Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)

SWIFT, JONATHAN (1667–1745), dean of St. Patrick's and satirist, son of Jonathan Swift, by Abigail (Erick) of Leicester, was born at 7 Hoey's Court, Dublin, on 30 Nov. 1667 (a drawing of the house, now destroyed, is in Wilde's Closing Years of Swift's Life, p. 89). The elder Jonathan was a younger son of Thomas Swift, vicar of Goodrich, near Ross, by Elizabeth (Dryden), niece of Sir Erasmus, the grandfather of John, Dryden. Thomas Swift descended from a Yorkshire family, one of whom, Barnham, called ‘Cavaliero’ Swifte, of an elder branch, was created Lord Carlingford in 1627 (for pedigrees of the Swift family see Monck Mason's St. Patrick's, pp. 225–6). The younger branch had settled at Canterbury. Thomas inherited from his mother a small estate at Goodrich, took orders, and was distinguished for his loyalty during the civil war; he subscribed money to the king, and invented warlike contrivances for the annoyance of the roundheads. When the roundheads gained the upper hand he naturally had to go through many troubles, which are recorded in ‘Mercurius Rusticus’ (1685; reprinted in Monck Mason, p. 228). He died in 1658. He had ten sons and four daughters. The second son, Thomas, became a clergyman, married the daughter of Sir William D'Avenant [q. v.], and was father of another Thomas (1666–1752), who became rector of Puttenham, Surrey. The eldest son, Godwin, was a barrister of Gray's Inn; he was four times married, and his wives, except the second, were heiresses. His first wife was connected with the Ormonde family; his third was daughter of Richard Deane [q. v.], the regicide admiral; and the fourth a sister of Sir John Mead, an Irish lawyer, described in Mrs. Pilkington's ‘Memoirs.’ Upon the Restoration, Godwin went to Ireland, where he was made attorney-general for the palatinate of Tipperary by the first Duke of Ormonde, lord-lieutenant from 1662 to 1664; he left fifteen sons and four daughters. He was ‘a little too dexterous in the subtle parts of the law,’ according to his nephew Jonathan, and in later years lost much of his fortune by rash speculations. He prospered, however, for some time, and four of his brothers followed him to Ireland. Of these, Jonathan (the father of the satirist) became a member of the King's Inns, Dublin, and was appointed steward of the society on 25 Jan. 1665–6. Upon his marriage, a short time before, he had been able to settle an annuity of 20l. upon his wife. He died a little more than a year after his appointment, leaving her with an infant daughter Jane. Soon after the birth of Jonathan, seven months later, Abigail went to her family at Leicester. The child was left with a nurse, who became so fond of him that she took him with her when she had to return to her native place, Whitehaven, Cumberland. His mother was afraid to venture a second voyage, and he was kept nearly three years at Whitehaven. There his nurse taught him so well that at three years old he could read any part of the Bible. He was then sent back to Dublin. Shortly afterwards his mother settled at Leicester, leaving him in Ireland, where his uncle Godwin took charge of him. He was sent at the age of six to the grammar school of Kilkenny. Congreve, two years his junior, was a schoolfellow, and afterwards a friend; but nothing is known of Swift at this time beyond a trifling anecdote or two. On 24 April 1682 he was entered at Trinity College, Dublin, his cousin Thomas being entered on the same day. Thomas became a scholar in May 1684; but Jonathan was never elected. Swift's own account of his college career is that he was depressed by the ‘ill-treatment of his nearest relations,’ and ‘too much neglected his academic studies, for some parts of which he had no great relish by nature.’ He read ‘history and poetry,’ and lived with great regularity; but was ‘stopped of his degree for dulness and insufficiency, and at last admitted in a manner little to his credit, which is called in that college speciali gratia.’ In a college roll of the Easter term, 1685 (facsimile in Forster's Life of Swift, p. 38), he is marked bene for Greek and Latin, male for philosophy, and negligenter for theology. He had not done well enough, it appears, to be allowed one of the twelve terms necessary for admission to the exercise of the B.A. degree. This however, according to custom, was granted to him by the ‘special grace,’ and he graduated at the regular date, February 1685–6. Swift in later years told Mrs. Pilkington, and his biographers, Deane Swift and Sheridan, that he had really been a ‘dunce.’ Sheridan (p. 5) also declares that Swift when in his last years repeated the exact arguments used in his degree exercise. He had been disgusted with the scholastic logic still taught at Dublin, and thought that he could reason as well without using the proper syllogistic forms. This dislike was characteristic of Swift's whole turn of thought, and probably explains in what sense we are to take the statement that he was a dunce, which, as Mrs. Pilkington observes, is ‘very surprising if true.’ Swift continued his residence after taking the B.A. degree. He became irregular in his conduct. According to Dr. Barrett (Essay, pp. 13, 14), he was constantly fined and censured for non-attendance at chapel and at the nightly roll-call. He was publicly censured for such offences (16 March 1687) with his cousin Thomas; and again (30 Nov. 1688) for insolence to the junior dean (Barrett's statements are sufficiently clear, though criticised by Forster, p. 34). Samuel Richardson (to Lady Bradshaigh, 22 April 1752) gives a story that Swift had been expelled from Dublin on account of an oration as terræ filius. One Jones, a contemporary, was actually punished, though not expelled, for such an oration in 1688. Barrett tried to make out that Swift was an accomplice in this wretched performance, which has accordingly been printed in his ‘Works.’ The arguments, however, both from external and internal evidence, establish at the outside a bare possibility. Swift attributes his recklessness to the neglect of his relations. ‘Was it not your uncle Godwin who educated you?’ he was asked. ‘Yes,’ said Swift, ‘he gave me the education of a dog.’ ‘Then,’ was the reply, ‘you have not the gratitude of a dog’ (Scott on the authority of Theophilus Swift). Godwin was at this period losing money (Deane Swift, pp. 41, 21), and in 1688 ‘fell into a lethargy.’ Swift was apparently helped by his other uncles—William, whom he calls the ‘best of his relations’ (to William Swift on 29 Nov. 1692), and Adam. Godwin's son Willoughby, settled in an English factory at Lisbon, sent him a present at a moment when he was almost in despair, and from that time, he says, he learnt to be a better economist (Deane Swift, p. 54). Swift, however, seems to have retained little regard for his family (ib. p. 353), and it is probable that their generosity was so administered as to hurt his pride. A desire for independence became a passion with him. The troubles which followed the expulsion of James II forced Swift to leave Dublin. He retired to his mother's house at Leicester. She was a cheerful frugal woman, who thought herself rich and happy on 20l. a year. She had a touch of humour, and amused herself, on a visit to Dublin in later years, by passing off her son to her landlady as a lover who had to visit her secretly. Swift was always a good son, and deeply affected by her death (24 April 1710). Mrs. Swift was now alarmed by her son's attentions to a certain Betty Jones. He explained to a friend that he despised the Leicester people as ‘wretched fools,’ and that prudence and a ‘cold temper’ prevented any thoughts of marriage. A ‘person of great honour’ in Ireland had told him that his mind was ‘like a conjured spirit which would do mischief if I did not give it employment.’ He had therefore permitted himself these little ‘distractions’ (to Kendall, 11 Feb. 16 Feb. 1691–2). Sir William Temple, the statesman, was about this time retiring from Sheen to Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey. Temple and his father had known Godwin Swift, and Lady Temple, it is said, was related to Swift's mother. Temple now took Swift into his family. He was, according to an untrustworthy report (Richardson to Lady Bradshaigh, quoting John, nephew of Sir W. Temple), to have 20l. a year and his board, and was not allowed to sit at table with his employer. He was by this time suffering from attacks of giddiness, attributed by himself to a ‘surfeit of fruit.’ Physicians, he says, ‘weakly imagined’ that his native air might be beneficial. On 28 May 1690, in any case, Temple recommended him to Sir Robert Southwell (1635–1702) [q. v.], who had been appointed secretary of state for Ireland, and was to accompany William III on his expedition from England (Letter first published in Cunningham's edition of Johnson's Lives, iii. 160). Temple says that Swift knew Latin and Greek, some French, wrote a good hand, and was honest and diligent. He had kept Temple's accounts, served as amanuensis, and might wait on Southwell ‘as a gentleman,’ act as clerk, or be appointed to a fellowship at Trinity College. Nothing came of this; but Swift was in Ireland in 1691, whence he returned in the autumn, and, after visiting Leicester, was again at Moor Park in February 1691–2. He was now thinking of taking orders. He was admitted in June to the B.A. degree at Oxford on the strength of testimonials from Dublin, and on 5 July became M.A. as a member of Hart Hall. In November he writes that he is not to take orders until the king fulfils a promise to Temple of giving him a prebend. Temple is ‘less forward’ than could be wished, finding the value of Swift's services to himself. Temple showed his rising estimate of Swift by introducing him to William III, who offered, it is said, to give the young man a troop of horse, and taught him how to cut asparagus (Deane Swift, p. 108; and see Faulkner's story in Scott, p. 29). In the spring of 1693 Temple sent Swift to William to persuade the king to consent to the bill for triennial parliaments. William's refusal to be convinced was, he says, ‘the first incident that helped to cure him of vanity.’ Swift had already been trying his hand at literature. He wrote pindarics after the fashion of Cowley, one of which (dated 1691–2) appeared in the ‘Athenian Mercury’ of the eccentric John Dunton [q. v.], and is said by Johnson to have provoked Dryden's contemptuous remark, ‘Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.’ Swift gave up pindarics; and two later epistles—one to Congreve, and one to Temple upon his recovery from an illness—begin to show genuine satirical power. He was becoming restless and doubtful as to his prospects. He had, he says, ‘a scruple of entering into the church merely for support;’ but Temple, who held the sinecure office of master of the rolls in Ireland, having offered him ‘an employ of about 120l. a year’ in that office, Swift thought his scruple removed, and returned to Ireland, where he was ordained deacon by Moreton, bishop of Kildare, on 28 Oct. 1694, and priest on 13 Jan. 1694–5 (Craik, p. 48 n.) Whatever the force of the scruples, Swift had become indignant at Temple's slowness in procuring him preferment (to Deane Swift, 3 June 1694). Temple was ‘extremely angry’ at his departure in May. When Swift reached Ireland, he found that the bishops demanded some testimonial as to his conduct during his stay in England, and he was forced to make an application to Temple (6 Oct. 1694) in sufficiently humiliating terms (the original letter in Swift's autograph is in the Rowfant Library). Temple gave the necessary document, and Swift had enough interest to obtain from Lord Capel, then lord-deputy, the prebend of Kilroot, near Belfast, worth about 100l. a year. A preposterous story of a criminal assault upon a farmer's daughter, discussed by some writers upon Swift, originated, as Scott shows, in the blunders of a lunatic. Swift carried on a flirtation with a Miss Jane Waring (‘Varina’) of Belfast, sister of an old college friend. On 29 May 1696 he wrote her a letter full of extravagant protestations, offering to give up his prospects for her sake, or, if she will wait for him, to ‘push his advancement’ in England till he is in a position to marry her. Temple had been making fresh promises to induce him to return; and Swift accordingly went back to Moor Park in May 1696. He left John Winder in charge of his prebend, which in the course of the next year he resolved to resign. He obtained the succession to Kilroot for his friend Winder, a fact which was the foundation of a story told by Sheridan (p. 19) to prove his romantic benevolence. A letter to Winder (Forster, p. 84) shows that he had entertained hopes of patronage which were ruined by the fall of Lord Sunderland, and that he was being consulted in some political intrigues. Swift's relation to Temple had completely changed its character. Temple's age and previous history entitled him to the respect of a young man who depended upon his patronage; but he had sufficiently shown his need of Swift's services, and now treated him as a friend. Swift employed himself in preparing Temple's letters and memoirs for publication (Swift's letter in Courtenay's Sir W. Temple, ii. 243). Swift had also time for a great deal of reading, chiefly classical and historical (see Craik, pp. 56, 57 n.) He spent ten hours a day in study according to Deane Swift (p. 271), or eight according to Delany (p. 50), and now wrote the first of his books which became famous. Temple had in 1692 published his essay upon ancient and modern learning, which transplanted to England a controversy begun in France by Fontenelle. William Wotton [q. v.] had replied by ‘Reflections’ in 1694; and incidental points had started the famous controversy between Bentley and Charles Boyle [q. v.], supported by the wits of Christ Church. Swift hereupon wrote his prose mock heroic, ‘The Battle of the Books,’ in which Bentley and Wotton, as the representatives of modern pedantry, are transfixed by Boyle in a suit of armour given him by the gods as a representative of ‘the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.’ Wotton accused Swift of plagiarism from a French book by François de Callières (not ‘Coutrey,’ as Scott says; see Craik, p. 71). There are slight resemblances which suggest that Swift may have seen the book, though his denial implies that, if so, he had forgotten it. The book remained in manuscript until its publication in 1704, with a greater satire, the ‘Tale of a Tub.’ According to Deane Swift (p. 60) the ‘Tale of a Tub’ was revised by Temple. Deane Swift also says (p. 31) that a sketch had been seen by Waring when Swift was still at Trinity College. The report, if it had any foundation, probably referred to the later period when Waring met Swift at Kilroot. In any case, it was finished early in 1697, and circulated in manuscript with the ‘Battle of the Books.’ Johnson said to Boswell (24 March 1775) that the book had ‘such a swarm of thoughts, so much of nature, and vigour, and life,’ that Swift could not have written it. The inference only expresses Johnson's prejudice; and the authorship, never seriously doubted, was assumed by Swift in a letter to his publisher Tooke (29 June 1710). The power of the satire, which anticipates Carlyle's clothes philosophy as a general denunciation of shams and pedantry, is indisputable. The contemptuous ridicule of theological pedantry in particular produced very natural suspicions of Swift's orthodoxy. The ridicule which he directs against papists and dissenters was only too applicable to Christianity in general. For the present, however, the book was known only to Temple's circle. In 1710 Swift prefixed an anonymous ‘Apology’ to a fifth edition. Curll, in a ‘Key,’ had insinuated that Thomas Swift, Jonathan's cousin, who had been chaplain at Moor Park, was the chief author. Wotton, in his ‘Defence’ of his ‘Reflections,’ also calls Thomas the editor. Swift, in writing to his publisher Tooke, makes some contemptuous references to his ‘little parson cousin,’ whom he guesses to have been an accomplice in this. While at Moor Park Swift made occasional excursions to Leicester and elsewhere. He was fond of walking, and used, it is said, to interrupt his studies by running up a hill and back, half a mile in six minutes (Deane Swift, p. 272). He constantly preached the duty of exercise to his friends. He made some of his expeditions on foot, and liked to put up at wayside inns where ‘lodgings for a penny’ were advertised, and to enjoy the rough talk of wagoners and hostlers (Orrery, p. 34; Delany, p. 72). He showed his love of Moor Park Gardens by afterwards imitating them on a small scale in Ireland. The great charm of Moor Park, however, was of a different kind. Esther Johnson (1681–1728), born at Richmond, Surrey, on 13 March 1680–1 (Richmond Register), was the daughter of a merchant who died young. Her mother became the companion of Lady Giffard, sister of Temple, who, as a widow, went to live with her brother. The Johnsons also became inmates of the family. A writer in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ for November 1757 asserts that both Esther and Swift were Temple's natural children. The statement as to Swift is all but demonstrably false, and the other a gratuitous guess. The Rev. James Hay has tried to revive this hypothesis in ‘Swift, the Mystery of his Life and Love,’ 1891. Swift during his first stay at Moor Park took some part in Esther's early education, which seems to have been imperfect enough. When he returned in 1696 she had got over an early delicacy, was one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable ‘young women in London, only a little too fat.’ Her ‘hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection’ (‘On the death of Mrs. Johnson’). Another member of the household was Rebecca Dingley, who was in some way related to the Temple family. Sir William Temple died on 26 Jan. 1698–9, and with him, as Swift noted at the time, died ‘all that was good and amiable among mankind.’ He left 100l. to Swift, and a lease of some lands in Ireland to Esther Johnson (Will in Courtenay's Temple, ii. 484–6). To Swift he also left the trust and profit of publishing his posthumous writings. Five volumes appeared in 1700, 1703, and 1709, for one of which Swift received 40l. (a presentation copy to Archbishop Marsh, with Swift's autograph, is now in Marsh's library, Dublin). The last volume, containing a ‘third part’ of Temple's ‘Memoirs,’ provoked an angry correspondence with Lady Giffard, who charged him with printing against Temple's wishes and from an ‘unfaithful copy.’ Swift defended himself successfully (see Courtenay, ii. 242–8; Forster, p. 99), but was alienated from the family. His hopes of preferment vanished, and he long afterwards declared that he owed no obligation to Temple, at ‘whose death he was’ as far to ‘seek as ever’ (to Palmerston, 29 Jan. 1725–6). In the ‘Journal to Stella’ there are various reminiscences of the days in which he had been treated ‘like a schoolboy’ and felt his dependence painful. He calls Temple, however, ‘a man of sense and virtue’ (notes on Burnet, ap. Scott's Swift, xii. 206), and praises him warmly in a memorandum printed in Scott's ‘Life.’ It was not Temple's fault, Swift admitted, that nothing had come of the connection. Temple had obtained a promise from the king of a prebend at Canterbury or Westminster. Swift went to London, and begged Henry Sidney, earl of Romney [q. v.], to obtain its fulfilment. Romney agreed to speak, but did not keep his word. Swift then accepted an offer from Lord Berkeley, who in the summer of 1699 was appointed one of the lords justices of Ireland. Swift was to be his chaplain and secretary, but, upon reaching Ireland, Berkeley gave the secretaryship to a Mr. Bush, who had persuaded him that it was unfit for a clergyman. The rich deanery of Derry becoming vacant, Swift applied for it, but Bush had been bribed by another candidate. Swift was told that he might still have it for 1,000l. He replied to the secretary and his master, ‘God confound you both for a couple of scoundrels!’ (Sheridan, p. 30). He wrote some verses in ridicule of the pair, and in consequence, or in spite, of this received in February 1699–1700 the livings of Laracor, Agher, and Rathbeggan. To these was added in 1700 the prebend of Dunlavin in St. Patrick's. The whole was worth about 230l. a year (Forster, p. 117), which to Swift, with his strictly economical habits, meant independence, so long as he had only himself to keep. Miss Waring apparently thought that the income would be enough for two. In a letter to her (4 May 1700) Swift, after demolishing this theory, offers still to take her as his wife, but upon terms so insulting as to make her acceptance incompatible with the slightest self-respect. This, perhaps the most unpleasant of his actions, produced the desired result. Laracor is a mile or two from Trim. Swift rebuilt the parsonage, made a fishpond, planted willows, and formed a garden. His congregation consisted of about fifteen persons, ‘most of them gentle and all simple’ (to King, 6 Jan. 1708–9; to Sterne, 17 April 1710). Orrery (p. 29) tells how he proposed to read prayers every Wednesday and Friday, and had to commence the exhortation with the words, ‘Dearly beloved Roger, the scripture moveth you and me.’ Swift, however, passed much of his time at Dublin, where he was familiar with the official society. Lady Betty Germain [see Germain, Lady Elizabeth], the daughter of Lord Berkeley, dated from this time a long friendship, and in 1700 he gave the first specimen of a peculiar vein of humour in the ‘Petition of Mrs. Frances Harris.’ He made various visits to London, where he spent altogether some four out of the next ten years, always finding time for a visit to his mother at Leicester. In February 1701 he took his D.D. degree at Dublin, and in April returned with Lord Berkeley to London. The impeachment of the whig lords was then exciting the political world, and a conversation with Berkeley led Swift to write his ‘discourse on the dissensions in Athens and Rome.’ The pamphlet was to show that the desirable balance of power had been upset by measures analogous to impeachments, and, though well written, appears now to be pedantic or ‘academical.’ It was, however, successful at the time, and was attributed to Somers and to Burnet. Bishop Sheridan told Swift himself, when he returned to Ireland, that it was written by Burnet, whereupon Swift could not refrain from claiming the authorship (Deane Swift, p. 122; Sheridan, p. 34). On his next visit to England he was welcomed as a promising whig author by Somers, Halifax, and Sunderland, who held out liberal prospects of preferment (Memoirs relating to the Change of Ministry). Though the impeached ministers are incidentally compared to Aristides and other virtuous persons, there is nothing in the pamphlet committing Swift to specifically whig doctrine. He says himself that this was the first occasion on which he began to trouble himself about the difference between whig and tory. On his return to Ireland in September 1701 Swift was accompanied by Esther Johnson, best known as Stella (though, according to Forster, the name was not given to her till after the famous journal), and her friend, Mrs. Dingley. Swift says (in his paper upon her death) that Stella's fortune was only 1,500l., and that she would get a better interest for her money in Ireland. The two ladies settled there permanently. During Swift's absence they lived in his houses at Dublin and Laracor, and when he was in Ireland took lodgings in his neighbourhood. Suggestions were naturally made that this implied a ‘secret history.’ Swift, however, carefully guarded against scandal. He never saw Stella except in presence of a third person, and says many years afterwards that he has not seen her in a morning these dozen years, except once or ‘twice in a journey’ (to Tickell, 7 July 1726). They visited England when Swift was there in 1705 and 1708 (Forster, pp. 131, 230; Craik, p. 176). In 1704 Dr. William Tisdal or Tisdall [q. v.], clergyman at Dublin, made an offer to Stella, and charged Swift with opposing his suit. In a remarkable letter (20 April 1704) Swift admits that if his ‘fortune and humour’ permitted him to think of marriage, he should prefer her to any one on earth. As matters are, however, he is prepared to give Tisdall a fair chance if he will make a proper application to the mother, and declares that he has been Tisdall's friend ‘in the whole concern.’ The letter, the tone of which is remarkably calm, has been variously interpreted. It admits an affection of which the natural end would be marriage. It may mean that he considered the obstacles in his own case to be so decisive that he could not fairly stand in the way of another match, or that he had private reasons for knowing Tisdall's suit to be hopeless, or that he did not choose to be forced to declare his intentions, and considered that he was giving Tisdall a sufficient hint to keep at a distance. It is certain that he afterwards speaks of Tisdall with marked dislike. Swift was again in England from April to November 1702, and from November 1703 till May 1704. The Occasional Conformity Bill was now exciting bitter contests in parliament. Swift was mightily urged ‘by some great people’ to write against the bill. His strong church prejudices made it difficult for him to agree with the whigs, although he still considered himself to belong to the party, and his chance of preferment depended upon them. Somers and Burnet assured him eagerly that they meant no harm to the church. He at last wrote, though with many qualms, but too late to publish (to Tisdall, 16 Dec. 1703 and 3 Feb. 1703–4). Before leaving London in 1704 he published the ‘Battle of the Books’ and the ‘Tale of a Tub.’ The authorship was secret, though known in the Moor Park time, and doubtless guessed by many of his friends. When he next came to London, in April 1705, he became known to the wits. Addison presented to him a copy of his travels (now in the Forster Library), inscribed ‘to the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of the age.’ The genius had no doubt been recognised in the ‘Tale of a Tub.’ Sheridan (p. 41) tells a story of the quaint behaviour at a coffee-house by which he got the name of the ‘mad parson’ and attracted the notice of the circle. He knew, however, enough distinguished men to have no difficulty about an introduction. The friendship with Addison was permanent, and is illustrated by one of his pleasantest pieces of humour, ‘Baucis and Philemon,’ a travesty of Ovid. Swift told Delany (p. 19) that Addison had made him ‘blot fourscore lines, add fourscore, and alter fourscore’ in a poem ‘of not two hundred lines.’ Swift exaggerated, but not very much. Forster found the original at Narford, the seat of Sir Andrew Fountaine, and gives the exact figures (Forster, pp. 164, &c.) Addison and Swift met constantly at this time, and never, says Delany, wished for a third person (Delany, p. 32; Forster, p. 159). Swift spent the whole of 1706 in Ireland, and returned to England in November 1707 with Lord Pembroke, who had been lord lieutenant for a time, and had thus made Swift's acquaintance. Swift had now an official mission. Queen Anne's bounty had been founded in England in 1704. A similar measure had been suggested for Ireland (see Swift to King, 31 Dec. 1704) some time before, and Swift was now instructed to apply to the English government to make the grant. Swift calculated that the surrender of the first-fruits and twentieths and certain other funds for the benefit of the church would cost the crown about 2,500l. a year (see his Memorial to Harley, 17 Nov. 1710). The negotiation dragged, and Swift remained in England till the beginning of 1709. He applied to Somers and other great men, and at last, in June 1708, had an interview with Godolphin. Godolphin intimated that some acknowledgment would be expected from the Irish clergy. The phrase meant that they should consent to the abolition of the test. This was regarded both by Swift and his clients as out of the question. He could for the present only wait for opportunities of further negotiation. He was still reckoned a whig. In January 1708 the bishopric of Waterford was vacant, and Somers, as Swift believed, pressed his claims upon the government (Forster, p. 211). Swift was bitterly disappointed when it was given to Thomas Milles [q. v.] The fall of Harley in February marked the triumph of the whigs. When Somers and others came into office, Swift thought that the change might prove favourable to his cause and himself, though protesting that he would not make his fortune at the expense of the church (to King, 9 Nov. 1708). At the same time, however, he had thoughts of getting ‘out of the way of the parties’ by becoming secretary to Lord Berkeley's proposed embassy to Vienna. Meanwhile Swift was seeing much of Halifax, Addison, Steele, and Congreve. It was at the end of 1707 that he launched his famous joke against the astrologer John Partridge [q. v.] (1644–1715, for a full account of this performance). The name of Bickerstaff, under which he wrote, became famous, and was adopted by Steele for the ‘Tatler.’ He wrote some graver pamphlets: the ‘Argument to prove the inconvenience of abolishing Christianity,’ which showed that he could ridicule a deist as well as a papist or a presbyterian; a ‘Project for the Advancement of Religion,’ and the ‘Sentiments of a Church of England Man.’ In the ‘Project’ he suggested the plan adopted by Harley a little later for building fifty new churches in London. These pamphlets are remarkable as an exposition of his political principles at the time. He fully agrees with the whigs as accepting the ‘revolution principles,’ but holds that the state should vigorously support the church. The government therefore could not give the dissenters too ‘much ease nor trust them with too little power.’ The application of this principle to the Test Act is obvious, and is significant of Swift's position in the following months. In October 1708 the Earl of Wharton was appointed lord lieutenant. Swift waited upon him to press the first-fruits application. Wharton put him off with ‘lame excuses,’ which were repeated when Swift made a second attempt with the help of Somers. Perceiving that Wharton would endeavour to abolish the test, Swift wrote a pamphlet, his ‘Letter on the Sacramental Test’ (December 1708), in which for the first time his power as a political writer was revealed. It is a fierce attack upon the claims put forward by the Irish presbyterians, and amounts to a declaration of war to the knife. Swift carefully concealed the authorship, even from his correspondent, Archbishop King. He even complains to King that the author ‘reflects upon me as a person likely to write for repealing the test’ (to King 6 Jan. 1708–9). This apparently refers to a passage not discoverable and suppressed in the reprint of 1711 (see Forster, p. 250). The authorship, however, was suspected, according to Swift, by Wharton's secretary (Change of Ministry), and injured him with ministers. Swift in fact, while still hoping for preferment, was anonymously attacking a favourite measure of the advanced whigs. He was afterwards accused of having made an application to be Wharton's chaplain. Samuel Salter [q. v.] of the Charterhouse professed to have seen letters of Swift to Somers, and Somers's letters to Wharton, and reported Wharton's contemptuous answer: ‘We cannot countenance these fellows. We have not character enough ourselves.’ This, it is suggested, caused Swift's desertion of the whigs. Swift, however, writing at the time, states that he made no application to Wharton (to King, 30 Nov. 1708, and to Sterne same day). Before he left England Somers asked him to take a letter (no doubt of recommendation) to Wharton, but he ‘absolutely refused,’ though he finally consented to deliver it in Dublin some months later. Swift's account is clear and consistent, and Salter is described by Bishop Percy as a repeater of silly anecdotes (Nichols, Illustrations, viii. 160). The story is merely an instance of the calumnies suggested by Swift's change of party (the story told originally by Salter in the Gentleman's Magazine is given in the annotated Tatler, 1786, vol. v., with an answer by Theophilus Swift [q. v.] It is also discussed in Monck Berkeley's Literary Relics, 1789, pp. xl, &c.; and see Scott's Swift, i. 99, &c., and Craik, p. 154 n.) Swift had still hopes of success in the ‘first-fruits’ business, and on 6 Jan. 1708–9 tells King that he has heard from Lord Pembroke that the concession had been made. On 26 March he has to explain that this was a delusion. He was suffering from bad attacks of his old complaint and greatly dispirited. He lingered in London till 3 May, when he called upon Halifax and begged a book, asking the donor to remember that it was the only favour he had ever received from him or his party. A few months later he endorsed a complimentary letter from the great man as a ‘true original of courtiers and court promises’ (Sheridan, p. 97). He sent two adulatory letters, however, to Halifax (Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. Cunningham, iii. 201) to remind him of his promise in case of accident. He left London on 3 May, and, after staying five weeks at Chester, reached Ireland on 30 June. He retired at once to Laracor, and saw nothing of any friends except Esther Johnson and Addison, who was now Wharton's secretary (Journal to Stella, 3 May 1711). When the whig ministry was breaking up in 1710, Swift remarked that he might expect something in ‘a new world, since’ he ‘had the merit of suffering by not complying with the old’ (to Tooke, 29 June 1710); he considered, that is, that preferment had been withheld by the whigs because he would not support their policy. There can in fact be no doubt that the secret of Swift's alienation from the whigs was his intense devotion to his order. He had imbibed in an intensified form all the prejudices of the Irish churchmen of his day. He hated with exceeding bitterness the presbyterians of the north, their Scottish allies, and the English dissenters. But he also heartily despised the Jacobites. James II had taught him and his friends a lesson in 1688, and his relations to Temple had thrown him into a whig connection at starting. As it became evident that whiggism meant alliance with dissent, Swift's distrust of the leaders deepened into aversion. He is indeed more to be blamed for adhering so long to so uncongenial a connection than for breaking it off so early. Unfortunately, Swift could never separate personal from public questions. He complained of not being rewarded for his services, not the less bitterly because he also boasted that he had never rendered them. He would not exculpate the whigs from ingratitude, though as whigs they had no reasons to be grateful. His complaints have therefore given plausibility to imputations of ‘ratting’ when in fact he was really discovering his genuine affinities, at a time, it is true, when the discovery coincided with his personal interests. In the summer of 1710 Swift was requested by the Irish bishops to take up once more the first-fruits negotiation, which would have better chance under a change of administration. He went to England, as he writes to Esther Johnson, with less desire than ever before. The famous ‘Journal to Stella’ begins from Chester on 2 Sept., and records his history minutely in the following years. He reached London on 7 Sept., and on the 9th writes to King that he was ‘caressed by both parties.’ The whigs took him to be ‘a sort of bough for drowning men to lay hold of.’ Godolphin, however, was ‘morose.’ Somers made explanations to which Swift listened coldly. Somers, he says (24 Jan. 1710–11), is a ‘false, deceitful rascal.’ Halifax asked him to dinner. He saw something of Addison, and contributed to Steele's ‘Tatler.’ Meanwhile the elections were going for the tories, and on 4 Oct. Swift saw Harley, to whom he had got himself represented as ‘one extremely ill-used by the last ministry.’ Harley welcomed him with effusion. Within a week he was treating Swift as an intimate friend, and promising to get the first-fruits business settled at once. Swift's exultation was mingled with triumph over those ‘ungrateful dogs’ the whigs. On 4 Nov. he writes to King to announce authoritatively that the first-fruits will be granted. The Irish bishops had meanwhile bethought themselves that Swift's whiggish connections might disqualify him as an intercessor, and proposed to take the matter out of his hands. Swift was angry, though no doubt amused by this unconscious testimony to his success. Harley had won not only the gratitude but the permanent devotion of his new friend. Swift, though seeing plainly the minister's faults, always speaks of him hereafter with the strongest personal affection. Swift began at once by political squibs, attacking his enemy Godolphin in ‘Sid Hamet's Rod,’ which had a great success, and producing in December what he rightly calls ‘a damned libellous pamphlet’ against the hated Wharton, of which two thousand copies were sold in two days (Journal, 15 Oct. 1710, and 1 Jan. 1710–1). He was already employed upon more important work. The ‘Examiner’ had been started as a weekly paper to support the tories, and had been for a time answered by Addison in a short-lived ‘Whig Examiner.’ Swift now took over the ‘Examiner,’ of which the original authors were tired, and wrote the numbers from 2 Nov. 1710 to 14 June 1711. Their success was unprecedented. With an air of downright common-sense and vigorous insistence upon the main points, Swift defends the ministerial policy. He expresses the general weariness of the war, which was now, he argued, being carried on for the benefit of Marlborough, the ‘monied men,’ and our Dutch allies; he appeals to the interests of the church and the landed men, and denounces some of his hated opponents. He often took credit for sparing Marlborough (Journal, 7 Jan., 12 Jan., and 18 Feb. 1710–1711), whom he heartily disliked, but still took to be necessary. The ‘sparing’ is not very evident now, but at the time Swift and his patron, Harley, appeared as too moderate to some of their own side. The ministry, as Swift says (4 March 1710–11), stood ‘like an isthmus’ between whigs and violent tories. Swift endeavoured to restrain the excess of zeal, and was very nervous at reports of Harley's ill-health. When, on 8 March 1711, Harley was stabbed by Guiscard, Swift was thrown into an agony of fear. He afterwards preserved Guiscard's knife as a memorial (Deane Swift, p. 163; Scott, i. 196 n.; Nichols, Lit. Illustr. v. 379). Swift took lodgings at Chelsea on 26 April to have the benefit of a walk to London. He often went to Windsor in the summer with ministers, and describes his journeys in his imitation of Horace (6th satire of 2nd book). He saw the queen occasionally, but Harley, it seems, never fulfilled his promise of presenting him formally at court. Prior's secret mission to Paris in the summer gave occasion for one of Swift's characteristic ‘bites.’ When it was made known by an accident, he wrote a mock account, supposed to come from a French valet, which is an amusing instance of his power of mystification. The serious purpose of the pamphlet was apparently to test the public feeling as to the peace negotiations. This gave the occasion for Swift's most important work at this time. In concert with St. John he prepared, during the summer, his pamphlet upon the ‘Conduct of the Allies.’ The whigs were to make a great effort at the meeting of parliament. They made an alliance with Nottingham [see Finch, Daniel, second Earl of Nottingham] by agreeing to accept the Occasional Conformity Bill; and the queen was thought to be drawn towards them by the influence of the Duchess of Somerset. Swift, as usual, took a gloomy view of political prospects. His pamphlet appeared on 27 Nov., and was greedily bought. It was a powerful defence of the thesis assumed in the ‘Examiner,’ that the war had been protracted against our true interests from corrupt motives, and solely to benefit our allies. When a vote hostile to the ministry was passed in the House of Lords, Swift was in despair and begged St. John to get him a secretaryship abroad, to which he might retreat if the ministry fell (Journal, 7 Dec. 1711). He recommended, however, strong measures all the more earnestly. On 13 Dec. he was alarmed by hearing that the chief justice (Parker) had threatened the printer of the ‘Conduct of the Allies,’ which he would not have had the impudence to do had he not anticipated a change. Swift consoled himself by writing the ‘Windsor Prophecy,’ a squib in which he charged the Duchess of Somerset with having red hair and having been concerned in the murder of her second husband [see under Seymour, Charles, sixth Duke of Somerset]. It was privately printed, and a dozen copies given to each of his friends at the Brothers' Club. Mrs. Masham persuaded him not to publish it; but it was probably shown to the queen, and would not conciliate her or her favourite (Journal, 23, 26, and 27 Dec. 1711). His anxiety was at last relieved by the creation of the twelve peers and the dismissal of Marlborough from all his offices at the end of the year. The tories were now triumphant; but success brought disunion. The October Club, composed of the more violent tories, complained that the ministry had not gone far enough. Swift endeavoured to pacify them by a ‘twopenny pamphlet’ of advice, and complains (ib. 28 Jan. 1711–12) that, though ‘finely written,’ it did not sell. The jealousies between Harley (now Lord Oxford) and St. John were becoming serious. Swift had noticed a discord soon after Guiscard's attempt, and had been labouring to effect a reconciliation (ib. 27 April, 15 and 27 Aug., and 20 Oct. 1711). He knew, he said, that he was endangering his own interests by acting an ‘honest part,’ but the jealousy was steadily growing. Swift, during the early part of 1712, speaks several times of his expectation of returning to Ireland, and is only detained by some piece of business (ib. 7, 27 Feb. 1711–12, 31 May, 17 June 1712). He had received promises from ministers at an early period, but professed to count little upon them (ib. 5 April, 22 May, 25 Aug. 1711). He was becoming discontented, and complains that he can help every one except himself (ib. 8 and 17 March 1711–12). He employed himself in some of his usual squibs and in helping to preface a famous ‘Representation’ from the House of Commons (ib. 8 March 1711–12). He wrote nothing, however, comparable to his previous efforts. A distressing illness at the end of March caused him to drop his regular ‘Journal to Stella.’ He wrote occasional letters, but the journal was suspended until the following December. He was at Windsor for some time in August and September, and was at work upon the book afterwards published as the ‘History of the Last Four Years of Queen Anne’ (ib. 15 Sept. 1712). His letters frequently complain of giddiness and depression of spirits, and the want of any personal result of his labours became vexatious. John Sharp, the archbishop of York [q. v.], is said to have complained to the queen of the irreligious tendency of the ‘Tale of a Tub.’ Swift calls Sharp his ‘mortal enemy’ (ib. 23 April 1713), and although, at the end, Sharp seems to have wished for a reconciliation, this plausible imputation would no doubt be a serious obstacle (see Swift, The Author upon Himself, 1713; and Delany, Observations, p. 270). At last, in the spring of 1713, there were several vacancies, and Swift told Oxford that he would at once go to Ireland if ‘something honourable’ were not immediately given to him. After a long dispute it was at last settled that John Sterne [q. v.], dean of St. Patrick's, should be made bishop of Dromore, and Swift promoted to the vacated deanery. The warrants were finally signed on 23 April, and Swift left London on 1 June, and was installed dean of St. Patrick's on the 13th. During his stay in London Swift had made himself conspicuous in society as well as in politics. His relations to the whigs had naturally cooled. Steele had lost his place as gazetteer, but had another small office, which Swift begged Harley not to take away. Harley consented, but stipulated that Steele should call with an apology for previous errors. Steele never came, being held back, as Swift thought, by Addison. Swift declared that he would never speak in their favour again (Journal, 22 Oct., 15 Dec. 1710, 4 Feb. 1710–11, 29 June 1711). The breach with Steele was complete, but he still occasionally saw Addison, and declares (14 Sept. 1711) that no man was ‘half so agreeable to him.’ Meanwhile he had been welcomed to the tables of ministers. Harley offered him a 50l. banknote for his services as ‘a writer;’ Swift insisted upon an apology, and, upon the quarrel being made up, was invited to one of Harley's Saturday dinners, with St. John and Harcourt, the lord-keeper (ib. 7 and 17 Feb., and 6 March 1710–11). He ‘chid’ Lord Rivers for presuming to join the party, and they all called him ‘Jonathan.’ They would, he replied, leave him Jonathan as they found him. In June he was one of the original members of the Brothers' Club (ib. 21 June 1711). The club held weekly dinners, and was intended, besides promoting sociability, to advise ministers to a worthy distribution of patronage to men of letters. Harley and Harcourt were excluded, apparently to secure the independence of the advice, but it included St. John and several tory peers; while literature was represented by Swift, Prior, Freind, and Arbuthnot. Political squibs were occasionally laid upon the table and subscriptions raised for poor authors. The club declined in 1713, but its members long addressed each other as ‘brother.’ Swift's ambition to become a patron of literature suggested the only pamphlet published with his name, a ‘Proposal for Correcting … the English Language’ written in February 1711–12 (ib. 21 Feb. 1711–12). An academy was to be founded for this purpose. Swift speaks of this scheme on 22 June 1711, and continued to cherish it. The ministry had other things to think of. Swift was heartily desirous to help poor authors. He was perseveringly kind to William Harrison (1685–1713) [q. v.], and deeply affected by his death. He got help for him in his last illness and for William Diaper, a ‘poor poet in a nasty garret.’ He induced Oxford to make the first advances to Parnell, and recommended Berkeley (afterwards the bishop) to all the ministers (13 Jan. 1712–13 and 12 April 1713). He did a ‘good day's work’ by relieving his old schoolfellow Congreve of the fears of being turned out by the new ministry (22 June 1711), and obtained a promise of a place for Nicholas Rowe (27 Dec. 1712). The members, he says, complained that he never came to them ‘without a whig in his sleeve.’ Naturally, however, his intimates were chiefly tories, and the most eminent of the young men encouraged by him was Pope (first mentioned in his Journal, 13 March 1712–13). A passage frequently quoted from the ‘Journal’ of Bishop White Kennett [q. v.] describes Swift at court in 1713 touting for subscriptions to Pope's ‘Homer,’ and making an ostentatious display of his interest at court. It tends to confirm the unjust impression that Swift was a sycophant disguised as a bully. His self-assertion showed bad taste, but the independence was genuine, and the services of which he bragged were really performed. If he could be generous to dependents, he had no mercy upon his enemies, and complained that Bolingbroke was not active enough in ‘swingeing’ Grub Street assailants (28 Oct. 1712). He was sensitive to abuse, and was stung to the quick when Steele in the ‘Guardian’ of 12 May 1713, attacking an article in the ‘Examiner,’ insinuated that Swift was an accomplice, and hinted that he was an unbeliever. The ‘Examiner’ was now edited by William Oldisworth [q. v.], who was unknown to Swift, but who received occasional hints from government and took a gift from the Brothers' Club (1 Feb. and 12 March 1712–13). Swift wrote an indignant remonstrance to Addison denying all complicity with the ‘Examiner,’ and truly declaring that he had done his best to keep Steele's place for him. Steele unjustifiably refused to accept either statement, and they became bitter enemies. When Swift reached Dublin in 1713 he was received, according to Orrery (p. 49) and Sheridan (p. 183), with insults by the people generally. Delany (p. 87) denies this, which may perhaps refer to his arrival after the fall of the tories. He was, in any case, ‘horribly melancholy.’ The discord of the ministry was increasing. Swift fancied at one time (Journal, 8 April 1713) that he had effected a reconciliation. But he was entreated by his political friends to return to try the hopeless task again. He reached London in September, and found the political excitement rising; the new parliament was to be elected; the treaty of Utrecht had enraged the whigs; and the state of the queen's health threatened a political catastrophe at any moment. Swift showed his own bitterness by writing against Bishop Burnet and Steele. ‘The Importance of the “Guardian” considered’ was his reply to Steele's ‘Importance of Dunkirk considered.’ ‘The Public Spirit of the Whigs considered’ replied to Steele's ‘Crisis,’ published in January 1713–14. (The ‘Character of Steele’ and another attack by ‘Andrew Tripe’ are attributed to Swift. The evidence, however, would be equally cogent against Pope or some other friend, whom Swift may possibly have encouraged to write. The internal evidence is not in favour of Swift's own authorship.). Swift's powerful invective was in striking contrast to Steele's feeble performance in an uncongenial field; and he treats both Steele and Burnet with contemptuous insolence. One of his aims was to repudiate the charge of jacobitism made against the tories. Swift's frequent denials that any jacobite intrigue existed (see especially letter to King, 16 Dec. 1716), though mistaken in fact, were certainly sincere. The ministers had an obvious interest in keeping him in the dark, if only that he might give the lie to dangerous reports more effectively. Steele was expelled from the House of Commons for the ‘Crisis;’ and the peers petitioned the crown for action against the unknown author of the ‘Public Spirit.’ Oxford offered a reward of 300l. for his discovery, and when the printers were summoned to the bar of the House, sent 100l. privately to Swift to pay for their damages. Meanwhile, the split between Oxford and Bolingbroke was widening. Swift, after vain expostulations, gave up the game, and retired at the end of May to the vicarage of an old friend at Upper Letcombe in Berkshire. He had shortly before (15 April) applied for the office of historiographer to the queen, which brought trifling profit, but would enable him to write his proposed history. He seems to have been greatly annoyed at Bolingbroke's failure to secure the success of this application (to Miss Vanhomrigh, 1 Aug. 1714). He tried at times to forget politics; he corresponded with Arbuthnot and Pope on the satire to be written by the ‘Scriblerus Club,’ an informal association of the tory wits started at this period, with which Oxford had found time to exchange verses in April. Politicians, however, entreated Swift to leave his retirement; and he was writing his ‘Free Thoughts on the Present State of Affairs,’ throwing the blame chiefly upon Oxford's vacillation, and recommending vigorous action against the whigs. The pamphlet, of which the authorship was to be carefully concealed (Ford to Swift, 20 July 1714), was too late. The final fall of Oxford was followed by the death of the queen (1 Aug.), and Swift saw at once that the case was hopeless. Lady Masham, who had helped Bolingbroke's intrigue, wrote on 29 July to entreat Swift to stay in England and support the queen, who had been, as she said, ‘barbarously used’ by Oxford. On 1 July, however, Swift had written a warm acknowledgment of gratitude to Oxford, whose resignation he anticipated. On 25 July, hearing that it was coming, he had written offering to accompany Oxford in his retreat. On 1 Aug. he tells Miss Vanhomrigh that he could not join with Bolingbroke; Oxford had accepted his offer in the ‘most moving terms imaginable.’ Swift could not refuse the fallen minister who, when in power, had been so good to him. Although condemning Oxford as a minister, he could not desert the friend. The queen's death ruined both ministers; and Swift on 16 Aug. left Berkshire for Ireland. Swift retired to what he always regarded as a place of exile in sullen despondency. In verses written in sickness he laments his solitude, and says that life is becoming a burden. He is living alone, he tells Pope next year (28 June 1715), in ‘the corner of a vast unfurnished house.’ Could he be easy, he asks, while his friends Oxford, Bolingbroke, and Ormonde were in danger of losing their heads? He wrote another affectionate letter to Oxford upon his impeachment (19 July 1715). Next year he bitterly resented a suggestion from King that Bolingbroke might be able to tell an ‘ill story’ of him (16 Dec. 1716). He declares his innocence of any plots in favour of the Pretender. King's suspicions had been stimulated by letters addressed to Swift and seized in the post office, but they were clearly groundless (see Craik, p. 306). Swift's chief amusement seems to have been in petty quarrels with the archbishop and his choir. To this period has been assigned his alleged marriage to Esther Johnson. The journal addressed to her during her stay in London, full of caresses so playful and intimate that to read them even now seems a breach of confidence, clearly suggests intention of marriage. He ostensibly joins her with Mrs. Dingley as ‘M.D.,’ but when he says (23 May 1711) that ‘M.D.'s felicity is the great goal I aim at in all my pursuits,’ there could be only one interpretation. In the journal Swift frequently mentions a Mrs. Vanhomrigh, with whom he often dined, and at whose lodgings he kept his ‘best gown and periwig’ when he was at Chelsea. Mrs. Vanhomrigh was the widow of a Dutch merchant who had followed William III to Ireland and obtained places of profit. He died in 1703, leaving about 16,000l. and four children. One son died early, and the other behaved ill (Orrery, p. 103; Deane Swift, pp. 257–262). In 1708 Mrs. Vanhomrigh, with her two daughters, Esther (born 14 Feb. 1689–1690; see Journal, 14 Feb. 1710–11, 14 Aug. 1711) and Mary, was living in London, where Swift met them in that year. The journal rarely mentions Esther, and the silence may be significant. An intimacy sprang up between her and Swift, which is described in his remarkable poem, ‘Cadenus and Vanessa,’ written at Windsor in 1713 (revised in 1719), but not then published. Swift's behaviour to women was always a mixture of tyrannising and petting. He often refers in later years to an ‘edict’ which he issued annually in London commanding all ladies to make the first advances. In 1709 he drew up a treaty setting forth the terms on which a beautiful Miss Long was to claim his acquaintance. ‘Hessy’ Vanhomrigh undertakes not to abet her in her ‘contumacy.’ He showed genuine kindness to Miss Long, who died in sad circumstances, to his great sorrow, in 1711 (Journal, 25 Dec. 1711). Miss Vanhomrigh became his devoted slave. The ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’ states that he at first regarded her as a master might regard a promising pupil. She startled him after a time by confessing that love had taken the place of admiration in her heart. He tried to persuade her to suppress her passion, but offered as much friendship as she pleased. She replied that she would now become his tutor; but the result of her instructions remained a secret. Swift wrote to her from Dublin in 1713, and from Letcombe in 1714, in terms implying close confidence, though expressing no special affection. Her mother died in the summer of 1714. Vanessa seems to have surprised Swift by an indiscreet visit at Letcombe soon afterwards. She was intending to return to Ireland with her sister, and he warns her that if she comes he will see her very seldom. She was in Dublin, however, in November 1714, and complains piteously of the restrictions upon their intercourse, of his ‘killing words,’ and the ‘awful’ look which ‘strikes her dumb.’ She settled at Marlay Abbey, near Celbridge, on the Liffey, where her sister died in 1720. The correspondence, which is fragmentary, shows that she wrote to him in terms of passionate adoration. He makes excuses for not seeing her oftener; he advises her (5 July 1721) to ‘quit this scoundrel island,’ and yet he assures her in the same breath ‘que jamais personne du monde a été aimée, honorée, estimée, adorée par votre ami que vous.’ In other passages he recalls old associations and uses fondling terms, while he yet seems to reproach her for yielding to morbid sentiment. It is also said that he favoured the proposals of marriage to her from another person (Deane Swift, p. 263). How far he was ‘in love’ with her is a matter of doubtful inference. The stronger his feeling, the greater would be the excuse for his behaviour to her. Reluctance to give her pain, and to sacrifice a friendship so valuable to himself in his retirement, might be pleaded as some extenuation of his temporising; but if, as is alleged, he was really married to Stella, he was clearly bound to speak out. In 1723 Vanessa wrote a letter to Stella (Sheridan, p. 290), or to Swift himself (Orrery, p. 113), asking whether they were married. Swift rode off to Celbridge in a fury, threw down the letter, and retired without speaking a word. Vanessa died before the autumn from the shock. She revoked a will in favour of Swift, and by another (dated 1 May 1723) divided her fortune between the famous Berkeley and Judge Marshall. She also entrusted to them as executors her correspondence with Swift (extracts from this were given by Sheridan, but it was first fully published in Scott's edition of the ‘Works’) and ‘Cadenus and Vanessa,’ which was published after her death. Swift hid himself for two months in the south of Ireland. Stella was also shocked, but, when somebody remarked that Vanessa must have been a remarkable woman to inspire such poetry, observed that the dean could write well upon a broomstick (Delany, p. 57). The story of the marriage to Stella has been much discussed. Swift had sufficient reasons, in his passionate desire for independence, for not marrying before he had won his deanery. The profound depression into which he was thrown by the fall of his party, and the constant alarms as to his health, which made him old before his time, may well account for his not caring to marry on his return to Ireland. Nor does it seem necessary with some of his biographers to lay any particular stress upon the coldness of temperament of which he speaks. The marriage was, in any case, merely formal. Orrery (p. 22) states positively, and Delany (p. 52) confirms the statement, that Swift was privately married to Stella by St. George Ashe [q. v.], bishop of Clogher, in 1716. Deane Swift first thought the story to be an idle rumour (Craik, p. 529), but accepts it in his book (p. 92). Sheridan (p. 282) agrees in this, and adds that Swift found that Stella was depressed, and, on learning the cause through a common friend, declared that he was too old and too poor to marry, but consented to have the ceremony performed, which would at least prevent his marrying any one else. Sheridan gives Mrs. Sican, a friend of Swift's in his later years, for his authority. Monck Berkeley, in his ‘Relics’ (p. xxxvi), repeats the statement of the marriage by Ashe on the authority of his grandmother, Bishop Berkeley's widow, who told him that Berkeley himself had the story from Ashe. Berkeley in 1716 was travelling abroad as tutor to Ashe's son, and did not return till after Ashe's death (1718). It is hardly conceivable that Ashe should have at once written to communicate so confidential a transaction to his son's tutor, and the grandson could only have heard the story in his childhood. Johnson heard from Samuel Madden [q. v.] that Stella had told the story on her deathbed to Dr. Sheridan, Swift's old friend, the father of the biographer. Besides this, there is a story told by Delany (p. 56) that shortly before Vanessa's death Swift offered to own the marriage, and that Stella replied ‘too late.’ Stella told this to a friend well known to Delany, probably Sheridan. Deane Swift was told by Mrs. Whiteway, who lived with Swift in later years, that Stella had given the same account to Dr. Sheridan (unpublished letter to Orrery, written before Swift's death; quoted by Craik, p. 532). Theophilus, son of Deane Swift, told Scott a story which is apparently a distorted version of the same. Sheridan (p. 316) says that Stella begged Swift in presence of Dr. Sheridan, shortly before her death, to make the acknowledgment, and that Swift turned on his heel and left the room. He adds an erroneous statement that she altered her will in consequence. Her will (in which she appears as ‘spinster’) was in accordance with a suggestion made by Swift (to Worrall, 15 July 1726). Dr. John Lyon [q. v.], who attended Swift in his last years, disbelieved the whole story, and says that Mrs. Dingley laughed at it as an ‘idle tale.’ Mrs. Brent, the dean's housekeeper, similarly disbelieved it. Sir Henry Craik, whose authority is very high, is convinced by the evidence. Forster (p. 140) thought it quite insufficient. The objections are obvious. The general curiosity which had been stimulated by the mystery made it quite certain that some such story would be told, and the tellers would have the glory of being in the secret. Orrery, Deane Swift, and the younger Sheridan are uncritical, and could only know the story at second-hand. Delany was an old friend of Swift, and his belief in the marriage is strongly in its favour; but he does not tell us by what evidence he was convinced. It seems to be clear from Mrs. Whiteway's evidence that the elder Sheridan (who died in 1738) received some statement from Stella, whom he certainly saw frequently in her last illness. The other stories seem to depend more or less directly upon Sheridan. It is impossible to say what precisely was Sheridan's own version of a story which became more circumstantial with repetitions, or how far he was simply reporting or interpreting Stella's own account. It does not appear on what ground the date and the name of Ashe were assigned. Experience in biography does not tend to strengthen belief in such anecdotes. On the whole, though the evidence has weight, it can hardly be regarded as conclusive. The ceremony, in any case, made no difference to the habits of the parties. They lived apart, and Stella used her maiden name in her will. Until he was over fifty Swift had not appeared as a patriot. He shared in an intensified form all the prejudices of the Irish churchman against dissenters, catholics, and jacobites. He was proud of being an Englishman, though he ‘happened to be dropped’ in Ireland (see letter to Grant, 23 March 1733–4, and Oxford, 14 June 1737). He could speak warmly of the natural intelligence of the native Irish (to Wogan, July 1732), but he considered them to be politically insignificant, and shows no desire for any change or for a relaxation of the penal laws. At this period, however, his prejudices were roused against the English government. The English colonists in Ireland were aggrieved by the restrictions upon Irish trade, and their oppressors were the hated whigs. Swift's eyes were opened, and his hatred of oppression was not the less genuine because first excited by his personal antipathies. The first symptom of his return to political warfare was the publication of a proposal for the universal use of Irish manufactures in 1720. He declared that the oppression of Ireland was calculated to call down a judgment from heaven, and says that whoever travels in the country will hardly think himself ‘in a land where law, religion, and common humanity are professed.’ The printer of the pamphlet was prosecuted, and the chief justice, Whitsted, after sending the jury back nine times, only induced them, after eleven hours' struggle, to return a special verdict. The prosecution had to be dropped. In 1722 a patent was given to William Wood, an English tradesman, to provide a copper coinage, which was much wanted in Ireland. Wood was to pay 1,000l. a year to the crown for fourteen years, and the Duchess of Kendal, the king's mistress, sold the patent to Wood for 10,000l. It seems that Wood was allowed to make a good bargain in order to be able to pay these sums. The real grievance, however, was not so much that the Irish had to pay a high price for their copper coinage, as that they had to pay a high price for the benefit of Wood and the duchess without being in any way consulted as to the bargain. The Irish parliament presented a memorial against Wood, other bodies petitioned, and a committee of inquiry of the privy council met to consider the matter in April 1724. Swift hereupon published a pamphlet, signed ‘M. B. drapier,’ in his tersest style. He declared, with audacious exaggeration, that Wood's project would ruin the country, and prophesied the most extravagant results. The committee reported on 24 July 1724, defending the patent, but recommending that the amount to be coined should be reduced from 100,800l. to 40,000l. Before the report was published its general nature had transpired, and Swift published a second letter, dated 4 Aug., taking wider ground, and proposing a general agreement to refuse the money. A third letter followed the publication of the report on 25 Aug., and a fourth, the most powerful of all, appeared on 13 Oct. Swift now asserted the broad principle that Ireland depended upon England no more than England upon Ireland. Government without the consent of the governed, he said, is the ‘very definition of slavery,’ and, if Irishmen would not be slaves, the remedy was in their own hands. Meanwhile Lord Carteret had been appointed lord lieutenant. Swift had written to him privately to protest against Wood's patent. Carteret [see under Carteret, John, Earl Granville, for his relations to Swift] had replied graciously. His post was a kind of exile due to Sir Robert Walpole's jealousy, and he was to be responsible for compromising the dispute. He reached Ireland on 22 Oct., and issued a proclamation on the 27th offering a reward of 300l. for a discovery of the authorship of the fourth letter. The printer, Harding, was prosecuted. Swift went to Carteret's levee and reproached him for attacking a poor tradesman (Sheridan, p. 215). The butler to whom Swift had dictated the letters having absented himself, Swift suspected him of presuming upon his knowledge of the secret, and at once dismissed him for his insolence (Deane Swift, p. 190; Sheridan, on his father's authority, p. 213). The butler did not inform, and when the storm was over Swift made him verger of the cathedral. Sir Henry Craik rejects the story on the ground that Swift's authorship was notorious. Legal evidence, however, might be important, and the printer's trial was proceeding. Swift, at any rate, wrote a letter admitting the authorship to the chancellor, Lord Middleton, who was opposed to the patent. It was first published in 1735, and it is not certain that it was sent (it is erroneously placed, in Scott's edition, after the letter to Molesworth). On 11 Nov. he printed a letter of ‘seasonable advice’ to the grand jury, who threw out the bill against the printer. Another grand jury presented Wood's halfpence as a nuisance. Swift became the idol of the people. Ballads were sung in his honour and clubs in honour of the ‘Drapier’ formed in every tavern. The patent had to be surrendered, and the victory was complete. Swift wrote a final letter as ‘Drapier’ on 24 Dec. addressed to Lord Molesworth, ironically apologising for errors caused by his simplicity as a tradesman. A seventh letter, addressed to parliament, going over the list of Irish grievances, did not appear, if written, at this time, but was added to the edition of 1735. Swift's triumph as ‘Drapier’ suggested the possibility of his again taking part in politics. He had kept up an intermittent correspondence with the old ‘Scriblerus’ set, and with Bolingbroke, who was in 1725 permitted to return to England and settled at Dawley. Swift had been frequently invited to visit his friends, and now resolved to come, bringing literary and political projects. He left Dublin for London in March 1725–6, and, after a visit to Gay at Whitehall, spent most of his time with Pope at Twickenham. Hugh Boulter [q. v.] had now been appointed to the Irish primacy, and was virtually the representative of Walpole in place of the lord lieutenant. He advised that a watch should be kept upon Swift (Boulter, Letters, i. 62). Walpole invited Swift to dinner (to Lady Betty Germaine, 8 Jan. 1732–3), and Swift afterwards obtained an interview. He wrote an account of it next day to Peterborough, with a request that it should be shown to Walpole (to Peterborough, 28 April 1726). Swift, according to this remarkable document, complained that the Englishmen whose ancestors had conquered Ireland were treated as Irishmen; that their manufactures were restrained; all preferments given to others; the gentry forced to rack their tenants; and the nation controlled by laws to which they did not consent. Walpole, he says, took an entirely different view; Swift ‘absolutely broke with him’—never saw him again, and for the time refused even to see the lord lieutenant (to Stopford, 20 July 1726). Meanwhile he was on friendly terms with Pulteney, who was now forming an alliance with Bolingbroke against Walpole. He was paying some court to the princess, soon to become Queen Caroline, to whom he was at once presented by Arbuthnot, and to Mrs. Howard, afterwards Lady Suffolk, the princess's friend and the prince's mistress. He made a present of Irish silks to them, and had a promise, never fulfilled, of a present of medals from the princess. Meanwhile Swift, with Pope and Arbuthnot, was collecting fragments of the old Scriblerus scheme, which were put together in the volumes of ‘Miscellanies,’ of which the first two were published by Pope in 1727. He had also brought with him the finished manuscript of ‘Gulliver's Travels.’ The book had been begun about 1720, a date suggested by a passage at the conclusion. An allusion to the incident is made by Vanessa about that time, and Bolingbroke speaks of the ‘Travels’ on 1 June 1721–2. It is frequently discussed by Pope's friends as the time of publication approached, and on 8 Nov. 1726 Arbuthnot prophesies that it will have as great a run as Bunyan. Swift chose, however, to keep up for a time an affectation of secrecy, and the publication was managed by Pope. It appeared at the end of October 1726 (2nd ed. May 1727; cf. Gent. Mag. 1855, ii. 34). Through Pope's management Swift obtained 200l. for the copyright, and this, he says, was the only occasion on which he ever made a farthing by his writings (to Pulteney, 12 May 1735). Pope apparently got Erasmus Lewis [q. v.] to transact the business (see Carruthers, Pope, p. 239). The work made an instantaneous success. Lady Bolingbroke remarks in February 1726–1727 that it has been already translated into French, and soon afterwards that two plays have been founded upon it. The first translation was by the Abbé des Fontaines, who explained in his preface that he had suppressed much, to avoid shocking the good taste of Frenchmen. He sent a copy to Swift, who did not appreciate the improvement (Des Fontaines to Swift, 4 July 1727, and reply). Critics, he said, had declared that ‘Gulliver’ would last as long as the language, because it described the vices of man in all countries. It had, at any rate, an extraordinary combination of qualities which made it at once a favourite book of children and a summary of bitter scorn for mankind. Swift reports to Pope (17 Nov. 1726) an excellent testimony to one quality—an Irish bishop had said that it was full of improbable lies, and that he hardly believed a word of it. Swift had been tormented during his stay in England by grave reports of Stella's state of health. He shows the profoundest feeling in writing to his friends in Dublin, and at the same time expresses his anxiety that her death may not occur in the deanery, for fear of scandal, and laments the close friendship which has caused such cruel suffering (to Worrall, 15 July, and Stopford, 20 July 1726). He returned to Dublin to find her rather better. He was welcomed with popular enthusiasm; bells were rung and bonfires lighted; the harbour covered with wherries on his arrival; the corporation went to meet him; and he was taken in triumph to the deanery (Sheridan, p. 227). In 1727 he made another visit to England, leaving Dublin in April, and staying most of his time with Pope at Twickenham. He thought of trying the waters at Aix-la-Chapelle, and Voltaire sent him introductions to friends. Bolingbroke (24 June 1727) dissuaded him, on the ground that it might injure his prospects in England. Mrs. Howard also told him that he ought to stay, and he afterwards resented her advice, which he had taken as a hint that he was wanted and would be patronised at home. The death of George I (11 June) now raised for a time the hopes of his friends Pulteney and Bolingbroke; but it soon appeared that Walpole was to be supported by the new queen, and that Mrs. Howard's influence was of no account. Swift was welcomed at Leicester House, the centre of the opposition which gathered round the new Prince of Wales, and was asked to join in the ‘Craftsman.’ His health, however, was weak, and his gloom deep. It was made deeper still in August by reports that Stella was sinking. He left Pope's house abruptly at the end of August. He could not bear society, and yet could not bear to be present in the ‘very midst of grief’ at Dublin. He scarcely dared to open letters from Ireland; he was very ill, though he might escape this time, and could hardly travel. ‘I am able,’ he tells Sheridan (2 Sept. 1727), ‘to hold up my sorry head no longer.’ He is still anxious that the death may not take place at the deanery. He thinks of going to France, but finally resolves to start for Ireland. He reached Dublin in the beginning of October (a fragment of a journal of his journey to Holyhead is printed by Sir Henry Craik, App. ix., from the original in the Forster Library). Stella still lingered till 28 Jan. 1727–8. Swift had some one with him at the deanery when the news was brought to him at eight in the evening. He could not be alone till eleven P.M., when he sat down to begin writing the remarkable ‘Character of Mrs. Johnson.’ She was buried in St. Patrick's on the 30th, but he was too ill to be present. An envelope, with a lock of her hair, belonged, says Scott, to Dr. Tuke of St. Stephen's Green, on which Swift had written the famous words, ‘Only a woman's hair.’ To interpret them rightly is to understand Swift. Swift never again left Ireland. He wrote occasional pamphlets, expressing the old views with growing bitterness. He repeats the list of Irish wrongs, and traces all the sufferings of the country to the oppression of the English rulers. The most famous is the ‘Modest Proposal’ (1729) for preventing the children of the poor from being burdensome by using them as articles of food. A similar tract is an ‘Answer to the Craftsman’ (1730), in which Swift argues that the Irish should be permitted to join the French army, because it will lead to depopulation, which is the one end of English policy. Swift received the freedom of Dublin in 1729, and, in returning thanks, accepted the authorship of the ‘Drapier's Letters.’ Lord Allen, a silly Irish peer, protested against the action of the corporation, and was bitterly satirised by Swift as ‘Traulus.’ He wrote against the proposed repeal of the Test Act, and in 1731 he attacked two bills for enforcing residence on the clergy and dividing large benefices. Swift described them afterwards (to Sterne, July 1733) as ‘two abominable bills for enslaving and beggaring the clergy, which took their birth from hell.’ They were thrown out. In 1733 and afterwards bills were introduced for commuting the tithe, which Swift took to be an attack upon the church by the landlords. He fiercely denounced the measures, and attacked the Irish parliament in the most savage of all his satires in verse, ‘The Legion Club’ (1736). (For the impression made upon Tennyson by this poem, see ‘Memoir of Tennyson,’ 1897, ii. 73.). While writing this he was seized with a fit of giddiness which prevented its completion (Orrery, p. 245), and he was never afterwards fit for serious work. Swift was the most thoroughgoing of pessimists. Do not the corruptions of men in power ‘eat your flesh and exhaust your spirits?’ he asked a friend (Delany, p. 148). His so-called patriotism, he declares, is ‘perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness’ (to Pope, 1 June 1728). He feared that he should die at Dublin in a rage, ‘like a poisoned rat in a hole’ (to Bolingbroke, 21 March 1728–9). Bolingbroke (18 July 1732) offered to procure him an exchange for the rectory of Binfield in Berkshire, which Swift declined as inadequate. He continued, however, to write to his friends Bolingbroke, Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot in letters touching from the evident desire for affection, and showing increasing symptoms of decay. He is querulous over old grievances: the 1,000l. owing to him from the crown when he accepted the deanery, and the medals which the queen never remembered to give. He hopes for death. ‘Good night; I hope I shall never see you again,’ was his habitual leave-taking to one of his friends (Deane Swift, p. 217). On the anniversary of his birthday he had long been in the habit of shutting himself up and reading the third chapter of Job. He declares that he is tired of company, sees only his inferiors, and kills time with writing nonsense (to Pope, 6 March; Bolingbroke, 21 March 1728–9). The merest trifles he ever wrote are ‘serious philosophical lucubrations’ in comparison with his ‘present employments’ (to Gay, 28 Aug. 1731). Carteret, till he ceased to be lord lieutenant in 1730, remained upon very friendly terms with Swift, who recommended various friends for preferment, and wrote a humorous defence of Carteret's supposed patronage of tories. He was a bitter enemy of Boulter, the virtual ruler of Ireland, and attacked the Irish bishops too fiercely to be on pleasant terms. His habitual tone is indicated by an earlier letter, in which he tells the bishop of Meath (22 May 1719) to remember that he was speaking to a clergyman, and not to a footman. He governed his chapter vigorously and judiciously, performing the services impressively, and refusing to grant leases upon terms which would benefit him at the expense of the permanent revenue (DELANY, pp. 40, 208). He insisted upon the repair of monuments, especially of one to the Duke of Schomberg. When the duke's relations refused help, he set up a monument at the expense of the cathedral. A bitter inscription reflecting upon their neglect offended the courts of England and Prussia (an unpublished letter is quoted in Craik, p. 445, with a characteristic reference to this). Swift's alienation from the official society of Dublin did not prevent him from attracting friends among those who were willing to submit to his masterful ways. Delany (pp. 90–7), in answer to Orrery's not unfounded complaint of Swift's taste for inferior company, gives a list of his chief friends. Chief among them were the family of Grattans, who, as he told Carteret, could ‘raise 10,000 men;’ Thomas Sheridan (1684–1738) [q. v.], Richard Helsham [q. v.], a physician, and Delany himself [see Delany, Patrick]. Mrs. Pendarves (afterwards Mary Delany [q. v.]) was one of his chief female friends. Soon after the death of Stella, Swift spent eight months with Sir Arthur Acheson at Market Hill. During Stella's life he had two public days for receiving his friends (D. Swift, p. 180) when the two ladies acted as unofficial hostesses. After Stella's death the circle gradually narrowed. The ‘meanest’ of Swift's friends, according to Delany (p. 90), was John Worrall, vicar of St. Patrick's, who often did business for him. Swift dined regularly at Worrall's house, bringing his friends and paying the expense. (Deane Swift, pp. 293, &c., gives a long and hostile account of Worrall). His closest intimate was Sheridan, whom he warmly patronised, abused, ridiculed, and bullied. Sheridan bore Swift's whims with unfailing good temper, till his unlucky forgetfulness of the famous passage in ‘Gil Blas’ led to a final breach between the two old friends, shortly before Sheridan's death in 1738. Swift still received his friends upon Sunday afternoons; but his temper became morose, and his love of saving increased till he grudged a bottle of wine to his friends. An obstinate refusal to wear spectacles weakened his eyes, and he filled his time by excessive exercise, in spite of his physicians (Delany, pp. 144–6). He found some distraction, however, in literary employments of various kinds. He took up two works, both begun, as he tells Pope (12 June 1731; see also to Gay, 28 Aug. 1731), about 1703—the ‘Polite Conversation,’ of which he made a present to Mary Barber [q. v.] in 1737, and the ‘Directions to Servants,’ not published till after his death. Both of them are singularly characteristic of keen powers of satirical observation employed upon trivial purposes. Two or three of his most characteristic poems are of the same dates; especially the verses on his own death (to Gay 1 Dec. 1731), the ‘Rhapsody on Poetry’ (1733), and probably the verses upon the ‘Day of Judgment,’ sent by Chesterfield to Voltaire (27 Aug. 1752) from an original manuscript of the author (published in Chesterfield's ‘Letters’). These poems give the very essence of Swift. Other works show him killing time by trifling. At Market Hill he carried on a commerce of ‘libels’ with his hostess, written in good humour, though misrepresented by scandal (see his curious letter to Dr. Jeremy, 8 June 1732). The ‘Grand Question Debated’ shows his old humour. Other performances, such as the laborious riddles and plays upon words in which Sheridan was his accomplice, are painful illustrations of his maxim Vive la bagatelle. Two or three performances, which appear to have been surreptitiously printed about this time, show the morbid dwelling upon filth which was unfortunately characteristic. Delany (pp. 75, 175) remarks that Swift was remarkable for scrupulous cleanliness, and moreover (though allowance must certainly be made for the manners of the time) particularly delicate in conversation. In this, as in other cases, he seems to have tormented himself from a kind of fascination by what revolted him. During this period Swift was also engaged upon the history which he had begun in 1712. He made Mrs. Pilkington read it to him. He consulted Erasmus Lewis upon the advisability of publishing it (to Lewis, 23 July 1737). Lewis pointed out the need of revision (to Swift, 8 April 1738); and Swift, who had become unequal to the task, did no more in the matter. As long as he retained his powers, Swift was constantly endeavouring to help various dependents. Among them were Mary Barber, William Dunkin, Constantia Grierson, and Lætitia and Matthew Pilkington (for details of Swift's services to them, see the articles under those names). Swift's zeal as a patron is more conspicuous than his discrimination. The Pilkingtons turned out to be worthless; and a counterfeit letter from Swift to Queen Caroline (22 June 1731), enforcing Mrs. Barber's claims to patronage, gave him great annoyance. The true authorship was never revealed. Deane Swift insinuates that it was a practical joke of Delany's (Nichols, Lit. Illustr. v. 378, 384); and Swift wrote some indignant and obviously truthful repudiations (to Pope, 20 July, and to Lady Suffolk, 24 July 1731). His sister Jane had married (in December 1699) Joseph Fenton, a carrier in good business and well educated (see Craik, p. 82). Swift broke off all connection with her, and makes some unpleasant references to her in the ‘Journal to Stella,’ but, on her husband's death as a bankrupt, made her an allowance until her death in 1738 (Motte to Swift, 4 Oct. 1735). To Mrs. Dingley he is said to have made an allowance of fifty guineas a year, persuading her that it was the product of a fund for which he was trustee. He was also generous to a Mrs. Ridgeway, daughter of his old housekeeper, Mrs. Brent, with whom Mrs. Dingley lodged (to Mrs. Dingley, 29 Aug. 1733, and 28 Dec. 1734 and note; see Deane Swift, pp. 345, &c.; Sheridan, p. 439). According to Delany (pp. 115, 213), Swift was one of the best masters in the world, though ‘churlish’ in appearance. He began by testing his servants' humility but paid them well, and, if they submitted, was generous and helped them to save money. The common people retained their reverence for him, and apparently took his rough ways from the humorous point of view. He tells Pope in one of his last letters (9 Feb. 1736–7) that he has ‘a thousand hats and blessings’ from his ‘lower friends’ in the streets, though the gentry have forgotten him. Sheridan (p. 375) tells the story that a crowd collected to see an eclipse dispersed on being told that it had been put off by the dean's orders. A lawyer named Bettesworth, whom he had ridiculed, called at the deanery to remonstrate and gave some intimations of threatening violence. Had the neighbours been called in, says Swift, in a letter to the lord lieutenant (to Dorset, January 1733–4), their rage would have endangered the lawyer's life. They sent a deputation to offer reprisals, and when Swift sent them away peaceably formed an association to protect ‘the person of the Drapier.’ Bettesworth was said to have lost 1,200l. a year by the insult. Swift's parsimony enabled him to be charitable. Sheridan (p. 235) states that he spent a third of his income upon charity, and saved a third with a view to a charitable foundation at his death. As soon as he had 500l. to spare, he lent it in small sums to be repaid in weekly instalments without interest. Delany (p. 8) testifies that he never saw the poor so well cared for as those round the cathedral. Swift visited them steadily, helped to found an almshouse, and set up a system of ‘badges’ to suppress promiscuous charity. He had a ‘seraglio’ of poor old women, to whom he gave grotesque names, and whom he helped and encouraged. There was hardly a lane in or near Dublin, says Delany (p. 133), without one of them. The project of founding a hospital occupied him for some years. On 9 Sept. 1732 Sir W. Fownes sends him a careful plan in answer to some of his suggestions upon the subject, and in 1735 he applied to the corporation of Dublin for a piece of ground on which to erect it. Swift's mental decay was becoming marked about 1738. It was from 1736 to 1741 that Pope carried out the miserable scheme by which Swift was made to appear as publishing their correspondence out of vanity (a full account is given by Mr. Elwin in his edition of Pope's ‘Works,’ vol. i. introduction; see also under Pope, Alexander, (1688–1744)). Mrs. Whiteway (daughter of his uncle Adam, and mother-in-law of Deane Swift) had come to superintend his household, and discharged her duty affectionately and judiciously. Swift constantly suffered from the disease which first attacked him at Moor Park. Dr. Bucknill (in ‘Brain’ for January 1882) has identified the symptoms with those of ‘labyrinthine vertigo,’ a disease in the region of the ear. In any case, it caused not only physical distress, but continual anxiety. Young, in his letter on original composition, tells how he once heard Swift say, ‘I shall be like that tree: I shall die at the top.’ Frequent references in his letters and journals show how he was harassed by some such fear. Many of these references are collected in the ‘Closing Years of Swift's Life,’ by (Sir) W. R. Wilde, who discusses the disease and shows that Swift did not suffer from insanity proper. Towards the end of his life paralysis came on, and he suffered from aphasia. A last very painful letter is addressed to Mrs. Whiteway, dated 26 July 1740. An ‘exhortation’ to his chapter against allowing the choir to take part in a ‘fiddlers' club,’ is dated 28 Jan. 1741. In March 1741–2 guardians were appointed for him by the court of chancery. In the following summer a strange attack was made upon him by a Dr. Wilson, a prebendary of the cathedral. Wilson, while taking him in a carriage, tried, it was said, by actual violence to extort from him a promise of the subdeanery (Orrery to Deane Swift, 4 Dec. 1742; Craik, p. 493, n.) Great indignation was aroused. Wilson swore that Swift had been violent. In September 1742 a crisis took place. Swift suffered much agony from an abscess in the eye. When this broke the pain ceased; he recognised his friends for a short time, and then sank into a state of apathy. He survived till 19 Oct. 1745. Painful anecdotes of his last days and occasional gleams of intelligence are given by his biographers, chiefly from letters of Mrs. Whiteway and Deane Swift (first published by Orrery, pp. 136–42). At midnight on 22 Oct. Swift was buried privately, according to his own careful directions, in the cathedral of St. Patrick, by the side of Stella. A famous inscription by himself, saying that he was ‘ubi sæva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit,’ was, by his direction, engraved in large letters deeply cut and strongly gilded. In 1835, some repairs being made in the cathedral, Swift's and Stella's coffins were found side by side. The British Association was holding a meeting at Dublin, and the skulls were examined by various scientific people (Wilde, pp. 54, &c.). Wilde describes the results and gives drawings of both skulls (pp. 62, 116) and of a cast from the interior of Swift's (p. 63). Swift's design of founding a hospital is mentioned in the verses on his own death (1731), and had occupied him in the succeeding years. He made a will in 1735, modified in 1737, and again in 1740 (Craik, pp. 449, 450). He left between 10,000l. and 11,000l. for the purpose, which was increased by other donations; and St. Patrick's Hospital, so called by his direction, was opened on 19 Sept. 1757, to receive fifty patients. It was upon ground adjoining ‘Dr. Steevens's Hospital,’ to which Stella had left 1,000l. to endow a chaplaincy (see her will in Wilde, pp. 94–7). Swift left the tithes of Effernock to the vicars of Laracor, with the provision, dictated probably by his fear of the dissenters, that ‘when any other form of the Christian religion shall become the established faith in this kingdom,’ the proceeds shall go to the poor; so long as ‘Christianity in any shape shall be tolerated among us,’ but ‘still excepting professed Jews, atheists, and infidels.’ A similar provision is in Stella's will, no doubt suggested by Swift (Swift's will of March 1737 is printed in the appendix to Scott's ‘Life’). An interesting portrait of Swift as a student at Trinity College, by an unknown artist, is reproduced as a frontispiece to ‘Swift's Prose Works’ (1897, vol. i.). The present whereabouts of this portrait is unknown; the negative was obtained at South Kensington in 1867. Francis Bindon [q. v.] painted a portrait of Swift in 1738, now in the deanery of St. Patrick's, engraved in mezzotint at the time, and by Scriven in 1818. A portrait, in the theatre of Trinity College, Dublin, is said to be a copy from this. Another at Howth Castle, with Wood writhing in agony at Swift's feet, was painted by Bindon for Lord Howth in 1735. A bust-portrait, ascribed to Bindon, is in the National Gallery at Dublin. A portrait by Jervas was presented to the Bodleian Library by Alderman Barber in 1739. Another by Jervas is in the National Portrait Gallery. An engraving from a portrait by Benjamin Wilson (1741) is the frontispiece to Orrery's ‘Letters.’ A portrait, said to be taken from a cast after death, is prefixed to the first volume of Nichols's edition of the ‘Works.’ A plaster bust in the museum at Trinity College is also taken from a cast after death, the original of which was destroyed. A bust by Roubiliac is in the library of Trinity College. Wilde gives an engraving of a supposed portrait of Stella and of a medallion at Delville, also supposed to be intended for her. In Swift the author and the man are identical. No writings ever reflected more perfectly a powerful idiosyncrasy; and his famous sayings resemble groans wrung from a strong man by torture. His misanthropy partly excuses, if it does not justify, the prejudices of Johnson and of Macaulay. Thackeray, in the ‘English Humourists,’ accepted Macaulay's statements of fact too unreservedly, and, while appreciating the power, was alienated by the ferocity, of some of Swift's writings. To deny the ferocity is impossible; but it may be forgiven by those who recognise some of the noblest of qualities soured by hard experience. Swift was a man of proud and masterful nature doomed to dependence on weaker men; suffering till past middle life from hope deferred, and, after a brief gleam of triumph, sent, with all his ambitions crushed, to eat his heart out in exile. His strongest personal affections involved him in a tragedy; the country which he had served most generously seemed to be sinking into ruin under the system which he had denounced. His writings are a record of his moods. The early ‘Tale of a Tub’ and ‘Battle of the Books’ express the scorn of a vigorous youth for effete pedantry. But he had not, like his contemporaries, any faith in the advent of a reign of ‘common sense.’ The apparently sceptical tendency of his ridicule of mysterious dogmas was balanced by his utter scorn for the capacities of the race. He believed most unequivocally in the corruption of human nature, and inferred the practical necessity of a religion to restrain immorality. The ‘Scorn of Fools,’ which he confesses in an early poem, is never absent. He could be both humorous and really playful when in good spirits with congenial society; but his humour has almost always a sardonic tinge. He never shows the gentle kindliness which gives the charm to the writings of Addison. This characteristic attitude to society is indicated in the singular collections for the history of social follies, begun at an early period, which were ultimately published in the ‘Polite Conversations’ and the ‘Directions to Servants.’ His fun is always tinged with contempt, and he is absolutely incapable of pitying his victims. This singular combination culminates in ‘Gulliver's Travels,’ which varies so strangely from the simple ingenuity displayed in working out the problem of Lilliput, to the intense bitterness which culminates in the ‘Struldbrugs.’ A similar contrast appears in the ‘Drapier's Letters.’ The earlier political pamphlets are admirable, and the ‘Conduct of the Allies’ in particular a masterpiece of its kind. The whole aim of the author is to strike an effective blow, not to expound any general principles. It shows Swift's intensely practical character. He cares nothing for abstract principles, and is simply a man of most powerful common-sense uttering the strong prejudices which are part of himself. The sincerity is palpable, although the selfish element gave colour to the charge of ‘ratting,’ sufficiently discussed above. This is equally obvious in the ‘Drapier's Letters,’ in which is embodied all the passionate resentment accumulated in ten years of exile. It is as easy to attribute the wrath to hatred of Walpole as to hatred of oppression; Swift appears as an Irish patriot, and yet claims to be a thorough Englishman, and speaks in the name of the dominant race. He was really unable to distinguish between the two impulses, which happened to coincide. It is bare justice, however, to admit that, if his eyes were opened by personal antipathy, he saw most clearly the really bad side of his enemies, and that his indignation, however roused, was as genuine as intense. The same peculiarity appears in his personal relations and in the poems suggested by them. Nobody could be a warmer friend, but it was on condition that his friends should be part of himself. He annexed other persons rather than attracted them. Hence follows one painful characteristic. The suffering from the loss overbalances for him the happiness from the love. He almost curses the friendship which has caused the pain; with the ‘inverted hypocrisy’ often ascribed to him, he habitually regards his best feelings as the cause of his misfortunes, and disavows or laments their existence. It is this unique combination of an ‘intense and glowing mind’ with narrow prejudices, and the perversion of a deeply affectionate nature with a kind of double selfishness, which gives enduring interest to so many of Swift's utterances. His insight is as keen as it is one-sided, and his genuine hatred of vice and folly seems always to be tinctured with a recognition of the futility in this world of virtue or wisdom. Swift's works, by the insertion of the life, the ‘Journal,’ and the letters, fill nineteen volumes in Scott's edition. The greatest part of these is occupied partly by the historical writings—which, written in times of repression and without the stimulus of an immediate practical purpose, are languid, though giving some interesting facts—and partly by the miserable trifles with which he killed time in later years, and which, though Fox thought them a proof of ‘good-nature,’ are to most readers melancholy illustrations of the waste of great faculties by a man dying ‘like a poisoned rat in a hole.’ Such people will hold that the fire would have been the best editor. Swift's works, with the exception of the letter upon the correction of the language in 1712, were all anonymous. A great number of trifles are attributed to him, some of which he may only have corrected or suggested, while others may be not his at all. Many were published surreptitiously; collections were made without authority, and the editors of his works added many pieces without assigning any reasons. Confusion is caused by the publication of some books both as independent and as additional volumes to previous collections. A complete bibliography would require much labour, especially upon the accumulations of rubbish. The nearest approach is Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole's ‘Notes for a Bibliography of Swift’ in the ‘Bibliographer’ (vi. 160–71). Mr. Lane-Poole has been unable to find separate copies of some of Swift's works which we know to have appeared separately. Others were published for the first time from the manuscripts in the editions of his works. The following list owes much to Mr. Lane-Poole's very careful article: 1. ‘Preface to Letters … by Sir W. Temple,’ London, 1700, 2 vols. 8vo. 2. ‘A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and Commons in Athens and Rome, with the Consequences,’ London, 1701, 4to (‘Miscellany,’ 1711). 3. ‘A Tale of a Tub … [with] an Account of a Battle between the Ancient and Modern Books in St. James's Library,’ London, 1704, 8vo (this includes the ‘Mechanical Operations of the Spirit;’ the fifth edition, 1710, adds the author's ‘Apology’ and Wotton's notes). 4. ‘An Argument to prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England may, as Things now stand, be attended with some Inconveniences, and perhaps not produce those many good Effects proposed thereby,’ 1708 (‘Miscellany,’ 1711). 5. ‘The Sentiments of a Church of England Man with respect to Religion and Government,’ 1708 (‘Miscellany,’ 1711). 6. ‘A Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners: by a Person of Quality,’ 1708 (‘Miscellany,’ 1711). 7. ‘A Letter to a Member of Parliament in Ireland upon choosing a New Speaker there,’ 1708. 8. ‘A Letter from a Member of the House of Commons in Ireland to a Member of the House of Commons in England concerning the Sacramental Test,’ 1708 (‘Miscellany,’ 1711). 9. ‘Predictions for the Year 1708 … by Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.,’ London, 1708, 4to (‘Miscellany,’ 1711). 10. ‘The Accomplishment of … Mr. Bickerstaff's Prediction,’ 1708 (‘Miscellany,’ 1711). 11. ‘An Answer to Bickerstaff … by a Person of Quality,’ 1708. 12. ‘An Elegy upon Mr. Pa[r]tridge the Almanac Maker,’ 1708, s. sh. fol. 13. ‘A Famous Prediction of Merlin … by T. M. Philomath,’ 1709 (‘Miscellany,’ 1711). 14. ‘Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., against … Mr. Partridge,’ London, 1709, 8vo (‘Miscellany,’ 1711). 15. ‘The Virtues of Sid Hamet the Magician's Rod,’ London, 1710, s. sh. fol. 16. The ‘Tatler’ of 1709 and 1710 contains thirteen papers ascribed to Swift; and the second ‘Tatler,’ by his friend Harrison, six papers in 1710–1711. 17. ‘The Examiner,’ London, 1710–1711 (Nos. 14 to 46, by Swift, which in a 12mo reprint of 1712 appear as 13 to 45, the original No. 13 being omitted). 18. ‘A Short Character of T[homas] E[arl] of W[harton], L.L. of I[reland],’ &c., London, 1710, 12mo. 19. ‘Miscellanies in Prose and Verse,’ London, 1711, 8vo; pamphlets marked above: ‘Meditations upon a Broomstick,’ ‘Various Thoughts,’ ‘Critical Essay,’ and ‘Baucis and Philemon’ (first published in Tonson's ‘Miscellany Poems,’ pt. vi. 1709), Mrs. Harris's Petitions and other verses. In 1710 and 1711 Curll published ‘Baucis and Philemon,’ with the ‘Broomstick’ and some trifles in two or three different shapes. 20. ‘Remarks upon a Pamphlet’ (on the examination of Gregg), London, 1711, 8vo. 21. ‘A New Journey to Paris, together with the most secret transactions between the French king and an English gentleman, by the Sieur du Baudrier; translated from the French,’ London, 1711, 8vo. 22. ‘The Conduct of the Allies and of the Late Ministry in beginning and carrying on the Present War,’ London, 1711, 8vo. 23. ‘Some Remarks on the Barrier-Treaty between Her Majesty and the States-General,’ &c., London, 1712, 8vo. 24. ‘Some Advice humbly offered to Members of the October Club, in a letter from a Person of Honour,’ London, 1712, 8vo. 25. ‘Some Reasons to prove that no Person is obliged by his Principles as a Whig to oppose her Majesty or her present Ministry ....’ London, 1712, 8vo. 26. ‘A Proposal for correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English Tongue in a letter to the .... Lord High Treasurer, by Jonathan Swift, D.D.,’ London, 1712, 8vo. 27. ‘A pretended letter of thanks from Lord W[harton] to Bp. of St. Asaph …’ 1712, 8vo. 28. ‘T—d's [i.e. Toland's] invitation to Dismal [i.e. Nottingham] to dine with the Calves' Head Club; imitated from Horace, Ep. v. lib. i,’ 1712, s. sh. 29. ‘Part of the Seventh Epistle of the First Book of Horace, imitated and addressed to a Noble Lord,’ London, 1713, 8vo. 30. ‘Mr. C—n's Discourse of Freethinking put into plain English by way of Abstract, for the Use of the Poor,’ London, 1713, 8vo. 31. ‘A Preface to the B—p of S—r—m's Introduction to the third volume of the History of the Reformation. … By Gregory Misosarum,’ London, 1713, 8vo. 32. ‘The Importance of the Guardian considered in a Second Letter to the Bailiff of Stockbridge, by a friend of Mr. St—le,’ London, 1713, 8vo. 33. ‘The Character of Richard St—le, Esq., by Abel, Toby's Kinsman …’ 1713; reprinted in ‘Miscellaneous Works of Mr. William Wagstaffe,’ 1726, but attributed to Swift. See Dilke's ‘Papers of a Critic,’ i. 369–81, for this and the following letter, which differs from one of the same title in Wagstaffe's ‘Miscellanies.’ 34. ‘A Letter from the Facetious Dr. Andrew Tripe to the Venerable Nestor Ironside,’ 1714. 35. ‘The Publick Spirit of the Whigs set forth in their generous encouragement of the Author of the “Crisis,” with some observations on the seasonableness, candour, erudition, and style of that treatise,’ London, 1714, 8vo. 36. ‘A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures …’ Dublin, 1720. 37. ‘The Right of Precedence between Phisicians [sic] and Civilians enquired into,’ Dublin, 1720, 8vo. 38. ‘An Elegy on the much lamented Death of Mr. Demar. …’ 1720, s. sh. fol. 39. ‘The Swearer's Bank … wherein the medicinal use of oaths is considered; to which is prefaced an Essay upon English Bubbles by Thomas Hope,’ Dublin, 1720. 40. ‘Miscellaneous Works, comical and diverting, by T. R. D. J. S. D. O. P. I. I.’ (‘Tale of a Tub,’ and ‘Miscellanies in Prose and Verse’), London, 1720, 8vo. 41. ‘Letter to a Young Gentleman lately entered into Holy Orders, by a Person of Quality. It is known that … the treatise was writ … by … Dr. S.,’ London, 1721, 8vo. 42. ‘A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet,’ &c. Dublin, 1721. 43. ‘Miscellanies by Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patricks,’ 4th ed. London, 1722, 8vo. (Some of the later pamphlets with [Sheridan's] ‘Wonderful Wonder of Wonders’ and ‘Ars Punica.’). 44. ‘Some Arguments against Enlarging the Power of the Bishops in letting leases …’ Dublin, 1723, 8vo. 45. ‘Maxims controuled in Ireland. The truth of maxims in state and government examined with reference to Ireland,’ 1724. 46. ‘A Letter to the Shopkeepers, Tradesmen, Farmers, and Common People of Ireland, concerning the brass halfpence coined by Mr. Woods … by M. B. Drapier,’ Dublin, 1724, 8vo. 47. ‘A Letter to Mr. Harding, the printer … by M. B. Drapier’ (dated Aug. 4), Dublin, 1724, 8vo. 48. ‘Some Observations on … the Report [on] … Wood's Halfpence,’ by M. B. Drapier (25 Aug.), Dublin, 1724, 8vo. 49. ‘A Letter to the whole People of Ireland,’ by M. B. Drapier (23 Oct.), Dublin, 1724, 8vo. 50. ‘Seasonable Advice to the Grand Jury’ (November), Dublin, 1724, s. sh. fol. 51. ‘A Letter to Viscount Molesworth,’ by M. B. Drapier (14 Dec.), Dublin, 1724, 8vo. 52. ‘Fraud detected in the “Hibernian Patriot,”’ reprints the five ‘Drapiers' Letters,’ with other trifles, Dublin, 1725, 12mo. The letters to Middleton (in October) called the sixth ‘Drapier's Letter,’ and a seventh addressed to both houses of parliament, were first published in the works of 1735. 53. ‘To his Excellency the Lord Carteret’ (‘Birth of Manly Virtue’), 1725, fol. 54. ‘Cadenus and Vanessa,’ Dublin, 1726, 8vo. 55. ‘It cannot Rain but it Pours, or London strewed with Rarities,’ London, 1726, 8vo. 56. ‘Travels into several remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon and then a Captain of several Ships,’ 2 vols. 8vo. 1726, London. A large-paper copy, with manuscript additions by Swift, is in the Forster Library. For an account of the various forms of the first edition, see ‘Notes and Queries,’ 6th ser. xi. 367, 431, xii. 198, 350, 398, 473. 57. ‘A Short View of the State of Ireland,’ Dublin, 1727, 8vo. 58. ‘Miscellanies in Prose and Verse,’ with preface (dated 27 May 1727) signed by Swift and Pope, 5 vols. 8vo, London (the first two volumes, 1727, the third and the ‘last volume,’ 1732). The fifth volume in 1735 is entirely by Swift, and professes to add all that was new in the Dublin works of that year. There is also a three-volume edition of 1727, of which vols. i. and ii. are the same as in this, and vol. iii. the same as vol. iv. of this. 59. ‘An Answer to … a Memorial of the Poor Inhabitants … of Ireland,’ Dublin, 1728, 8vo. 60. The ‘Military Memoirs’ of George Carleton (fl. 1728) [q. v.], 1728, have been ascribed to Swift by Colonel Parnell in the ‘English Historical Review,’ vi. 97–151; but, though he demolishes Carleton, his grounds for attributing the authorship to Swift are of no weight, and a consideration of Swift's position at the time, and of the internal evidence, seems to be conclusive against the suggestion. 61. ‘The Intelligencer,’ Dublin, 1728, republished in a volume in London in 1729, was set up by Swift and Sheridan. Swift describes his share in letters to Pope on 6 March 1728–9, and 12 June 1731. 62. ‘A Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of the Poor from being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for making them beneficial to the Publick,’ Dublin, 1729, 8vo. 63. ‘The Grand Question debated whether Hamilton's Bawn should be turned into a Barrack or a Malthouse,’ 1729, s. sh. fol. (also as ‘A Soldier and a Scholar’ in 1732, 4to). 64. ‘The Journal of a Modern Lady … by the Author of “Cadenus and Vanessa,”’ Dublin, 1729, 8vo. 65. ‘Libel on Dr. D—ny and a certain great Lord,’ &c., Dublin, 1730, also as ‘Satire on Dr. D—ny,’ &c. 66. ‘Vindication of his Ex— the Lord L—t from the charge of favouring none but Toryes, High Churchmen and Jacobites,’ by the Rev. D. S., London, 1730, 8vo. 67. ‘An Excellent new Ballad; or the True En—sh D—n to be hanged for a R—pe,’ 1730, s. sh. fol. 68. ‘A Scheme for making R[eligio]n and the C[lerg]y useful,’ 1731, 8vo. 69. ‘Infallible Scheme to pay the Public Debt of the Nation in Six Months; humbly offered to the Consideration of the present Parliament, by D—n S—T.,’ 1731, 8vo. 70. ‘The Memoirs of Captain John Creighton, written by himself’ (edited with a preface by Swift), 1731. 71. ‘Advantages proposed for repealing the Sacramental Test, impartially considered,’ &c., London, 1732, 8vo. 72. ‘Queries relating to the Sacramental Test,’ 1732 (‘Works’ of 1735). 73. ‘Considerations on two Bills sent down from the House of Lords, &c., by Dr. S.,’ Dublin, 1732, 8vo. 74. ‘The Lady's Dressing-room, to which is added a Poem on cutting down the old Thorn at Market Hill, by the Rev. Dr. S—T.,’ Dublin, 1732, 8vo. 75. ‘Some Reasons against the Bill for settling the Tithe of Hemp, Flax, &c., by a Modus,’ 1733. 