession. In his licmarka on a Letter to the Seven Lords he retorts with great asperity on certain Whig journalists, who had in a recent publication accused him of circulat- ing calumnious reports against the committee who examined Greg in 1708. But these controversies 86 JONATHAN SWIFT were only preliminary to the most important of his services to the Ministry. The pivot on which the political fortunes of his party turned was peace with France. It was the measure to which on their acces- sion to power they were pledged ; it was the measure on which their continuance in power depended. Without peace their fall was certain. So enormous and complicated were the difficulties in which the protraction of the war was even now involving them, that the Ministry were already heginning to despair. * We have nothing,' wrote St. John, * in possession, and hardly anything in expectation ; our governmeni is in a consumption, our vitals are consuming, and we must inevitably sink at once.' But, tremendous as these ditUculties were, the attempts of Ilarley ami St. John to extricate themselves and their party by pressing on the conclusion of the war had involved them in difficulties of a still more formidable kind. As early as the autumn of 1710 clandestine negotia- tions had been opened with France. During the winter of that year, and all through the spring and summer of 1711, a surreptitious correspondence had been carried on between Ilarley and St. John and the agents of the French King. In September eight Preliminary Articles of Peace had, with the privity and consent of the Queen, been secretly signed. By an unfortunate accident these dishonourable negotia- tions had been very nearly publicly detected. Prior, who had been sent on a clandestine mission to France, was on his return detained at Deal. It was known that he was in the confidence of the Mhiistry, and that he was ordinarily employed in diplomatic business. The officer who arrested him was not discreet. The ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710-1714 S7 news soon spread. The suspicion of the Whigs was aroused. Harley and St. John, thankful, no douht, that nothing more had heen discovered than that peace with France was contemplated, thought it hest, l)rohahly with the object of sounding public opinion, to allow what was practically the ministerial organ, the V(ni Bo]j^ to hazard conjectures as to the terms on which peace was likely to be settled. It is clear from the Journal to Stella that up to this point at least Harley and St. John had not taken Swift into their confidence, and that he knew nothing of these negotiations.' But it was probably at their instiga- tion that he wrote that pleasant jcu (Vcyn-it, A New Journey to Paris^ in which he endeavoured to throw pui)lic curiosity on a false scent by pretending to give a detailed account of Prior's adventures and business in France. The two ministers now, as the Journal shows, concealed nothing from him but the trans- actions in which they were engaged with the Pretender and his agents.'^ Towards the end of September it was known throughout the country that negotiations for peace were in progress. The Whigs and the Allies were furious. It was in vain for the Tories to retort, m answer to taunts of treachery and perfidy, that the war had reduced the country to the point of bankruptcy ; that what had in 1702 cost England less than four millions was now, in consequence of the failure of the Allies to supply what they had under- taken to supply, costing her eight millions ; that we had entiered into it merely as auxiliaries, that we had for some years been engaging in it as principals ; that the original objects of it had long been attained ; and • Journal to Stella, Aug. 24, 1711. « Id., Sept. 28. 88 JONATHAN SWIFT that to protract it further was to ruin England for the aggrandisement of Austria and Holland abroad, and for the profit of stock-jobbers and usurers at home. The Whigs were as impervious to the testi- mony of facts as they were deaf to reason and argu- ment. Every artifice of sophistry and rhetoric was employed to cast discredit on the advocates for peace and to swell the clamour for war. Again the Min- istry had recourse to the pen of Swift. At the end of November appeared The Cundtict of the Allies, It appeared anonymously, but in forty-eight hours tlui first edition had run out ; in five hours a second edition was exhausted, and within a few days no less than five editions were in circulation. Nor is this surprising. Levelled to the capacity of the meanest understanding, it urged with irresistible power and cogency all that could be advanced against the war party on the side of testimony, and all that could ho deducted, for their refutation, on the side of argu- ment. The style and tone of this masterly pamphkt are adapted with great skill both to the popular taste and to the reason of thoughtful men. Nothing, fur example, could bring home to the vulgar the folly of glorying in war that posterity might be proud of u s more forcibly than the following : * It will no doubt be a mighty comfort to our grandchildren to see a few rags hung up in Westminster Hall which cost a hun- dred millions, whereof they are paying the arrears, to boast, as beggars do, that their grandfathers were rich and great.' The influence of this pamphlet was co- extensive with its popularity. It touched the nation to the quick. From that moment the fate of Marl- borough and the Allies was sealed. From that ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710-1714 89 moment victory, however it fluctuated, declared for the Tories. II Up to this time the writings of Swift had, since tlic publication of the Talc of a Tuh^ dealt almost entirely with subjects of ephemeral interest In pure literature he had produced little or nothing. A few copies of occasional verses — such verses, for example, as Bauds and Philemon, an adaptation of the well- known story in Ovid (suggested, perhaps, by Chaucer's similar transformation of the story of Apollo and Coronis from the same work), the Description of a Citj/ SJmwcr, a few unimportant contributions to the Tilth )\^ and one or two short trifles scarcely intended, perhaps, for the public eye — would probably exhaust the list. But in the summer of 1711 an incident occurred which recalled him for a moment from politics to letters. That incident was the foundation of the famous Brothers' Club,^ one of those institutions ' In the Taller his only entire paper was No. 230, on ' Popular Corruptions of Language.' He contributed to No. 9 the verses on ' A Morning in Town ' ; to No. 32 the • History of Madonella ' ; to No. G3 the letter ridiculing the college for young damsels ; to No. 3i> the letter signed ' Eliz. Potatrix ' ; to No. 59 the letter signed * Oba- diuh Greenhat ' ; to No. 60 the remarks on pulpit oratory in the first part of the paper ; portions of Nos. G7 and G8 ; to No. 70 the letter en pulpit eloquence ; to No. 71 the admonitory letter to the vicar and schoolmaster; to No. 238 the verses on the 'City Shower ' ; to No. 25B the letter on the words ' Great Britain ' — this he wrote in conjunction with Prior and Rowe. In the Spectator he supplied hints for No. 50, nnd was, perhaps, the author of a paragraph in No. 575. See Drake's Essays on the Tatlcr and Spectator, vol. iii., and Scott's Swift, vol. ix. ' This club must be distinguished from the meetings held at Harley's house, generally on Saturdays, and occasionally on the same day (Thursday) on which the Brothers met. The company hero 90 JONATHAN SWIFT which shed peculiar luBtre on the reign of Anne. It was a club founded by the leaders of the Tory party, and it numbered among its members the most distinguished Tories then living. Its object was, in the words of Swift, to encourage literature by the judicious dispensation of patronage, to improve con- versation, and to temper party ardour with humanity and wit. In its meetings all those artificial dis- tinctions which separate caste from caste and man from man were ignored. Its members met and mingled on terms of fraternal equality. As brothers, indeed, they addressed each other. Among the brethren were — in addition to Swift, Arbuthnot, Friend, and Prior — the beads of three ducal houses, Ormond, Beaufort, and Shrewsbury, the Lord Trea- surer Oxford, St. John, then leader of the Lower House, the Solicitor-General Raymond, Lords Arran, Dupplin, Lansdowne, Bathurst, and the Earl of Orrery. Nothing illustrates more pleasingly than consisted of the Lord Keeper Ilarcourt, Earl Rivers, the Earl of Peter- borough, and St. John, to whom were subsequently added the Dukes of Ormond, Shrewsbury, and Argyle, Earl Pouleti, and the Earls of Anglesey, Dartmouth, and Berkeley. Swift was the only person with- out title and without ollicc who was admitted as a regular guest at these meetings. ' They had,' said Mr. Forster, ' the character of Ministerial meetings, and the day when Swift was admitted to them was practi- cally that of hia appointment as a minister without ollice.' Li/c 0/ Sivift, p. 359. This is very doubtful ; it is certainly difficult to re- concile with Swift's statement in the Jomnial to Stella, Feb. 2G, 1712-13, ' I know less of what passes than anybody because I go to no coffee-houses nor see any but ministers and such people, and ministers never talk politics in conversation.^ Ct. too Id., Dec. 20, 1712. In his Memoirs relating to the Cluinge he seems exactly to describe his position : ' My early appearance at these meetings, w hich many thought to be of greater consequence than they really were,' dc. ; Bee Scott's Swift, iii. 246-7. ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710 1714 9' this society the most charming feature in the social life of that age. Never, since the gatherings at which Augustus and Mrocenas assemhled on the Palatine the wit and genius of Rome, had the alliance hetween the class which governs and the class which adorns a nation heen so close and so honourable. From the reigns of Elizabeth and James men of letters had never, it is true, lacked patrons cither in the Ministry or among the aristocracy. At the Revolution, and (luring the early years of Anne, they had grown in fiivour and reputation. Some of the leading Whig statesmen — Somers, for example, and Halifax — had prided themselves on their connection with letters. Indeed, at no period had literary merit been so muni- ficently rewarded. But the relative position of the two classes had never changed. The barriers which fortune had placed between them had always been jealously guarded. The language in which Addison addresses Halifax and Somers differs in no respect from the language in which Spenser addressed Leicester ; Shakespeare, Southampton ; and Dryden, Dorset or Rochester. It is the language of respectful homage ; it sometimes savours of servility ; it is in all cases that of an inferior addressing a superior. It may be doubted whether any of the ordinary nobility condescended to associate even with the most distin- guished of their clients as friend with friend. The reserve and hauteur displayed by Somerset, Bucking- hamshire, and Nottingham in their intercourse with men of letters were proverbial. When Prior was appointed to act with the Earl of Strafford as Am- bassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary for the Peace of Utrecht, Strafford refused to be joined in 92 JONATHAN SWIFT commission with a commoner, and caused much inconvenience by doing so. To the members of tlic Brothers' Club belongs the honour of having been the first to recognise in men of parts and genius not cfbjeets of patronage merely, but companions and equals. Though Swift was not, as Scott erroneouBJy supposes, the founder of this society, he was undoubt- edly one of its most influential members. He was treasurer ; he dispensed its charity ; he proposed candidates for election; he prevented the election of candidates proposed by others. He was its presiding genius. In the Journal to Stella the meetings of the club are regularly chronicled, and nothing is more characteristic of Swift than these records. To in- demnify himself for the want of fortune and title by seizing every pretext for slighting and mortifying their more favoured possessors was to him a source of the most exquisite pleasure. And in that pleasure he could now indulge to the full. He opposed the election of the Lord Keeper and the Lord Treasurer, though their sons were members. He excluded the Earl of Jersey, he attempted to exclude the Duke of Beaufort. He * opposed Lord Arran to his face.' The election of the Duke of Beaufort was carried in spite of him, but when the Duke ' had the confidence to propose his brother-in-law, the Earl of Danby,' Swift opposed the application so strongly that it was waived. Jt is amusing to find him — and in all gravity — ' holding out hopes ' to the Duke of Shrewsbury. In his conversations with the brethren he had often discussed a scheme which had long been in his mind. This was the foundation of an Academy for fixing and correcting the English language. The ADMINISTRATION OF IIARLEY^ 1710 1714 93 f^clieme was no doubt Buggcsted by the Italian and French Academies, but the idea was not new, even in England. Towards the end of Charles II.'s reign, Pillon, Earl of Roscommon, had not only proposed tlie same scheme, but had made some progress in carrying it out. With the assistance of Dryden and otliers he had begun to form a society on the model of an institution to which he had been introduced at Caen,' 'for the refining and fixing the standard of our language.' But the design hod been interrupted by the civil troubles at the commencement of James II.'s rdgn, and on the Earl's death, shortly afterwards, it had collapsed. Then De Foe attempted to revive it, and gave it, in his Essa>/ on Projects, a prominent place among the institutions which he hoped to see ( stablished. But De Foe had little authority and no influence. Roscommon had found an ally in the Marquis of Halifax. Swift hoped to find an ally and [matron in Harley. His cause was a good one and he pleaded it powerfully. He was, he said, convinced that, if some stand was not made against the tide of corruption which was from all sides pouring in upon our language, that language would in less than two centuries be an unintelligible jargon. From the time of the civil struggles its pollution had been systematic. First it had been invaded by the cant of the Puritans, tlien by the still more offensive cant of the Cavaliers. Later on it had been vitiated by licentious abbrevi- ations. Its grammar was unsettled and abounded in solecisms. It fluctuated, in fact, with every colloquial fashion ; and with every colloquial fashion it would, ' See the Memoirs of JRoseommon, compiled from Fenton's notei, and cf. Johnson's Life of Roscommon, 94 i JONATHAN SWIFT unless proper measures were taken, continue to fluctuate. He proposed, therefore, that a committee should be formed, composed of such persons as should be generally admitted to be most qualified for the task, that they should meet at an appointed place, that their expenses should be defrayed by the State, and that they should be authorised to ascertain and fix our language. This proposal he embodied in a letter to the Lord Treasurer, which was published in May, 1712, and was much discussed in literary circles. The Lord Treasurer professed to be greatly interested in the scheme. He would give it, he said, his most serious consideration. But his encouragement ex- tended only to words, and the project fared as such projects always have fared at the hands of English statesmen. Out of the Society of Brothers sprang the still more famous Scriblerus Club. This undoubtedlv owed its origin to Swift, though Arbuthnot seems to has'e been the creator of the hero who gave the club its name. The Scriblerians, like the Brothers, had no settled place for assembling. When they met they met at each other's houses. The topics discussed were as a rule purely literary, and seldom have men so well qualified to shine in such discussions gathered together at the same table. First in reputation, and first in colloquial ability, stood Congreve, who, though comparatively young in years, had already taken his ])lace among classics as the Moliere of England. Hf had won his laurels when Dryden still presided at Will's, and he had lived among the flower of an ag« now fast becoming historical. With a weakness not uncommon among men of his class, he affected in ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710-1714 95 pnicral society to attach raoro importance to his repu- t lit ion as a man of fashion and pjallantry than to his fame as a writer. But Congreve as he revealed him- self to the world, and Congrevo as he revealed himself in the Scrihlerus meetings, were very different persons. The wit which blazes in his comedies sparkled in his discourse. He overflowed with anecdote and plea- santry. His mind had been assiduously cultivated, lie was not only an accomplished Latinist, but he was one of the few Englishmen then living who were familiar with the poetry of Greece. Sixteen years junior to Congreve was Pope, whose Kssa// on Criti- im and Rape of the Lock had given fine promise of the great future before him. He was now busy with the translation of the Iliad. Under what cir- cumstances and at what period he became acquainted w ith Swift we have now no means of knowing. They were certainly on intimate terms in the winter of 1713, Another distinguished Scriblerian was Atterbury. In .Atterbury the Universities of that day recognised their most finished product. His graceful scholarship, his refined taste, his varied acquirements, his polished and luminous eloquence, had placed him in the first rank of literary churchmen. The part he had played in the Phalaris Controversy, and the part he had played still more recently in the controversy with Wake, had proved that his superior in polemical skill was not to be found. His learning, indeed, if we may judge from his dissertations and sermons, was neither exact nor deep, but it was elegant, curious, and exten- sive. French he both spoke and wrote with Parisian purity. In the vernacular and Latin poetry of modern Italy he was probably better versed than any 96 JONATHAN SWIFT other man in England. But it was not as a scholar or as a controversialist that Atterbury was most valued by those who knew him. On all questions pertaining to the niceties of criticism he was an unerring guide, for his judgment was clear and solid, his perception fine, and his taste pure even to fastidiousness. In no contemporary critic had Pope so much confidence. Atterbury's approving nod relieved his mind of any doubt he might have about the excellence of a verse. It was at Atterbury's advice that he committed to the flames a work on which he had expended great labour and on which he had himself passed a more favourable verdict. Of a very different order were the genius and character of John Gay. The early part of his life had been passed behind a linendraper's counter in the City. He had received no regular education, and had, on emerging from obscurity, been too indo- lent to remedy the defect. A smattering of Latin and a smattering of French and Italian constituted all his stock as a scholar ; but, if he owed little to the schools, he owed much to nature — a rich vein of gonial humour, wit less abundant, indeed, and less brilliant, than that of his friends Congreve and Pope, but scarcely less pleasing, native grace, and, what were rare with the poets of that age, spontaneity and simplicity. His first experiment had been made in serious poetry, and in serious poetry Gay never rises, even in his happiest moments, above mediocrity. But this poem he had judiciously dedicated to Pope, then fast rising into reputation ; and Pope, charmed with his young admirer's unaffected modesty, sprightly conversation, and amiable temper, took him under his protection. The favourable impression which he ADMINISTRATION OF HARLE\\ 1 710 1714 97 made on Pope ho made on Swift ; and when the Scriblcrufl Chih was formed, Giiy, tliougli he had as yet produced nothing:; which entitled him to so high ;in honour, was invited to join it. Next came Thomas rariielL Few things in hterary liistoiy are more n'niarka])le than tlie fate which has befallen this once popular poet. The praises of his personal friends, though these friends were Pope and Swift, may be Huspected of partiality,' but so late as 1760 Hume placed Parnell among the very few poets whom a reader of mature taste would delight in re-perusing for the fiftieth time. His biography was written in a laudatory strain by Goldsmith, and the eulogies of (ioldsmith were repeated by Johnson. Since then, however, his fame has been rapidly declinhig, and is now almost extinct. But his poetry has not deserved this fate. It has often a charm which makes Hume's reuiark perfectly intelligible. His touches of senti- ment and his pictures of nature are sometimes exqui- site. His Jfcrmit is, in point of execution, a perfect gem. His Fain/ Talc is delightful, and no reader of taste and sensibility could peruse such poems as the N\f}ht Piece and the llijmn to Contentment with- out feeling that he was in communion with genius, if not of a high, certainly of a fine order. He seems to anticipate Goldsmith on one side and Gray on another. To his brother-poets Parnell owed nothing. He chose his own themes, he treated those themes in his own way, and never conventionally. His versifi- cation — and his versification is peculiarly his own — is singularly soft and musical. ' Swift Bftys of him, Journal to Stella, • He passes all the poets of the day by a bar's length.' H 98 JONATHAN SWIFT But the member who fills the largest space in the history of Swift's Club remains to be mentioned. Thia was Drr-JehH^-^rbuiluiQt., Arbuthnot is one of those figures on which the memory loves to dwell. If we are to credit the testimony of men little prone either to exaggeration or to delusion, his character approached as near to i)L'rfection as it is possible for humanity to attain. His charity, his benevolence, his philanthropy, were boundless. He possessed, says Swift, every quality and every virtue which can make a man either amiable or useful. Ill-health and adverse fortune were powerless to rufHe his gentle and equable temper.* But the beauty of his character was equalled by the vigour and amplitude of his mind. ' I think Arbuthnot,' said Johnson, speaking of the wits of Anne's reign, * the first man among them ; he was the most universal genius.' "^ His literary and scientific attainments were immensi^. While a mere youth he distinguished himself in a controversy with the veteran geologist Woodward. His Tahlca of Anciiut Coins, Weights, and Mvitsures long remained a standard work, and, though his medical writings have, like all the medical writings of past time, been superseded, they entitle him to an honourable place among the fathers of his profession. To one of his treatises particular praise is due, for in his l>isserta' thn on the lleAfuhtnty of Births in the Two Sexes he may be said to have laid the foundation of the science of Vital Statistics. Nor is he without striking merit as a poet. His VvcjOi, 'Usavrop, published in Dochley's Collection,^ which would have done honour to Dry den ' For a beautiful picture of Arbuthnot see Chesterfield's Characters. » Boswell's Johnson. Croker's one-vol. ed. p. 145. ' Supplement, i. 192 scqq. ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710-1714 99 and Pope, has a condensed energy of thought, an originality, and a vigour of expression, such as few «»tlier poems of that age possess. In addition to these atcomplishments he was an amateur musician, and an anthem hy him, Af< pants the TIart, is in the col- lection of the Chapel Eoyal.' But it is not as a man nf science, nor as a writer, that the world is most familiar with Arhuthnot's name. The lustre of that name is still indeed untarnished hy time, hut it shines iiov; rather with reflected liglit than with light eman- ating from itself. By modern readers he is remem- Inred chiefly as the friend of Pope and Swift ; to modern readers he lives, not so much as the author of tlie Uistori) of John Bull, as the dedicatee of the Pro- ioijnc to the Satires, Very difi'erent was the position lie held among those who knew him, and among those who had inherited the traditions of those who knew him. Of his wit and humour both Pope and Swift speak in terms of extravagant praise. * He has,' said Swift, * more wit than we all have.' * In wit and liumour,' observed Pope, ' I think Arbuthnot superior to all mankind.' Half a century later Johnson rated him almost as highly. And in our own time Mac- nulay has not hesitated to pronounce the Ilistonj of John Bull the most ingenious and humorous satire extant in the English tongue. The truth is that Arhuthnot's literary fame has suffered from causes which must* sooner or later preclude any writer from l)crmanent popularity. With two exceptions, the first book of ihQ Memoirs of Scrihlcrus and the inimitable Epitaph on ChartrcSy his satires must be unintelligible to a reader not minutely versed in the politics of that ' Macmiohaers Oold-headed Cane, p. 83. h2 loo JONATHAN SWIFT time. No satire in itself so intrinsically excellent is BO little capable of universal application. His wit, his humour, his sarcasm, exhausting themselves on particular persons and on particular events, now re- quire an elaborate commentary. There is, moreover, nothing either striking or felicitous in his style. The History of John Bull and the Art of Political Lyiug will probably not find half a dozen readers in as many years, but we venture to think that out of these readers th(?re will be one or two who will have no difficulty in understanding the position which Arbuth- not once hold. Last of this illustrious group of wits comes William Fortescue, afterwards blaster of the Rolls. A descendant of the celebrated Chief Justice, and a man of ample fortune, he had joined the Bar to divert his mind from the grief occasioned by the loss of his wife. Gay, who is said to have been his school- fellow at Barnstaple, introduced him to Pope, and Pope to the Scriblerians. At what time he became a member of the Club does not appear, but he is de- f^iribt'd as their legal adviser.' He was an accom- plished and good-natured man, and so great a lover of mirth that Jervas has in one of his letters to Pope described him as laughing Fortescue. When Pope imitated the first satire of the second book of Horace he very happily substituted Fortescue for Trebatius. Such were the men in whose society Oxford and Bolingbroke forgot the cares of State, whose gatherings have been immortalised by Pope, and whose diversions have enriched literature with compositions which tlie world will not readily let die. For out of these diver- » Suffolk Papers, i. 202. ADMINISTRATION OF HARLE\\ 1710-1714 loi sions grew many years afterwards Gulliver's Travels jind the fourth book of the Dimeiad, The project with which the Scriblerians sought to amuse themselves was the production of a compre- hensive satire on the abuses of human learning. These abuses were to be satirised in the person of one Martinus Scriblerus, a foolish and conceited pedanK who, with a head replete with learning, was entirely \ f the AlUcs, which had Ijeen an attack on them generally, by a particular attack on the Dutch. No point had been urged with more emphasis by the opponents of the Peace, both within Parliament and without, than the obligations imposed on us by the Barrier Treaty. By this absurd treaty, which even ^larlborough had had the sagacity to oppose,'^ England had, in addition to other provisions, bound herself to place Holland not only in possession of the most important cities in the Spanish Netherlands then ^ conquered, but of ' Recorded with much complacency by Swift, Journal to Stella, Jan. 8, 1712. ■^ Marlborough to the Duchess, Aug. 19, and to Godolphin, Aug. *2t). Coxe, Life of Marl. iv. 413-14. » October 17UU. ADMINISTRATION OF IIARLEY, 1710-1714 107 I very town which Rhould in the course of the war be fonqiiered from Franco, stipulating also to guarantee the possession of these cities to the Dutch, and engag- ing to come with an ado(piate force to their defence, sliould the enemy attack thorn. In return for these iinmense concessions, Holland was to guarantee the I'rotostant succession in England. Nothing could exceed the skill with which the lirni'irhs ott the Harrier Treat}) is composed. It well (Icsorves to be studied by all who would understand tlio power of simplicity as an artifice of rhetoric. We rise from its perusal persuaded and convinced, glowing with indignation, as in sympathy with some invective, St ttled and resolute, as in accordance with irresistible argument. And yet it appears to consist of little more than the plain statement of plaui facts, so obvious as to appear self-evident. But analyse it and the art is apparent — it is the art of which Demosthenes was so consummate a master. ^ But it was not the Allies and Whigs alone who ^ wore embarrassing tlM3 Ministry. Harley was regarcM with disfavour by certain malcontents among hi^ own supporters, and Swift never did his patron more service than in the tract entitled Some Advice to the Oetohcr Club. The October Club wa.