trembled lest he should be forced to admit that, after all, Pope and Shaftesbury were sound in their optimism. But his satire probed the insufficiency of mankind in place after place, and there gradually rose in Swift, like an intoxication, a certainty of the vileness of the race. When he was quite convinced, madness was close upon him, but in the interval he wrote that sinister and incomparable masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels, in which misanthropy reaches the pitch of a cardinal virtue, and the despicable race of man is grossly and finally humiliated.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was born at 7 Hoey's Court, Dublin, on the Jonathan 30th of November 1667. He was the posthumous son of Jonathan Swift, younger (1667-1745) Swift son of Thomas Swift, vicar of Good

rich, near Ross, in Herefordshire,
who had been, from January 1666
to April 1667, Steward of the King's
Inns in Dublin; his mother had
been Abigail Erick of Leicester; the
family of the Swifts came from
Yorkshire. As Swift was always
anxious to insist, he was an English-
man except for the accident which
made him born an Irishman. "I
was a year old before I left Ireland,
and to my sorrow did not die before
I came back to it." To claim him
as a Milesian, therefore, requires
courage. Swift's return to England
was abrupt; he was kidnapped over
to Whitehaven by a nurse who
could not bear to part with him.
Mrs. Swift does not seem to have
been anxious about him, and he
was perhaps at Whitehaven until,
about 1671, she came over to her
native town of Leicester. In 1673,
at the age of six, Swift was sent to Kilkenny School, called the Eton of Ireland,
where, in process of time, Congreve became his school-fellow. He stayed at Kilkenny
until in April 1682 he was entered at Trinity College, Dublin. But, so he tells us,
"by the ill-treatment of his nearest relations, he was so discouraged and sunk in
his spirits that he too much neglected his academic studies." In 1686 he was
given a degree, but, "in a manner little to his credit," speciali gratia. He continued
on at Trinity College, but was guilty of repeated irregularities and cynical reckless-
ness of conduct; on his twenty-first birthday he was severely punished and suspended
from his degrees. But this marked the close of his academic career; in company
with hosts of others, he fled to England after the Revolution of 1688, where his
mother received him at Leicester. He was presently offered a situation in the family
of Sir William Temple, who was a connection on the father's as well as on the

mother's side. Temple was now retired from diplomacy to his house, Moor Park, Farnham; he does not seem to have discovered that his amanuensis was a man of genius. In May 1694 Swift left Temple in a fit of sudden anger, passed over into Ireland, and in October was ordained deacon; he took priest's orders in the following January. His quarrel with his kinsman and patron was, however, healed, and after an absence of exactly two years Swift returned to Moor Park. This was the approximate date of the first of Swift's mysterious relations with women; he left behind him in Ireland a "Varina" (Miss Waring), with whom he was in passionate correspondence. It is believed that Swift's second period of residence at Moor Park was happier than the first, and that Temple learned to value his strange inmate. Those who have condemned Sir

William have perhaps forgotten how much there was in his agreeable and cultivated conversation which must have been far more attractive to Swift than what

most country houses at that day could afford him. We find the latter already an invalid, but trying to combat ill-health by violent daily exercise. He was isolated; "I am often," he says, "two or three months without seeing anybody besides the family," but one member of this was Esther Johnson, the celebrated "Stella." Early in 1699 Temple died, and Swift sincerely mourned his loss. Meanwhile, in the retirement and obscurity of Moor Park, Swift had composed some astonishing things-the Tale of a Tub in 1696, the Battle of the Books in 1697; his stiff attempts at the Pindaric Ode were earlier. He had been reading history and the classics with extreme eagerness and fulness. He was now in his thirty-second year, with a small inheritance from Temple, but with no