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apparent means of income. After some disappointment, he accepted the post of chaplain to the Earl of Berkeley, who was just going over to Ireland; he was under-secretary also, but immediately on reaching Dublin he found himself dismissed from this post, and he resigned the chaplaincy as well. Early in 1700 he was given a group of livings and a prebend, the total revenues of all of which were sufficient for a single man to live upon in Ireland. He now finally broke off all relations with Varina, and came into closer connection with Stella, who had arrived at Dublin "with full resolution to engage him." Swift's duties now called him chiefly to his living of Laracor, in Meath, where he improved the house and garden, and even kept a curate, although the congregation was so small that it was here, having no audience but the clerk, that he opened the service with "Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me." Five visits to London, covering in all some three years, broke up the monotony of Swift's Irish residence from 1700 to 1710. In 1704 he published, in a single anonymous volume, the Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, and some brief kindred treatises; and this introduced him to the London wits, of whom he was already intimately known to Congreve. His friendship with Addison and Steele dates from 1705, and under this stimulus he wrote Baucis and Philemon and the facetious Partridge tracts (1708). He saw his friends advance in the world, however, while he himself remained what he scornfully called a "hedge-parson." Already, since 1701, Swift had dabbled in politics, and had privately published, in the Whig interest, his brilliant Discourse on the Dissensions in Athens and Rome. After 1704

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Esther Johnson ("Stella")

he found himself too high a churchman to applaud Whig measures without reserve. It was probably the uncertain note which he sounded in such tracts as the Project for the Advancement of Religion, which stood in the way of his promotion; years passed and Swift got nothing, although in 1708 the bishopric of Waterford seemed within his reach. In 1709, after the failure of his negotiations to secure Queen Anne's Bounty for the Irish Church, Swift abandoned the Whigs altogether, and returned to Laracor to sulk. He stayed a year and a half "in one scurvy acre of ground," until the Whigs were turned out of office in August 1710. Swift hastened to London as soon as the news reached him, and he received civil attentions from the leaders of both parties. He was presented, "as a discontented person, who was ill-used for not being Whig enough," to the Tory leader, Harley, and was welcomed with flattering effusion. The Journal to Stella now begins, and for thirty months keeps us closely informed as to Swift's movements. Swift found himself "ten times better with the new people than he ever was with the old, and forty times more caressed." He began to write with vehement and effective wit in the Tory Examiner. His tract on the Conduct of the Allies may plausibly be conceived as having brought about the fall of Marlborough, and early in 1712 Swift was at the height of his political and personal prestige.

VOL. III.

He used it with generous pertinacity for the advantage of his personal friends, and At last, in April especially of men of letters; for himself he could do nothing. 1713, Swift was appointed to be Dean of St. Patrick's; he saw he should get nothing better, and three months later, in great depression of spirits, he left for

Dublin. The Tories

wanted his pen, and presently called him

May 1714 he saw

the quarrel between

Harley (now Lord Oxford) and St. John (now Lord Boling

brich, for broke) to be hope.

a = Welch men or woman by 'the jewich paflionele way of barking. This paper thall Sane to cry www ill your question about my Journey; and I will hour it printed to schiet the Kingdom Força it hoce olim Xi & damund lye bo I shall clavagy fret at the ven of this imprisonment. Prey with peer всё днан he is called I was yppy. and Lyar 500 times an haw, and yet he means and ill, for he mics nothing. Oh for & dosan battles of and a bottle broad and hatte slices $ of ведад Bet butter. The wine you fund is is a little upon picom, I with you had chosen belter, I car going to had at law a clock, because I am weary of being up. Wednesday. Sest night I dreamt that Рус 2 Relinglich and her Pypes were at my lathidh in the Gallery, and Nast my Id was and wel find my Surplice, the Church for the Dear van Hand: way: nere and aft of the I works land is my Dd to come more concesiuney to get into the Oulgut the shell

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less, he withdrew to

a rectory in Berkshire, and wrote his brilliant pamphlet, Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs. But when Oxford fell in July, Swift refused to join