^ a clique of • country gentlemen and Members of Parliament who l>elonged to the extreme section of the Tory party, am who, having long expressed dissatisfaction with their chief, were now assuming a very menacing attitude. Constitutionally cautious and moderate, dilatory also, and with the fortunes of his party so often on the razor's edge, Harley had always preferred a trimming to a decided policy. He never entirely trusted tho io8 JONATHAN SWIFT Tories; he cherished to the last a hope of coahtion with the Whigb.' To his procrastination, indecision, and half-heartedness his party attributed, and no doubt justly, the recent defeat in the debate on the Peace. That disaster had for a moment roused him to take, or at least to allow his colleague St. John to take, decisive measures. The simultaneous creation of twelve peers had turned the Tory minority in the House of Lords into a majority. The dismissal of the Duke of Somerset, the disgrace of Marlborough, the incarceration of "Walpole, and the expedition with which the Treaty with France was progressing, had indeed delighted the Club. But they were not satisfied. AVhat had been begun, they said, should be completed. A clean sweep ought to be made of the AYliigs from all places of post and power ; there should be no more compromise, no more half measures. To pacify and if possible to gain the coniidence of these malcontents was at this moment of more urgent importance than anything else. But how to do so without at the same time making concessions which it was of almost ecpuil importance not to make was a problem by no means easy to solve. It was solved by Swift in a pamphlet which Scott justly calls a masterpiece of political tact. The Litter to the October Club is perhaps the best ' It was no iloubt impossible for Harley, even had he been so inclined, to adopt any other policy, for it was the policy which the Queen, who equally distrusted the Tories, had made up her mind to adopt. * She had,' says Swift, ' entertained the notion of forming a moderate comprehensive scheme, which she maintained with great firmness, nor would ever depart from until half a year before her death.' Enquiry into the Bcliaviour of the Queen's Last Ministry. See, too. Journal to Stella, passitn. ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710-1714 109 example to be found in Swift's writings of the rare skill with which he could perform the niccst-oilices of diplomacy. He regarded it himself with much satis- faction. It was one of the few works with which he confessed that he was pleased. The hvUcr to the October Cliih was succeeded by a very powerful tract, tlic Letter to a Whip Lord. This lord is said, though (•n doubtful evidence, to have been Lord Ashburnham, Originally a AVhig, he had joined the Tories. He was now fluctuating, and it was feared that he would again L,'o over to the Whigs. But, if the pamphlet is osten- sibly addressed to an individual, it is really addressed to that largo class of whom a man in the position of Ashburnham may be regarded as typical. It is an appeal to the waverers. Its design is to con- firm the Tories in their allegiance to their chief, and to make converts of the doubtful Whigs. Art- fully arguing that there is nothing incompatil)lc be- tween the principles and interests of the moderate Tories and those of the moderate Whigs, he proceeds to show that what separates the two parties is simply the dispute ' between those who would support and those who would violate the royal prerogative ' ; that what were in (luestion were not measures but men, not principles but factious brangles. ' There is no opinion properly belonging to you as a Whig wherein you may not still continue and yet deserve the favour and continuance of the Court, provided you offer nothing in violation of the royal prerogative, nor take the advantage in critical junctures to bring difficulties upon the administration, with no other view but that of putting the Queen under the necessity of changing it.' But the object of the tract was not merely to no JONATHAN SWIFT confirm the waverers; it is in effect an elaborate defence and justification of Harley's policy of com- promise. It was probably written at his suggestion, and there is a sentence in it which looks very like an interpolation. If Swift promised that ' the ministers will second your utmost zeal for securing the indulg- ence to Protestant dissenterB,' it must have been with a wry i'lce. Side ^y side with these pamphlets ho was keeping up an incessant fire of squibs and broadsides, some- times in verse and sometimes in prose, pelting Marl- borough when he left England, and Prince Eugene when he came to England. Paking into the scandals of private life and noting all that passed in public, he kept a vigilant eye for every incident that could be turned to account against the Whigs. No man Was probably ever so much feared. For neither age, rank, nor sex afforded any protection from his bitter and often filthy raillery. Some of these lampoons lind a place in his collected writings. But the greater portion of them have certainly escaped the diligence of his editors, and lurk unidentified among the broad- sheets preserved in the British Museum. It would be easy to point to many in these collections which bear his sign manual. What is certain is that he was en- gaged, as we know from his correspondence, on pieces of which in his republished works not a vestige remains. Incessant as these occupations were, they did not exhaust his extraordinary energy. Towards the end of 1712 he commenced his History of the Peace of Utrecht, which appeared many years afterwards, when completed, under the title of the History of the Four Last Years of the Queen. He had vindicated the ADMINISTRATWX OF HARLEY, 1710 1714 m policy and conduct of the Ministry in these ephemeral publications, which were for the purposes of the moment addressed to his poHtical contemporaries, and he was now anxious to vindicate them as a liistorian to the world generally and to posterity. Ho liad access to documents and correspondence of the most secret kind. The manuscript was submitted to Harley, who corrected portions of it with his own liiind. Swift frequently speaks in the Joumal to SfrlJa of the pains lie took with its composition, and we learn from the same source that it was completed on May 16, 1713. Seven weeks before he had put the finishing touches to his work, that other work for the further- ance of which he had toiled so much and had toiled so long had at last been accomplished. His party had triumphed ; the Peace of Utrecht had been signed. IV If the measure of a man's importance be the measure of the influence he exercises on contempo- raries, it would be no exaggeration to say that, in the spring of 1713, no Commoner in England stood so high as Swift, He dictated the political opinions of half the nation. He had turned the tide of popularity against the Whigs. He had done more than any single man then living to confound the designs of Austria and Holland, to crush Marlborough, to paralyse MArlborough's coadjutors.' A war, splendid ' • This day se'ennight, after I had been talking at Court with Sir William Wyndham, the Spanish Ambassador came up to him, and !^aid he heard that was Dr. Swift, and desired him to tell me that 112 JONATHAN SWIFT beyond parallel, he bad rendered odious. At two perilous junctures be bad saved tbe Ministry^ For every step in tbe negotiations with France, for every measure in tbe domestic policy of Oxford, be bad paved the way. He bad indeed done more for his party, and for tbe leaders of bis party, than any man of letters bad ever done for any patron or for any cause. And what be bad done be bad done gratui- tously.* *I never,' be says, * received one shilling' from tbe Ministers, or any other present except that of a few books, iior did I want this assistance to support me.''^ All this had been acknowledged in terms flattering even to fulsomeness. Notliing there- fore was more natural than that he should expect some substantial mark of ministerial favour. That be expected preferment though he never solicited it,"* and that Harley and St. John were perfectly aware of the tacit contract into which by accepting his services they had entered, is abundantly clear from the Jour- nal to Stella, He was neither impatient nor unrea- sonable. It is not until ^lay 1711 that he begins to liis master, and the King of France, anel the Queen, were more obliged to me than any man in Europe.'— Journal to StcUa, Dec. 21, 1712. ' It is remarkable that Swift, though lie was one of the most volu- minous and popular writers of his age, never troubled himself to negotiate with publishers. * I never got a farthing for anything I writ,' he says in a letter to Pulteney, dated May, 1735, ' except once, about eight years ago, and that by Mr. Pope's prudent management for rae '—a fact vsiiich Jeffrey, when taxing him with sordid avarice, found it convenient to suppress. ■•* History of the Four Last Years, Ac. Preface. » His reasons for not doing so he characteristically explains in a letter to Archbishop King, Oct. 1, 1711. Works (Scott), xv. 445-«). Bee, too. King's letter, earnestly urging him to conquer his mischievous pride. Id. pp. -lol-Q. ADMINISTRATION OF IIARLEY, 1710-1714 113 ixprcss dissatisfaction. * To return,' he writes, * with- out some mark of distinction would look extremely little, and I would likewise gladly be somewhat richer than I am. Everything here is tasteless to me for want of being where I would be. And so a short sigh and no more of this.' And no more of this there is for another year. Then expressions of querulousness and discontent become frequent. 'Less of civility and more of interest,' he adds bitterly, after telling Stella that the Lord Treasurer had chidden him for not having visited him for three days. ' Ministers,' he observes on another occasion, 'never do anything for the companions of their pleasures.' His first <;reat disappointment was the deanery of Wells, which was vacated in the spring of 1712, and which everyone expected would have been conferred on him. In November the death of Dr. Humphrey Humphreys left the See of Hereford vacant. For a moment it pccmed not unlikely that Swift would be selected to fill it. There is reason to believe that he was strongly recommended to the Queen. But the Queen, whose natural dislike to him is said to have been sharpened l)y the Archbishop of York and by the Duchess of Somerset, whom, as we have seen, he had grossly libelled, turned a deaf ear to the recommendations of her Ministers.* She probably thought, as a pious and sensible woman might reasonably think, that the ' This story is contradicted by King, who was informed by Boling- brokc that the Queen had herself assured him that she ' had never received any unfavourable character of Swift, nor had the Archbishop or any other person endeavoured to lessen him in her esteem.' And Bolingbroke added that it was ft story invented by Oxford to deceive Swift and make him contented with bis deanery in Ireland.— King'i Anecdotes, pp. 60-61. I 114 JONATHAN SWIFT author of such a treatise as the Tale of a Tub, and of Buch verses as the Windsor Prophecy ^ was scarcely the man for a place among the Fathers of the Church. This feehng appears to have been understood and respected by Swift himself, for, though he was well aware that Anne had been the only obstacle between himself and the prize he most coveted, it is remark- able that in speaking of her — and he often has occa- sion to speak of her — he never betrays the smallest ill-will or vindictiveness. Other disappointments followed, ' This morning ' (April 13, 1713), he wrote to Stella, * my friend Mr. Lewis came to me and showed me an order for three deaneries, but none of them for me.' And now he lost all patience, * Tell the Lord Treasurer,' he said, 'that I take nothing ill of him but his not giving me timely notice, as he promised to do, that the Queen would do nothing for me.' Oxford, no doubt as mortitied as himself, hearing that he was in the Under Secretary's office, came in to see him. In the course of a long conver- sation Swift plainly told him that unless he had * something honourable ' immediately conferred on him he should at once leave for Ireland. Oxford, without informing Swift at the time, stopped the warrants, and they both dined that niglit at the Duke of Ormond's. The object of this visit appears to have been to induce Ormond to exercise his influence in persuading the Queen to confer the vacant See of Dromore on Sterne, then Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin. This would leave the deanery, which was in the gift of Ormond, open, and it was hoped that the Queen would allow Ormond to confer it on Swift. But pre- ferment at the price of exile from all that made life. ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710-1714 115 as he said, tolerable to him, was by no means to his mind or to the mind of his friends. Oxford, not yet in despair of the Queen's conversion, still kept back the warrants. Lady Masham, who on hearing of the proposed arrangement burst into tears, had an inter- view with the Queen. Then Oxford, who saw that liigher preferment in England was, in the Queen's present mood, out of the question, suggested as a last resource that a prebendary ship at Windsor, whicli then happened to be vacant, should be conferred on his friend. But the Queen was inexorable. It should be the deanery of St. Patrick's or nothing. Mean- while even this had become uncertain and appeared to be eluding him. * Ormond had changed his mind and refused to consent to Sterne's promotion. Sterne had, he said, not treated him with respect, and he disliked Sterne, and Sterne was under the influence (»f the Archbishop of Dublin. He desired Swift, there- fore, to name some other deanery. ' I desire,' replied Swift, with quiet dignity, 'that your Grace will put me out of the case, and do as you please.' Ormond was a gentleman and, though irascible, a-kind-hearted man. He probably read in a moment the full mean- ing of what Swift had said, and perhaps a glance at the face of the speaker assisted the interpretation. He replied with great kindness, * I will consent,' adding that he w^ould not have done so for any other man alive. How inexpressibly galling all this must have been to a man of Swift's temper may well be imagined. He had not only the humiliation of feeling that what he ought to have owed to simple desert he had owed to extorted favour*, but that, in securing a prize which it was almost an indignity to accept, ho 1 2 Ii6 JONATHAN SWIFT had secured for another — and that an inferior — the prize which he himself most coveted. Under these mortifying circumstances, he accepted what he was not in a position to refuse, and, swallow- ing his chagrin, set out early in June for Ireland. His reception in Dublin was not calculated to raise his spirits. He was grossly insulted as he passed along the streets, and on the morning of his installa- tion a copy of verses, which is still extant,' taunting him with apostasy and infidelity, is said to have been posted on the door of the cathedral. In a few weeks he was again in London. He had been summoned to mediate, as he had so often done before, between Oxford and Bolingbroke, whose inter- necine feuds were now causing grave alarm. He soon found, however, that the differences between them were not such as admitted either of reconciliation or of compromise ; for who can reconcile rivals, or who negotiate compromise when the struggle is for supre- macy ? But what it was possible to do he did, and his correspondence amply shows that he acted at this unhappy crisis in a manner that reflects the highest credit both on his heart and on his judgment. Meanwhile he had not permitted those terrible weapons which had already done so much execution among the "Whigs to rust in idleness. Of all the Whig journahsts, none were at that moment carrying scurrility and intemperance to greater length than Richard Steele. In an evil hour he had abandoned literature for polities, had dropped the Spectator to set up the Guardian, and had recently entered Parliament. ' Printed in Monck Mason's Amuils of St. Patrick's Cathedral, p. 2C9. ADMINISTRATION OF HARLE\\ 1710-1714 n? Botwecn Swift and himself there had existed for 8omo years cordial friendship, a friendship which political differences had suhsequently cooled, hut which hotli had heen, even in the heat of controversy, careful to respect. To Swift he was under great ohligations. At Swift's intercession he had heen permitted to retain a lucrative office under Government. He had heen assisted hy him in his literary ventures ; he had on more than one occasion heen protected hy him from slander and insult. But, shortly hefore Swift's departure from Ireland, Steele, now drunk with party spirit, had so far forf:;ottcn himself as to insert in the Onard\(\)\ a coarse and ungenerous reflection on his old friend. Upon that, Swift sought through Addison an explanation. Steele's reply was pert and rude. Swift, in spite of this douhle provocation, displayed at first singular forhearance. Nothing indeed could he more dignified and hecoming than his conduct at the heginning of this rupture. A reference to the cor- respondence which passed hetween the two men will show how greatly Mr. Forster has, in his Essay on Steele, misrepresented the facts, the letters of Swift are those of a man calm, just, and candid. The letters of Steele are those of a hlustering egotist, who, without reason himself, will listen to reason in nobody else. Swift was, however, seldom insulted with impunity. The castigation which Steele now received was due no doubt immediately to his prominence as a party writer, but it is easy to see that private animosity glows in every paragraph of that cruel pamphlet — The, Im' portance of the ' Ouardian ' Considered ' — in which the ' TTorfca (Scott), iy. p. 869 118 JONATHAN SWIFT Member for Stockbridge was held up to the mockery of his constituents. While busy with Steele, he was busy also with Burnet. That turbulent prelate, who was on the point of bringing out the third volume of his History of the Information y had, with the double object of whetting public curiosity and of gratifying his own abaurd vanity, published by anticipation the Preface. In this he had taken occasion to taunt the Tories with Jacobitib^m and Popery. Swift's reply, which assumed the form partly of a parody, and partly of a running commentary of a parody on the Bishop's Preface^ is one of the most amusing, as it is assuredly one of the most severe, of his polemical pieces. He had long suspected, he said, that Steele and the Bishop were working in co-operation, for, * though that peculiar manner of expresshig themselves which the poverty of our language forces us to call their style ' presented points of dilVerence, their notions were precisely similar. * But I will confess,' he goes on to say, ' that my suspicions did not carry me so far as to conjecture that this venerable champion would be in such mighty haste to come into the Held and serve in the quality of an enfant perdu, armed only with a pocket pistol before his great blunderbuss could be got ready, his old rusty breastplate scoured, and his cracked head- piece mended.' But the whole pamphlet is inimitable. Its irony, its Immour, its drollery, are delicious. And now the country was tossing under the storms which shook the last year of Anne. The "Whigs taunted the Tories with designing to bring in the Pretender, and the Tories taunted the Whigs with treachery to the Throne and the Constitution. In the ADMINISTRATION OF HARLEY, 1710-1714 119 spring of 1714 appeared Steele's Crisis, Swift, whose wrath against Steele had heen sharpened by their recent controversy, at once replied to it in the Public Spirit of tlw ir//?V/8^^.^othing which ever came from his pen appears to have exasperated his op- lionents so much as this tract. The attention of the Legislature was directed to it. The Scotch Peers, with the Duke of Argyle at their head, complained personally to the Queen. The bookseller and the printer were arrested. A proclamation offering a reward of three hundred pounds to any one who would reveal the author was issued. Swift, with the fate of Tutchin and I)e Foe before his eyes, became alarmed and meditated flight. But the tact of Oxford averted discovery, and the danger blew over. The catastrophe which he had long feared was, however, fast approaching. The feud between Oxford and Bolingbroke was about to terminate in the ruin of both. In May he met his two friends for the last time under the same roof, and he made a final effort to recall them to reason and duty. He pleaded, ho argued ; but expostulation, warning, counsel, were vain. He now saw clearly that all was over. • I can no longer,' he sighed, * 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 ; ' ' and he had hurried away sick at heart to hide his sorrow and chagrin at Letcombe. Two troubled months passed by. Though he was out of the world, numerous corre- spondents kept him fully informed of all that occurred. Each step in the rapid decline of Oxford, each step in • Letter to Walls, Mr. Murray's MSS., quoted by Mr. Craik. 120 JONATHAN SWIFT the fallacious triuni]Th__Qf_ Bolingbrokei was at oi^ce communicated to him. IncTeed, his con*©iipondenco at this period forms the best account extant of the"? momentous weeks which preceded the death of Anne/ The history of that crisis reflects indelible infamy on the leaders of Swift's party ; it is pleasing to add that the conduct of Swift himself may be regarded with unalloyed satisfaction. When poHtical immor- ality, in the worst type it can assume, was epidemic among the statesmen of his faction, his patriotism and integrity remained without taint. It is certain that he had no share in the intrigues with James. It is certain that he resolutely opposed all attempts to tamper with the Act of Settlement. He expressed with great courage his disapprobation both of the conduct of Oxford and of the conduct of Bolingbroke, and he sought in a powerful pamphlet— one of the very best he ever wrote — to repair the mischief which their (piarrels had inflicted on the common cause. But the manuscript unfortunately found its way into the hands of Bolingbroke, who, having his own pur- poses to serve, made in it certain alterations which were more calculated to benefit himself than his party; and Swift, justly annoyed, withdrew it from publica- ^tion. Had this pamphlet, Free ThmKjhta upon the present State of Affaii'Hy appeared a few weeks earlier, and had the policy prescribed in it been carried out, • See in addition to the letters dated in these months, Swift (Scott), vol. xvi. ; the letter to the Earl of Oxford, dated June 14, 1737 (Scott), xix. p. 15H ; and the Inquiry into the Behaviour of the Queen^s Last Ministry. Thin appears to have been designed as a supplement to the History of the Four Last Years, and the two are probably frag- ments of Swift's design to \vrite a history of the reign, abandoned when he failed to obtain the lloyal Historiographership. ADMINISTRATION OF IIARLEY, 1710-1714 121 the ruin of the Tories would in all probability have been averted. What Swift plainly foresaw was that the Whi^^a, availing themselves of the dissensions among the Tories, and identifying the Tories as a party with the Jacobites, would, as a party, bring over the Elector and carry out the Act of Settlement. lie jn-oposed therefore to cut the ground from under the Whigs by abolishing party distinctions, or rather by enlarging the delinition of what constituted a Tory, and by narrowing the definition of what constituted a Whig. There were, he says, two points on which * a very large majority of the kingdom appear perfectly hearty and unanimous ' ; the first was loyalty to the Church of England, the other, was the security of the Protestant Succession in the House of Hanover ; and in this party he recognises the Tories. The other party, which he speaks of as * the faction,' consisted of a confederacy of the open and secret enemies of the Church, of moderation men and of republicans ; and in this party he recognises the Whigs. Frankly attri- buting the disorganisation and anarchy of the Tories to the ill-management and mutual dissensions of Oxford and Bolingbroke, he points out that it is not too late to retrieve the past. Let them rally round them that 'very large majority,' the friends of the Church and the friends of the Protestant Succession ; let there be no truce, no compromise, with ' the faction,* which should be excluded from all civil and military posts ; let the army, and especially the Guards, be under the closest surveillance ; let them spare no pains to counteract the slanders of their enemies at Herren- hausen, and to reconcile themselves and their party with the Elector, Had Swift known what we know 123 . JONATHAN SWIFT now, how deeply both Oxford and Bolingbroke were implicated with the Pretender, he would not perhaps have been surprised that his admonitions carried so little weight. On July 27 Oxford resigned, and the reins of government were in the hands of Boling- broke. Nothing we know of Swift is more honourable to him than his behaviour at this juncture. Of his two friends, the one was at the summit of political great- ness, the other was not merely under a cloud, but ruined beyond possibility of redemption. Both sought his presence. Bolingbroke, inviting him with eager importunity to share his triumph, held out hopes at once the most splendid and the most plausible. He >would undertake, he said, to reconcile him with the Duchess of Somerset, he would introduce him to the Queen, he would provide and provide amply for him in the EngHsh Church. Oxford, pathetically appealing to ancient friendship, had nothing to offer him but the opportunity of proving that that friendship had been sincere and disinterested. Without a moment's hesi- tation Swift chose the nobler course.^ As he was on the point of setting out for Oxford's country seat, he received a letter announcing the death of Anne. It was an event which for some days had been almost hourly expected, but its effect on the Tories was the effect of sudden and unforeseen calamity. It found them without resources, without iixed plans, in the midst of internecine strife. Boling- broke indeed continued to bluster about the miracles which a little judicious management could still effect, assured him that the Tories were not in despair, and that the cry in a month might be that the Whigs ADMINISTRATION OF IIARLEY, 1710-1714 123 were a pack of Jacobites. And he hoped, he said, that his old friend would lose no time in assisting him *to save the Constitution.' To this fustian Swift replied in a letter' written with great calmness, dignity, and good sense. He dwelt sadly on the efforts he had made to save from self-destruction the friends who had been so dear to him, and he spoke with some bitterness of the folly and infatuation which had made those efforts nugatory. In the present condition of affairs he was, he continued, unable to discern any favourable symptom. The wreck of the Tories was complete. All that remained for Bolingbroke to do was to maintain his post at the head of the Church party. * You are,' he went on to say, ' still in the prime of life. You have sustained, it is true, a heavy defeat, but you will no doubt learn, like a prudent general, to profit from disaster.' He added in conclusion that he had a lively sense of the favours which his patron had purposed to confer on him, that he hoped before the end of the year to be again at his side, but that for the present he must, he feared, take leave of a scene which would, however, seldom be absent from his thoughts. And he took leave of that scene for ever. By the middle of August he was again in Dubhn. From this moment the biography of Swift assumes a new complexion. During the last few years cir- cumstances had, in a manner, enabled him to escape from himself. Incessant activity had left him little time for gloomy reflection. If he was not among the Fathers of the Church, the position which he most coveted he had attained. His genius and force of ' Dated August 7, 1714 (Scott, xvi. p. 212). 