76. ‘The Presbyterians' Plea of Merit … examined,’ Dublin, 1733, 8vo (to the second edition was added a ‘Narrative of … Attempts … for a Repeal of the Sacramental Test,’ published in the ‘Correspondent,’ a periodical). 77. ‘A Serious and Useful Scheme to make an Hospital for Incurables of Universal Benefit, with Petition of Footmen in and about Dublin,’ sm. 1733, 12mo. 78. ‘On Poetry: a Rapsody’ [sic] London, 1733, 8vo. 79. ‘A beautiful young Nymph going to Bed,’ by Dr. S–T., 1734, 4to. 80. ‘The Works of J. S., D.D., D.S.P.D.,’ 4 vols. 1735. This is Faulkner's edition, and was revised by the author, although he complained of the publication (see Orrery, p. 79). It was reprinted with two additional volumes, also seen by the author, in 1738, and other volumes of Miscellanies and Letters, making it a set of sixteen in all, were added up to 1767. 81. ‘Poetical Works,’ London, 1736, 12mo. 82. ‘A Proposal for giving Badges to the Beggars in all the Parishes of Dublin,’ London, 1737, 4to. 83. ‘A complete Collection of genteel and ingenious Conversation, according to the most polite Mode and Method now used at Court, and in the best Companies of England, in three Dialogues. By Simon Wagstaff,’ London, 1738, 8vo. 84. ‘The Beast's Confession to the Priest, on observing how most Men mistake their Talents, by J.S., D.S.P.,’ London, 1738, 8vo. 85. ‘Imitation of the Sixth Satire of the Second Book of Horace,’ London, 1738, fol. 86. ‘Verses on the Death of Dean Swift, written by himself in 1731,’ Dublin, 1739, 8vo. A spurious version of this appeared in 1733 as ‘Life and genuine Character of Dr. Swift,’ &c. An edition was published in London by Dr. W. King (1685–1763) [q. v.] in 1739, with omissions of which Swift complained. 87. ‘Letters to and from Dean Swift from 1714 to 1738,’ with ‘Free Thoughts’ (see below), appeared in 1741 as a seventh volume of Faulkner's edition of Swift's ‘Works,’ and was published in London in 4to as ‘Dean Swift's Literary Correspondence for Twenty-four Years’ (for the circumstances see Mr. Elwin's Introduction to Pope's ‘Works,’ vol. i.). 88. ‘Some Free Thoughts upon the present State of Affairs,’ by the Author of ‘Gulliver's Travels’ (written in 1714), London, 1741, 8vo. 89. Three Sermons: ‘On Mutual Subjection,’ ‘On the Conscience,’ ‘On the Trinity,’ London, 1744, 4to. 90. ‘The Difficulty of Knowing Oneself’ (a sermon), London, 1745. 91. ‘Directions to Servants in general,’ London, 1745, 8vo. 92. ‘Story of the Injured Lady, being a true Picture of Scotch Perfidy, Irish Poverty, and English Partiality,’ with letters and poems, London, 1746, 8vo. 93. ‘History of the last Four Years of the Queen,’ published without the editor's name by Charles Lucas, M.D. (1713–1771) [q. v.], London, 1758, 8vo. (The authenticity of this has been disputed, but seems to be conclusively established. See Craik, App. iii.). A collective edition of Swift's ‘Works,’ in 12 vols. 8vo, edited by Hawkesworth, appeared in 1755. The thirteenth and fourteenth volumes were added by Bowyer in 1762, and the fifteenth and sixteenth by Deane Swift in 1765. Three volumes of correspondence were added by Hawkesworth in 1766, and three by Deane Swift in 1767. These became volumes xviii. to xxiii., when J. Nichols added a seventeenth volume, containing an index to the whole, in 1775. Nichols afterwards added two more volumes in 1778 and 1779. This edition was also published in 4to and in 12mo. An edition in seventeen volumes 8vo, edited by T. Sheridan, appeared in 1785. In 1801 J. Nichols edited an edition in nineteen volumes 8vo, which was reprinted in twenty-four small 8vo volumes in 1804, and in nineteen 8vo volumes in 1808. Malone contributed to the 1808 edition (see Nichols's Illustrations of Literature, v. 391–7). In 1814 appeared the edition in nineteen volumes by Scott, which was again published in 1824. An edition by Thomas Roscoe, 2 vols. royal 8vo, appeared in 1849, and has been reprinted. An edition of ‘Swift's Prose Works’ is now progress in ‘Bohn's Standard Library’ (12 vols. 1897–1908) the second volume (1897) contains for the first time an accurate version of the ‘Journal to Stella.’

[The original authorities for Swift's life are chiefly Lord Orrery's Remarks on the Life and Writings of Jonathan Swift, 1751; Dr. Delany's (anonymous) Observations upon Lord Orrery's Remarks, 1754; Deane Swift's Essay upon the Life … of Swift, 1755, and Thomas Sheridan's Life, 1785. Delany, who knew Swift from about 1718, is the most trustworthy and judicious. Orrery, born in 1707, knew Swift from only about 1731, and is pompous and weak. Deane Swift [see under Swift, Theophilus] had access to some sources of information, though, as he was born in 1707 and did not live in Ireland till 1738, he knew little of Swift personally. Sheridan also settled in Ireland in 1738 only, but had information from his father, Swift's intimate friend, and from others of the circle. Swift's own writings, however, give the fullest information. His fragment of autobiography, first published by Deane Swift, is now in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, and is published in Forster's life, with corrections from another copy. The later letters, forming the Journal to Stella, first appeared in the three volumes of correspondence edited by Hawkesworth; the originals of this part are in the British Museum; the earlier letters first appeared in the three volumes of correspondence edited by Deane Swift. Only the first of these letters is preserved. Forster gives a collation of the letters preserved, from which it appears that both editors took considerable liberty with the text (Forster, Life of Swift, pp. 405–59). Hawkesworth's life (1755) followed the authorities noticed above. A copy in Forster Library has manuscript annotations by Dr. John Lyon (1702–1790) [q. v.] of some importance. In the same library are other manuscripts collected by Forster, including a series of letters from Swift to Knightley Chetwode, published by Dr. Birkbeck Hill in the Atlantic Monthly in 1896. Dr. Johnson's life in the Lives of the Poets refers his readers to Hawkesworth, and is both perfunctory and prejudiced. An Inquiry into the Life of Dean Swift, prefixed to the Literary Relics of G. Monck Berkeley [q. v.], is only important for the marriage story. An Essay on the earlier part of Swift's life, 1808, by Dr. Barrett, collects some facts from the Trinity College records, and prints some rubbish attributed to Swift. The life by Scott in 1814, though otherwise agreeable and judicious, is not very critical. Scott received some fresh anecdotes from Theophilus, the son of Deane Swift, and a few others. The correspondence with Vanessa, already used by Sheridan, was first fully published in Scott's edition. The ponderous History of St. Patrick's (1819), by William Monck Mason, contains a very elaborate life of Swift, with many documents and bibliographical references. In 1875 John Forster published the first volume of a Life of Swift (1667–1711), but his death prevented its continuation. The life by Mr. (now Sir) Henry Craik (1 vol. 8vo, 1885) is the fullest and most careful. Anecdotes of Swift are given in many books, and generally become more detailed and circumstantial as they are further from their source. Among them may be mentioned Spence's Anecdotes; the Memoirs of Lætitia Pilkington [q. v.]; Swiftiana, a worthless collection by C. H. Wilson, 2 vols. 12mo, 1804; and Mrs. Delany's Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Lady Llanover, 1st and 2nd ser. 1861–2, passim. See also The Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life, by W. R. Wilde, 1849, 8vo; Lecky's Leaders of Public Opinion (revised for the edition of Swift's Works, 12 vols. 1897–1908); Mr. Churton Collins's Jonathan Swift, a Biographical and Critical Study, 1893.]

L. S.

SWIFT, JONATHAN (1667–1745), dean of St Patrick’s, Dublin, British satirist, was born at No. 7 Hoey’s Court, Dublin, on the 30th of November 1667, a few months after the death of his father, Jonathan Swift (1640–1667), who married about 1664 Abigaile Erick, of an old Leicestershire family. He was taken over to England as an infant and nursed at Whitehaven, whence he returned to Ireland in his fourth year. His grandfather, Thomas Swift, vicar of Goodrich near Ross, appears to have been a doughty member of the church militant, who lost his possessions by taking the losing side in the Civil War and died in 1658 before the restoration could bring him redress. He married Elizabeth, niece of Sir Erasmus Dryden, the poet’s grandfather. Hence the familiarity of the poet's well-known “cooling-card” to the budding genius of his kinsman Jonathan: “Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.” The young Jonathan was educated mainly at the charges of his uncle Godwin, a Tipperary official, who was thought to dole out his help in a somewhat grudging manner. In fact the apparently prosperous relative was the victim of unfortunate speculations, and chose rather to be reproached with avarice than with imprudence. The youth was resentful of what he regarded as curmudgeonly treatment, a bitterness became ingrained and began to corrode his whole nature; and although he came in time to grasp the real state of the case he never mentioned his uncle with kindness or regard. At six he went to Kilkenny School, where Congreve was a schoolfellow; at fourteen he entered pensioner at Trinity College, Dublin, where he seems to have neglected his opportunities. He was referred in natural, philosophy, including mathematics, and obtained his degree only by a special but by no means infrequent act of indulgence. The patronage of his uncle galled him: he was dull and unhappy. We find in Swift few signs of precocious genius. As with Goldsmith, and so many other men who have become artists of the pen, college proved a stepmother to him. In 1688 the rich uncle, whose supposed riches had dwindled so much that at his death he was almost insolvent, died, having decayed, it would seem, not less in mind than in body and estate, and Swift sought counsel of his mother at Leicester. After a brief residence with his mother, who was needlessly alarmed at the idea of her son falling a victim to some casual coquette, Swift towards the close of 1689 entered upon an engagement as secretary to Sir William Temple, whose wife (Dorothy Osborne) was distantly related to Mrs Swift. It was at Moor Park, near Farnham, the residence to which Temple had retired to cultivate apricots after the rapid decline of his influence during the critical period of Charles II.'s reign (1679–1681), that Swift's acquaintance with Esther Johnson, the "Stella" of the famous Journal, was begun. Stella's mother was living at Moor Park, as servant or dame de compagnie of Temple's strong-minded sister, Lady Giffard. Swift was twenty-two and Esther eight years old at the time, and a curious friendship sprang up between them. He taught the little girl how to write and gave her advice in reading. On his arrival at Moor Park, Swift was, in his own words, a raw, inexperienced youth, and his duties were merely those of accountkeeper and amanuensis: his ability gradually won him the confidence of his employer, and he was entrusted with some important missions. He was introduced to William III. during that monarch's visit to Sir William's, and on one occasion accompanied the king in his walks round the grounds. In 1693 Temple sent him to try and convince the king of the inevitable necessity of triennial parliaments. William remained unconvinced and Swift's vanity received a useful lesson. The king had previously taught him "how to cut asparagus after the Dutch fashion." Next year, however, Swift (who had in the meantime obtained the degree of M.A. ad eundem at Oxford) quitted Temple, who had, he considered, delayed too long in obtaining him preferment. A certificate of conduct while under Temple's roof was required by all the Irish bishops he consulted before they would proceed in the matter of his ordination, and after five months' delay, caused by wounded pride, Swift had to kiss the rod and solicit in obsequious terms the favour of a testimonial from his discarded patron. Forgiveness was easy to a man of Temple's elevation and temperament, and he not only despatched the necessary recommendation but added a personal request which obtained for Swift the small prebend of Kilroot near Belfast (January 1695), where the new incumbent carried on a premature flirtation with a Miss Jane Waring, whom he called "Varina." In the spring of 1696 he asked the reluctant Varina to wait until he was in a position to marry. Just four years later he wrote to her in terms of such calculated harshness and imposed such conditions as to make further intercourse virtually impossible. In the meantime he had grown tired of Irish life and was glad to accept Temple's proposal for his return to Moor Park, where he continued until Temple's death in January 1699. During this period he wrote much and burned most of what he had written. He read and learned even more than he wrote. Moor Park took him away from brooding and glooming in Ireland and brought him into the corridor of contemporary history, an intimate acquaintance with which became the chief passion of Swift's life. His Pindaric Odes, written at this period or earlier, in the manner of Cowley, indicate the rudiments of a real satirist, but a satirist struggling with a most uncongenial form of expression. Of more importance was his first essay in satiric prose which arose directly from the position which he occupied as domestic author in the Temple household. Sir William had in 1692 published his Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning, transplanting to England a controversy begun in France by Fontenelle. Incidentally Temple had cited the letters of Phalaris as evidence of the superiority of the Ancients over the Moderns. Temple's praise of Phalaris led to an Oxford edition of the Epistles nominally edited by Charles Boyle. While this was preparing, William Wotton, in 1694, wrote his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, traversing Temple's general conclusions. Swift's Battle of the Books was written in 1697 expressly to refute this. Boyle's Vindication and Bentley's refutation of the authenticity of Phalaris came later. Swift's aim was limited to co-operation in what was then deemed the well-deserved putting down of Bentley by Boyle, with a view to which he represented Bentley and Wotton as the representatives of modern pedantry, transfixed by Boyle in a suit of armour given him by the gods as the representative of the "two noblest of things, sweetness and light." The satire remained unpublished until 1704, when it was issued along with The Tale of a Tub. Next year Wotton declared that Swift had borrowed his Combat des livres from the Histoire poétique de la guerre nouvellement déclarée entre les anciens et les modernes (Paris, 1688). He might have derived the idea of a battle from the French title, but the resemblances and parallels between the two books are slight. Swift was manifestly extremely imperfectly acquainted with the facts of the case at issue. Such data as he displays may well have been derived from no authority more recondite than Temple's own essay. In addition to £100, Temple left to Swift the trust and profit of publishing his posthumous writings. Five volumes appeared in 1700, 1703 and 1709. The resulting profit was small, and Swift's editorial duties brought him into acrimonious relation with Lady Giffard. The dedication to King William was to have procured Swift an English prebend, but this miscarried owing to the negligence or indifference of Henry Sidney, earl of Romney. Swift then accepted an offer from Lord Berkeley, who in the summer of 1699 was appointed one of the lords justices of Ireland. Swift was to be his chaplain and secretary, but upon reaching Ireland Berkeley gave the secretaryship to a Mr Bushe, who had persuaded him that it was an unfit post for a clergyman. The rich deanery of Derry then became vacant and Swift applied for it. The secretary had already accepted a bribe, but Swift was informed that he might still have the place for £1000. With bitter indignation Swift denounced the simony and threw up his chaplaincy, but he was ultimately reconciled to Berkeley by the presentation to the rectory of Agher in Meath with the united vicarages of Laracor and Rathbeggan, to which was added the prebend of Dunlavin in St Patrick's—the total value being about £230 a year. He was now often in Dublin, at most twenty miles distant, and through Lady Berkeley and her daughters he became the familiar and chartered satirist of the fashionable society there. At Laracor, near Trim, Swift rebuilt the parsonage, made a fish-pond, and planted a garden with poplars and willows, bordering a canal. His congregation consisted of about fifteen persons, "most of them gentle and all of them simple." He read prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays to himself and his clerk, beginning the exhortation "Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me in sundry places." But he soon began to grow tired of Ireland again and to pay visits in Leicester and London. The author of the Tale of a Tub, which he had had by him since 1696 or 1698, must have felt conscious of powers capable of far more effective exercise than reading-desk or pulpit at Laracor could supply; and his resolution to exchange divinity for politics must appear fully justified by the result. The Discourse on the Dissensions in Athens and Rome (September 1701), written to repel the tactics of the Tory commons in their attack on the Partition Treaties "without humour and without satire," and intended as a dissuasive from the pending impeachment of Somers, Orford, Halifax and Portland, received the honour, extraordinary for the maiden publication of a young politician, of being generally attributed to Somers himself or to Burnet, the latter of whom found a public disavowal necessary. In April or May 1704 appeared a more remarkable work. Clearness, cogency, masculine simplicity of diction, are conspicuous in the pamphlet, but true creative power told the Tale of a Tub. "Good God! what a genius I had when I wrote that book!" was his own exclamation in his latter years. It is, indeed, if not the most amusing of Swift's satirical works, the most strikingly original, and the one in which the compass of his powers is most fully displayed. In his kindred productions he relies mainly upon a single element of the humorous - logical sequence and unruffled gravity bridling in an otherwise frantic absurdity, and investing it with an air of sense. In the Tale of a Tub he lashes out in all directions. The humour, if less cogent and cumulative, is richer and more varied; the invention, too, is more daringly original and more completely out of the reach of ordinary faculties. The supernatural coats and the quintessential loaf may be paralleled but cannot be surpassed; and the book is throughout a mine of suggestiveness, as, for example, in the anticipation of Carlyle's clothes philosophy within the compass of a few lines. At the same time it wants unity and coherence, it attains no conclusion, and the author abuses his digressive method of composition and his convenient fiction of hiatuses in the original manuscript. The charges it occasioned of profanity and irreverence were natural, but groundless. There is nothing in the book inconsistent with Swift's professed and real character as a sturdy Church of England parson, who accepted the doctrines of his Church as an essential constituent of the social order around him, battled for them with the fidelity of a soldier defending his colours, and held it no part of his duty to understand, interpret, or assimilate them. In February 1701 Swift took his D.D. degree at Dublin, and before the close of the year he had taken a step destined to exercise a most important influence on his life, by inviting two ladies to Laracor. Esther, daughter of a merchant named Edward Johnson, a dependant, and legatee to a small amount, of Sir William Temple's (born in March 1680), whose acquaintance he had made at Moor Park in 1689, and whom he has immortalized as "Stella,"¹ came over with her companion Rebecca Dingley, a poor relative of the Temple family, and was soon permanently domiciled in his neighbourhood. The melancholy tale of Swift's attachment will be more conveniently narrated in another place, and is only alluded to here for the sake of chronology. Meanwhile the sphere of his intimacies was rapidly widening. He had been in England for three years together, 1701 to 1704, and counted Pope, Steele and Addison among his friends. The success of his pamphlet gained him ready access to all Whig circles; but already his confidence in that party was shaken, and he was beginning to meditate that change of sides which has drawn down upon him so much but such unjustifiable obloquy. The true state of the case may easily be collected from his next publications - The Sentiments of a Church of England Man, and On the Reasonableness of a Test (1708). The vital differences among the friends of the Hanover succession were not political, but ecclesiastical. From this point of view Swift's sympathies were entirely with the Tories. As a minister of the Church he felt his duty and his interest equally concerned in the support of her cause; nor could he fail to discover the inevitable tendency of Whig doctrines, whatever caresses individual Whigs might bestow on individual clergymen, to abase the Establishment as a corporation. He sincerely believed that the ultimate purpose of freethinkers was to escape from moral restraints, and he had an unreasoning antipathy to Scotch Presbyterians and English Dissenters. If Whiggism could be proved to entail Dissent, he was prepared to abandon it. One of his pamphlets, written about this time, contains his recipe for the promotion of religion, and is of itself a sufficient testimony to the extreme materialism of his views. Censorships and penalties are among the means he recommends. His pen was exerted to better purpose in the most consummate example of his irony, the Argument to prove that the abolishing of Christianity in England may, as things now stand, be attended with some inconveniencies (1708). About this time, too (November 1707), he produced his best narrative poem, Baucis and Philemon, while the next few months witnessed one of the most amusing hoaxes ever perpetrated against the quackery of astrologers. In his Almanac for 1707 a Protestant alarmist and plot vaticinator styled John Partridge warned customers against rivals and impostors. This notice attracted Swift's attention, and in January 1708 he issued predictions for the ensuing year by Isaac Bickerstaff, written to prevent the people of England being imposed upon by vulgar almanac makers. In this brochure he predicts solemnly that on the 29th of March at 11 o'clock at night Partridge the almanac maker should infallibly die of a raging fever. On the 30th of March he issued a letter confirming Partridge's sad fate. Grub Street elegies on the almanac maker were hawked about London. Partridge was widely deplored in obituary notices and his name was struck off the rolls at Stationers' Hall. The poor man was obliged to issue a special almanac to assure his clients and the public that he was not dead: he was fatuous enough to add that he was not only alive at the time of writing, but that he was also demonstrably alive on the day when the knave Bickerstaff (a name borrowed by Swift from a sign in Long Acre) asserted that he died of fever. This elicited Swift's most amusing Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff Esq. in April 1709. The laughter thus provoked extinguished the Predictions for three years, and in 1715 Partridge died in fact; but the episode left a permanent trace in classic literature, for when in 1709 Steele was to start the Tatler, it occurred to him that he could secure the public ear in no surer way than by adopting the name of Bickerstaff. From February 1708 to April 1709 Swift was in London, urging upon the Godolphin administration the claims of the Irish clergy to the first-fruits and twentieths ("Queen Anne's Bounty"), which brought in about £2500 a year, already granted to their brethren in England.