124 JONATHAN SWIFT . character had extorted from society the homage which society is as a rule slow to pay to any but the opulent and noble. In literary circles his pre-eminence was. acknowledged. On politics the influence which ho had exercised had been without parallel in the history of private men*- Now all was changed. He found himself suddenly reduced to obscurity and impotence. He was no longer the confidant of great ministers, the companion of ambassadors and privy councillors, the pet* of fine ladies, and the boon comrade of wits and poets. He was an exile, and an exile with little to do and with nothing to hope, in a place which was of all places in the world the most odious to him. The \only society with which he could mingle was thu eociety of inferiors. What followed, followed natu- rally. He became the prey of that constitutiona melancholy which had been his bane from childhood. The fierce and gloomy passions, which prosperous activity had for a \vliile composed, again awoke. Each month as it passed by addud to his irritation and wretchedness. Ill-health, the loss of friends, his own unpopularity, aiid, above all, the condition of the unhappy country in which his lot was cast, alternately maddened and depressed him. CHAPTER VI SWIFT IN IRELAND, 1714-1720 The circumstances under which he entered on his new duties were sufficiently inauspicious. It was well known that he had been one of the chief supporters of the last ^[inistry, and that his preferment had been the price of his services. In Dublin, where the Whigs were as three to one, the downfall of the Tories had been hailed with savage glee. Indeed, of all the sects into which Irish politicians were divided and sub- divided, it may be questioned whether there was one which regarded with much favour the party to which Swift had attached himself. The victory gained by the Whigs was celebrated as such victories always were celebrated. On Swift's head broke in full force the storm of obloquy which was overwhelming his friends in England. Libels taunting him with Popery and Jacobitism freely circulated among the vulgar. He was hustled and pelted in the street. One mis- creant, an Irish nobleman, assaulted him with such ferocious violence that he presented a petition, which is still extant, appealing for protection to the House of Peers. For some months he went in fear of his life, and he never ventured to show himself even in the prindpal thoroughfares without an escort of armed 126 JONATHAN SWIFT flervants. And these were not his only troubles. He was on bad terms with his Chapter ; he was on bad terms with the Archbishop. He was in debt to his predecessor for the deanery house. He was in wretched health, and in still more wretched spirits. His feelings found vent in a copy of verses, which are inexpressibly sad and touching. Why Bhoultl I repine To see my life so fast decline ? But why obscurely here alone, Where I am neither, lov'd nor known ? My state of health none care to learn, My life is here no soul's concern. And those with whom I now converse Without a tear will tend my hearse. Remov'd from kind Arbuthnot's aid, Who knows his art but not his trade, Some formal visits, looks and words. Which mere humanity affords. My life is now a burden f a misnomer. The portion which Swift completed was the History oi the Treaty of Utrecht ; he no doubt designed to continue it to the eiul of the reign. ■•' Maeaulay, in some very amusing MS. notes scrawled on th' margin of Orrery's Remarks on Swift, and preserved in the Briti>l Museum, makes short work of the book : ' Wretched stuff ; and, 1 firmly believe, not Swift's.' SWIFT IN IRELAND, 1714 1720 131 family, or by any one having authority from his exe- cutors. It was printed by an anonymous editor from a copy surreptitiously taken by an anonymous friend. And yet, surely, we need have no more doubt of its genuineness than we have of the genuine- ness of Gulliver's T ravels. One piece of evidence alone is surely conclusive. In 1738 the original manuscript was read by Erasmus Lewis, the second Lord Oxford, and others, in conclave, with a view to discussing the propriety of its publication. Their opinion was that it contained several inaccuracies of statement, and those inaccuracies Lewis, in a letter to Swift — it may be found in Swift's correspondence ' —categorically pointed out. Now a reference to the printed Memoirs will show that they contain th v identical errors detected by Lewis and his friends in Swift's manuscript. Again, those portions in the manuscript narrative which Lewis describes as most entertaining and instructive are precisely those por- tions in the printed work which are undoubtedly best entitled to that praise. And, to clamp this evidence, there is in the British ^luseum an abstract of Swift's original manuscript made in 1742, nearly three years before the Dean's death, by Dr. Birch. A comparison of this abstract with the work as printed in 1758 proves conclusively that the manuscript abstracted by Birch must have been a manuscript of the Uistory then first given to the world.'' Nor is there anything improb- able in the assertion of the editor — one Lucos— that ' Scott's Swift, xix. 218. ' For this interesting piece of evidence I am indebted to Mr. Craili's Life of Swift, Appendix iii. p. 618. It was communicated to him by Mr. Elwin. K 2 133 JONATHAN SWIFT he printed the work from a transcript of the ori- ginal manuscript, for the original manuscript, as wo know from Deane Swift, circulated freely amon<^ Swift's friends in Dublin. It is certain that Nugent, Dr. William King, and Orrery had perused that manu- script, and that they were alive when the printcil work appeared ; it is equally certain that none ol them expressed any doubt of the genuineness of th<* printed Memoirs^ though those Memoirs attracted si. much attention that they were printed by instalments in the Oenth'man^s Magazine. Swift's life during these years is reflected very faithfully in his correspondence. It was passed prin- cipally in the discharge of his clerical duties, which Ih' performed with punctilious care ; in improving tlu glel)e of Laracor ; in endeavouring to come to an understanding with the Archbishop on the one hand, and with his rebellious Chapter on the other; and in devising means for escaping from himself, and fron» the daily annoyances to which his position exposoil him. * I am,' he writes to BolingV)roke, * forced into the most trifling amusements, to divert the vexation of former thoughts and present objects.* He gardencti and sauntered ; he turned over the Greek and Roman classics ; he bandied nonsense with Sheridan anil Esther Johnson ; he went through a course of eccle- siastical history ; he dabbled in mathematics. ' 1 live,' he writes to Pope, *in the corner of a vast un- furnished house : my family consists of a steward, a groom, a helper in the stable, a footman, and an oM maid, who are all at board wages, and when I do not dine abroad or make an entertainment, which last i> very rare, I eat a mutton-pie and drink half a pint ol SWIFT IN IRELAND, 17141720 133 Avine; my amusements are defending my Bmall do- minion against the Archbishop and endeavouring to reduce ray rebellious choir. Pcrditur luce inter miHcro In.v.' Thus much the world saw ; thus much he im- parted with all the garrulity of Montaigne and Walpole to the friends who exchanged letters with him. But there were troubles — troubles which must ut this time have been weighing heavily on his mind — which were little suspected by the world, and from which he never raised the veil even to those who knew him best. II Shortly after his arrival in London, in the autumn of 1710, he had renewed his acquaintance with a lady of the name of Vanhomrigh. Her husband, origin- ally a merchant of Amsterdam, but subsequently the li older of lucrative offices under the Government of William III., had died some years before, leaving her in easy circumstances, with a family of two sons and two daughters. Her house was in Bury Street, St. James's, within a few paces of Swift's lodgings. Mrs. Vanhomrigh was fond — indeed, inordinately fond — of society, and, as she was not only well connected and hospitable, but the mother of two charming girls in the bloom of youth, she had no difficulty in grati- fying her whim. Among her male guests she could number such distinguished men as Sir Andrew Foun- taine. Among her female visitors were to be found some of the most attractive and most accomplished young women in England. There appears, indeed, to have been no more pleasant lounge in London than the little drawing-room in Bury Street. This Swift 1 34 J ON A THA N S IVIFT soon discovered. Within a few months he had come to be regarded almost as a member of the family. He took his coffee there of an afternoon ; he dropped in, as the humom* took him, to breakfast or dinner ; his best gown and his best wig were kept there ; and when a friend sent him a flask of choice Florence or a haunch of venison it was shared with his hospit- able neighbom's. With the young ladies, Miss Hester, who had not yet completed her twentieth year, and Miss Molly, who was a year or two younger, he was a great favourite. No man thought more highly of tin- moral and intellectual capacities of women than Swift, and nothing gave him so much pleasure as superin- tending their education. What ho had done for Esther Johnson he now aspired to do for the Miss Vanhomrighs, and, as he found his new pupils a:> eager to receive as he was to impart instruction, he became earnest in his pleasant task. So passed partly in the innocent frivolities of social gatherings, and partly in the graver intercourse of teacher and pupil — two happy years. But towards the end of 1712 Swift suddenly found, to his great embarrass- ment, that the elder of the two sisters had con- ceived a violent passion for him. The unhappy girl, who had, as she well knew, received no encourage- ment, stru ^led for jjjvhjje^ with, niaidenmoclc^ty, to ^conceal Tier feelhigs. At this point it would liavr been well, perhaps, if Swift had devised some mean-^ of withdrawing. But he probably judged all women from the standard of Esther Johnson. She, too, ha-l at one time entertained feelings for him which it wa> not in his power to return ; but had, as soon as sIk saw that reciprocity of passion was hopeless, cheer- SWIFT IN IRELAND, 1714-1720 135 fully accepted friendship for love. There was surely no reason to suppose that Miss Vanhomrigh would not consent to make the same compromise when she was convinced that there was the same necessity. All that was needed was a clear understanding hetween them. That understanding would, as time went on, he silently arrived at. But ho little knew the character of the woman with whom he liad to deal. The less her passion was encouraged the more it grew. The more eloquently he dilated on friendship, the vaoxv rapturously she declaimed on love. As he pleaded for the mind, she pleaded for the heart. So for some months they continued to play at cross-purposes, each perceiving, and each disregarding, the innuendoes of the other. At last the poor girl could hear her tortures no longer, and, he coming lost t o all sens_e.of femlmue , delicacyjJ-hreNv.licrselfjit^wiXt'j^ieet. And now commenced the really culpahle part of his conduct. He ought at once to have' taken a deci- sive step. He ought to have seen that there were only two courses open to him : the one was to make her his wife, the other was to take leave of her for ever. Unhappily, he did neither. He merely pro- ceeded to apply particularly what hefore he had stated generally. He continued to enlarge on the superiority of friendship to love, and he went on to dcscrihe the depth and sincerity of the friendship which he had long felt for her; as for her passion — so ran his reasoning — it was a passing whim — an unwelcome intruder into the paradise of purer joys. He could not return it— no true philosopher would ; he could offer instead all that made human intercourse most precious — devoted affection, gratitude, respect, esteem. 136 JONATHAN SWIFT All this he contrived to convey in such a manner as could not have inflicted a wound even on the most sensitive pride. It was conveyed — perhaps conveyed for the first time— in that exquisitely graceful and original poem which has made the name of Hester A^anhomrigh deathless. She could there read how Venus, provoked by the complaints which were daily reaching her about the degeneracy of the female Hex, resolved to retrieve the reputation of that sex ; how, with this object, she called into being a match- less maid, who to every feminine virtue united every feminine grace and charm; how, not content with endowing her paragon with all that is proper to wgman, the goddess succeeded by a stratagem in in- ducing Pallas to bestow on her the choicest of the virtues proper to man ; how Pallas, angry at being deceived, consoled herself with the reflection that a being so endowed would be little likely to prove obe- dient to the goddess who had created her; how Vanessa — for such was the peerless creature's name — did not for a while belie the expectations of Pallas, but how at last she was attacked by treacherous Cupid in Wisdom's very stronghold. The flattered girl could then follow in a transparent allegory the whole history of her relation with her friend, sketched so delicately, and at the same time so humorously, /that it must have been impossible for her either to Vake offence or to miss his meaning. How grievously /Swift had erred in thus temporising became every (day more apparent. It was in vain that he now ^began to absent himself from Bury Street ; in vain that, as she grew more intemperate, he left her letters unanswered; in vain that in his own letters he 1714 1720 137 showed, in a manner not to be mistaken, that he had no ear for the language of love. In the summer of 1714 occurred an event which introduced further complications in this unhappy ])Ubiness. Mrs. Vanhomrigh died, leaving her affairs in a very embarrassed state. The daughters, who appear to have been on bad terms with their brother, applied for assistance to Swift ; and Swift, who had at this time left London, was thus again forced into intimate relations with ILcjater^ Nor was this all. 13y the terms of her father's will she had become possessed of some property near Dublin, and Swift learned, to his intense mortification and perplexity, iliat, as there was now nothing to detain her in England, it was her intention to follow him to Ireland, lie at once wrote off, imploring her to be discreet, and pointing out how easily such a relation as theirs might be misinterpreted by censorious people. Dublin, he said, was not a place for any freedom ; everything that happened there was known in a week, and every- thing that was known was exaggerated a hundredfold. ' If,' he added, ' you are in Ireland while I am there, I shall sec you very seldom.' But all was of no avail, and a few weeks after his arrival in Dublin Hester and hct sister were in lodgings within a stone's throw of the deanery. Swift's position was now perplexing in the extreme. By every tie but one which can bind man to woman he was bound to Esther Johnson. For more than thirteen years she had been a portion of his life. She had been the partner of his most secret thoughts; she had been his solace in gloom and sorrow; she had been his nurse in sickness. In return for all this she 138 JONATHAN SWIFT had claimed neither to bear his name nor to share his fortune ; she had been satisfied with his undivided afifection. As yet nothing had arisen to disturb their sweet and placid intercourse. Indeed, he had been so careful to abstain from anything which could cause her uneasiness, that in his letters from London he had never even referred to his intimacy with Hester Vanhomrigh ; and poor Stella, little suspect- ing the presence of a rival, was now in the first joy of having her idol again at her side. For awhile he nursed the hope that Miss Vanhomrigh would, on seeing that he absented himself from her society, withdraw from Dublin. He was soon undeceived. The more he left her to herself the more importunate she became. The letters addressed by her at this period to Swift have been preserved, and exhibit a state of mind which it is both terrible and pitiable to contemplate. * It is impossible,,' she writes in one of her letters, * to describe what I have sufiered since 1 saw you last. I am sure 1 could have borne the rack much better than those kiUing, kiUing words of yours. Sometimes I have resolved to die without seeing you more, but those resolves, to your misfortune, did not last long.' How deeply Swift was affected by all this, and with what tenderness and delicacy he acted under these most trying circumstances, is evident from his reply to this letter ; — I will see you in a day or two, ami believe mo it goes to my Boul not to see you oftener. I will give you the best advice, countenance, and assistance I can. I would have been with you sooner if a thousand impediments had not prevented mo. I did not imagine you had been under difficulties. I am sure my whole fortune should go to remove thcuj. I cannot see you to- day, I fear, having affairs of my "own place to do, but pray think SWIFT IN IRELAND, 17141720 139 it not want of friendship or tenderness, which I will always continue to the utmost. He did all in his power to recall her to reason. He implored her to remember that the world was censorious and that scandal was beginning to be busy with their names. At last she left Dublin and removed to Celbridge. There, in seclusion, she continued to cherish her hopeless passion ; there Swift for some years regu- larly corresponded with her and occasionally visited her ; and there, in 1723, while still in the bloom of womanhood, she died. This is a melancholy story, but it is a story little likely to lose in the telling, and peculiarly susceptible of prejudiced distortion. It behoves us, therefore, before passing judgment on Swift's conduct, to dis- tinguish carefully between what has been asserted and what has been proved, between what rests on mere conjecture and what rests on authentic testi- mony. Now we may say at once that all that is certainly known of his connection with Hester Vanhomrigh is what may be gathered from the letters that passed between them, and from his own poem of Cade nils and Vdncssa, and all that can be safely conjectured is that, when they finally parted, they parted abruptly and in anger. This exhausts the evidence on which we can fairly rely in judging Swift; but this is very far from exhausting the evidence on which the world has judged him. First came the almost incredibly malignant perversions of Orrery. Then came the loose and random gossip of Mrs. Pilkington and Thomas Sheridan. Out of these and similar materials Scott wove his dramatic 140 JONATHAN SWIFT narrative — not, indeed, with any prejudice against Swift, but doing him signal injustice by disseminating stories greatly calculated to prejudice others against him. Thus he tells, and tells most impressively, a story which, if true, would justify us in believing the very worst of Swift. Hester Vanhomrigh — so the story runs — having discovered his intimacy with Stella, wrote to her, requesting to know the nature of her connection with Swift. Stella, indignant that such a question should be put to her, placed the letter in Swift's hands. Swift instantly rode off in a paroxysm of fury to Celbridge, and, abruptly entering the room where Miss Vanhomrigh was sitting, Hung the letter angrily on tlie table, and then, without saying a word, remounted his horse and galloped back to Dublin. From that moment he was a stranger to her. In a few weeks Vanessa was in her grave. The authority cited for this anecdote is Sheridan,' who wrote nearly sixty years after the event he narrates, who is confessedly among the most in- accurate and uncritical of Swift's biographers, whose habit of grossly exaggerating whatever he described is notorious, and who has been more than once suspected of enlivening his pages with deliberate fabrications. In the present case, however, he had contented him- self with embellishment ; for the story had been already told, th'st by Orrery, in whose hands it had assumed an entirely different form, and secondly by Ilawkesworth, who merely copied what he found in Orrery. ^Vllat Orrery says is that Vanessa wrote, not to Stella, but to Swift ; and that the object of her letter was, not to ascertain the nature of Swift's con- « Lf/c 0/ Su'j//, pp. 330-1 ; lieviarka, p. 113. SIV/FT IN IRELAND, 17141720 141 nection with her rival, hut to ascertain his intentions with regard to herself — in other words, to insist on knowing whether it was his intention to make her his wife. Why the letter, which he descrihes as a very tender one — it wpuld he interesting to know how he could have seen it — should have had such an effect on Swift he has not condescended to explain. But Orrery's whole story is not only in itself monstrously improhable, but it rests on his own unsupported testimony ; and on the value of Orrery's unsupported testimony it is scarcely necessary to comment. Such is the evidence in support of one of the gravest of the charges which have been brought against Swift with respect to Vanessa. Again, Scott asserts, still following Sheridan, that, on hearing of Miss Vanhomrigh's death, Swift ' retreated in an agony of self-reproach and remorse into the South of Ireland, where he spent two months, without the place of his abode being known to any one.' Nothing can be more untrue. A reference to his corre- spondence at this period will show that he had long intended to take what he calls a southern journey, that many of his friends were acquainted with his movements, and that, so far from wishing to bury himself in solitude, he was extremely vexed that a clergyman, who had promised to be his companion, disappointed him at the last moment.' That Miss Vanhomrigh's death deeply distressed him is likely enough ; that it excited in him any such emotions as Scott and Sheridan describe requires better proof than evidence which, on the only point on which it is capable of being tested, turns out to be false. ' Letter to Robert Cope, June 1723, Works^ xvi. 440. 142 JONA THAN S WIFT To pass, however, from what is apocryphal to what is authentic. A careful study of the letters which passed between Swift and Vanessa ' must satisfy anyone that Swift's conduct throughout was far less culpable than it would at first sight seem to have been. It resolves itself, in fact, into one great error. As soon as he discovered that he had inspired a passion which he was unable to return, his intercourse with Miss Vanhomrigh should have immediately ceased. All that followed, followed as the result of that error. And yet that error was, as his poem and correspond- ence clearly show, a mere error of judgment. Had he been aware that, by continuing the intimacy, he was pursuing a course which would be fatal to the girl's happiness, he was either under the spell of a libertine passion or lie was a man of a nature incon- ceivably callous and brutal. Tliat he was no libertine is admitted even by those who have taken the least favourable view of his conduct ; that he was neither callous nor brutal, but, on the contrary, a man pre- eminently distinguished by humanity and tenderness, is admitted by no one more emphatically than by Miss Vanhomrigh herself. The truth is that he recognised no essential distinc- tion between the affection which exists between man and man, and the affection which exists between man and woman. He knew, indeed, tbat in the latter case it fre- quently becomes complicated with passion, but such a complication he regarded as purely accidental. It was a mere excrescence which, without the nutrition of sympa^- thetic folly, would wither up and perish. It was a fault of the heart, which the head would and should correct. ' The correspondence is printed by Scott, xix. 393-454. SWIFT IN IRELAND, 1714-1720 143 Hence he saw no necessity for breaking ofY a friend- ship which he vahiod. Hence the indifference, the easy jocularity, with whicli, after the first emotion of surprise was over, he persistently treated the poor girl's rhapsodies. Time passed on, and before he could discover his error it was too late to repair it. From the moment of Mrs. Vanhomrigh's death he was, in truth, involved in a labyrinth, out of which it was not merely difficult, but simply impossible, to extricate himself. K he attemjited, as he twice did attempt, to take the step to which duty pointed, en- treaties, which would have melted a heart far more ol)durate than his, instantly recalled him. Could he kave a miserable girl— such is the burden of the first appeal which was made to him — to struggle alone with * a wretch of a brother, cunning executors, and importunate creditors ' ? ' Pray what,' she asks, * can 1)6 wrong in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman '? ' * All I beg is that you will for once coun- terfeit, since you can't do otherwise, that indulgent friend you once were, till I get the better of these difficulties.' He assists her; he visits her; he sees her safely through her difliculties ; and he again with- draws. Upon that she breaks out into hysterical raving, informs him that she had been on the point of destroying herself, and appeals to him in the most piteous terms to renew his visits. To this he replies in the letter which has been already quoted, and ho grants the favour so importunately and indelicately extorted. It is remarkable that throughout the whole correspondence she makes no attempt to conceal the fact that she is forcing herself upon him, frankly ad- mitting over and over again that there had been 144 JONATHAN SWIFT nothing either in his actions or in his words to justify her conduct. Search as we may, however carefully, for any indications of a belief, or even of a hint on her part, that she had been deceived or misled, nothing of the kind is to be found. From beginning to end it is the same story — on the woman's side, blind, uncon- trollable passion — on the man's side, perplexity, com- miseration, undeviating kindness. * Believe me,* she says at the commencement of one of her letters, * it is with the utmost regret that I now complain to you, because I know your good nature that you cannot see any human creature miserable without being sensibly touched ; yet what can I do ? I must unload my heart.' But she was not always, it may be added, in the melting mood. Occasionally she expressed her- self in very different language. It is easy to conceive Swift's embarrassment on having the following mis- sive handed in to him while entertaining a party of friends at the deanery : — I believe you thought I only rallied when I told you the other night that I would pester you with letters. Once more I advise you, if you have any regard for your own quiet, to alter your behaviour quickly, — that is, to visit her more frequently, though he had already told her that scandal was beginning to be busy with their names — for I have too much spirit to sit down contented with this treatment. Pray think cahnly of it I Is it not better to come of yourself tlian to be brought by force, and that perhaps when you have the most agreeable engagement in the world [on allu- sion probably to Esther Johnson], for when I undertake any- thing, I don't love to do it by halves. In a letter written not long afterwards he com- SWIFT IN IRELAND, 1714-1720 145 plains bitterly of the cmbarrassmont which one of her communications had caused. * I received your letter,' he ^vrites, ' when some company was with me on Satur- day, and it put me into such confusion, that I could not tell what to do.' His patience was often, no doubt, severely tried, and his irritation appears occa- sionally to have found sharp expression. But it is clear from his letters that until within a few months of Vanessa's death he studied in every way to soothe and cheer her. What finally parted them we have now no means of knowing. That they parted in anger and were never afterwards reconciled seems certain. It is possible that the habits of intemperance to which ^[iss Vanhomrigh latterly gave way ' may have led to some action or some expression which Swift could neither pardon nor forget. Far be it from any man to speak a harsh or disrespectful word of this unhappy woman. Never, perhaps, has the grave closed over a sadder or more truly tragical life. It is a story which no man of sensibility could possibly follow without deep emotion. But such emotion should not be permitted to blind us to justice and truth. No protest can be too strong against the course adopted by writers like Jeffrey and Thackeray in treating of this portion of Swift's life. They assume that the measure of Vanessa's frenzy is the measure of Swift's culpability. They argue that, because she was infatuated, he was inhuman. They print long extracts from her ravings, and then ask, with indignation, whether there could be two opinions about the man whose conduct had wrought 8uc)\ ' Delany, pp. 128-4. 146 JONATHAN SWIFT wretchedness. Nor is it surprising that they should have carried their point. The world knows that, when women address men in such language as Vanessa addresses Swift, they are not as a rule taking the initiative ; that, if feminine passion is strong, feminine delicacy is stronger ; and that nothing is more im- probable than that a young and eminently attractive woman should, for twelve years, continue, without the smallest encouragement, to force her love on a man who, though double her age, was still in the prime of life. And yet this was most assuredly the case. Vanessa is most sincerely to be pitied, but there is nothing in Swift's conduct to justify the charges which hostile biographers have brought against him. Condemn yo\i him for that tho maid did love him ? So may you blame some fair and crystal river For that some melancholic distracted woman Hath drown'd herself in *t. But it is only right to say that those who have judged him thus harshly have proceeded on an as- sumption which would, if correct, have greatly modified this view of the question. If Swift was the husband of Esther Johnson, it may be admitted, without the smallest hesitation, that his conduct was all that his enemies would represent. It was at once cruel and mean ; it was at once cowardly and treacherous ; it was at once lying and hypocritical. In that case every visit he paid, every letter he wrote, to Miss Van- homrigh subsequent to 1716 was derogatory to him. We may go further. In that case, we are justified in believing the very worst of him, not only in his rela- tions with Stella and Vanessa, but in his relations with men and the world. In that case, there is not ambi- SIVIFT IN IRELAND, 17141720 147 <];nou9 action, either in his public or in his private cnrecr, which does not become pregnant with suspi- cion. For, in that case, he stands convicted of havinfj jiassed half his life in systematically practising, and in compelling the woman he loved to practise sys- tematically, the two vices which of all vices he pro- fessed to hold in the deepest abhorrence. Those who know anything of Swift know with what loathing he .'ilways shrank from anything bearing the remotest resemblance to duplicity and falsehood. As a political pamphleteer he might, like his brother-penmen, allow liimself licence, but in the ordinary intercourse of life it was his habit to exact and assume absolute sincerity. It was the virtue, indeed, on which he ostentatiously prided himself ; it was the virtue by which, in the opinion of those who were intimate with hiin, he was most distinguished. ' Dr. Swift may be described,* observed Bolingbroke on one occa- sion, ' as a hypocrite reversed.' He was never known to tell an untruth. In discussing, therefore, the question of his sup- posed marriage, the point at issue is not simply whether he was the husband of Esther Johnson, but whether we are to believe him capable of acting in a manner wholly inconsistent with his principles and his reputation — in other words, whether we are to believe that a man, whose scrupulous veracity and whose repugnance to falsehood in any form were pro- verbial, would, with the object of concealing what there was surely no adequate motive for concealing, deliberately devise the subtlest and most elaborate system of hypocrisy ever yet exposed to the world. It is scarcely necessary to say that the documents L 2 148 JONATHAN SWIFT bearing on Swift's relations with Esther Johnson are very voluminous, and, from a biographical point of view, of unusual value. We have the verses which he was accustomed to send to her on the anniversary of her birthday. We have the Journal addressed to her during his residence in Ljondon. We have allu- sions to her in his most secret memoranda. We have the letters written in agony to Worral, Stopford, and Sheridan, when he expected that every post would bring him news of her death. We have the prayers which he offered up at her bedside during her last hours ; and we have the whole history of his acquaint- unco with her, written with his own hand while she was lying unburied in her coffin — a history intended for no eye but his own. Now, from the beginning to the end of these documents, there is not one line which could by any possibility be tortured into an indication that she was his wife. Throughout the language is the same. He addresses her as the ' kindest and wisest of his friends.