² His having been selected for such a commission shows that he was not yet regarded as a deserter from the Whigs, although the ill success of his representations probably helped to make him one. By November 1710 he was again domiciled in London, and writing his Journal to Stella, that unique exemplar of a giant's playfulness, "which was written for one person's private pleasure and has had indestructible attractiveness for every one since." In the first pages of this marvellously minute record of a busy life we find him depicting the decline of Whig credit and complaining of the cold reception accorded him by Godolphin, whose penetration had doubtless detected the precariousness of his allegiance. Within a few weeks he had become the lampooner of the fallen treasurer, the bosom friend of Oxford and Bolingbroke, and the writer of the Examiner, a journal established as the exponent of Tory views (November 1710). He was now a power in the state, the intimate friend and recognized equal of the first writers of the day, the associate of ministers on a footing of perfect cordiality and familiarity. "We were determined to have you," said Bolingbroke to him afterwards; "you were the only one we were afraid of." He gained his point respecting the Irish endowments; and, by his own account, his credit procured the fortune of more than forty deserving or undeserving clients. The envious but graphic description of his demeanour conveyed to us by Bishop Kennet attests the real dignity of his position no less than the airs he thought fit to assume in consequence. The cheerful, almost jovial, tone of his letters to Stella evinces his full contentment, nor was he one to be moved to gratitude for small mercies. He had it, in fact, fully in his own power to determine his relations with the ministry, and he would be satisfied with nothing short of familiar and ostentatious equality. His advent marks a new era in English political life, the age of public opinion, created indeed by the circumstances of the time, but powerfully fostered and accelerated by him. By a strange but not infrequent irony of fate the most imperious and despotic spirit of his day laboured to enthrone a power which, had he himself been in authority, he would have utterly detested and despised. For a brief time he seemed to resume the whole power of the English press in his own pen and to guide public opinion as he would. His services to his party as writer of the Examiner, which he quitted in July 1711, were even surpassed by those which he rendered as the author of telling pamphlets, among which The Conduct of the Allies and of the Late Ministry, in beginning and carrying on the Present War, and Remarks on the Barrier Treaty (November and December 1711) hold the first rank. In truth, however, he was lifted by the wave he seemed to command. Surfeited with glory, which it began, after Malplaquet, to think might be purchased at too heavy a cost, the nation wanted a convenient excuse for relinquishing a burdensome war, which the great military genius of the age was suspected of prolonging to fill his pockets. The Whigs had been long in office. The High Church party had derived great strength from the Sacheverell trial. Swift did not bring about the revolution with which, notwithstanding, he associated his name. There seems no reason to suppose that he was consulted respecting the great Tory strokes of the creation of the twelve new peers and the dismissal of Marlborough (December 1711), but they would hardly have been ventured upon if The Conduct of the Allies and the Examiners had not prepared the way. A scarcely less important service was rendered to the ministry by his Letter to the October Club, artfully composed to soothe the impatience of Harley's extreme followers. He had every claim to the highest preferment that ministers could give him, but his own pride and prejudice in high places stood in his way. Generous men like Oxford and Bolingbroke cannot have been unwilling to reward so serviceable a friend, especially when their own interest lay in keeping him in England. Harley by this time was losing influence and was becoming chronically incapable of any sustained effort. Swift was naturally a little sore at seeing the see of Hereford slipping through his fingers. He had already lost Waterford owing to the prejudice against making the author of the Tale of a Tub a bishop, and he still had formidable antagonists in the archbishop of York, whom he had scandalized, and the duchess of Somerset, whom he had satirized. Anne was particularly amenable to the influence of priestly and female favourites, and it must be considered a proof of the strong interest made for Swift that she was eventually persuaded to appoint him to the deanery of St Patrick's, Dublin, vacant by the removal of Bishop Sterne to Dromore. It is to his honour that he never speaks of the queen with resentment or bitterness. In June 1713 he set out to take possession of his dignity, and encountered a very cold reception from the Dublin public. The dissensions between the chiefs of his party speedily recalled him to England. He found affairs in a desperate condition. The queen's demise was evidently at hand, and the same instinctive good sense which had ranged the nation on the side of the Tories, when Tories alone could terminate a fatiguing war, rendered it Whig when Tories manifestly could not be trusted to maintain the Protestant succession. In any event the occupants of office could merely have had the choice of risking their heads in an attempt to exclude the elector of Hanover, or of waiting patiently till he should come and eject them from their posts; yet they might have remained formidable could they have remained united. To the indignation with which he regarded Oxford's refusal to advance him in the peerage the active St John added an old disgust at the treasurer's pedantic and dilatory formalism, as well as his evident propensity, while leaving his colleague the fatigues, to engross for himself the chief credit of the administration. Their schemes of policy diverged as widely as their characters: Bolingbroke's brain teemed with the wildest plans, which Oxford might have more effectually discountenanced had he been prepared with anything in their place. Swift's endeavours after an accommodation were as fruitless as unremitting. His mortification was little likely to temper the habitual virulence of his pen, which rarely produced anything more acrimonious than the attacks he at this period directed against Burnet and his former friend Steele. One of his pamphlets against the latter (The Public Spirit of the Whigs set forth in their Generous Encouragement of the Author of the Crisis, 1714) was near involving him in a prosecution, some invectives against the Scottish peers having proved so exasperating to Argyll and others that they repaired to the queen to demand the punishment of the author, of whose identity there could be no doubt, although, like all Swift's writings, except the Proposal for the Extension of Religion, the pamphlet had been published anonymously. The immediate withdrawal of the offensive passage, and a sham prosecution instituted against the printer, extricated Swift from his danger. Meanwhile the crisis had arrived, and the discord of Oxford and Bolingbroke had become patent to all the nation. Foreseeing, as is probable, the impending fall of the former, Swift retired to Upper Letcombe, in Berkshire, and there spent some weeks in the strictest seclusion. This leisure was occupied in the composition of his remarkable pamphlet, Some Free Thoughts on the Present State of Affairs, which indicates his complete conversion to the bold policy of Bolingbroke. The utter exclusion of Whigs as well as Dissenters from office, the remodelling of the army, the imposition of the most rigid restraints on the heir to the throne - such were the measures which, by recommending, Swift tacitly admitted to be necessary to the triumph of his party. If he were serious, it can only be said that the desperation of his circumstances had momentarily troubled the lucidity of his understanding; if the pamphlet were merely intended as a feeler after public opinion, it is surprising that he did not perceive how irretrievably he was ruining his friends in the eyes of all moderate men. Bolingbroke's daring spirit, however, recoiled from no extreme, and, fortunately for Swift, he added so much of his own to the latter's MS. that the production was first delayed and then, upon the news of Anne's death, immediately suppressed. This incident but just anticipated the revolution which, after Bolingbroke had enjoyed a three days' triumph over Oxford, drove him into:exile and prostrated his party, but enabled Swift to perform the noblest action of his life. Almost the first acts of Bolingbroke's ephemeral premiership were to order him a thousand pounds from the exchequer and despatch him the most flattering invitations. The same post brought a letter from Oxford, soliciting Swift's company in his retirement; and, to the latter's immortal honour, he hesitated not an instant in preferring the solace of his friend to the offers of St John. When, a few days afterwards, Oxford was in prison and in danger of his life, Swift begged to share his captivity; and it was only on the offer being declined that he finally directed his steps towards Ireland, where he was very ill received. The draft on the exchequer was intercepted by the queen's death. These four busy years of Swift's London life had not been entirely engrossed by politics. First as the associate of Steele, with whom he quarrelled, and of Addison, whose esteem for him survived all differences, afterwards as the intimate comrade of Pope and Arbuthnot, the friend of Congreve and Atterbury, Parnell and Gay, he entered deeply into the literary life of the period. He was treasurer and a leading member of the Brothers, a society of wits and statesmen which recalls the days of Horace and Maecenas. He promoted the subscription for Pope's Homer, contributed some numbers to the Tatler, Spectator, and Intelligencer, and joined with Pope and Arbuthnot in establishing the Scriblerus Club, writing Martinus Scriblerus, his share in which can have been but small, as well as John Bull, where the chapter recommending the education of all blue-eyed children in depravity for the public good must surely be his. His miscellanies, in some of which his satire made the nearest approach perhaps ever made to the methods of physical force, such as A Meditation upon a Broomstick, and the poems Sid Hamet's Rod, The City Shower, The Windsor Prophecy, The Prediction of Merlin, and The History of Vanbrugh's House, belong to this period. A more laboured work, his Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), in a letter to Harley, suggesting the regulation of the English language by an academy, is chiefly remarkable as a proof of the deference paid to French taste by the most original English writer of his day. His History of the Four Last Years of the Reign of Queen Anne is not on a level with his other political writings. To sum up the incidents of this eventful period of his life, it was during it that he lost his mother, always loved and dutifully honoured, by death; his sister had been estranged from him some years before by an imprudent marriage, which, though making her a liberal allowance, he never forgave. The change from London to Dublin can seldom be an agreeable one. To Swift it meant for the time the fall from unique authority to absolute insignificance. All share in the administration of even Irish affairs was denied him; every politician shunned him; and his society hardly included a single author or wit. He "continued in the greatest privacy" and "began to think of death." At a later period he talked of "dying of rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole"; for some time, however, he was buoyed up by feeble hopes of a restoration to England. So late as 1726 he was in England making overtures to Walpole, but he had no claim on ministerial goodwill, and as an opponent he had by that time done his worst. By an especial cruelty of fate, what should have been the comfort became the bane of his existence. We have already mentioned his invitation of Esther Johnson and Mrs Dingley to Ireland. Both before and after his elevation to the deanery of St Patrick's these ladies continued to reside near him, and superintended his household during his absence in London. He had offered no obstacle in 1704 to a match proposed for Stella to Dr William Tisdall of Dublin, and, with his evident delight in the society of the dark-haired, brighteyed, witty beauty—a model, if we may take his word, of all that woman should be—it seemed unaccountable that he did not secure it to himself by the expedient of matrimony. A constitutional infirmity has been suggested as the reason, and the conjecture derives support from several peculiarities in his writings. But, whatever the cause, his conduct proved none the less the fatal embitterment of his life and Stella's and yet another's. He had always been unlucky in his relations with the fair sex. In 1695 he had idealized "Varina." Varina was avenged by Vanessa, who pursued Swift to far other purpose. Esther Vanhomrigh (b. February 14, 1690), the daughter of a Dublin merchant of Dutch origin, who died in 1703 leaving £16,000, had become known to Swift at the height of his political influence. He lodged close to her mother, was introduced to the family by Sir A. Fountaine in 1708 and became an intimate of the house. Vanessa insensibly became his pupil, and he insensibly became the object of her impassioned affection. Her letters reveal a spirit full of ardour and enthusiasm, and warped by that perverse bent which leads so many women to prefer a tyrant to a companion. Swift, on the other hand, was devoid of passion. Of friendship, even of tender regard, he was fully capable, but not of love. The spiritual realm, whether in divine or earthly things, was a region closed to him, where he had never set foot. As a friend he must have greatly preferred Stella to Vanessa. Marriage was out of the question with him, and, judged in the light of Stella's dignity and womanliness, this ardent and unreasoning display of passion was beyond comprehension. But Vanessa assailed him on a very weak side. The strongest of all his instincts was the thirst for imperious domination. Vanessa hugged the fetters to which Stella merely submitted. Flattered to excess by her surrender, yet conscious of his binding obligations and his real preference, he could neither discard the one beauty nor desert the other. It is humiliating to human strength and consoling to human weakness to find the Titan behaving like the least resolute of mortals, seeking refuge in temporizing, in evasion, in fortuitious circumstance. He no doubt trusted that his removal to Dublin would bring relief, but here again his evil star interposed. Vanessa's mother died (1714), and she followed him to Ireland, taking up her abode at Celbridge within ten miles of Dublin. Unable to marry Stella without destroying Vanessa, or to openly welcome Vanessa without destroying Stella, he was thus involved in the most miserable embarrassment; he continued to temporize. Had the solution of marriage been open Stella would undoubtedly have been Swift's choice. Some mysterious obstacle intervened. It was rumoured at the time that Stella was the natural daughter of Temple, and Swift himself at times seems to have been doubtful as to his own paternity. There is naturally no evidence for such reports, which may have been fabrications of the anti-deanery faction in Dublin. From the same source sprang the report of Swift's marriage to Stella by Bishop Ashe in the deanery garden at Clogher in the summer of 1716. The ceremony, it is suggested, may have been extorted by the jealousy of Stella and have been accompanied by the express condition on Swift's side that the marriage was never to be avowed. The evidence is by no means complete and has never been exhaustively reviewed. John Lyon, Swift's constant attendant from 1735 onwards, disbelieved the story. It was accepted by the early biographers, Deane Swift, Orrery, Delany and Sheridan; also by Johnson, Scott, Dr Garnett, Craik, Dr Bernard and others. The arguments against the marriage were first marshalled by Monck Mason in his History of St Patrick's, and the conjecture, though plausible, has failed to convince Forster, Stephen, Aitken, Hill, Lane Poole and Churton Collins. Never more than a nominal wife at most, the unfortunate Stella commonly passed for his mistress till the day of her death (in her will she writes herself spinster), bearing her doom with uncomplaining resignation, and consoled in some degree by unquestionable proofs of the permanence of his love, if his feeling for her deserves the name. Meanwhile his efforts were directed to soothe Miss Vanhomrigh, to whom he addressed Cadenus [Decanus] and' Vanessa, the history of their attachment and the best example of his serious poetry, and for whom he sought to provide honourably in marriage, without either succeeding in his immediate aim or in thereby opening her eyes to the hopelessness of her passion. In 1720, on what occasion is uncertain, he began to pay her regular visits. Sir Walter Scott found the Abbey garden at Celbridge still full of laurels, several of which she was accustomed to plant whenever she expected Swift, and the table at which they had been used to sit was still shown. But the catastrophe of her tragedy was at hand. Worn out with his evasions, she at last (1723) took the desperate step of writing to Stella or, according to another account, to Swift himself, demanding to know the nature of the connexion with him, and this terminated the melancholy history as with a clap of thunder. Stella sent her rival's letter to Swift, and retired to a friend's house. Swift rode down to Marley Abbey with a terrible countenance, petrified Vanessa by his frown, and departed without a word, flinging down a packet which only contained her own letter to Stella. Vanessa died within a few weeks. She left the poem and correspondence for publication. The former appeared immediately, the latter was suppressed until it was published by Sir Walter Scott. Five years afterwards Stella followed Vanessa to the grave. The grief which the gradual decay of her health evidently occasioned Swift is sufficient proof of the sincerity of his attachment, as he understood it. It is a just remark of Thackeray's that he everywhere half-consciously recognizes her as his better angel, and dwells on her wit and her tenderness with a fondness he never exhibits for any other topic. On the 28th of January 1728, she died, and her wretched lover sat down the same night to record her virtues in language of unsurpassed simplicity, but to us who know the story more significantly for what it conceals than for what it tells. A lock of her hair is preserved, with the inscription in Swift's handwriting, most affecting in its apparent cynicism, "Only a woman's hair!" "Only a woman's hair," comments Thackeray; "only love, only fidelity, purity, innocence, beauty, only the tenderest heart in the world stricken and wounded, and passed away out of reach of pangs of hope deferred, love insulted and pitiless desertion; only that lock of hair left, and memory, and remorse, for the guilty, lonely wretch, shuddering over the grave of his victim." The more unanswerable this tremendous indictment appears upon the evidence the greater the probability that the evidence is incomplete. Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. Between the death of Vanessa and the death of Stella came the greatest political and the greatest literary triumph of Swift's life. He had fled to Ireland a broken man, to all appearance politically extinct; a few years were to raise him once more to the summit of popularity, though power was for ever denied him. Consciously or unconsciously he first taught the Irish to rely upon themselves and for many generations his name was the most universally popular in the country. With his fierce hatred of what he recognized as injustice, it was impossible that he should not feel exasperated at the gross misgovernment of Ireland for the supposed benefit of England, the systematic exclusion of Irishmen from places of honour and profit, the spoliation of the country by absentee landlords, the deliberate discouragement of Irish trade and manufactures. An Irish patriot in the strict sense of the term he was not; he was proud of being an Englishman, who had been accidentally "dropped in Ireland"; he looked upon the indigenous population as conquered savages; but his pride and sense of equity alike revolted against the stay-at-home Englishmen's contemptuous treatment of their own garrison, and he delighted in finding a point in which the triumphant faction was still vulnerable. His Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures, published anonymously in 1720, urging the Irish to disuse English goods, became the subject of a prosecution, which at length had to be dropped. A greater opportunity was at hand. One of the chief wants of Ireland in that day, and for many a day afterwards, was that of small currency adapted to the daily transactions of life. Questions of coinage occupy a large part of the correspondence of the primate, Archbishop Boulter, whose anxiety to deal rightly with the matter is evidently very real and conscientious. There is no reason to think that the English ministry wished otherwise; but secret influences were at work, and a patent for supplying Ireland with a coinage of copper halfpence was accorded to William Wood on such terms that the profit accruing from the difference between the intrinsic and the nominal value of the coins, about 40%, was mainly divided between him and George I.'s favourite duchess of Kendal, by whose influence Wood had obtained the privilege. Swift now had his opportunity, and the famous six letters signed M. B. Drapier (April to Dec. 1724) soon set Ireland in a flame. Every effort was used to discover, or rather to obtain legal evidence against, the author, whom, Walpole was assured, it would then have taken ten thousand men to apprehend. None could be procured; the public passion swept everything before it; the patent was cancelled; Wood was compensated by a pension; Swift was raised to a height of popularity which he retained for the rest of his life; and the only real sufferers were the Irish people, who lost a convenience so badly needed that they might well have afforded to connive at Wood's illicit profits. Perhaps, however, it was worth while to teach the English ministry that not everything could be done in Ireland. Swift's pamphlets, written in a style more level with the popular intelligence than even his own ordinary manner, are models alike to the controversialist who aids a good cause and to him who is burdened with a bad one. The former may profit by the study of his marvellous lucidity and vehemence, the latter by his sublime audacity in exaggeration and the sophistry with which he involves the innocent halfpence in the obloquy of the nefarious patentee. The noise of the Drapier Letters had hardly died away when Swift acquired a more durable glory by the publication of Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, in four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, first a surgeon and then a captain of several ships (Benjamin Motto, October 1726). The first hint came to him at the meetings of the Scriblerus Club in 1714, and the work was well advanced, it would seem, by 1720. Allusions show that it was circulated privately for a considerable period before its actual (anonymous) publication, on the 28th of October 1726. Pope arranged that Erasmus Lewis should act as literary agent in negotiating the manuscript. Swift was afraid of the reception the book would meet with, especially in political circles. The keenness of the satire on courts, parties and statesmen certainly suggests that it was planned while Swift's disappointments as a public man were still rankling and recent. It is Swift's peculiar good fortune that his book can dispense with the interpretation of which it is nevertheless susceptible, and may be equally enjoyed whether its inner meaning is apprehended or not. It is so true, so entirely based upon the facts of human nature, that the question what particular class of persons supplied the author with his examples of folly or misdoing, however interesting to the commentator, may be neglected by the reader. It is also fortunate for him that in three parts out of the four he should have entirely missed "the chief end I propose to myself, to vex the world rather than divert it." The world, which perhaps ought to have been vexed, chose rather to be diverted; and the great satirist literally strains his power ut pueris placeat. Few books have added so much to the innocent mirth of mankind of the first two parts of Gulliver; the misanthropy is quite overpowered by the fun. The third part, equally masterly in composition, is less felicitous in invention; and in the fourth Swift has indeed carried out his design of vexing the world at his own cost. Human nature indignantly rejects her portrait in the Yahoo as a gross libel, and the protest is fully warranted. An intelligence from a superior sphere, bound on a voyage to the earth, might actually have obtained a fair idea of average humanity by a preliminary call at Lilliput or Brobdingnag, but not from a visit to the Yahoos. While Gulliver is infinitely the most famous and popular of Swift's works, it exhibits no greater powers of mind than many others. The secret of success, here as elsewhere, is the writer's marvellous imperturbability in paradox, his teeming imagination and his rigid logic. Grant his premises, and all the rest follows; his world may be turned topsy-turvy, but the relative situation of its contents is unchanged. The laborious attempts that have been made, particularly in Germany, to affiliate the Travels only serve to bring Swift's essential originality into stronger relief. He had naturally read Lucian and Rabelais - possibly Crusoe and the Arabian Nights. He had read as a young man the lunary adventure of Bishop Wilkins, Bishop Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac. He had read contemporary accounts of Peter the Wild Boy, the History of Sevarambes by D'Alais (1677) and Foligny's Journey of Jacques Sadeut to Australia (1693). He may have read Joshua Barnes's description of a race of "Pygmies" in his Gerania of 1675. He copied the account of the storm in the second voyage almost literally from Sturmy's Compleat Mariner. Travellers' tales were deliberately embalmed by Swift in the amber of his irony. Something similar was attempted by Raspe in his Munchausen sixty years later. Swift's grave humour and power of enforcing momentous truth by ludicrous exaggeration were next displayed in his Modest Proposal for Preventing the' Children of Poor People from being a Burden to their Parents or the Country, by fattening and eating them (1729), a parallel to the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, and as great a masterpiece of tragic as the latter is of comic irony. The Directions to Servants (first published in 1745) in like manner derive their overpowering comic force from the imperturbable solemnity with which all the misdemeanours that domestics can commit are enjoined upon them as duties. The power of minute observation displayed is most remarkable, as also in Polite Conversation (written in 1731, published in 1738), a surprising assemblage of the vulgarities and trivialities current in ordinary talk. As in the Directions, the satire, though cutting, is good-natured, and the piece shows more animal spirits than usual in Swift's latter years. It was a last flash of gaiety. The attacks of giddiness and deafness to which he had always been liable increased upon him. Already in 1721 he complains that the buzzing in his ears disconcerts and confounds him. After the Directions he writes little beyond occasional verses, not seldom indecent and commonly trivial. He sought refuge from inferior society often in nonsense, occasionally in obscenity. An exception must be made in the case of the delightful Hamilton's Bawn, and still more of the verses on his own death (1731), one of the most powerful and also one of the saddest of his poems. In The Legion Club of 1736 he composed the fiercest of all his verse satires. He hated the Irish parliament for its lethargy and the Irish bishops for their interference. He fiercely opposed Archbishop Boulter's plans for the reform of the Irish currency, but admitted that his real objection was sentimental: the coins should be struck as well as circulated in Ireland. His exertions in repressing robbery and mendicancy were strenuous and successful. His popularity remained as great as ever (he received the freedom of Dublin in 1729), and, when he was menaced by the bully Bettesworth, Dublin rose as one man to defend him. He governed his cathedral with great strictness and conscientiousness, and for years after Stella's death continued to hold a miniature court at the deanery. But his failings of mind were exacerbated by his bodily infirmities; he grew more and more whimsical and capricious, morbidly suspicious and morbidly parsimonius; old friends were estranged or removed by death, and new friends did not come forward in their place. For many years, nevertheless, he maintained a correspondence with Pope and Bolingbroke, and with Arbuthnot and Gay until their deaths, with such warmth as to prove that an ill opinion of mankind had not made him a misanthrope, and that human affection and sympathy were still very necessary to him. The letters become scarcer and scarcer with the decay of his faculties; at last, in 1740, comes one to his kind niece, Mrs Whiteway, of heartrending pathos:— "I have been very miserable all night, and to-day extremely deaf and full of pain. I am so stupid and confounded that I cannot express the mortification I am under both of body and mind. All I can say is that I am not in torture; but I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know how your health is and your family: I hardly understand one word I write. I am sure my days will be very few; few and miserable they must be. I am, for those few days, yours entirely—Jonathan Swift.

"If I do not blunder, it is Saturday, July 26, 1740. "If I live till Monday I shall hope to see you, perhaps for the last time."

Account book entries continue until 1742. In March 1742 it was necessary to appoint guardians of Swift's person and estate. In September of the same year his physical malady reached a crisis, from which he emerged a helpless wreck, with faculties paralysed rather than destroyed—"He never talked nonsense or said a foolish thing." The particulars of his case have been investigated by Dr Bucknill and Sir William Wilde, who have proved that he suffered from nothing that could be called mental derangement until the "labyrinthine vertigo" from which he had suffered all his life, and which he erroneously attributed to a surfeit of fruit, produced paralysis, "a symptom of which was the not uncommon one of aphasia, or the automatic utterance of words ungoverned by intention. As a consequence of that paralysis, but not before, the brain, already weakened by senile decay, at length gave way, and Swift sank into the dementia which preceded his death." In other words he retained his reason until in his 74th year he was struck down by a new disease in the form of a localized left-sided apoplexy or cerebral softening. Aphasia due to the local trouble and general decay then progressed rapidly together, and even then at 76, two more years were still to elapse before "he exchanged the sleep of idiocy for the sleep of death." The scene closed on the 10th of October 1745. With what he himself described as a satiric touch, his fortune was bequeathed to found a hospital for idiots and lunatics, now an important institution, as it was in many respects a pioneer bequest. He was interred in his cathedral at midnight on the 22nd of October, in the same coffin as Stella, with the epitaph, written by himself, "Hic depositum est corpus Jonathan Swift, S.T.P., hujus ecclesiae cathedralis decani; ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. Abi, viator, et imitare, si poteris, strenuum pro virili libertatis vindicem." The stress which Swift thus laid upon his character as an assertor of liberty has hardly been ratified by posterity, which has apparently neglected the patriot for the genius and the wit. Not unreasonably; for if half his patriotism sprang from an instinctive hatred of oppression, the other half was disappointed egotism. He utterly lacked the ideal aspiration which the patriot should possess: his hatred of villany was far more intense than his love of virtue. The same cramping realism clings to him everywhere beyond the domain of politics—in his religion, in his fancies, in his affections. At the same time, it is the secret of his wonderful concentration of power: he realizes everything with such intensity that he cannot fail to be impressive. Except in his unsuccessful essay in history, he never, after the mistake of his first Pindaric attempts, strays beyond his sphere, never attempts what he is not qualified to do, and never fails to do it. His writings have not one literary fault except their occasional looseness of grammar and their frequent indecency. Within certain limits, his imagination and invention are as active as those of the most creative poets. As a master of humour, irony and invective he has no superior; his reasoning powers are no less remarkable within their range, but he never gets beyond the range of an advocate. Few men of so much mental force have had so little genius for speculation, and he is constantly dominated by fierce instincts which he mistakes for reasons. As a man the leading note of his character is the same—strength without elevation. His master passion is imperious pride—the lust of despotic dominion. He would have his superiority acknowledged, and cared little for the rest. Place and profit were comparatively indifferent to him; he declares that he never received a farthing for any of his works except Gulliver's Travels, and that only by Pope's management; and he had so little regard for literary fame that he put his name to only one of his writings. Contemptuous of the opinion of his fellows, he hid his virtues, paraded his faults, affected some failings from which he was really exempt, and, since his munificent charity could not be concealed from the recipients, laboured to spoil it by gratuitous surliness. Judged by some passages of his life he would appear a heartless egotist, and yet he was capable of the sincerest friendship and could never dispense with human sympathy. Thus an object of pity as well as awe, he is the most tragic figure in our literature—the only man of his age who could be conceived as affording a groundwork for one of the creations of Shakespeare. "To think of him," says Thackeray, "is like thinking of the ruin of a great empire." Nothing finer or truer could be said. Swift inoculated the Scriblerus Club with his own hatred of pedantry, cant and circumlocution. His own prose is the acme of incisive force and directness. He uses the vernacular with an economy which no other English writer has rivalled. There is a masculinity about his phrases which makes him as clear to the humblest capacity as they are capable of being made to anyone. Ironist as he is, there is no writer that ever wrote whose meaning is more absolutely unmistakable. He is the grand master of the order of plain speech. His influence, which grew during the 18th century in spite of the depreciation of Dr Johnson, has shared in the eclipse of the Queen Anne wits which began about the time of Jeffrey. Yet as the author of Gulliver he is still read all over the world, while in England discipleship to Swift is recognized as one of the surest passports to a prose style. Among those upon whom Swift's influence has been most discernible may be mentioned Chesterfield, Smollett, Cobbett, Hazlitt, Scott, Borrow, Newman, Belloc.

Authorities:—Among the authorities for Swift's life the first place is still of course occupied by his own writings, especially the fragment of autobiography now at Trinity College, Dublin, and his Correspondence, which still awaits an authoritative annotated edition. The most important portion is contained in the Journal to Stella. Twenty-five of these letters on Swift's death became the property of Dr Lyon. Hawkesworth bought them for his 1766 edition of the Works and eventually gave them to the British Museum. Forty additional letters were published by Dean Swift in 1768 (of these only No. 1 survives in the British Museum). Sheridan brought out the complete Journal in 1784 in a mangled form, but the text has as far as possible been restored by modern editors such as Forster, Rylands and Aitken. A full annotated edition is in course of preparation by H. Spencer Scott. The Vanessa correspondence was used by Sheridan, but first published in full by Sir Walter Scott, and Swift's letters to his friend Knightley Chetwode of Woodbrook between 1714 and 1731, over fifty in number, were first issued by Dr Birkbeck Hill in 1899. The more or less contemporary lives of Swift, most of which contain a certain amount of apocrypha, are those of Lord Orrery (1751); Dr Delany's Observations on Orrery (1754); Dean Swift's Essay upon the Life of Swift (1755); and Thomas Sheridan's Life (of 1785). Dr. Hawkesworth, in the life prefixed to his edition of the Works in 1755, adds little of importance. Dr Johnson's Life is marred by manifest prejudice. Dr Barrett produced an Essay upon the Early Life of some value (in 1808). Six years later came the useful biography of Sir Walter Scott, and (in 1819) appeared the elaborate Life by W. Monck Mason in the form of an appendix to his ponderous History of St Patrick's. A new epoch of investigation was inaugurated by John Forster, who began a new scrutiny of the accumulated material and published his first volume in 1875. Invaluable in many respects, it exhibited the process as well as the result of biography, and never got beyond 1711. The Life by Sir Henry Craik (1882 and reissues) now holds the field. Valuable monographs have been produced by Sir Leslie Stephen (Men of Letters and the Memoirs, in the Dict. Nat. Biog.), by Thackeray, in his English Humourists, by W. R. Wilde, in his Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life, by Lecky, in his Leaders of Public Opinion, by G. P. Moriarty, J. Churton Collins (1893), Max Simon (1893), Henriette Cordelet (1907) and Sophie Shilleto Smith (1910). The anecdotes of Swift related in Spence, Laetitia Pilkington, Wilson's Swiftiana, Delany's Autobiography, &c., though often amusing, can hardly be accepted as authentic. The collective editions of Dr Hawkesworth (various issues, 1755–1779), T. Sheridan (1785), John Nichols (1801, 1804, 1808), Scott (1814 and 1821) and Roscoe (2 vols., 1849) have been in most respects superseded by the edition in Bohn's Standard Library in fourteen volumes (including the two subsequently issued volumes of Poems) (1897–1910); arranged as follows: I. Biog. Introduction by W. E. H. Lecky; Tale of a Tub; Battle of the Books; Critical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind; The Bickerstaff Pamphlets, &c., ed. Temple Scott. II. Journal to Stella, ed. F. Ryland (two portraits of Stella). III. and IV. Writings on Religion and the Church, ed. Temple Scott. V. Historical and Political Tracts - English, ed. Temple Scott. VI. Historical and Political Tracts - Irish, ed. Temple Scott. VII. The Drapier's Letters, ed. Temple Scott. VIII. and XI. Literary Essays, including Gulliver's Travels (ed. G. R. Dennis); A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue; Hints towards an Essay on Conversation; Character; Directions to Servants; and Autobiographical Fragment, ed. Temple Scott. IX. Contributions to the Examiner, Tatler, Spectator, &c., ed. Temple Scott. X. Historical Writings, including the Four Last Years; Abstract of English History; and Remarks on Burnet, ed. Temple Scott. XII. Essays on the Portraits, &c., Bibliography by W. Spencer Jackson, and Index. Twelve portraits of Swift are included in the work, in addition to two portraits of Stella and one of Vanessa. XIII. and XIV. Poems, ed. W. Ernst Browning. Translations and editions of Gulliver's Travels have been numerous. "Valuable Notes for a Bibliography of Swift" were published by Dr S. Lane Poole in The Bibliographer (November 1884).

(R. G.; T. SE.)

1. The name "Stella" is simply a translation of Esther. Swift may have learned that Esther means "star" from the Elementa linguae persicae of John Greaves or from some Persian scholar; but he is more likely to have seen the etymology in the form given from Jewish sources in Buxtorf's Lexicon, where the interpretation takes the more suggestive form "Stella Veneris."
2. The grant of the first-fruits was to be made contingent on a concession from the Irish clergy in the shape of the abolition of the sacramental test. This Swift would not agree to. He ultimately won his point from Harley, and his success marks his open rupture with the Whigs.