* He described her in his Memoir as * the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with.' In all his letters he alludes to her in similar terms. In the Diary at Holyhead she is his * dearest friend.' At her bedside, when the end was hourly expected, he prays for her as his * dear and useful friend.* * There is not,* he writes to Dr. Stopford on the occasion of Stella's fatal illness, ' a greater folly than that of entering into too strict and particular friendship, with the loss of which a man must be absolutely miserable, but especially at an age when it is too late to engage in a new friendship ; besides, this was a person of my own rearing and instructing from childhood ; but, pardon me, I know SWIFT IN IRELAND, 1714-1720 149 not what I am saying, but, believe me, that :v4f>fent" friendship is much more lasting and engaging than violent love.' If Stella was his wife, could hypocrisy l;o further ? ' It is certain that he not only led all who were acquainted with him to believe that he was unmarried, but, whenever he spoke of wedlock, he ^poke of it as a thing utterly alien to his tastes and inclinations. ' I never yet,' he once said to a gentle- man who was speaking to him about marriage, * saw the woman I would wish to make my wife.* It would be easy to multiply instances, both in his correspond- ence and in his recorded conversation, in which, if he was even formally a married man, he went out of his way to indulge in unnecessary hypocrisy. What, again, could be more improbable than that Esther Johnson, a woman of distinguished piety, nay, a woman whose detestation of falsehood formed, as Swift has himself told us, one of her chief attrac- tions, would, when on the point of death, prefacQ her will with a wholly gratuitous lie ? For not only ' Is it credible that a man could have addrcsf?ed a woman who had, if the theory of the marriage is true, been his wife for four years, in lines like these— lines, we may add, intended for no eyes but her own ? — Thou, Stella, wert no longer young When first for thee my harp was sprung Without one word of Cupid's darts, Of killing eyes or bleeding hearts. With friendship and esteem possess'd I ne'er admitted love a guest. In all the habitudes of life, The friend, the mistress, and the wife, Variety we still pursue. In pleasure seek for something new ; But his pursuits are at an end Whom Stella chooses for a friend. ISO JONATHAN SWIFT is that will signed with her maiden name, but in the first clause she describes herself as an unmarried woman. The external evidence against the marriage appears equally conclusive. If there was any person entitled to speak with authority on the subject, that person was assuredly ^to-J^iglt^y. For twenty-nine years, from the commencement, that is to say, of Swift's intimate connection with Stella till the day of Stella's death, she had been her inseparable companion, her friend and confidant. She had shared the same lodgings with her ; it was understood that Swift and Esther were to have no secrets apart from her. "When they met, they met in her presence ; what they wrote, passed, by Swift's special rcipiest, through her hands. Now it is well known that Mrs. Dingley was convinced that no marriage had ever taken place. The whole story was, she said, an idle tale. Two of Stella's executors, Dr. Corbet and Mr. Itochford, dis- tinctly stated that no suspicion of a marriage had ever even crossed their minds, though tlicy had seen the Dean and Esther together a thousand times. Swift's housekeeper, Mrs. Brent, a shrewd and obser- \j vant woman, who resided at the deanery during the whole period of her nuister's intimacy with Miss Johnson, was satisfied that there had been no mar- riage. So said Mrs. Ridgeway, who succeeded her as housekeeper, and who watched over the Dean in his declining years. Dut no testimony could carry greater wci.-^lit than that of J)r, John Lyon. Jle was one of Swift's most iutnnate friends, and, when the state of the Dean's health was such that it had ))ecome neces- sary to place hiui under surveillance, Lyon was the SWIFT IN IRELAND, 17 14- 1720 151 person selected to undertake the duty. He lived with liim at the deanery ; he had full control over his papers ; he was consequently hrought into contact with all who corresponded with him, and with all who visited him. He had thus at his command every contemporary source of information. Not long after the story was first circulated, he set to work to ascer- tain, if possible, the truth. The result of his investi- gations was to convince him that there was absolutely no foundation for it but popular gossip, unsupported by a particle of evidence. Such is the testimony against the marriage. Let us now briefly review the evidence in its favour. The first writer who mentions it is Orrery, and his words are these : * Stella was the concealed but un- doubted wife of Dr. Swift, and if niy informations are right, she was married to him in the year 1716 by Dr. Ash, then Bishop of Clogher.' ' On this we need merely remark that he offers no proof whatever of what he asserts, though he must have known well enough that what he asserted was contrary to current tradition ; that in thus expressing himself he was guilty of gross inconsistency, as he had nine years before maintained the opposite opinion ; "^ and that there is every reason to believe that he resorted to this fiction, as he resorted to other fictions, with the simple object of seasoning his narrative with the piquant scandal in which he notoriously delighted. The next deponent is Delany,' whose independent testi- ' Bemarks, p. 22. ' See his letter to Deane Swift, dated Dec. 4, 1742 ; Scott, xiz. 336. • Obscrvatiom on Orrery^s Remarks, p. 62 seqq. 152 JONATHAN SWIFT mony would undoubtedly have carried great weight with it. JBut Delan y simply foUowa Orrery, without explain- ing his reason for doing so, without bringing forward anything in proof of what Orrery had stated, and without contril)uting a single fact on his own autho- rity. Then comes Deane Swift/ All that he con- tributes to the question is simply the statement that he was thoroughly persuaded that Swift was married to Stella in or about 1710. But he gives no explana- tion of what induced his persuasion, and admits that there was no evidence at all of the marriage. And, unsatisfactory as his testimony is, it is rendered more so by the fact that some years before he had, in a letter to Lord Orrery, stated that to many the marriage seemed based only ' on a buzz and rumours.' - Such was the story in its lirst stage. In 1780 a new particular was added, and a new authority cited. The new particular was that the marriage took place in the garden ; the new authority was Dr. Samuel ^Madden, and the narrator was Dr. Johnson. Of Gladden it may sutlice to say that there is no proof that he was acquainted either with Swift himself or with any member of Swift's circle ; that in temper and blood he was half French, half Irish ; and that as a writer he is chiefly known as the author of a work wilder and more absurd than the wildest and most absurd of Winston's prophecies or Asgill's paradoxes. On the value of the unsupported testimony of such a person there is surely no necessity for commenting. Next comes Sheridan's account, which, as it adds an incident very much to Swift's discredit, it is necessary ' Essau on the Life and Writings of Swift, p. 02 Sfqq. * Orrery Pajicrs, (luoted by Mr. Ciaik. SWJFT IN IRELAND, 17141720 153 to examine with some care. The substance of it ia this : — that, at the earnest solicitation of Stella, Swift consented to marry her ; that the marriage ceremony was performed without witnesses, and on two con- ditions — first, that they should continue to live separ- ately ; and secondly, that their union should remain a secret ; that for some years these conditions were observed, but that on her death -bed Stella implored Swift to acknowledge her as his wife ; that to this request Swift made no reply, l)ut, turning on his heel, left the room, and never afterwards saw her. The first part of this story he professes to have derived from Mrs. Sican, the second part from his father. We have no right to charge Sheridan with deliberate falsehood, but his whole account of Swift's relations with Miss .Johnson teems with inconsistencies and improbabilities so glaring that it is impossible to place the smallest confidence in what he says. He here tolls us that the marriage had been kept a profound secret ; in another place he tells us that Stella had herself communicated it to Miss Vanhomrigh. He admits that the only unequivocal proof of the marriage is the evidence of Dr. Sheridan, and yet in his account of the marriage he cites as his authority, not Dr. Sheridan, but Mrs. Sican. But a single circumstance is, perhaps, quite sufficient to prove the utterly un- trustworthy character of his assertions. He informs us, on the authority of his father, that -Stella was so enraged by Swift's refusal to acknowledge her as his wife, that to spite and annoy him she bequeathed her ifortune to a public charity. A reference to Swift's correspondence' will show that it was in accordance ' See Swift'B letter to Worral, dated July 15, 1726. 154 JONATHAN SWIFT with his wishes that she thus disposed of her property. A reference to the will itself will show that, so far from expressing ill-will towards him, she left him her strong hox and all her papers. Nor is this all. His statement is flatly contradicted hoth by Delany and by Deane Swift. Delany tells us that he had been informed by a friend that Swift had earnestly desired to acknowledge the marriage^ but that Stella had wished it to remain a secret. Deane Swift assured Orrery, on the authority of Mrs. Whiteway, that Stella had told Sheridan ' that Swift had offered to declare the marriage to the world, but that she had refused.' Again, Sheridan asserts that his father, Dr. Sheridan, was present during tlie supposed conversation between Swift and Stella. Mrs. "Whiteway, on the contrary, assured Deane Swift that Dr. Sheridan was not present on that occasion.' This brings us to the last deponent whose evidence is ^Yorth consideration. In 1789 Mr. Monck-Berkeley ^ brought forward the authority of a Mrs. Hearne, who was, it seems, a niece of Esther Johnson, to prove that the Dean had made Stella his wife. As nothing, however, is known of the history of Mrs. Hearne, and as she cited nothing in corroboration of her statement, except vaguely that it was a tradition among her relatives — a tradition which was, of course, just as likely to have had its origin from the narratives of Orrery and Delany as in any authentic communication — no importance whatever can be attached to it. But the evidence on which Monck-Berkeley chiefly relied was ' For Sheridan's narrative, see section vi. of his Li/c of Swift. ' See Monck-Berkeley's Inquiry into Oic Life of Dean Swift, pre- fixed to his Literary Jielic^, xxvi.-xxix. SWIFT IN IRELAND, 1714-1720 155 not that of Mrs. Hearne. * I was,' he says, * informed l)y the reUct of Bishop Berkeley that her hushand had assured her of the truth of Swift's marriage, as the Bishop of Clogher, who had performed the ceremony, had himself communicated the circumstance to him.' If this could he depended on, it would, of course, settle the question ; hut, unfortunately for Monck-Berkeley, and for ^fonck-Berkeley's adherents, it can be con- clusively proved that no such communication could have taken place. In 1715, a year before the supposed marriage was solemnised, Berkeley was in Italy, where he remained till 1721. Between 171G and 1717 it is certain that the Bishop of Clogher never left Ireland, and at the end of 1717 he died. As for the testimony on which Scott lays so much stress — the story, that is to say, about Mrs. Whiteway having heard Swift mutter to Stella that * if she wished, it should bo owned,' and of having heard Stella sigh back to Swift that * it was too late ' — it need only be observed, first, that it was communicated about seventy years after the supposed words had been spoken, not by the son of Mrs. Whiteway, who, had he known of it or had he attached the smallest importance to it, would have inserted it in his Memoirs of Swiftf but by her grandson, Theophilus Swift, who was the laughing- stock of all who knew him ; ' secondly, it was admitted that those words, and that those words only, had been heard, and that consequently there was nothing to indicate either that the words themselves, or that the ' Those who would understand what Theophilus Swift was would do well to turn to TJic Touch-stotu of Truth uniting Mr. SwifVs kite Correspondence tuith the Rev. Doctor Dobbin and his Family. Such another tool probably never existed out of fiction. 156 JONATHAN SWIFT conversation of which they formed a portion, had any reference to the marriage. How, then, stands the case ? Even thus. Against the marriage we have the fact that there is no docu- mentary evidence of its having been solemnised ; that, so far from there being any evidence of it deducible from the conduct of Swift and Stella, Orrery himself admits that it would be difficult, if not im- possible, to prove that they had ever been alone together during their whole lives. We have the fact that Esther Johnson, at a time when there could have been no possible motive for falsehood, emphatic- ally asserted that she was unmarried : the fact that Swift led every one to believe that he was unmarried : the fact that Esther Johnson's bosom friend and inseparable companion was satisfied that there had been no marriage : the fact that two of Swift's house- keepers, two of Stella's executors, and Dr. Lyon, wore satisfied that there had been no marriage. It is easy to say that all that has been advanced merely proves that the marriage was a secret, and that the secret was well kept. But that is no answer. The question must be argued on evidence; and it is incumbent on those who insist, in the teeth of such evidence as has been adduced, that a marriage was sokinnised, to produce evidence as satisfactory. This they have failed to do. Till they have done so, let us decline to charge Swift with mendacity and hypocrisy, and to convict him of having acted both meanly and treacherously in his dealings with the two women whose names will for all time be bound up with his. In itself it matters not two straws to any one whether Swift was or was not the husband of Stella. But the SIVIFT IN IRELAND, 1714 1720 157 point of importance is this. If he was the husband of Stella, his conduct to Miss Vanhomrigh admits of no defence — it was unmanly and dishonourable. If he was not married to Stella, the fate of her rival leaves no stain on his memory. Moral courage in a man's relations with men is, it is true, quite com- patible with moral cowardice in his relations with women, but that this deplorable anomaly finds illus- tration in Swift is at present uK^re assumption. How- ever, it is too late now to reverse, or even to modify, the verdict of the world. The story of Stella and Vanessa soon passed from essayists and biographers to novelists and poets. Not long after Swift's death appeared, dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, a wretched fiction entitled The Amours and Intr'ujnrH of o certain Irifth Dean, Chaufepie, in his supplements to Bayle's Dictionary, scattered, in an article on Swift, the traditions of Orrery, Delany, and Deane Swift broadcast over Europe. The romance arrested Lessing, who founded on it his famous domestic drama Miss Sara Sampson. Then it was consecrated by the genius of Goethe, and his Stella made it a household word wherever German was spoken. It has formed the plot of more than one romance in French. It is now going the round of Mr. Mudie's readers in a three-volume novel. 158 JONATHAN SWIFT CHAPTER VII IRISH POLITICS * Nothing has convinced me so much that I am of a little suhaltern spirit, inoiVxi atque pusilli animit as to reflect how I am forced into the most trifling amuse- ments to divert the vexation of former thoughts and present objects.' So wrote Swift to Bolingbroke at the end of 1719. And reason, indeed, were his old /. enemies soon to have for exclaiming with the Roman / poet: Utinam his potius nugis tota ilia dedisset Tempora saL>viti£b I With the new year his diversion took another turn. \ In the spring he began to direct his attention seriously ^to Irish affairs. In the summer appeared the pamphlet which opened the war with England. It was entitled .1 Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures^ and its ostensible object was to induce the people of Inland to rely entirely, so far at least as house furniture and wearing apparel wxa-e concerned, on their own industry and on their own produce, and to close their markets against everything wearablt^ which should be imported from England. In the first part of this proposal there was nothing new. IRISH POLITICS 159 It was merely the embodiment of a resolution which had been repeatedly passed by the Irish House of Commons, and passed without opposition from the Crown. It may be doubted whether even the second l)art of the proposal, audacious though it undoubtedly was, would in itself have provoked the English Govern- ment to retaliate. But the ostensible object of the pamphlet, as it requires very little penetration to see, was by no means its only or indeed its chief object. In effect it was a bitter protest against the inhumanity and injustice which had since 1G65 (liar actcrise d the Irish policy of England ; and it was ;in appeal toTfeland to assert her independence in the only way in which fortune had as yet enabled her to assert it. Both as a protest and as an appeal, the pamphlet was equally justified. Even now, on recalling those cruel statutes which completed between 1666 and 1699 the annihilation of Irish trade, it is impos- sible not to feel something of the indignation which burned in Swift. In 1660 there was every prospect that in a few years Ireland might become a happy and prosperous country. Her natural advantages were great. In no regions within the compass of the British Isles w^as the soil more fertile. As pasture land she was indeed to the modern world what Argos was to the ancient. She was not without navigable rivers ; the ports and harbours with which Nature had bountifully provided her were the envy of every maritime nation in Europe ; and her geographical position was eminently propitious to commercial en- terprise. For the first time in her history she was at peace. The aborigines had at last succumbed to the Englishry. A race of sturdy and industrious colonists i6o JONATHAN SWIFT were rapidly changing the face of the country. Agri- culture was thriving. A remunerative trade in live cattle and in miscellaneous farm produce had been opened with England ; a still more remunerative trade in manufiictured wool was holding out prospects still more promising. There were even hopes of an extensive mercantile connection with the colonies. But the dawn of this fair day was soon overcast. Im- pelled partly by jealousy, partly by that short-sighted selfishness which was, in former days, so unhappily conspicuous in her commercial relations with subject states, and partly in accordance with the principles ordinarily regulating her colonial policy, England pro- ceeded to the systematic destruction of Irish com- merce and of Irish industrial art. First came the two statutes forbidding the importation of live cattle and farm produce into England, and Ireland was at once deprived of her chief source of revenue. Then came the statutes which annihilated her colonial trade. Crushing and terrible though these blows were, she still, however, continued to struggle on, crippled and dispirited indeed, but not entirely without heart. But in 1G99 was enacted the statute which completed her ruin. By this she was prohibited from seeking any vent for her raw and manufactured wool except in England and Wales, where the duties imposed on both these commodities were so heavy as virtually to exclude them from the market. The immediate result of this atrocious measure was to turn flourish- ing villages into deserts, and to throw between twenty and thirty thousand able-bodied and industrious artisans on public charity. The ultimate result of all these measures was the comi)lete paralysis of opera- IRISH POLITICS 161 tivc energy, the emigration of the only class who were of benefit to the community, and the commence- ment of a period of unprecedented wretchedness and degradation.' The condition of Ireland between 1700 and 1750 was in truth such as no historian, who was not pre- pared to have his narrative laid aside with disgust and incredulity, would venture to depict. If analogy is to be sought for it, it must be sought in the scenes through which, in the frightful fiction of Monti, the disembodied spirit of Bassville was condemned to roam. In a time of peace the unhappy island suf- f(>red all the most terrible calamities which follow in the train of war. Famine succeeding famine deci-^ mated the provincial villages and depopulated whole regions. Travellers have described how their way has lain through districts strewn like a battlefield with unburied corpses, which lay some in ditches, some on the roadside, and some on heaps of ofTal, the prey of dogs and carrion birds. ^ * I have seen,' says a writer quoted by Mr. Lecky,^ ' the helpless orphan exposed on the dunghill, and the hungry infant sucking ' See The Ptrsmt Miserable State of Ireland, in a letter from a gentleman in Dublin— attributed to Swift and printed in the Appendix to Soott's Swift, vol. i. Ixxxix. scqq^. The chief tracts and letters of Swift bearing on Irish affairs are, in addition to the Proposal and the Drapicr Letters, Two Letters on Subjects Relative to Ireland, Scott, vol. vii. ; The Story of an Injured Lady, id. ; A Short View of the State of Ireland, id. ; Maxims controlled in Ireland, id. ; A Letter to the Archbislioj) of Dublin concerning tlie Weavers, id.; Amwer to a Paper called .a Memorial, id.; A Modest Proposal, id.; Letter to Peterborough, Scott, xvii. 68 ; Sermon Ix. On the Causes of the Wretched Condition of Ireland, « Burdy'8 Life of Skclton, p. 333. • Hiitory of England in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 219. M x63 JONATHAN SWIFT at the breast of the already expired servant.* Even when there was no actual famine, the food of the rustic vulgar was often such as our domestic animals would reject with disgust. Their' ordinary fare was butter- milk and potatoes, and when these failed they were at the mercy of fortune. Frequently the pot of the wretched cottier contained nothing but the product of the marsh and the waste ground. The flesh of a horse which had died in harness, the flesh of woodland vermin, even when corruption had begun to do its revolting work, were devoured voraciously. Burdy ' tells us that these famishing savages would surrei> titiously bleed the cattle which they had not the courage to steal, and, boiling the blood with sorrel, convert the sickening mixture into food. Epidemic diseases, and all the loathsome maladies which were the natural inheritance of men whose food was the food of hogs and jackalsj whose dwellings were scarcely distinguishable from dunghills, and whose personal habits were filthy even to beastliness, raged with a fury rarely witnessed in Western latitudes. Not less deplorable was the spectacle presented by the country itself. ' Whoever took a journey through Ireland,' says Swift, ' would be apt to imagine himself travelling in Lapland or Iceland.' In the south, in the east, and in the west, stretched vast tracks of land untilled and unpeopled, mere waste and solitude. Even where Nature had been most bounteous, the traveller might wander for miles without finding a single habitation, without meeting a single human being, without beholding a ningle trace of human culture. Many of the churches were roofless, the , » Life of Skelton, p. 385. IRISH POLITICS 163 walls still gaping with the breaches which the cannon of Cromwell had made in them. Ahiiost all the old ficats of the nobility were in ruins. In the villages and country towns every object on which the eye rested told the same lamentable story. Much of this misery was undoubtedly to 1)6 at- tributed to the inhabitants themselves. For the al)origines Swift could scarcely find terms sufficiently strong to express his contempt. He always, indeed, denied their title to the denomination of Irishmen, and nothing enraged him more than tlie persistency with which the English Government confounded, under the common name of Irish, the natives and the Knglishry. He regarded it, and perhaps justly, as a manceuvrc employed to thwart and baflle his efforts^ to place Ireland on a footing of equality with Eng- land.' But there was little to choose between them. It was distinction without difference. If the Celt had been exterminated, Celtic infiltration had done its work. Never had co-operation and concord been more neces- sary, but never had civil and religious dissension raged with greater fury than it was raging now. Feuds in religion, feuds in politics, feuds which had their origin in private differences, and feuds which had descended as a cursed heirloom from father to child, rankled in their hearts and inflamed their blood. There was the old enmity between the aborigines and the English ; there was a deadly feud between the Catholics and the Protestants ; there was a feud not less deadly between the Episcopalians and the Non conformists ; while the war between Whig and Tory ' See particularly his letter to Peterborough giving an account of what he had submitted to Walpolc (Scott's Swift, xvii. G8). M 2 l64 JONATHAN SWIFT was prosecuted with a ferocity and malignity scarcely human. * There is hardly a Wliig in Ireland,' wrote Swift to Sheridan, *who would allow a potato and buttermilk to a reputed Tory.' But this was not all. The principal landowners resided in England, leaving as their lieutenants a class of men known in Irish history as Middlemen. It may be doubted whether, since the days of the Roman Publicans, oppression and rapacity had ever assumed a shape so odious as they assumed in these men. The Middleman was, as a rule, entirely destitute of education ; his tastes were low, his habits debauched and recklessly extravagant. Long familiarity with such scenes as have been de- scribed had rendered him not merely indifferent to human suffering, but ruthless and brutal. All the tenancies held under him were at rack-rent, and with the extraction of that rent, or what was, in kind, equiva- lent to that rent, began and ended his relations with his tenants. As many of those tenants were little better than impecunious serfs, often insolvent and always in arrears, it was only by keeping a wary eye on their movements, and by pouncing with seasonable avidity on anything of which they might happen to become possessed, either by the labour of their hands or by some accident of fortune, that he could turn them to account. Sometimes the produce of the potato-plot became his prey, sometimes their agricultural tools ; not unfrequently he would seize everything whicii belonged to them, and, driving them with their wives and children, often under circumstances of revolting cruelty, out of their cabins, send them to perish of cold and hunger in the open country. Nor were the Irish provincial gentry in any way IRISH POLITICS 165 superior to the Middlemen. Swift, indeed, regarded them with still greater detestation. As public men, they were chiefly remarkable for their savage oppres- sion of the clergy, for the mercilessness with which they exacted their rack-rents from the tenantry, and for the mean ingenuity with which they contrived to make capital out of the miseries of their country. In private life they were dissolute, litigious, and arrogant, and their vices would comprehend some of the worst vices incident to man — inhuman cruelty, tyranny in its most repulsive aspects, brutal appetites forcibly gratified, or gratified under circumstances scarcely less atrocious, and an ostentatious lawlessness which revelled unchecked either by civil authority or by religion. But, whatever degree of culpability may attach itself to the inhabitants of Ireland, there can be no (uestion that the English Government were in the LUiin responsible for the existence of this hell. It requires very little sagacity to see that the miseries of Ireland flowed naturally and inevitably from the paralysis of national industry, from the alienation of the national revenue, from the completi; dislocation of the machinery of government, and from the almost total absence, so far at least as the masses were con- cerned, of the influence of civilising culture and re- ligion, lleference has already been made to the sta- tutes which annihilated the trade and prostrated the industrial energy of the country. Equally iniquitous and oppressive was the alienation of the revenue. On that revenue had been quartered the parasites and mistresses of succeeding generations of English kings. Almost all the most remunerative public posts were i66 JON A THAN S WIFT sinecures in the possession of men who resided in England. Indeed, some of these sinecurists had never set foot on Irish earth. But nothing was more dero- gatory to England than the scandalous condition of the Protestant hierarchy. On that body depended not only the spiritual welfare but the education of the multitude, and their responsibility was the greater in consequence of the inhibitions which had been laid by the Legislature on the Catholic priesthood. But the Protestant clergy were, as a class, a scandal to Christendom. Many of the bishops would have dis- graced the hierarchy of Henry III. Their ignorance, their apathy, their nepotism, were proverj^ial. It was not uncommon for them to abandon even the sem- blance of their sacred character, and to live the life of jovial country squires, their palaces ringing with revelry, their dioceses mere anarchy. If their seis were not to their taste, they resided elsewhere. Thu Bishop of Down, for example, settled at Ilammersmitli, where he lived for twenty years without having oni*e during the whole of that time set foot in his dioceseJ That tliere were a few noble exceptions must injustice be admitted. No chitrchman could pronounce the . names of Berkeley, King, and Synge without rever- ence. But the virtues of these illustrious prelates had little influence either on their degenerate peers or on the inferior clergy. Of this body it would not be too much to say that no section of the demoralised society of which they formed a part was more demo- ralised or so completely despicable. Here and there indeed might be found a priest who resided among his • See for all this Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century (ii. 2.S1-235), and the authorities quoted by him. IRISH POLITICS 167 parishioners, and who performed conscientiously the duties of his profession. Such a priest was Skelton, and such a priest was Jackson, but Skelton and Jackson were to the general body of the minor clergy what Dr. Primrose was to Trulliber, or what the parson in the Canterbury Tales is to the parson in Pcre(fr\ne IHvkle. Few men could have contemplated unmoved the spectacle of a country in such a condition as this. Its effect on Swift was to excite emotions which in ordinary men are seldom excited save by personal injuries. It fevered his blood, it broke his rest, it drove him at times half-frantic with furious indigna- tion, it sunk him at times in abysses of sullen de- spondency. He brooded over it in solitude ; it is his constant theme in his correspondence ; it was his constant topic in conversation. He spoke of it as eating his flesh and exhausting his spirits. For a while he cherished the hope that these evils, vast and complicated though they were, were not beyond remedy. And this remedy lay, he thought, not in appealing to the justice and humanity of the English Government, for such an appeal he knew would be vain, but in appeal- ing to the Irish themselves, to the landed gentry, to the middlemen, to the manufacturer's, to the clergy. Throughout his object was twofold — the internal re- formation of the kingdom, and the establishment of the principle that Ireland ought either to be autono- mous or on a footing of exact political equality with the mother-country. His first pamphlet, the Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish MannfacturcSf is a masterpiece. Ad- dressed, in what it' insinuates, to the pasBions, and in I6a JONATHAN SWIFT what it directly asserts, to the reason, it is at once an inflammatory harangue and a manual of sober counsel. In a few plain paragraphs the secret of Ireland's wretchedness is laid bare, how far it is in her power to alleviate that wretchedness is demon- strated, and the step which ought immediately to be taken is pointed out. In the proposal that she should close her markets against EngUsh goods and draw entirely on her own manufactures there was nothing treasonable or even disrespectful to England. It was no more than she had a perfect right to do ; it was no more than the EngHsh Government would probably have permitted her to do. But the pamphlet had another side. Though there is not perhaps a sentence in it which could, so far as the mere words are concerned, have been challenged as either in- flammatory or insulting, the whole piece is in effect a lierce and bitter commentary on the tyranny of the mother-country, and an api)eal to Ireland to strike, if not for indei)endence, at least for indenniity. The pamphlet, though it appeared, as almost all Swift's pamphlets did appear, anonymously, instantly at- tracted attention. The English Government became alarmed. The work was pronounced to be * seditious, factious, and virulent,* and the attention of Whitshed, then Chief Justice of Ireland, was directed to it. Whit- shed, who had little sympathy with Irish agitation, and who was probably acting on instructions from England, proceeded at once to extreme measures. The pamphlet was laid before the Grand Jury of the county and the city. The printer was arrested. The trial came on, and a disgraceful scene ensued. The jury acquitted the prisoner. The Chief Justice refused to accept the IRISH POLITICS 169 verdict, and the jury were Bent back to reconsider tlieir decision. Again they found the man not guilty, and again Whitshcd dechned to record the verdict. Nine times was this odious farce repeated, until the wretched men, worn out by physical fatigue, left the case by special verdict in the hands of the judge. But AVhitHlicd's iniquitous triumph was merely nominal, for his conduct had excited such disgust that it was deemed advisable to put off the trial of the verdict. Successive postponements terminated at last in the Lord Lieutenant granting a nolle prosequi. Such a concession to popular feeling the Enghsli Government had never before nuuh;. It was a victory on which the Irish justly congratulated themselves. It was a victory destined, indeed, to form a new era in tlieir history. Nothing we know of Swift illustrates more ntrikhigly his tact and sagacity as a political leader than his conduct at this juncture. A less skilful strategist would, in the elation of triumph, have been impatient for new triumphs, would have lost no time in pressing eagerly forward, and would thus have forced on a crisis when a crisis was premature. But Swift saw that affairs were at that stage when the wisest course is to leave them to themselves. The lire had been kindled— it might be safely trusted to spread ; the leaven of dissatisfaction and resistance was seething — it was best to leave it to ferment. Up to a certain point the course of revolution is deter- mined by human agency, but in all revolutions there is a point at which human agency is powerless, and the reins are in the hands of Fortune. At such crises occur those apparently insignificant accidents, the effects of which are so strangely disproportionate to I70 JONATHAN SWIFT the character of the accidents themselves, and which are to pohtical communities what the spark is to comhustible explosives. Such a crisis had not as yet arrived in the struggle between England and Ireland, but for such a crisis — and he saw it was maturing — Swift deemed it expedient to wait. He employed the interval in serving Ireland in another way. The mania for commercial adventures, which originating in Law's Mississippi Scheme had culminated in the South Sea Bubble, was now in- vading Dublin. Among other schemes, a project was formed for estabUshing a National Bank, and was regarded with favour by some of the leading citizens and many of the petty tradesmen in Dublin. But Swift saw that an institution eminently useful, and indeed necessary, in a prosperous community could only end in ruin and mischief in a community where Btoek is incommensurate with credit, lie determined, therefore, to oppose the scheme ; and ridicule was his weapon. Two pamphlets bearing the signature of Thomas Hope were soon in circulation. Introducing, by an K&m\j on Kufilinh JiuhblcHy a project for estab- lishing a Swearer's Bank, Mr. Hope proposes to raise a revenue by enforcing the Act against profane language. The line for swearing was, he reminds his Riders, one shilling, and of the two million who made up the population of Ireland one-half might be fairly computed as swearing souls. Of these it might ))e safely assumed that live thousand were gentlemen, everyone of whom could afford an oath a day. This would yield a yearly produce of 1,825,000 oaths; which, at a shilling each, would amount annually to 91,250/. Twenty-live thousand a year might be IRISH POLITICS 171 expected from the farmers, who, if reckoned at 10,000, would surely be equal to the annual expen- diture of 500,000 oaths. Provision for a sufticient number of informers would constitute, no doubt, a serious item in the expenses of the Bank, but, allowing for them and for all other necessary deductions, there would remain from these and other sources a clear yearly sum of 100,000/., ' which,' says Mr. Hope, * may very justly claim a million subscription.* As the projector's motives are purely patriotic, and as his scheme is desi<^ned solely for the benefit of the nation, he proposes that the Bank should be erected on par- liamentary security. And, * to take away all jealousy of any private view of the undertaker, he assures the world that he is now in a garret, in a very thin waistcoat, studying the public good ; having given an undeniable pledge of his love to his country by pawning his cloak in order to defray the expense of the press.' Swift's satire was effective. The project for a National Bank was rejected by the House of Commons in the ensuing Session. These pamphlets were succeeded a few months afterwards by a little piece in which the extraor- dinary versatility of Swift's genius is very 'strikingly and very amusingly illustrated. The streets of Dublin had for several years been infested with gangs of marauders, whose depredations and violence made them the terror of the citizens. A man who ventured out unarmed at night carried, it was said, his life in his hands. Scarce a week passed without some gross outrage. At such a pitch, indeed, had their lawless- ness and audacity arrived, that it bad become perilous 17a JONATHAN SWIFT even in broad daylight to walk in any but the most frequented thoroughfares. Conspicuous among these miscreants was one Ebenezer Elliston. The fellow had long succeeded in eluding the pohce, but had recently been captured and publicly executed. In itself, however, the execution would probably have had very little effect, for the class to which Elliston belonged is, as a rule, either too sanguine or too obtuse to take warning from example. But on the very day of the execution appeared, in the form of a broadsheet, an announcement which carried terror and dismay into every rookery in Dublin. This was the Last Speech and Dyiny Worth of Kbenezer KllistoHf published,- as was stated on the title-page, by his own desire, and for the public good. In it he not only solemnly exhorted his brother-bandits to amend their lives, and to avoid the fate which had most righteously overtaken himself, and would in the end inevitably overtake them, but he informed them that, having resolved to atone in some measure for his own crimes against God and society, he had thought it his duty to do what in him lay to assist the Government in suppressing the crimes of others. 'For that purpose, I have,' he said, 'left with an honest man the names of all my wicked brethren, the l)resent places of their abode, with a short account of the chief crimes they have committed. I have like- wise set down the names of those we call our setters, of the wicked houses we frequent, and of those who receive and buy our stolen goods.' He then goes on to say that the person with whom the paper had been deposited would, on hearing of the arrest of any rogue whose name was mentioned in it, place the document IRISH POLITICS 175 in the hands of the Government. * And of this,' he adds, * I hereby give my companions fair and public warning, and hope they will take it.' As Elliston was known to be a man of education, and as the information displayed in the piece was such as it seemed scarcely possible that any one who was not in the secrets of Elliston's fraternity could possess, the genuineness of the confession was never for a moment doubted. Its effect was, we are told, immediately apparent. Brigandism lost heart ; many of the lead- ing bandits quitted the city ; and the Dean was en- abled to boast that Dublin enjoyed, for a time at least, almost complete immunity from the most formidable of social pests. And now arrived, suddenly and unexpectedly, that crisis in the struggle with England which Swift had with judicious patience been so long awaiting. For some years there had been a great scarcity of copper money, and the deficiency had le Meanwhile he was putting the finishing touches to that itnmortal satire, the fame of which has thrown all ins other writings into the shade. At what pre- cise time he commenced the composition of GnUirer is not known. It was originally designed to form a portion of the work projected by the Scriblerus Glub in 1714 ; and, if it was not commenced then, it was in all probability commenced shortly after- wards. He had certainly made Bome progress in it 202 JONATHAN SWIFT as early as the winter of 1721, for we find allusion to it in a letter of Bolingbroke^s dated January, 1721, and in a letter of Miss Vanhomrigh's, undated, but written probably about the same time. There can be little doubt, therefore, that the work was far advanced before his visit to Quilca at the end of 1724, and we know from his correspondence that during that visit — a visit which extended over the greater part of a year — the manuscript was seldom out of his hands. Between that date and the date of publication it appears to have undergone repeated revisions. Many passages, lor example, must almost certainly have been inserted during his residence in England. Indeed, I am in- clined to suspect that it was to his residence in England that the satire owed much of its local colour- ing. Nor is it at all surprising that Gtdiwer should have occupied Swift's thoughts for many years, and should have been the result of patient and protracted 'labour. It would be easy to point to lictions which / iu. wealth of imagination and fancy, in humour, iu wit, in originality, would suffer nothing from com- parison with Swift's masterpiece. Such in ancient times would be the ]\irds and the True Art of Writiu 8^, &v T^ irpC»70V y^itiZos, &\Ao h\ % tovtov tyros iydyKij thai fl ytyiaQai % wpoadtiyai' 5 despicable and ridiculous, medicine as mere charla- tanry, and experimental philosophy as an idle and silly delusion — in a word, toj)our contempt ojQl. thoM pursuits and faculties on which the intellectual supremacy of man ih based. Not less sophistical an-l disingenuous is tliu dv> ue employed by him in tlu VoxjLVje to the ILuiffhnhnmH for dethroning his kimi from their moral supremacy. We hcTe find hlni assigning to beasts, the qualitiescharacteristic of nun. and assigning to men the qualities characteristic ot beasts, that men may by comparison with beasts b. degraded, and that beasts may by comparison will men be exalted. In the brutal passages ridiculin tiie construction of the human body the satire glanct from the creature to the Creator, and is in truth ;i impious as it is absurd. It is when we compart- work like this with such works as the Apohujie d Haimond Schond ' and the Esnatj on Man that its riai character becomes at once apparent. '^The aim both of Montaigne and of Pope was, like that oT S wift, U^ \ mortify human pride, to show how little, how despi able, how helpless a creature is nrarm -But tb. Exposure of human infirmities iind human emu rested on no * basis of misanthropy.* It was a meai to an end — and a noble end. Montaigne's object \\ to teach us that all is vain but faith and grace, ai that we are to live not by the senses and the rea> ' It is curious that none of Pope's commentators should li noticed how groally he was indebted to this remarkable E.- Swift has also drawn on it. X VISIT TO ENGLAND 211 but by tbe spirit. He humbled man that he mip;ht exalt him. Pope's object was to teach us the secret of success and happiness by teachinj^ us to know ourselves, and to know our place in the scheme of creation. If he rebuked man's pride, he never \ forf];ot man's dignity. If he reminded us that W(^ !^\ ^ are below angels, he reminded us that we are above o^h^ brutes. But it is necessary to distinguish. What ap plies to the last two Voyages does not as a ruleaj)ply to the first two. In the Vojjofir to IJII{])i(t the saHPiv^'hich is more locaramT^^-sonal than in any othci^jiortion \/ of the work, is, as a rule, as just as it is temperate. ' If we catch the note of the later strain, it is only in subdued tones here and there. The humour is exquisite, and, though pungent, often playful, and seldom flavoured with the bitterness so characteristic of what follows. In the next Voyage another chord is Bti'uck. The satire becomes more general, and has gathered intensity and vehemence. It is here for the first time that the snrm indhjnaiio begins to find ex- pression, that the misanthrope declares himself. But the warfare is legitimate, and if it be vengeance it is justice. Nothing could be more admirable than ! the conversation between GuUiver and the King of Brobdingnag, who appears to represent Swift's ideal of a patriot king, or than the description of the consti- tution, habits, and customs of Brobdingnag. Many passages recall and might have been suggested by More's inimitable romance. If the work be regarded merely as a satire, it is not perhaps too much to say that in condensed and sustained power it has neither equal nor second among human productions. But it p 2 312 JONATHAN SWIFT is a satire the philosophy and moraUty of which \ not for a moment bear serious examination. The work appeared anonymously early in Nov* ber, 1720. It became instantly popular. ^Vit! a week the first edition was exhausted. A Sic* , edition speedily followed, but before the second v ready pirated copies of the iirst were in circulati in Ireland, and the work was traversing Great Brit, in all directions in the cohnnns of a weekly jouri No one has, I think, noticed that (JuUircr was reprint in successive instalments in a contemporary newspa] called Pai'ker'H Penny Past, between November i 1720, and the following spring— a sulhcient indicali of the opinion formed of it by those who are bt acquainted with the popular taste, and probably i; first occasion on which the weekly press was ai)pli to such a purpose. In France it was read \vi avidity, and a few weeks after its appearance portit) of it were twice dramatised.* But, thougli the work appealed to all, it ;i pealed in dilferent ways. By the multitude it w read, as it is read in the nurseries and playrooi of our more enlightened age, with wondering ci dulity. But the avidity with which it was devour by readers to whom the allegory was nothing ai the story everything was equalled by the avidi with which it was devoured by readers to wli< the allegory was supreme and the story purely su ordinate. At Court and in political circles it \\ read and (pioted as no satire since IfniUbras had bet To them Flimnapand Munobi, Skyresh Bolgolamai • Lady Bolingbroku to Swift, in a letter undated, but apparent written about February 17H^. VISIT TO ENGLAND 213 Reldresal, the Tramecksan and Slamecksan, the Bip- endians and Little-endians, the Sardrals and the Nardacs, the two FrelockB and Mully Ully Gue, wore what the caricatures of Gilray were, fifty years later, to the Court of George III. The circumstances which led to the flight of Gulliver from Lilliput, and the account given of the natives of Tribnia, must have come home with peculiar force and pungency to readers who could remember the proceedings which led to the imprisonment of Harley and the flight of Bolingbroko and Ormond, and in whose memories the trial of Atterbury was still fresh. To us the schemes pro- pounded in the Academy of Lagado have no more point than the schemes wliich occupied the courtiers of Queen Entelechy ; but how pregnant, how pertinent,\ how exquisite must the satire have appeared to readers who were still smarting from the Bubble-mania, who had been shareholders in the Society for Trans-, muting Quicksilver into Malleable Metal, or in tha Society for Extracting Silver from Lead ! Nor was the satire in its broader aspect less keenly relished. Aristotle has observed that the measure of a man's moral degradation may be held to be complete when he sees nothing derogatory in joining in the gibe against himself. And what is true of an hidi- vidual is assuredly true of an age. At no period dis- tinguished by generosity of sentiment, by humanity, by decency, by any of the nobler and finer qualities of mankind, could such satire as the satire of which the greater part of Gulliver is the embodiment have been universally applauded. Yet bo it was. The men and women of those times appear to have seen nothing objectionable in an apologue which would 214 JONATHAN SWIFT scarcely have passed without protest in the Rome of Petronius. The Queen and the Princess of Wales were in raptures with it. One nohle lady facetiously iden- tified herself with the Yahoos ; another declared that her whole life had been lost in caressing the worse part of mankind, and in treating the best as her foes. And so surely could Swift rely on the most disgusting passages of his work being to the taste of the ladies of the Court, that in a private letter to one of the Maids of Honour he not only referred facetiously to one of its most hidecent passages, but added to the indecency. Here and there, indeed, a reader miglit he found wlio was of opinion that the satire was too .strongly llavoured with misanthropy,' but such readers were altogether in the minority. It is remarkable that even Arbuthnot, though he objected to Laputa, expressed no dissatisfaction with the To/y^/^c io the llouyhnhinus. Nearly three months before the publication of Gullii'ir Swift had quitted London for Dublin. His departure had been hastened by the terrible news that the calamity which uf all calamities he dreaded most was imminent. The health of ^liss Johnson had long been faiUng, and had latterly aftbrded matter for grave anxiety. Shortly after Swift's arrival in England alarming symptoms had begun to develop themselves. For a while, however, his friends in Dublin had mercifully concealed the worst, and for a while his fears were not unmingled with hope. At last he knew the worst. She was on the point of death. His grief was such as absolutely to unnerve and unman him. The letters written at this time to ' See Young, Conjectures on Orujinal Compusitioii. VISIT TO ENGLAND 215 Sheridan, Worral, and Stopford ' exhibit a state of mind pitiable in the extreme. 'Ever since I left you,' he writes, * my heart has been so sunk that 1 have not been the same man nor ever shall be again, but drag on a wretched Ufe till it shall please God to call me away.' And again, when he expected to hear that ehe had passed away : ' Judge in what a temper I write this. ... I have been long weary of the world, and shall for my small remainder of years be weary of life, having for ever lost that conversation which could only make it tolerable.' But the blow was not to fall yet. Esther Johnson rallied, and Swift again visited England. He arrived in London with impaired health and with a mind ill at ease. Nor was the life on which he now entered at all calculated to remedy the mis- chief. His great work appeared. His popularity and fame were at their height, and he soon found that he had to pay the full price for his position. Neither friends nor strangers allowed him any jieacc. At Twickenham Pope teased him to death about the corrected edition of Gulliver and about the third volume of the Miscellanies. Gay, busy with the licfiffar^s Opera f sought anxiously to profit from his criticism ; and, if tradition is to be trusted, the drama which owed its existence to Bwift's suggestion owes to his pen two of its most famous songs,'^ In London and at Dawley he was subjected to persecutions of another kind. Peterborough and Harcourt were eager to negotiate an understanding with Walpole. Boling- broke and Pulteney sought to engage him in active ' Letters between July 8 and July 26, 1720. ' The song beginning • Through all the employments of life,' and that beginning ' Since laws were made for every degree.' 2l6 JONATHAN SWIFT co-operation with the Opposition. The Opposition were now high in hope. The death of the King couM he no remote event ; and it was confidently hehevtc! that with the accession of the Prince of Wales tlu supremacy of Walpole would he at an end and that the Muiistry would he reconstructed. The person who was popularly supposed to direct the counsels oi the Prince was Mrs. Howard, the declared enemy ci Walpole, the staunch ally of the faction opposed tt > him. That Swift shared in some measure the hopt - of his friends is very likely. With Mrs. Howard h. was on terms of close intimacy. Before his arrival in England he had frequently corresponded with her. During his residence in England he regularly visited her. At Leicester House he had heen received with marked favour, and the Princess had gone out of hei- way to pay him attention. He had thus ample reason for supposing that, if affairs took the turn which hi> friends anticipated, the prize which had twice hefori eluded him would again he within his grasp. Hr said, indeed, that he was too old to enter into new schemes, and we know from his correspondence how greatly ill-health and private anxieties were depressing' him. But his pen was not idle. To contrihute to the downfall of a mhiister whose treatment of him had not heen very different from the treatment for which he had eighteen years hefore made Godolphin and Somers pay so heavy a price must have heen a congenial task. At the suggestion of Bolinghroke he hegan a letter to the Craftsmaii, in which he significantly reminded Walpole that it was a grievous mistake in a great minister to neglect or despise, much more to irritate, men of genius and VISIT TO ENGLAND 217 learning.' Suddenly — far more suddenly than ^vas expected — occurred the event on which so much de- pended. On JuneJjO the-Jiin^ died. Swift remained in London during that period of intense excitement which intervened hetween the preferment of Sir Spencer Compton and the re-estahlishment of Walpolc. He kissed tlie hands of the new King and the new Queen, made a scathing attack on the tottering minister's character and conduct,^ saw in a few days that all was over, and then hurried off, sick and weary, to hury himself, first in Pope's study at Twickenham, and then at Lord Oxford's country seat at Wimpole. At the end of Septemher he ahruptly quitted England for ever. Of his last days on this side of the Channel a singularly interesting record has within the last few years come to light. On arriving at Holyhead ho found himself too late for the Duhlin packet. Un- favourahle weather set in, and he was detained for upwards of a week in what was then the most com- fortless of British seaports. During that week he amused himself with scribhling verses and with keep- ing a diary. The manuscript of this diary came into the possession of the late Mr. Fo^-ster, and is pre- served in the Dyce and Forster Library at South Ken- sington. It was edited and published by the present writer in the Gentleman's Ma(jazinc for June, 1882, and it has since been printed by ^[r. Craik."* Ita records are of no interest in themselves, but are » Letter to the Writer of t)xc Occmional Paper {Works, x. 329). « To this period almost certainly belongs the attack on Walpole in the Account of the Court and Empire of Japan {Works, x, 337). " Life of Swift, Appendix IX. 2i8 JONATHAN SWIFT curiously illustrative of the temper and habits of Swift. lie givt'H a full account of all that occurred to him shice leaving Chester on September 22, enter- ing with minute particularity into every detail of liis daily experience, what ho ate and drank, what lu Haw, where he walked, what he dreamt, and * all i\\'\^ to divert thinking.' In reading the journal it is im- pOHHible not to he struck with its rcHomblance to thti diary kept by Byron at Ravenna. In both there is the same contrast between what appears on the sur- face and what is beneath. Jn both cases the sanu' listless wretchedness takes refuge in the same laborious trifling. iJolh are the soliloquies of men who are us weary of. themsilves as they are weary of the world, and who clutch desperately at every expedient for escaping reflection and for killing time, sometimes by investing trifles with adventitious importance, some- times by indulging half-ironically in a sort of humor- ous self-analysis, sometimes by dallying lazily with idlt- fancies. / The death of Esther Johnson, in January, 1728, ^Xdissolved the only tie which bound Swift to life. It I r^iad been long expected, but when the end came it •\must have come suddenly, for, though in Dublin, he was not with her. With pathetic minuteness he has himself recorded the circumstances under which he heard of his irreparable loss. It was late in tlu- evening of Sunday, January 28. The guests who were in the habit of assembling weekly at the deanery on that evening were round him, and it was nearly midnight before he could be alone with his sorrow. How that sad night was passed was known to none until he had himself been laid in the grave. VISIT TO ENGLAND 219 Then was found among his papers that most touching memorial of his grief and love— the Munoir awl Character of Esther Johuaon. Firmly and calmly, had the desolate old man met the calamity which a few months hcfore he had dcscrihed himself as not daring to contemplate. That night he commenced the narrative which tells the story of her in whose collin was huried all that made existence tolerahle to him. And regularly as each night came round he appears to have resumed his task. There is some- thing almost ghastly in the contrast hetween the smooth and icy flow of the chronicle itself and the terribly pathetic significance of the parentheses which mark the stages in its composition. * This,' he. writes on the night of the 80th, * is the night of the funeral, which my sickness will not suffer me to attend. It is now nine o'clock, and I am removed into another compartment that I may not see the light in the church, which is just over the window of my hed- chamher.' Sorrow and despair have many voices, hut seldom have they found expression bo affecting as in those calm and simple words. It is said that her name was never afterwards known to pass his lips. When, seventeen years later, his own coffin had been laid beside hers, his executors found in his desk a lock of hair with four words written on the paper which wrapped it. The hair was Stella's ; the words, * Only! a woman's hair.' Se non piangi, di che piahger snoli ? 220 JONATHAN i^WIFl CHAPTER IX UFE IN IRELAND— LAST DAYS AND DEATH I The biography of Swift from the death of Esther Johnson to the hour in which his own eyes closed on the world is a tragedy sadder and more awful than any of those pathetic fictions which appal and intlt us on the stage of Sophocles and Shakespeare. The iibtressing malady under which he laboured never for ong relaxed its grasp, and when the paroxysms weri^ not actually on him the daily and hourly dread of their return was scarcely less agonising. In that [malady he thought he discerned the gradual but in- icvitable approacli of a calamity which is of all the calamities incident to man the most frightful to con- template. Over his spirits hung the cloud of profound and settled melancholy. His wretchedness was witli- out respite and without alloy. When he was not under the spell of dull, dumb misery, he was on the rack of furious passions. SeiiBe of intolerable wrong, And whom he scorned, those only strong ; Thirst of revenge, the powerless will Still bullied and yet burning still, For aye entenipesting anew The \nifathoniable hell within. LAST DAYS AND DEATH 221 His writinf:js and correspondence exhibit a mind per- petually oscillating between unutterable despair and demoniac raj^e, between a misanthropy bitterer and more savage than that which tore the heart of Timon, and a sympathy with suffering humanity as acute and gensitive as that which vibrated in liousseau and Shelley. It was not until the accession of George II. that Swift fully realised the hopelessness of effecting any reform in Ireland. Ilis second interview with Walpole had convinced him that, so long as that minister was at the head of affairs, the policy of England would remain unchanged, that a deaf ear would be turned to all appeals, all protests, all suggestions. The new reign would, he had hoped, have placed the reins of government in new hands. It had, on the contrary, confirmed the supremacy of Walpole, and the fate of Ireland was sealed. ]3ut what enraged him most was the consciousness that his efforts to awaken in the Irish themselves the spirit of resistance and reform had wholly failed. None of his proposals had been carried out, none of his warnings had been heeded. All was as all had been before. An ignoble rabble of sycophants and slaves still grovelled at the feet of Power. Corruption and iniquity pervaded the whole public service ; the two Houses still swarmed with the tools of oppression ; and the country, which his genius and energy had for a moment galvanised into life, had again sunk torpid and inert into the degra- dation in which he had found her. In the provinces was raging one of the most frightful famines ever known in the annals of the peasantry. Never, perhaps, in the whole course of her melancholy history 322 JONATHAN SWIFT was the condition of Ireland more deplorable than at the beginning of 1729.' All this worked like poison in Swift's blood, and, like the cleaving mischief of the fable, tortured him without intermission till torture ceased to be possible. But the savage indignation which the spectacle of English misgovernment excited in him. was now fully equalled by the disdain and loathing with which he regarded the sufferers them- selves. Towards the aborigines his feelings had never been other than those of repulsion and contempt, mingled with the sort of pity which the humane feel for the sufferings of the inferior animals. As a politician he looked upon them pretty much as Prospero looked upon Caliban, or as a Spartan legis- lator looked upon the Helots.' On the regeneration of the Englishry dtjpended, in his opinion, the regem- ration of the whole island. It was in their interests that he had laboured. It was on their co-operation that he had relied. It was to them that he had appealed. And he had found them as frivolous, ah impracticable, as despicable, as their compatriots. The hatred with which Swift in his latter years regarded Ireland and its inhabitants recalls in its in- tensity and bitterness the hatred with which Juvenal appears to have regarded the people of Egypt and 1 )ante the people of the Yal d' Arno. It resembled a consuming passion. It overflowed, we are told, in his conversation, it glows at white heat in his writings, it flames out in his correspondence. 'It is time for me,' he says in one place, * to have done with the world, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.' He is * in a cursed, oppressed, miserable ' See IJouUer's letters between November, 1728, aiul October, 17'2',>. LAST DAYS AND DEATH 223 country, not made so l)y nature, but by the slavish, helUsh principles of an execrable prevailing faction.' He is surrounded * by slaves and knaves and fools, ^ in a country which is * a wretched dirty dog-hole ; a prison, but good enough to die in.' Man ' he hates more than a toad, a viper, a wasp, a stork, a fox, or any other that you will please to add.' He is ' worn out with years and sickness and rage against all public proceedings ; ' and * what has sunk his spirits more than years nnd sickness is reflecting on the most execrable corruptions that run through every branch of public nmnagement.' * !My llesh and bones,' he furiously exclaims in another letter, 'are to be carried to Holyhead, for 1 will not lie in a country of slaves.' His serious writings during the whole of tl period between the death of Stella and the time at which he sank into fatuity have one note — rage and despair. In A Short View of the State of Ireland^ published in the middle of 1727, he again drew the attention of England to the horrors and calamities for which she was responsible. But the words h( sowed he was sowing, as ho well knew, on the wind. Then his pleas and his protests clothed theraselve? in the ghastly irony of the Modest Proposal^ and England answered that she appreciated the humour and enjoyed the joke. Next he turned furiously on his old enemies the Bishops. In 1731 two Bills had been brought forward — one for the purpose of enforc- ing clerical residence and compelling the clergy to build houses upon their glebes, the other for sub- dividing large livings into as many portions as the Bishops should advise. It is not easy to see what was mischievous or unreasonable in these proposals. But 234 JONATHAN SWIFT Swift, tearing them to pieces in two Bavage pamphlets/ denounced them as designed to enslave and beggar the clergy, and as having taken their birth from Hell. Nor did the Bishops escape without castigation. The fathers of the Church have seldom stood in such a pillory as we find them standhig in Judas and in The Irish JUshops.'^ From the Bishops he turned to the Dissenters. Any indulgence to the Dissenters, any attempt to relax the stringency of the Test Act, had even in his calmer days brought him instantly into the arena. But his hostility was now inflamed by other causes ; his opposition had new motives. The Government were almost pledged to hululgence, the Whig Bishops to a man were in favour of it. In resisting such a measure he would therefore be annoy- ing and embarrassing his political enemies, and have at the same time the peculiar satisfaction of assuming the championship of the Church against its natural defenders. Between 1731 and 1731 measures were taken for introducing a Bill, and a memorial was drawn up for presentation to the Privy Council."* Then Swift opened fire. He began by reprinting his Presbyterian Plea of Merit, and went on to produce his Narrative of the Several Attempts ivJiieJi have tteen made for a Pupcal of the Saeramental Test, following it up next year by his bitterly ironical Adranta(/es Pro- 2>osed by ItepeaUny the Saeramental Test. This was suc- ceeded by his Queries coneerniny the Saera)nental Test and his Peasons hunddy offered to the Parliament of ' On the Bill for the Clergy Residing on their Livings (Scott, ix. 5), and Considerations upon the Two Bills (Id. p. 13). - Scott, X. 2Grt, and xiv. 525. • For all this see Boulter's Letters, ii. 85-90. LAST DAYS AND DEATH 225 Ircl'wd for Rcpcalinfi the Sacramental Test in Favour of the Catholics. The contempt and ridicule which he poured on the unfortunate sectaries and their advocates lost no point when embodied in verse." His efforts had been successful, and a larfje majority in the Irish House of Commons were firm for the Test Act. He now fought the battle of the Church on another field — aji^ainst the landlords and a<:;ainst the Parliament. Towards the close of 1783 a Bill had been presented in the Commons for the encouragement of the linen manufacture, containing a clause for limiting, by a modus, the tithe payable on flax and hemp. As flax was the staple commodity of Ireland, the proposed commutation would have affected seriously the in- comes of the inferior clergy, entailing a loss of two parts in three of the legal tithe. Swift therefore opposed the Bill in a most powerful pamphlet,^ and joined with others in a petition presented to the House of Commons, The result was a compromise, and a compromise which was not satisfactory. And now began liis war with the Irish House of Commons. There appears at this time to have been a determined attempt on the part of the landlords to resist the claims of the clergy. The contest centred on the tithe of pasturage, or, as it was technically called, the tithe of agistment. It was resisted on all sides. Several suits instituted by defrauded clergymen were pending in the Court of Exchequer. The burdens of this tithe fell principally on the great graziers ' See the poem lirotJwr Protestants and Fellotv Christians (Scott, X. 632). « Smm Ueasons against the Bill for settling the Tythe of Hemp and Flax by a Modus (Scott, x. 29). Q 226 JONATHAN SWIFT and the great landlords, many of whom had a seat in the House of Commons. At their instigation resolutions were paRsed against the claims for tin; purpose of intimidating the clergy from instituting suits and the coarts of law from deliberating upon them. Of the illegality and gross injustice of sucli proceedings there could be no question. A more flagrant opposition of power to right could scarcely be conceived. By these persecutions many of the clergy were all but ruined. A very cruel case canic prominently into public notice. A Mr. Throp, who had refused to surrender to the patron of his living', one Colonel Waller, Home of its most important rights, was so harassed and broken by lawsuits, assaults, and arrests, that his health sank under them and he died. Upon that his brother pre- sented a petition to Parliament, stating the case against the Colonel, and praying that the House, considering the atrocity of Waller's conduct, would, though Waller was a member of their body, waive their privilege, and allow proceedings by arrest to be taken against him. Swift, already exasperated beyond measure by the action of the Commons in the agistment matter, now stepped in. He drew uj) a short statement of Throp's case which so ])rovoke(i Waller that he ottered a reward of ten guineas to any one who would discover the author. Meanwhile, the petition had been considered and unanimously rejected by the House. To say that the philippic in which Swift's vengeance found expression has neither equal nor second in the literature of invec- tive and satire would be but feeble testimony to its appalling power. The Leyion Club stands alone — LAST DAYS AXD DEATH 227 alone alike in the spirit that animates it and as a masterpiece of art. It seems to boil, a blasting tlood of filth and vitriol, out of some hellish foun- tain. So devilish is the malignity infusing it, so maniacal the fury of the scorn and hatred, that it would not have been surprising if the inspiration had overpowered the artist. But the execution is perfect. Nothing could be constructed with more exquisite ingenuity than the framework, nothing more elaborately finished than the details. The skill with which he selects, and in selecting concentrates, all those images and associations which could deform, degrade, and defile— the malicious tact with which, in gibbeting individuals, he seizes on what could be turned to most account against them in their persons, or in their public or private life, till every couplet has the sting of a hornet — the delibera- tion with which he gradually unfolds his horrible and loathsome panorama — the climax in the pinch of snuff and the parting curse, *May their God— the devil — confound them ! ' — all show that the most terrible of satirists was one of the most finished and patient of artists. II But these controversies did not occupy the whole of Swift's time. The extraordinary activity of his mind, and his habit of occupying himself in writing that he might escape from himself and, in his own words, divert thinking, resulted in the production of an immense number of compositions both in verse and in prose. Indeed, the mere enumeration of the pieces Q 2 . 228 JONATHAN SWIFT composed by him between 1727 and 1737 wouM occupy several pages. The greater part of these art trifles, which have been piously collected by his editors, but which were hardly worth preserving. But the list contains also some of his best poems and t\yo of the best of his non-political minor prose writings. In ilk- autumn of 1731 he told his friends Gay and tin Duchess of Queensberry that he was engaged on a worlv which was to reduce the whole politeness, wit. humour, and style of England into one short syst( in for the use of all persons of quality, and particularly the Plaids of Honour. This was the Art of Pal'it- ■CoHveraatUiH. With an irony the acrimony of which i- yery characteristic of his temper in his later days, bui hardly appropriate to the trifles on which it is heri employed, he ridicules the frivolities and affectation- then characteristic of conversation in modish society. With the ])irei'ti()U8 to ScrcantSf a part of the sanir scheme, he took immense pains, kept it by him, aiui added to it year by year. When the manuscript had passed out of his hands he was anxious for it - recovery that it might not be lost, for he thought tli. work 'useful as well as humorous.' Of its humour tlur. can be no question; its usefulness may be doubttd. It is the most striking illustration to be found in hi- works of one of his characteristics — his habit <>! observing and noting with minute accuracy all that passed round him. The work has some happy touclu > . but the general effect is tedious, and by its incom})K tion literature has sustained no great loss. To on- portion of it special interest belongs. The Direction to the Footman gave Fielding the idea of Jonatliai Wild. LAST DAYS AND DEATH 229 Of the poems, the verses On the Death of Dr. Swift, the Grand Qu ration Debated, the Rhapaodtj on Poetry, the Direetions for Making a Dirthday Sonp, the Kpintle to a Lady who desired the Author to write >iinne Verses upon her in the Heroie Style, and the I>ay (f Judyment, are incomparahly the hest. But, with tlie exception of the first and the last, they were mere trifles, thrown off occasionally, as scores of others were, listlessly, to kill time. * I would not give three j»ence,' he writes to his friend Barber, * for all I read, or write, or think, in the compass of a year.' They stand in the same relation to the man himself as his IVivolities at Market Hill or at Howth Castle, transitory j;leams on an abyss of gloom, straws on a boiling torrent. It is not to these poems, it is to poems of another class, and to his correspondence, that wo must turn if we would raise the veil of his inner life. Ill these poems — and they extend over the whole of til is period — he found a vent for the passions which tlio turn of a mood or the smallest provocation uistantly awoke. In them his misanthropy, his hatred of individuals, his rage, his pessimism, flamed out unrestrained. Of some of these poems it would be no exaggeration to say that nothing so purely dia- bolical had ever before emanated from man. There are passages in the satirists of antiquity which are — in mere indecency perhaps — as shameless and brutal. A misanthropy almost as bitter flavours the satire in which Juvenal depicts the feud between the Ombites and the Tentyrites. The invectives of Junius and the libels of Pope not unfrequently exhibit a mahgnity scarcely human ; and if the Mephistopheles of fable could be clothed in flesh, hiB mockery would probably 230 JONATHAN SWIFT be the mockery of Voltaire and Heine. But the later satire of Swift stands alone. It is the very alcohol ot hatred and contempt. Its intensity is the intensity of monomania, whether its object be an individual, a sect, or mankind. To find any parallel to such piect > as the Jjadies* Dressimj lioom, Cassinus and Peter, On CorinnUf Strephon and Cldoe^ A Love Pocnt, the Place of the Ikimned^ the Beasts* ConfesHion, and the Lejiion Club, we must go to the speeches in which the depraved and diseased mind of Lear runs riot in obscenity and rage. But it was when his sail it' was directed against particular hulividuals that il became most inhuman and most noisome. Such, fin example, would be the attack on Walpole in the Kpisth ti) Gaify the attack on Allen in Tvaulas, the libels oii^Bellesworth, and the libels on Tighe. To provoki- the hostility of Swift was, in truth, like rousing tlu- energies of a skunk and a polecat. It was to engagt in a contest the issue of which was certain — to bt- compelled to beat an ignominious retreat, cruelly lacerated, and half suffocated with filth. But, if the sutterings entailed on him by passion-^ like these were great, if the inordinatns aniniuH brought its tortures, we have only to turn to his correspondence to see how black were the clouds that had settled over his life. There is something inex- pressibly pathetic in the way in which he clings to the old scenes, to the old associations, to the oUl friends. Sheridan, Acheson, Delany, were shadows to him. He never took them to his heart ; he never admitted them into his confidence. It is only when he is writing to Pope, to Peterborough, to Gay, to Arbuthnot, to Barber, to Bolingbroke, that he seems LAST DAYS AND DEATH 231 to be himself. But one by one all sank out of his life. In December, 1732, death removed Gay. In October, 1784, Arbuthnot followed. The acuteness with which he felt these losses and the ine^xpressiblo wretchedness of his life during all these years are sufficiently testified by his letters to those to whom he opened his mind freely That he never woke without finding life a more insignificant thing than it was the day before — that it was not a farce but a ridiculous tragedy—that he thought of death not, as he once did, every day, but every minute — that he never took up his pen in any cause without saying to himself a thousand times non est tatdi — this is the strain from first to last. But Swift 'b private miseries, his fierce or gloomy moods, his feuds, his controversies, his contempt for those he served, his contempt for those who assisted him, never suspended or even interrupted his bene- volent activity. The most savage of misanthropes was in practice the most indefatigable of philanthropists. No city ever owed more to a private man than Dublin owed to Swift. We have already seen how in 1720 he defeated, or at least contributed to defeat, a scheme which would in all probability have involved hundreds of her citizens in beggar} , and how suc- cessfully he grappled with one of the most formid- able pests which infest great cities. His proposal to provide beggars with badges did much to abate an- other nuisance scarcely less mischievous and trouble- some ; ' and his Considerations about Maintaining the ' See his Proposal for giving Badges to the Beggars in all the Parishes of Dublin (Scott, vii. 581). 232 JONATHAN SWIFT Wmt} which was probably interrupted by ill-health, shows with what anxious attention he had studied the subject. His care, indeed, extended to every department of civic economy, from the direction of municipal and parliamentary elections'* to the regulation of the coal tralKc.^ It may be said of Dr. Swift, writes one who knew him well, that he literally followed the example of his Master, and went about doing good.^ His private charity, though judicious, was boundless. He never, we are told, went about without a pocketful of coins, which he distributed among the indigent and sick. His severe frugality, which fools mistook for avarice, arose solely from his determination to devote his money to the noblest uses to which money can be applied. If he denied himself and his guests super- fluities, it was that he might provide the needy with necessaries and posterity with St. Patrick's Hospital. He established a fund for charitable loans to the industrious poor ; he was acquainted with every beggar within the liberties of St. Patrick's, many of whom were in receipt of a small pension from him. His correspondence teems with instances of his kindness. Indeed, no one who deserved assistance or needed advice ever applied to him in vain. And he had his reward. If as the Drapier he commanded the homage and gratitude of all Ireland, as the Dean he was the idol of the people of Dublin. He ' Wor}i&, vii. 570. ■•' See his Considerations . . . on the Clioicc of a Ucc6rdcr (Scott, vii. 601), and Advice to the Freemen of Dublin (Id. p. 553). * See his Letters upon the Use of Irish Coal, and Scott, p. 408 scqq. * Delany, Observations, p. 201.* LAST DAYS AND DEATH 233 culled them his subjects, and they were proud of the title. * I know by experience ' (wrote Carteret just after he resigned the Lord Lieutenancy) * how much the city of Dublin thinks itself under your protection, and how strictly they used to obey all orders fulmin- ated from the sovereignty of St. Patrick's.' On the last occasion on which he took part in public affairs the Primate Boulter, whose proposal for diminishing the value of gold coin he had opposed, charged him at an entertainment of the Lord Mayor's with inflam- ing the populace against him. ' I inflame them ! ' replied Swift ; * had I lifted my finger they would have torn you to pieces.' In his war with England and with that party in Dublin which was in the English interest he was not unfrequently threatened with violence ; but" the mere rumour that the Dean was in danger was sufficient to rally round him a i»ody guard so formidable that he had little to fear either from the law or from private malice. It is said that Walpole was once on the point of des- l)atc]iing a messenger with a warrant to arrest the J)ean and bring him over to England. But on a gentleman, who knew Swift's position better than the minister, asking significantly what army was to ac- company the messenger, and whether tlie Government had ten thousand men to spare, Walpole very wisely took th.e hint and the matter dropped. But to Swift all this was nothing. Sick of him- self, sick of the world, fully aware of the awful fate which was impending over him — he saw it, says Lyon, as plainly as men foresee a coming shower — he longed only, he prayed only, for death. It was his constant habit— it had been so for years— to take leave of one 234 JONATHAN SWIFT of the few friends whom he admitted to his intimacy, and who was accustomed to visit him two or three times a week, with the words, * Well, God bless you, good night to you, but I hope I shall never see you again.'' At the end of 1737 it became apparent to his friends, and it becomes painfully apparent in his correspondence, that his mind was rapidly failin*^'. The deafness and giddiness which had before visited him intermittently now rarely left him. His memory was so impaired that he was scarcely able to converse. It was only with the greatest difticulty that he could express himself on paper. ' I am so stupid and con- founded,* he writes to Mrs. Whiteway in July, 1740, Hhat I cannot express the mortitication I am under both in body and mind. All I can say is I am not in torture, but I daily and hourly expect it. I am sure my days will be very few, few and miserable they must be.' Few they were not to be. More than five years of agony and degradation were before him. As his in- tellect decayed liis irritability and ferocity increased. On the slightest provocation he would break out .into paroxysms of frantic rage. At last he lost completely all self-command. His reason gave way, and he ceased to be responsible either for his words or for his actions.-^ In Alarch, 1742, guardians were appointed for him by the Court of Chancery. On August VI in the same year, at the petition of the Ilev. John Grattan and the Rev. James King, a Writ Da Lumitic ' Sheriaan, p. 391. ' In the HarJwicke MSS. quoted by Hunis, Life of Hanltvicke, ii. 21, a very painful detail of Swift's madness is given, which suf- ficiently explains why Mrs. Whiteway could not be in attendance oil him. LAST DA VS AND DEA TH 235 Inquircndo was issued, reciting * that the Dean of St. Patrick's hath for these nine months past heen gradu- ally failing in his memory, and that he is incapable of transacting any business or managing, conducting, or taking care either of his estate or person.' On August 17 a Commission was appointed ; a jury was empanelled, and their report corroborated the statement of the petitioners.' Into a particular account of Swift's last years it would be almost agony to enter. Nothing in the recorded history of humanity, nothing that the imagination of man has conceived, can transcend in horror and pathos the accounts which have come down to us of the closing scenes of his life. His memory was gone, his reason was gone; he recognised no friend ; he was below his own Struldbrugs. Day after day he paced his chamber, as a wild beast paces its cage, taking his food as he walked, but refusing to touch it as long as any one remained in the room. During the autumn of 1742 his state was horrible and pitiable beyond expression. At last, after suffering inispeakable tortures from one of the most agonising maladies known to surgery, he sank into the torpor of inil)Ocility. By (h(\mercy of Trnvidi-nce it generally happens that man so degraded is unconscious of his degradation. J>ut this mercy was withheld from Swift. On one occasion he was found gazing at his image in a pier-glass and muttering piteously over and over again, * Poor old man ! ' On another he ex- tlaimed, frequently repealing it, ' I am what I am.' ' Those melancholy documenta, the onRinals or copies of which ftre in the Forster Collection nt the Houth KcnsinRton Museum, have only recently come to li^ht, and are printed for the first time in tho Becond Appendix to this volume. 236 JONATHAN SWIFT * He- never talked nonsense,' says Deane Swift, 'nor said a foolish thing.' In this deplorable condition he continued for two years, and then maintained unbroken silence till death released him from calamity. He expired at three o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, October 19, 1745. Three days afterwards his coffin was laid at midnight beside the coffin of Esther John- son in the south nave of St. Patrick's Cathedral. 237 CHAPTER X CHARACTERISTICS The characteristics of this extraordinary man, so far as tlicy revealed themselves practically in action and conduct, and reflectively in liis writings, have in the preceding pages heen sufficiently illustrated. "We have now to consider him critically, to analyse arid, if possible, to account for his idiosyncrasies, and to rxaniinehis claims to a place among English classics. lUit the critic of Swift has no easy task. He is con- fronted on the very threshold of his inquiry with a problem perplexing enough hi itself, but perplexed still further by the efforts which have been made to solve it. From Swift's own day to the present it has been assumed that many of the essential peculiarities of his temper and genius are to be referred to con- stitutional disease, or were, at all events, considerably modified by it ; that in early youth were sown the seeds of a malady which, developing ultimately into insanity, tainted his whole Hfe and affected throughout, both directly and indirectly, much of his work. We now know, and know with certainty, that this was not the case. The distressing complaints which caused him 80 much inconvenience and suffering, and of which he speaks so frequently in his correspondence, had not, 238 JONATHAN SWIFT as he himself supposed, any connection with the cala- mity which befell him in his later days. They neither impaired nor perverted his mental powers. They had no more effect on the brain than an attack of bron- chitis or a fit of the ROut would have had. My readers will, I trust, forgive me for entering into medical details, but until the erroneous views which have been so long prevalent on the subject of Swift's disease have been dispelled, erroneous views will continue to be prevalent on more important points. He can never, as a subject of physiological study, be ap- proached properly. He can never, as a critic of man and life, be correctly estimated. The history of his case is briefly this. In his twenty-third year he became subject to fits of giddiness ; in his twenty- eighth year, or, according to another account, before be had completed his twentieth year, he was attacked by fits of deafness. The first disorder he attributed primarily to a surfeit of green fruit ; the origin of the second he ascribed to a common cold. The giddiness was occasionally attended with sickness, the deafness with ringing in the ears, and both with extreme de- pression. The attacks were periodic and paroxysmal, increasing in frequency and severity as life advanced. As old age drew on, his giddiness and deafness became more constant and intense ; he grew morbidly irri- table ; he lost all control over his temper, his intellect became abnormally enfeebled, his nii^mory at times almost totally failed him. But it was not until he had completed his seventy- fourth year that he exhi- bited what seemed to be symptoms of insanity. In 1742 what appeared to be an attack of acute mania — though it was mania without delusion, and may CHARACTERISTICS 239 j.crliaps liavc boen merely the frenzied cxpreHHion of excruciating physical pain, occasioned hy a tumour in the eye— was succeeded hy ahsolute fatuity. In this state, hroken, however, as we have seen, hy occasional j^deams of sensihility and reason, he remained till death. The autopsy revealed water on the hrain — the common result, it may he added, of cerehral atrophy. That a disease presenting; such symptoms as these slmuld have ori|4inat(>d from a surfeit of fruit and a (nmmon cold was a theory that may have passed un- cliallenf^ed in the infancy of medical science, hut was lint likely to ihid favour in more enh'i^htened times. Accordinj^ly, at th(» hef^dnnhij; of this century, an (iniricnt physician, ])r. 13eddoes,' came forward with another hypothesis. He entertained no douht that the disease was homoj^'encious and proj^ressive, and, con- iKctinj:; its primary symptoms with other peculiarities of Swift's conduct and writin«;s, he ascrihed their orip;in to a cause very dero^^atory to the moral character of the sutTerer. Scott, justly indignant that such an as- inrsion should have hecn cast on the Dean's memory, took occasion in his L\fv of Siii/t to comment very severely on Beddoes's remarks.'^ But Scott, unfortu- nately, had no means of refuting them. Medical science was silent; and Swift, ludicrous to relate, has heen held up in more than one puhlication as an appalling illustration of the effects of profligate indul- gence. At last, in 1840, Sir William Wilde came to the rescue. In an essay in the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Molical Science^ afterwards puhlishcd in a volume entitled 77/c Closing Years of Dean Swift's Lifet he reinvestigated with the minutest care the whole ' Ifygria, Essay ix. » P. 28, fwk. 240 JONATHAN SWIFT case. In the first place, he made the important dis- covery that Swift had undoubtedl}' had a stroke of paralysis. This was a circumstance which had not been recorded by any of the biographers, but which a plaster cast, taken from the mask applied, to the face after death, placed beyond doubt. Wilde boldly con- tended that there was no proof at all that Swift was ever insane in the sense in which the word is usually understood — nay, that previous to 1742 he showed no symptoms whatever of mental disease * beyond the ordinary decay of nature.' The deplorable condition into which he subsequently sank Wilde attributed not to insanity, or to imbecility, but to paralysis of the muscles by which the mechanism of speech is produced, and to loss of memory, the result in all probability of subarachnoid effusion. But what Wilder failed to understand was the nature of the original disease — in other words, the cause of the giddiness and deafness which, whatever may have been their connec- tion with the graver symptoms of the case, undoubt- edly preceded and ushered them in. And it is here that Dr. Bucknill comes to our assistance. In bis opinion the life-long malady of Swift is to be iden- tified with a malady which medical science has only recently recognised, ' Labyrinthine Vertigo,' or, as it is sometimes called, in honour of the eminent patho- logist who discovered it, ' Meniere's Disease.' ' To this are to be attributed all the symptoms which were supposed by Swift himself to have originated from a surfeit of fruit or a chill, which Beddoes attributed to profligate habits, and which Sir William Wilde was ' See Brain for January, 1882, and letter printed in Appendix I. of this volume. CHARACTERISTICS 241 iiiiiililo satisfactorily to account for. It was a purely physical and local disorder, uhich in no way afTccfrd tli(> intellect, and whieli, liad it run its conrsc nnconi- l)licated, would probably liavo ended merely in com- plete deafness. ' But on this disorder supervened, lutween 171^8 and ITiti, dementia, with hemiple^Ma and ai)hasia ; the dementia arisinj^' from general deciy nf thf brain ocensioned by a.f;e and de^'eneration, tl e lu niiplei^ia and nphasin resulting from dis(>asc of a. parliculiir |>art of the brjiin, probjibly the third leK iVontnl convolution. Thus tlu^ insanity, or, to speiik iiioi'e aecurately, the fatuity, of Swift was not, as b(^ liinisclf and his bio«;i-apliers after him have suppose^!, the gradual development of years, but was partly the < lYect of senile decay and partly the cfTect of a local lesion. The truth is that a mind saner than Swift's, a mind of stouter and sto n^( r fabric, a mind in which the reason, the pure reason, sate enthroned more securely, has never existed. From Ih-st to last, so long as he continued in possession of his faculties, it was his distinguishing characteristic ; it was his standard ; it was his touchstone ; it remained un- shaken and unimpaired, a fortress of rock on which the turbulent chaos of his furious passions broke harmlessly. The chief peculiarity of Swift's temper lay in the coexistence not merely of opposite qualities but of opposite natures. The union of a hard, cold, l(»gical intellect with a heart of almost feminine tenderness is no uncommon anomaly. But the anomaly which Swift presents is not an anomaly of this kind. In acute susceptibility to sensuous and emotional R 34a JONATHAN SWIFT impression he resembled Rousseau and Shelley. His nervous organisation was quite as exquisite, his sensibility as keen, his perceptions as nice. He was as dependent on human sympathy and on human affection; he was as passionately moved by what men less finely tempered regard with composure. The sight of a fellow-creature in distress or pain, the spectacle of an unjust or cruel action, a fancied sliglit conveyed in a word or look, an offensive or disagree- able object, were to him, as to them, little less than torture. Thus on the sensuous and emotional side he had the temperament of the poet and the enthu- siast. But Nature had not completed what she had begun. She had bestowed on him the cor cordimn ; she had endowed him with * the love of love ' and * thi' hate of hate ' ; she had been lavish of the gifts whicli are the poet's most painful inheritance; but from all else, from all that constitutes the poet's solaces, the poet's charm, the poet's power, she had excluded him. Utterly devoid of a sense of the beautiful, of the beautiful in nature, in the human form, in morals, in art, in philosophy, he neither sought it nor recog- nised it when seen. Its representation in concrete form is always perverted by him into the grotesque and ugly. As a critic and philosopher he has only one criterion — glain good sense in the one case, practical utiliiy-iti-tW-^ther. Of any perception of the ideal, of any sympathy with effort or tendency to aspire to it, he was as destitute as Sancho Panza and Falstaff. On no class of people have the shafts of his contemp- tuous raillery fallen thicker than on those who would seek for finer bread than is made of flour, and on the originators of Utopian schemes. His own ideal of life CHARACTERISTICS 243 began and ended, as he himself frankly admitted, with the attainment of worldly success.' Of transcendental imaf^ination, nay, of the transcendontal instinct, he had nothing. He never appears to have had even a f^Hmpse of those truths which lie outside the scope of the senses and the reason, and which find their ex- ])rpssion in poetry and in sentimental religion. Ho never refers to them as embodied in the first without ridicule and contempt, nor as embodied in the second without coldly resolving them into compulsory dogmas. 'Violent zeal for Truth,* he observes, 'has a hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, am- bition, or pride.'* If he does not deny the divine I lenient in man and in the world, it is only because it forms an article of the creed which for other !( asons he thought it expedient to uphold. But vliat he did not deny he either ignored or obscured. A conception of human nature and of human life more inconsistent than his with any theory of divinity itlior within man or without it would be impossible in find, even in the writings of professed atheists. * Miserable mortals!' he exclaims in his Thoughts on llcligiony * can we contribute to the honour and fzlory of God ? I could wish that expression were struck out of our prayer-books.' His whole concep- tion of religion appears to have been almost pure)}' ]»olitical. What Fielding puts into the mouth of ' 'All my endeavours, from a boy, to distipKuish myself were only >t the want of a great title and fortune, that I might he used like a il hy those who have an opinion of my parts, whether right or mg it is no great matter; and so the reputation of wit and great imingdoes the oftice of a blue ribbon or of a coach and six horses.' ' tter to Bolingbroke, April 6, 1820.) '' Thoughts on Religion {Works, viii. 173). B 2 244 JONATHAN SWIFT Thwackuin is literally descriptive of Swift's attitude : * When I mention religion I mean the Christian reli- gion ; and not only the Christian religion, but tlu^ Protestant ; and not only the Protestant, but the Church of England.* He makes no distinction between Deists and Nonconformists, between Roman Catholics ahd Infidels. They are all equally de- nounced, and regarded as equally excluded from the pale of what constitutes * religion.* And what con- stitutes religion has been prescribed by the State. To thfjt every man should be compelled to adhere. In relation to its essence and apart from its accidents he never contemplates it. * Rehgion,* he insists, * suppoi^ps Heaven and Hell, the "Word of God, and Sacraments.'* He complains bitterly that mm should be allowed a freedom in religious matters which they are not allowed in political ; that a citizin who prefers a commonwealth to monarchy, and wlio should endeavour to establish one, would be punished ^Yitll the utmost rigour of the law, but that a citizen who prefers Nonconformity to Episcopalianism is at perfect liberty to choose the one instead of the other.- So completely are the spiritual and essential elements of religion subordinated to its political and temporal utility, that he contends boldly that the truth or falsehood of the fundamental opinions on which tlir creed of the Christian rests are of comparatively little moment compared with the mischief involved in questioning them ; that it is not requisite for a man to believe what he professes ; and that it matters little what doubts and scruples he may have, provided ' Advice, to a Voting Poet (Works, ix. 392). • T}iou(jht& on, Iteligion (Id. viii. 170). CHARACTERISTICS 245 ' keeps them to himself.' A man may bo allowed, ■ > observes elsewhere in reference to this subject, to . p poisons in his closet, but not to vend them 'tut for cordials.'^ If, as has been sometimes sup- xcd, h e de^)icts his ideal man in t he King of '^m bdinffnaff. and his ideal of human e xcellenct-^^ in ^ M<- llouyhn hnms, it is remarkable that roiigioiT lias ) place in the education and life of either. The 'lues of the former are those of pure stoicism; !•' virtues of the latter are summed up in fricnd- hii), benevolence, temperance, industry, and clcanli- / ■li'SS. It is, of course, impossible to say, but it is very Inubtful whether Swift's own opinions inclined ccr- ainly towards belief in the promises of Christianity, r I'vcn in a future state. The balance of probability • k'cidedly adverse to the first supposition, and wavers ' ry uncertainly in favour of the second. His attitude •wards the metaphysics of Christianity is always the wwiiy he never dwells on them, and whenever it is < issible he avoids them. In his sermon on the Trinity 1' speaks of his theme as *a subject which probably i sliould not have chosen if I had not been invited to 1 1.' Rigidly orthodox, he repeats over and over again luit what the Church teaches is no matter for argu- ocnt and question, but must be accepted implicitly ind in its integrity. Episcopal Protestant Chris- • anity supplies as a coercive moral agency what no vstem of morality apart from it is able to supply ; it must, therefore, be retained, and if it is not retained ' Thoughts on Religion {Works, viii. 174). « Gulliver's Travels— Voyage to Brobdingnag. 246 JONATHAN SWIFT with all its dogmas it ceases to be Christianity.* This is his note throughout in apology as in exegesis. Without unction, without fervour, without sentiment, he leaves us with the impression that he neither sought nor found in the Gospel which he accepted and delivered so faithfully anything that illuminated or anything that cheered. Of its power as a source of consolation in sorrow he was well aware. * Take courage from Christianity,' he writes to Mrs. White- way, ' which will assist you when humanity fails.' But he took from it, or seems to have taken from it, little courage himself . It is mournfully apparent thai no ray from the creed of faith and hope pierced th( gloom of that long night which descended on the winter of his life. Assuming, as a churchman, the truth of Chris- tianity, he was bound also, as a churchman, to assunu the existence of a future state. But the evidence for supposing that it formed any article of his personal belief is very slight. In his Thoughts on lieligion he makes no reference to it, but observes of death that a thing so natural, so necessary, and so universal could not have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind. In his sermons he never dwells on it. lii his letters of consolation in bereavement he wrote, of course, as propriety dictated that a clergyman should write. And yet even here his expressions are fre- quently very guarded and sometimes ambiguous. * Beligion regards life,' he writes to Mrs. Moore on the death of her daughter, *only as a preparation for a better, which you are taught to be certain that ' See Sermons, passim, but particularly that on the Testimony of Conscience. CHARACTERISTICS 247 80 innocent a person is now in possession of.' ' He would, he said to Pope, exchange youth for advanced old age, if he could be as secure of a better life aa Mrs. Pope deemed herself.^ * If,' he remarked when his mother died, * the way to Heaven be through })icty, truth, justice and charity, she is there.' In his reflections on the death of Esther Johnson he makes 110 reference to immortality. In the prayers which he offered for her in her last illness he expresses a liope that she ' may be received into everlasting liabitations,' but there is nothing to indicate that he f( It the smallest confidence in the realisation of such liopcs. His own epitaph is without a trace of Chris- tian sentiment — that he had found in the grave a haven nh'i sccra indifjuatio tiltcrius cor Jaccrarc nequit — tliat he had left in his life an example which all who loved liberty would do well to imitate — this was the niily assurance, this the only admonition, which he desired to proclaim from the tomb. It is possible, of course, that his reticence and reserve on religious subjects had its origin in the same cause which led liim to conceal so studiously from guests in his house tlie fact that he daily read prayers to his servants — that it arose from his detestation of pretence and especially of pretentious piety. And this is by no means improbable, for there can be little doubt that, had he been as convinced of the truth of the Chris- tian dogmas as St. Paul himself, he would have avoided ostentatious or enthusiastic profession.' But a ' See his beautiful letter {Works, ivli, 197). ' Letter to Pope, Id. p. 224. ' ' There was no vice,' says Dclany, ' he so much abhorred as liypocrisy, and of consequence nothing he dreaded so much as to bo suspected of it, and this made him often conceal his piety with more care than others take to conceal their vices.'— ObservatUma, pp. 43-44. 248 JONATHAN SWIFT dibtmction must be made between the avoidance of ostentatious or enthusiastic profession and such an attitude as Swift's. We must take into consideration the whole tenor of his character and writings, and the impression conveyed by them is that of a man who was endeavouring honestly to support a part. He was convinced of the absolute necessity of main- taining, in the interests of soeiuty as well as of parti- cular individuals, the Christian religion with all its dogmas; he felt that the balance of what h€ could accept as sound and true in its teaching was more and much more than a counterpoise to what might be unsound and untrue ; and he probably felt that what hu could not accept he could not absolutely pronounce to be false. Applying the test of the politician, the magistrate, and the philanthropist, he was content to dispense with the test of the transcendental philo- sopher.' Hence his habit Of avoiding all discussion of such subjects as the immortality of the soul and a future state, his guarded phrases, his plain unwilling- ness to commit himself to expressions of his personal opinions, his appeals to reason rather than to faith, the ethical as distinguished from the theological character of his teaching, the absence, in the stress of affliction, of any indication of faith and hope. His deliciency on the side of what we commonly call sentiment is not less remarkable. Sentiment is never likely to be found in any great degree where the transcendental instinct is lacking. But the total atrophy, or rather non-existence, of both in a man ' Swift's opinions on religion probably, diffeieil little from thoso expressed so admirably by Polybius, vi. eh. 50, 57 ; by Strabo, i. ch. 2, 8 ; and by Cicero, Dc Lcgibus, ii. ch. 7. CHARACTERISTICS 249 of strong afYcctions and of acute susceptibility to luiotional impression is an anomaly rare indeed in I he temper of men. Of sentiment Swift was so wholly devoid that it was unintelligible to him. Its expression in language he regarded as cant, its ex- pression in action as afTeetation and folly. For him hie had no illusion f<, man no mystery, nature no < harm, llo looked on woman's beauty with the eye nf an anatomist, on earth's bejiuties with the eye of a rhemist. In the passion which not unfrequently transforms even the grossest and most commonplace nf human beings into poets he saw only brutal appetite, masijuerading in fantastic frippery. And his oth reduced all that ennol)le8, all that beautifies, all that consecrates life,.to a aiput mortnum. Both denied practically, and even ridiculed as . metaphysical tliinkers, what they asserted and maintained as ethi- cal political legislators. Both, in effect, eliminated the element of supernaturalism, and defended religion on civil grounds. Jlol)bes based its sanction and authority on the will of the State, Swift practically on the will of the State Church. AVhen Ilobbes wrote * It is with the mysteries of our religion as with wholesome pills for the sick, which, swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure, but chewed are for the most part cast up again without effect,' '^ he condensed what is in essence the argument of Swift. Both, by nature pure despots, regarded the mass of their fellow-men as fools and ' Letter to Pope, Nov. 26, 1725. ' LeviatJuin, ch. xxxii. 2S2 JONATHAN SWIFT knaves, to be ruled with justice indeed, and, if pos- re, with clemency, but to be ruled with a rod of iron. But it must not be forgotten that, if this anti- ideality and cynicism found its intensest and most powerful expression in Swift, it was essentially cha- racteristic of the age into which he was born and in which he died. That age may be compared to a deep valley between two eminences. On the one side are the heights to which the enthusiasm of the llenaissanee and the enthusiasm of Puritanism had elevated the national spirit ; on the other side is the ascent sloping upwards to the equally lofty tablelands of the idealists of the New World. Between the year of Swift's birth and the lirst administration of Pitt, it niay be safely said that in all that ejinobles and in all that beautifies human life and human nature England had reached her lowest level. The morals and temper of the London of th'e Restoration would have disgusted the Konians of St. Paul, while much of its literature would hardly have been tolerated by the friends of Trimalehion. After the accession of Anne, it is generally supposed that the evil spirit of the preceding era was exorcised, and that a new and good spirit entered in. And this is to some extent true. The example set by the Queen herself, the decency and decorum observed at her Court, and the writings of Addison and his circle, undoubtedly exercised a salu- tary influence on society. But all that was touched was the surface. The change was more apparent than real. The filth, the cynicism, the inhumanity, the unbelief of the former age underlay — a foul sub- btratum — the si)eeious exterior. The accession of George I. rendered concealment no longer necessary. CHARACTERISTICS 253 and witli some sli^^Oit nuxlirication all brcamo as all liarl bcoii before.' Wlierever we turn we find variously diluted and variously coloured wliat wc find condensed in Swift. AVIiat is Prior Init the poet of disillusion ? iris most elaborate poem was written to show the nothingness of maii and of the world, his Alma i6 ridicule m( taphysics, his most successful tales to lauj^h romance; to scorn ; his best lyrics are but (vnieal (lillcs. AVhat is (lay but an ele<^ant fribble, who ordered a llippant jest to Ik; inscribed ns his epi- taph ? - I'jven tlie fnie j^'enius of \\^\){^ is without wings, and many of tlie passag(!S wliich exhibit his' powers in their hi«;hest iMrfi-ction are directed to the ignoble purpose of degrading his species. ^Fandiiville's Fnhh' of tilt' 7>//.s' is as shamebss a libel on humanity as the W'lifiiic tii till' IfoniilniJninis, and his Virriin rnniaahrd wniild have disgraced Wyclierley. In the Jiirhanl- sonidfoi we ha\e ilie v(>ry alcohol of cynicism. The greatest painter of the age devoted his talents to bringing into prominence all that is most humiliating and odious in man, and the ])ens of I)e .Foe and Smollett vied with the pencil of Hogarth in depicting and hei;j;htening moral and physical ugliness and d(>pravity. Nor is tins spirit less apparent when it finds urbaner and more refined expression. The ' For the tompor nui\ tone; of tlin Enf;laniicntill, he says, 'A person of great honour in Ireland used to tell me tliat my mind was like a conjured spirit that would do mischief if I did not give it employment. It is this humour which makes me so busy.' Again, in a letter recently printed by the Historical Manuscripts Commissioners, ♦ I myself was never very miserable while my thoughts were in a ferment, for I imagine a dead calm is the troublesomest of our voyage througli the world.* CHARACTERISTICS 257 was in essonce of the same supcrliuman type as tlio genius which half reahscd universal empire. What Swift suffered in faihng to attain tlio prizes; which his hauf;hty spirit coveted is only too plain from his diaries and correspondence. Ilis prido amounted to disease. He was always on the watch for fancied slights. If a great man left a letter un- answered for a few days, or a friend let fall an ainhiguous word, he was miserahle. A man passing him in tlie streets without touching his hat or a woman failing to drop a curtsey seriously discomposed liim.' To whatever degree of mere intimacy he admitted a person who could amuse or entertain him, Im' guarded his dignity with tlie most jealous care. ' lie could not,' says Deane Swift, ' endure to be heated with any sort of famiHarity, or that any man living, his three or four old acipiaintanccs with whom lie corresponded to the last only excepted, should raidi himself in the number of his frienus.' '^ His iqieriority to envy, of which he had not, we are told, (lie smallest tincture, his inditYerence to literary fame, and his scrupulous truthfulness in all that related to ' To confine illustrations to the diary at Holyhead—* The master 'f the pacquet boat hath not treated me with the least civility, altho' Watt gave him my name . . . yet my hat is worn to pieces by an- wirinR the civilities of the poor inhabitants as they poss by. . . . I \\\n as insignificant here as Parson Brooke is in Dublin. By my '(in<^cience, I believe Cjrsar would le the same without his army nt 'lis back. . , . Not a bouI is yet come to Holyhead except a young M How who smiles when he meets me and would fain be my com - n mion, but it is not come to that yet . . . if I stay here much longer 1 am afraid all my pride and grandeur will truckle to comply with iiim.' « Eisay on Swift, p. 861. 9 358 JONATHAN SWIFT himself, had their origin in the same lofty conscious- ness of supereminence. Such were the characteristics and temper of Swift. And it would seem as if Fortune, perceiving what opportunities Nature had given her for malicious sport, had in some spiteful mood resolved to make liis life her cruel plaything. Everything that could depress, annoy, and irritate was his lot in youth. His early manhood, initiated by the fatal blunder he made in taking orders, miserable in itself, involved him in deeper miseries still. An nbaiulon'd wretch, by liope forsook, Forsook by hopes, ill fortime's last relief, Assigii'd for life to unremitting {,'rief ; For, let Heaven's wrath enlarge these weary -days, If Hope e'er dawns the smallest of its rays ' — it was thus that he could write of himself at a time when most men are bounding blithely from the start- ing-post of Ufe. Whenever a ray seemed to pierce the gloom it was always illusory. Hope after hope glimmered only to be extinguished. Even the paltry prizes he despised were beyond his reach, and his forty-third year found him eating out his heart in an obscure Irish vicarage. Then came power and eminence, without the glory and without the guerdon. A dictator and an underling, a despot and a tool, for nearly four years of his life, all that could pamper and flatter, and all that could gall and irritate his arrogant and sensitive spirit were his mingled portion. With exile as the reward of services great beyond any expression of gratitude, in that exile were accumulated ' Verses OH Sir W. Temjde^s Illness and Recovery^ written at Moor Paik in 1G93. CHARACTERISTICS 259 tenfold all causes of irritation, till irritation became torture, till torture goaded passion into fury. And brooding over the life of this unhappy man, wretched alike in what he owed to Nature and in the spite of Fortune, hung a phantom horror. As there can be no doubt that S\v'ift was never insane, and that the maladies from which he suffered had no connection with insanity, so there can equally be no doubt that he was himself convinced of the contrary — was con- vinced that he carried within him the gradually de- veloping germs of madness, and that his terrible doom was inevitable.' It has been sometimes supposed that Swift's rage for obscenity, so inconsistent with the austere purity of his morals and with his aversion to anything approaching indecency in conversation, had its origin in physical disease — that it was, as it so often is, a phase of insanity. But it is perfectly explicable with- out resorting to any such hypothesis. An observation of his own furnishes us with the true key— a nice man ie a man of nasty ideas ; '^ and he was one of the nicest and most fastidious of men. But its ex- pression in its most offensive forms is to be attributed partly to misanthropy, intensifying this depraved sen- sibility, and partly to a desire to furnish dissuasives from vice. Of such poems as the Ladifs Dressing Room Delany observes, and probably with perfect justice, that they were ' the prescriptions of an able ' This is placed beyond doubt by the well-known incident re- corded by Young in his Conjectures on Original Composition. The incident almost certainly oconrred in or about 1717. Bee Scott, i. 448-44. • Thoughts on Various Subjects. • a ^/ 26o JONATHAN SWIFT physician, who had the health of his patients at heart, but laboured to attain that end not only by strong emetics, hut also by all the m ost offensive drugs and potions that could be administered.' He was, in truth, doing nothing more than the Saints and Fathers of the Church have habitually done, and with the same object. There are passages, for example, in St. Chrysostom and in St. Gregory, which are as nauseous and disgusting as anything that can be found in Swift. But this plea cannot be always, or indeed generally, urged in his defence ; and how, in allowing himself such licence, he could see nothing incompatible with his position and behaviour as a clergyman, must remain a mystery.* Something is no doubt to be attributed to the age in which he hved, something to his constitution, and more to his rage against his kind. What is certain is that, as his misanthropy intensified, his imagination grew fouler and his filth became more noisome. II The writings of Swift are the exact reflection of his character, variously expressing itself on its various sides. Affectation and pretentiousness were his ab- horrence; for literary fame he cared nothing, and > What is still more surprising is that, although these productions appeared anonymously, it was no secret that they were from the pen of the Dean of St. Patrick's ; and how Swift, who in private life and in conversation never forgot and never allowed others to forget the respect due to his cloth, could expose himself to the derogatory retorts which his licence in this respect provoked is inexplicable. Yet so it was. See a ribald poem called The, Dean's Provocation, which pro- fesses to account for the reason of his writing the Lady*a Dressing Room. CHARACTERISTICS 261 ^ natural level of his powers. He wrote out of the ful- ness of his mind, as impulse or passion directed, practically, for the attainment of some immediate object, or idly, to amuse himself. To books he owed comparatively little. Butler was his model in verse. If he had any models in prose, they were the tracts of Father Parsons, and one of the most powerful political pieces extant in our language, Silas Titus' Killing No Murder. As a political pamphleteer. Swift is without a rival. Fenelon observed of Cicero, that when the Romans heard him they exclaimed, ' It is the voice of a God ; ' and of Demosthenes, that when the Athenians heard him they cried, ' Let us march against PhiHp.' The remark indicates the distinction between Swift's political pieces and the political pieces of such writers as BoUngbroke, Junius, and Burke. Compared with him, they appear to be but splendid sophists, maintaining with all the resources of rhetoric, and all the experience and skill of practised advocates, a case for the prosecution or a case for the defence. If the truth is of little moment to us, we concede to admiration what we ought to concede only to convic- tion. But the impression produced by Swift is the impression produced by a powerful and logical mind, with no object but the investigation of truth, amply furnished with the means of ascertaining it, and con- vinced itself before attempting to convince others. His profound knowledge of human nature and his experience of affairs enabled him to bring every point home, and to assume naturally, and with pro- priety, an air of authority such as in any mere man of letters would be affectation. 362 JONATHAN SWIFT ' Bwift ia a poet only by courtesy. Good sense, Immour, and wit are as a rule the diHtinguiBhing characteristics of his poetry, though, as Scott well observes, the intensity of his satire sometimes gives to his verses an emphatic violence which borders on grandeur, as in the lihapsody and in the poem on the Last Day. liut, if Apollo disowned him, ho was not altogether deserted by the Graces, as Cadenus . and Vanessa shows ; and of the attributes of the poet a touch of fancy may certainly bo claimed for him. It would, however, be doing him great injustice to deny his cluhn to a high place among nnisters of the scrmo jh'di'Hti'is. As dcsoriptive pieces his City Showrr and his Karhj Morning in London are pictures worthy of Hogarth ; his adaptations from Horace and Ovid are eminently felicitous and pleasing, while the verses on his own death and the Grand Question Debated tti-e among the best things of their kind. Some of his other trilies, particularly his Epistles, will always tind delighted readers. His verse, though too mechani- cally monotonous, is unlaboured and flowing, his diction terse and yet easy and natural. In the art of rhyming, an accomplishment on which he espe- cially prided himself, he has few superiors, and his rhymes are as exact and correct as they are ingenious and novel. Even the author of Don Jmn spoke of himself as contemplating Swift's mastery over rhyme with admiring despair. It is, of course, as a humorist and satirist that bwift is and will continue to be a power in hterature. Models as his political pieces are — in their style ner- \ vous, simple, trenchant — in their method lucid, logical ^ — in their tone masculine, vehement — few perhaps but CHARACTERISTICS 263 historical students will turn to them, for to none but historical students will their ephemeral matter bo intelligible. Two-thirds of his other writings have long ceased to be of interest to the many, but the Battle of the Booh, the Tale of a Tub, the Arguments agaimt aholishinp Chrhtiamty^ the Modest Proposal^ a dozen or two of his poems, and Gulliver ^ will keep his fame fresh in every generation. Here, then, are to bo found the qualities upon which his claim to a place among classics must rest. They are easily distin- guished. The first attribute of genius is originality, and Swift was essentially original. It is true that he was indebted to others for the hint of his three chief satires, but, as he has himself observed, if a" man hghts his candle at his neighbour's fire it does not affect his property in the candle which he lights.' Probably no other writer with the exception of Dickens has bor- rowed so little. His images and ideas are almost always his own ; his humour is his own ; his style is his own. In a well-known passage he claims to have been the first to introduce and teach the use of irony : — Arbuthnot is no more m.v friend, Who does to irony pretend, Which I was born to introduce, Refin'd it first, and taught its use. This was not strictly true, as he had been anticipated by De Foe, whose Shortest JVay with the Dissenters appeared nearly two years before the earliest of Swift's writings had been published. But a title to a place among classics depends not merely on originality — it depends also on quality, on the intrinsic value and in- terest of what is produced. Swift's serious reflections > Advice to a Young Poet. 264 JONATHAN SWIFT and remarks are the perfection of homely good sense — shrewd, trenchant, pointed, enriching life with new and useful truths. But his good sense is without refinement, without imagination, and without subtlety. The sphere in which his intelligence worked and within which his sympathy and insight were bounded was, comparatively speaking, a narrow one. He had the eye of a lynx for all that moves on the surface of life and for all that may be found on the beaten high- way of commonplace experience, but the depths he neither explored nor perhaps even suspected. In his innumerable aphorisms, generalisations, and precepts it would be impossible to find one which either indi- cates delicate discrimination or reveals a glimpse of ideal truth. I His style has in itself little distinction and no charm, but for his purposes it is the more effectivt; from the absence of distinction. A pure medium of expression, it owes nothing to art, for he disdained ornament and he disdained elaboration. To elo- ^luence he makes no pretension. Proper words in proper places was his own ideal of a good style, and tie was satisfied with attaining it. V As a master of irony he has few if any equals. It was his favourite weapon, tempered as finely as that wuth which the Platonic Socrates disarmed Protagoras and Hippias, and as that with which the author of the Proi'incial Letters lacerated the disciples of Le Moine and Father Annat. But the fineness of its temper constituted its chief resemblance to the irony of Plato and Pascal. It is without urbanity, without lightness, and without grace. Austere and saturnine, bitter and intense, it would seem strangely out of place as CHARACTERISTICS 265 the ally of pleasantry ; and yet seldom has pleasantry been so happily mated. Other humorists may move us to merriment and convulse us with laughter, but the irony of Swift is a source of more delicious enjoy- ment, of more exquisite pleasure. In its lighter forms it springs from a nice and subtle perception of the unbecoming and the ridiculous in their lighter and more trivial aspects, tempered with scorn and con- tempt J in its severer, from a similar perception of the same improprieties in their most impressive and most serious aspects, tempered not with scorn merely but with loathing, not with contempt merely but with horror and rage. The extremes are marked by the Dissertations in the Talc of a Tub and by the Direc- tious to Servants on the one side, by the Modest Pro- posal and the Voyage to the Houyhnhrims on the other. And the mean is in the Voyage to Brohdxngnag. lt_ is in irony that Swift's humour most generally finds expression, and always finds its most characteristic expression. And naturally. Wherever intelligence of clairvoyant insight, however narrow its area, together with a calm or contemptuous consciousness of superi- ority, is united with acute sensibility and with the keenest perception of the difference between things as they seem and things as they are, irony will always be the note. The attitude of Swift towards life and man is pre- cisely that of Juvenal's deity— nrf^f et odit—ha laughs and loathes. And his humour is the laughter. It is never good-natured. It is always sardonic, presenting a complete contrast to that of Cervantes and to that of Shakespeare. When we turn to the line which Shakespeare put into the mouth of Puck, * Lord, what 266 JONATHAN SWIFT fools these mortals be ! * and to the Temi^est, and then to the Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, and to the poem in which the Deity dismisses his cowering creatures from the judgment bar, as too despicable to be damned — I to such blockheads set my wit I I damn such fools 1 Go, go — you're bit — we measure the difference between the humour • which sees life steadily and sees it whole ' and the humour of the mere Titan. / Swift forniH one of an immortal trio. In the / writings of Addison will be mirrored for all time the imago of a beautiful human soul. Humour genial and kindly as it is exquisite, wit rethied and polished ^ as it is rich and abundant, and a style approaching as nearly to perfection as it is perhaps i)()S8ible for style to do, will unite with the charm of his character in keeping his memory green. If the poetry of Pope has not the vogue it once had, the fame of the most brilliant of poets is secure. He may not have the homage of the multitude, but he will have in every generation, us long as our language lasts, the homage of all who can discern. He stands indeed with Horace, Juvenal, and Dryden at the head of a great department of poetry — the poetry of ethics and satire. But the third of the trio will as a name and as a power over- shadow the other two. Before his vast proportions they seem indeed to dwindle into insigniticance. And what figure in that eighteenth century of time is not dwarfed beside this Momus-Prometheus ? Among men, but not of them, at war with himself, with the CHARACTERISTICS 267 world, and with destiny, he set at naught the warning /^^ which Greek wisdom was never weary of repeating — Born into life we are, and life must be our mould. He was in temper all that Pindar symbolises in Typhon, and all that revolts Plato in the inharmonious and unmusical soul. And so, while his writings bear the impress of powers such as have rarely been conceded to man, they reflect and return with repulsive fidelity /y^ the ugliness and discord of the Titanism which inspired them. "Without reverence and without reti- cence, he gloried in the licence which to the Greeks constituted the last offence against good taste and good sense, and out of the indulgence in which they have coined a synonym for shamclessness — the indis- criminate expression of what ought and what ought not to be said. A cynic and a misanthrope in prin- f , ciple, his philosophy of life is ignoble, base, and false, and his impious mockery extends even to the Deity. A large portion of his works exhibit, and in intense activity, all the worst attributes of our nature— re- venge, spite, malignity, uncleanness. His life, indeed, afforded a noble example of duty conscientiously ful- filled, of great services done to his kind, and of an active benevolence which knew no bounds. But it is not by these virtues that he will be remembered. He will live as one of the most conoimanding and fascin- ating figures which has ever appeared on the stage of life, and as the protagonist of a drama which caa never cease to interest the student of human Hfe and of human nature. In every generation his works will be read, but they will be read not so much for themselves as for their association. The fame of the man will 268 JONATHAN SWIFT preserve and support the fame of the author. For there is probably no writer of equal power and eminence in whose judgments and conclusions, in whose precepts and teaching, the instincts and experience of pro- gressive humanity will find so little to corroborate. APPENDICES I Dr. Bucknill's Letter My opinion, briefly stated, is that Dean Swift's insanity was purely accidental, as much so as if it had been brought on by a coup de soleil or a blow on the head ; and I think there are even grounds for believing that he had a blow :n the. head, namely, a slight stroke, which was the real cause of his insanity. I use the word accidental insanity in contradistinction to what I call developmental insanity, such as the mental disease under which Cowper laboured, or the still better example to be found in the insanity of Tasso, If you will read Black's biography of Tasso — an excellent work — you will see how curiously and gradually he developed into the madman^ he became, and how clearly the forewarnings of lunacy are to be seen in the still sane periods of his life. But there was nothing of this kind in Swift. If Swift had developed into a lunatic on the lines of his sane character, he would have been a very different kind of * person of unsound mind ' to the poor fatuous creature whose vitality survived his intellect in the manner I have read of him. I think I could form a not improbable guess of the kind of madman Swift might have developed into under a strong hereditary tendency, but the history of bis 370 JONATHAN SWIFT case is not of this kind. It is the history of physical disease, and I venture to assert that the details of the disease which have come down to us are sufficient to enable us to form a not improbable diagnosis of the case. It was, no doubt, a case of what you call fatuity, and what doctors call dementia — that is, loss of mental power. There was no delusion, so far as I remember ; but there was this pecu- liarity — the inability to find words for the expression of the poor remains of thought, although phrases did now and then find utterance under unwonted stimulus. It was, in fact, a case of aphasia with dementia, leading to the expect- ation that, if one could have seen the brain, a clot, or the effects or remains of a clot, would have been found on or about the third frontal convolution. I think the psychology and pathology of aphasia have been added to our store of medical knowledge since Sir William Wilde wrote his notes on the closing days of Dean Swift, and I am not sure that he makes any comment upon the often repeated fact that bwift was unable to find words to express his thoughts. You will gather from the above what luy answers must be to your questions, and yet, perhaps, it may be well to answer them categorically, and therefore permit me to say that in my opinion — A. There is sufficient evidence to render a correct diagnosis of Swift's mental disease possible. B. There are records of numerous cases in which the phenomena are parallel. C. It is not physically possible that Swift's fatuity at 76 originated from a surfeit of green fruit when he was 23. D. The sane part of Swift's life was not likely to have been affected by the latent presence of the insanity. This question, which I have answered last, seems the most interesting and important, seeing that the ignorant public are but too ready to refer the peculiarities of genius APPENDIX II 271 to madness, and that, when a great genius does become insane from some accidental cause, Dryden's Hnes are only too apt to be quoted. II Writ 'De Lunatico Inquirendo* and Report OF THE Commission George the Second by the Grace of God of Great Britain ffrance and Ireland King Defender of the ffaith and so forth. To our Trusty and welbeloved the R* honb** Luke Gardner Esq*"* Eaton Stannard Esq*"* Recorder of the Citty of Dublin Phillip Tisdall and Bolayn Whitney Esq" .John [?] Wilham Cooper and D»- Thomas Trotter [or Troller] S*" James Somcrvill Ald*^ John MacaroU Aid'" Percival Hunt Aid"* Kirkland Pearson Aid"" Robert King Thomas Lehunt and Alexander ^I*=Auly Esq" William Harward and John Rochfort Esq" Charles Grattan and Bellingham Boylo Esq" Greeting Whereas it is given us to understand by the petition of the Reverend John Grattan and the Reverend James King that the Rev^ Doctor Jonathan Swift Dean of S* Patricks Dublin hath for these nine months past been gradually faileing in his memory and understanding and of such unsound mind and- memory that he is incapable of transacting any business or manageing conducting or takeing care either of his Estate or person. We being willing to provide a remedy in this behalf do command you three or more of you that you repair to the said Doctor Jonathan Swift and by all proper ways and meanes you Examine him and moreover by the Oaths of good and lawfuU men by whom the truth of the matter may be best known you diligently Inquire whether the said Doctor Jonathan Swift be a person of unsound mind and memory and not capable of takeing care of his person or fortune as aforesaid, and if he be, how long he hath been so, and of what Lands and Tenements Goods and Chattels the said 27a JONATHAN SWIFT Doctor Jonathan Swift was possessed off at the time he so became of unsound mind and memory or at any time since an(J what is the yearly value thereof and who is his next heir and such Inquisition as shall be then found you or any three or more of you shall openly and distinctly make return thereof to us in our Chancery in Ireland on the third day of November next under your seals and the seals of those by whom the said Inquisition shall be made together with this Writ Witness our Justices General and General Governours of our said Kingdom of Ireland at Dublin the twelfth day of August the Sixteenth year of our Reign. DOMVILE. £x<> Ed Madden dep*)' Clk .vnRETT, his flasni/on thcEarlicr Part of the Life of Sinft, 5 Ikddocs, Dr., his views on Swift's mnlady, 239 IJerkcley, Earl of, Swift's chap- laincy to, 52 ' liickerstalT, Isaac,' pseudonym of Swift, 02 Boyle, Charles, his part in the Phalaris Controversy, 41 Bucknill, Dr., his views on Swift's malady, 240, 209 Burnet, IJishop, attacked by Swift, 117 Carteret, succeeds Grafton as liord Lieutenant of Ireland, 183 *, his behaviour with regard to the Drapier Letters, 180 Chaufepi^, his articleon Swift, 157 Congreve, at school with Swift at Kilkenny, 20 ; member of tlie Scriblerus Club, 94 ; his cha- racter and writings, 94 Cruik. Mr. Henry, his Life of Swift, 10 De Bkroerac, Cyrano, indebted- ness of Gulliver's Travels to his romances, 205 De Callitres, possible indebted- ness of the Battle of the Ikx)ks to his Histoirc PotUique, 42 Delany, his Observations, their merits and defects, 3 ; refer- ences to, 35, 70, 72, 151 Do Morgan, his observation on (hillirer's Travels, 203 Dingley, Mrs., the constant friend and companion of Esther Johnson. 150 ; her testimony against the alleged marriage of Swift and Esther Johnson, 150 Forstf.r, his Life of Swift, its merits and defects, 7 *, refer- ences to, 22, 23. 27, 28, 43 Fortescue, member of the Scriblerus Club, 100 Gay, member of the Scriblerus Club, 90; his character and writings, 90 Goethe, his Stella, 157 Goodwin, indebtedness of Oul- liver's Travels to his Voyage of Domingo Oonsnlez, 205 Grafton, succeeded by Carteret in Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, 183 Guiscard. his attempted assassin- ation of Uarley, 84 276 JONATHAN SWIFT Habdino, printer of the Drapier Letters, urnsteil, 180; tried, 187; the liill thrown out, 187 Ilarley, Earl of Oxford, leader of the Tories, 04 ; Lord Treasurer, OU ; hia diliicultics, 79 ; stabbed by Gui^card, H4 ; his popularity, 85 ; hia corre- gpondenee with the agents of the French king, 80 ; member of the Brothers' Club, UO ; tjuarrel with Nottingham, 104 ; his activity in the question of Swift's preferment, 114 ; quar- rel with Bolingbroke, 119 ; his resignation, 1*22 Herbert, Sir Thonjas, possible indebtedness of (lulVxver^ TraveU to his Traiuls, '205 Hobbes, compared with Swift, •251 ' Hope, Thomas,* pseudonym of Swift, 170 Howard, Mrs., Swift's intimacy with. 210 IitKLANP, condition of the country in the earlier years of the eiKhteonth century, 159; her natural advantages, 159 ; her treatment by Knglund, 100 ; famine and pestilence in, Kil ; torn by feuds and enmities of race, politics, religion, 10;-i; tlie Middlemen, 104 ; the i)ro- vincial giutry, 104 ; crushing statutes of the English Parlia- nunt, 105 ; the degraded Protestant hierarchy, KiO ; Grafton succeeded in Lord liieutenancy by Carteret, 183 ; deplorable condition of the country in 1729, 221 JoHNsov, Esther, Swift's first meeting with her at Moor Turk, 30; her personal ap- pearance and character, 73 ; her settlement near Swift in Ireland, 70 ; Swift's relations with her, 70 ; his Journal to her, 78; her alleged marriage with Swift, 140; the evidence against it, 147 ; the evidenco foi it, 151 ; general summary —testimony strongly against it, 150; the verdict of the world, 157 ; her death, 218 Lessino, his Miss Sara Saynjison, 15? Lucian, indebtedness of Qulli- ver's Travels to, 205 (bis) Lyon, Dr. John, hia testimony against the alleged marriage of Swift and Esther Johnson, 150 Macaclay, his estimate of Swift, 10, 27 Madden, Dr. Samuel, liis testi- mony as to the aileg«;d mar- riage of Swift and Esther Johnson, 152 Mason, Monck, his Ilistorj/ and Antiquities of St. Patrick's Cathedral, its merits and de- fects, Monck-Berkeley, liis Fnquiry into the Life of Dean Swift, 4 ; reference to, 154 Montaigne, compared with Swift, 210 Naioi.kon, compared with Swift, 255 Newton, Sir Isaac, his testing of Wood's copper coinage, 178 {note), 179 OaiiEuv, Lord, his Letters, their merits and defects, 2 ; refer- ence to, 151 Oxford, vide Harley INDEX 277 Paunkll. member of the ScMb- lerus Club, 1)7 ; his writings, 97 Partridge, John, his almanacks and • Isaac Bickerstaff'a ' pamphlets, Gl Philostratus. indebtednesg o( (iuUiver's Travels to liis Ima- gines, 205 Plato, Swift's knowledge of and allusions to, 39 (note 2) Pope, member of the Scriblerus Club, 95 ; compared with Swift, 210 RAnF.LAifl, compared with Swift, 40; indebtedness of Gulliver's Travels to his Pantagntcl, 20i Scott, his Life of Sirift, its merits and defects, 5 ; refer- ence to, 203 ; his views on Swift's malady, 239 Sharp, Archbishop, probable indebtedness of the Talc of a Tub to a sermon of, 17 Sheridan, Thonjas (senior), friend of Swift at Dublin, 195 ; his misfortunes, 195 ; his house at Quilca, 190 — Thomas (junior), his Memoir of Swift, 4 ; reference to, 152 Solinus, possible indebtedness of Gulliver's Travels to, 205 Stanhope, his attack on Swift, 10 Steele, Swift's breach with him, 110 ■ Stella,' rifle Johnson, Esther bturmy, Samuel, passage from his Mariner's Magazine copied by Swift in Oullivcr'a Travels, 206 Swift, Abigail, mother of the Dean, 18, 19, 20; her cha- racter, 25 ; her death, 63 — Deane, his Essay on Swift, 4 ; reference to, 152 I Swift, Godwin, uncle of the Dean, j IH, 19. 21,2* — Jonathan, father of the Dean, IH — Jonathan, the Dean, better known to us than any other writer of his age, 1 ; his auto- biographical writings, 1 ; his several biographers, their merits and defects, 2 ; a greatly maligned man, 11 ; his benevolence and kindliness, 12 ; his real attitude towards religion, 13 ; his ancestry and parentage, 17 ; his birth, 18 ; his boyhood, 20 ; his career at College, 21 ; his flight to Eng- land, 24 ; his first residence at Moor Park, 20 ; tutor to Esther Johnson, 30 ; his early poems - their extreme badness, 30 ; his departure from Moor Park, 31; his ordination, 32; his cluirchmnnship, 32 ; his life at Kilroot, 'M) ; the episode of • Varina ' (Miss Waryng), 30 ; his second residence at Moor Park, 38 ; his studious industry - his favourite authors, 38 ; the Battle of tJie Book.'s, 41; the Tale of a Tub-iU pur- pose, methods, and character- istics, 43 ; his second departure from Moor Park. 49; /his chaplaincy to Perkeley, 51 ; his return to England, 53 ; the Discourse of the Contests and Disscnfions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Timne, 53 ; the Discourse on the Mechanical Operatioi of tfie Spirit, 54 ; his eminent • position in Whig literary circles, 55 ; disappointed of preferment, 50 ; his views on the Established Church, 57 ; the Sentiments of a Church of England Man and the Ar- gument against Abolishing Christianity, 69; the Project 278 JONATHAN SWIFT for Uie Advancement of lUlujion, tiQ\ 'Isaac Bicker- 6ta£f'a' pamphlets on Part- ridge, (il ; his grief at his mother's death, 03 ; his de- legacy to England in connec- tion with First Fruits and Tenths, 04 ; his formal breach with the Whigs -its justifica- tion, 05 ; his haughty demean- our -his power of will and intellect— his personal appear- ' ance and manner, 00 ; his renewed acquaintance with Esther Johnson, 72 ; his atti- tude with regard to wonitn, 75 ; the Journal to Stella, 78 ; editor of the Examiner, 80; liemarks on a Letter to tlic Seven Lords, 85 ; A Neio Journey to Paris, 87 ; the Conduct of the Allien, 88 ; his pre-eminence in the Urothers' Club, 81) ; his proposal for an Academy, 'J2 ; the Scribleris Club, Ot; his literary activity — attack on his political opponents, 104 ; liemarks on the Harrier Treati/, 107 ; Sonut Advice to tlic October Club, 108 ; the Letter to a Whig Lord, 100; miscellaneous laiiipoojis, 110; his iunnense inlluence at thisptriod, 111 ; his services long unrewarded — successive disappointments, 112; ap- pointment as Dean of St. Patrick's, 115; his insulting reception in Dublin, 115; his return to London, IKi; his breach with Steele — the Im- jiortance of the Guardian considered, 11(5; his attack on Burnet, 118 ; the Public Spirit of the Whifjs, 110; his political views, 120 ; his return to Dublin, 12:i ; his miserable condition at this time, 12H ; dilliculty of his position in Dublin, 125 ; his loyalty to Oxford, 120; his anti-Jacobite views, 128; the Memoirs re- lating to tliat Change which Juippetud in the Queen's Ministry in the Year 1710, and the Enquiry itito the Behaviour of lite Queen's Last Ministry, 120; the Memoirs of the Last Four Years of tiia Queen, 130; his private life at this period, 132 ; his ac- quaintance with the Vanhom- righs, 133 ; his conduct to- wards Hester, 135 ; Cadenus and Vanessa, 130; distortions of the story of their actjuaint- ance -the charges against him examined, 130 ; his real rela- tions towards her, 142 ; his alleged marriage with Esther Johnson— important bearing of this question on his whole career, 140 ; the evidence ft»r and against the marriage, 147 ; summary of the evidence, 150 ; his indignation at the miser- able condition of Ireland, 107 ; the I'mposal for tha Vuiver.sal Use of Irish Manufactures, 1(»7 ; the Essay on English Jiubbles — the * Swearer's Bank,' 170 ; the Last Speech and D II ing Words of Ebenezer EUisto'n, 171 ; tlfe Drapier Letters— the first, 170; the second, 178; the third, 181; the fourth, 184; the fifth, 180; the sixth, 187; his innnense popularity through- out Ireland, 188 ; his eccle- siastical views —his violent attacks on the Whig Bishops, 180 ; his vehement hostility to the Nonconformists, 101 ; his scheme for the formation of an Irish National Church, 103 ; his endeavours to im- prove the condition of the inferior clergy — the Letter to a Young Clergyman and the INDEX 279 Essay on the Fates of Clergy- men, 193; his personal misery — his misanthropy, 194 ; his friendship with Sheridan, 195 ; his visit to England, 197 ; his visit to Walpole, 199 ; Gulliver's Travels— its cha- racteristics, 201 ; its object, 208; its defects, 208; its immediate success, 212 ; his departure for Dublin. 214 ; his return to England, 215; his literary and political activity Rt this time, 215 ; his last departure from England -the Holyhead Diary, 217; his grief at the death of Esther Johnson — the Memoir and Character of Esther JoJiuson, 218 ; the melancholy character of his last years, 220 ; the Short View of the State of Ireland and the Modeat Pro- jwsal, 22;{ ; Judas, the Irish liishops, and other pamphlets, 224; the tithe question, 225; the Legion Club, 220 ; the Art of Polite Conversation and the Directions to Servants, 228 ; his poems of this period, 229 ; his correspondence, 2H0 ; hia activity in benevolence — his immense popularity in Dublin, 231 ; rapid failure of his mind, 233 ; his death, 230 ; his malady, 237 ; his temper, 241 ; his views of life and mankind, 242; liis attitude towards Christianity, 245 ; his lack of sentiment- his refer- ence of all questions to pure intellect, 248 ; compared with Hobbes, ^ 251 ; his colossal capacitie's, 255 ; compared with Napoleon, 255 ; his pride, 257 ; his miserable circumstances, 258 ; his indecency, 259 ; his writings an exact reflection of his character, 200 ; his political pamphlets, 2G1; his poems, \ 202; his humorous and satirical writings, 202 ; his style, 204 ; his irony, 204 ; his attitude towards life and mankind, 205 ; general sum- mary of his characteristics, 200 ; the \Vrit • De Lunatico Inquirendo' for his examina- tion, and the Report of the Commission, 271 Swift, Thomas, grandfather of the Dean, 17 — William, great-grandfather of the Dean, 17 Tf.mplf, Sir William, his recep- tion of Swift at Moor Tark, 20 ; his kindness to Swift, 28 ; Swift's departure from Moor I'ark, 31 ; his invitation to Swift to return, 37 ; his part in the Phalaris Controversy, 40 ; his death, 48 Thackeray, his attack on Swift, 10 Throp, his case with Colonel Waller, 220 • Vanessa,' ride Vanhomrigh, Hester Vanhomrigh, Hester, her passion for Swift, 134 ; his conduct to- wards her, 135 ; her settlement in Dublin, 137 ; her departure from Dublin, 139 ; her death, 139; e.iamination of the false reports of Swift's relations to- wards her, 1.39; the facts of their intercourse, 142 • Varina,' vide Waryng, Miss W^ALLER, Colonel, his case with Throp, 220 I Walpole, his behaviour with re- ■ g ird to Wood's copper coinage, 175; Swift's interview with ' him, 199 a8o JONATHAN SWIFT Waryng, Miss, Swift's acquaint- ' KW; his trial o! Harding, ance with, 36 i 187 W'hitshed, Chief Justice of Ire- Wilde, Sir William, his views on land, his trial of the printer of i Swift's malady, 239 i\\e Proposal for tke Universal ' Wood, his patent for copper coins, Use of Irish Manufactures, ' 173; the patent withdrawn, 188 PnrXTED BY il"0TTk>WO4)I)K AND to., NKW-HTnEET 8QUAJIK t-y ^Tvn^ K> oit?^^ USE ^"boofcisdueoatheWH '• FE1 -EB 3 '68-1 rrn;^^°?'"3' library