Bolingbroke, nor was there much opportunity for doing so,

since Queen Anne died and the Tories

ruined as annihilated." Swift, "like a man knocked down," hastened to Dub

were "not so much

was all hoben, the to the Collegions had done lin. Here, for some it I squeeged among the Rabble, Saw my It i the Inuit I thought his preza was good,

years, he lived an extremely quiet life; "my amusements,”

and I faget it. In his Sermon, I did not like he says, "are dehis quoting hit Wychal you plays. by name, and he play. This is all and to I wahed. To

Facsimile Page from Swift's Private Diary

fending my small dominions against the archbishop, and endeavouring to reduce my rebellious choir." Hester Vanhomrigh,

He had pushed now to intimacy an acquaintance with Miss
"Vanessa," whom he had slightly known since 1708; the longest of Swift's poems,
the Cadenus [Decanus] and Vanessa, probably written in 1714, tells the story of
this unfortunate relationship. But on reaching Dublin, the influence of Stella

immediately began to supplant that of Vanessa, although the latter followed Swift to Ireland. But he began a strange, indeed a perfectly inexplicable, double subterranean life between these two unhappy women. There was a legend, unconfirmed but undenied, that in 1716 he secretly married Stella; in 1723 Vanessa wrote to Stella to ask if this was true, and Swift, possessing himself of the letter, rode at once to Celbridge, where Vanessa lived, flung the letter on the table without

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Vanessa is wholly mysterious; we know no more than what Archbishop King is said to have told Delany, that Swift "was the most unhappy man on earth, but on the subject of his wretchedness you must never ask a question." As early as 1717 he said to Young, "I shall die at the top," and he seems to have been always haunted by the fear of dying insane. To return to his public life, Swift was for six years silent both as an author and as a politician. In 1720 he published his earliest Irish pamphlet, an appeal to the people to consume none but Irish manufactures. This tract made a stir, but a far greater commotion was caused in 1724 by the publication of The Drapier's Letters, appealing with sarcastic vehemence against the proposed copper coinage of William Wood, a bankrupt hardwaresman; these are the most brilliant of Swift's polemical writings. Walpole sent Carteret over to Dublin to make a compromise and to punish the anonymous Drapier. Swift went to Carteret's levée, and mocked him for persecuting a poor tradesman; his own pseudonymity was preserved, Carteret failed, and

[graphic]

the coinage of Wood was presented by the Grand Jury as a nuisance. This was the most brilliantly successful of Swift's political actions. He became the idol of Ireland, and when Walpole proposed to arrest him, he was told that a guard of 10,000 men would be needful to get him safe out of the country. Swift was now already sketching the most famous of his books, but it was not until late in 1726 that Gulliver's Travels was ready for the press; it was published under the pseudonym of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, and as if edited by "Richard Sympson," Lemuel's cousin. After the death of Stella, Swift's cynicism became more pronounced. To 1729 belongs The Modest Proposal, that the children of poor people in Ireland should be prevented from being a burden to their parents or country by being served up as food. In 1731 he wrote his amazing poem On the Death of Dr. Swift. In these and similar writings, in prose and verse, we see "the corruptions and villanies of men" eating into Swift's flesh and exhausting his spirit. He breathed in a dry furnace of irony and anger. In 1726 and 1727 he paid two short

View of St. Patrick's Cathedral

visits to England, and saw Pope for the last time. In 1728, after Stella died, he went to Market Hill, and was the guest of Sir Arthur Acheson for nearly a year, glad to escape from that "wretched, dirty dog-hole and prison," as he called Dublin. The finest of his poems, On Poetry, a Rhapsody, belongs to 1733, and many of the sardonic bagatelles of these late years of his life have been preserved. He was

Engraved Frontispiece to "Gulliver's Travels"

extremely unhappy, and attempted more and more to escape by sheer nonsense from the bondage of his intolerable depression of spirits. The latest of his important works show, in astonishing combination, an inanity of theme with unflagging splendour of wit and intellectual movement; these are The Polite Conversation and Directions for Servants, strangest monuments of a genius already in decay. These appear to have been finished in 1738, and after this he grew to be but the shadow of himself. His intellect steadily declined, and after 1740 was almost wholly eclipsed. He suffered from deep dejection, and occasionally from violent insanity, but "as a rule he enjoyed the painlessness of torpor." He died, after a long succession of convulsions, on the 19th of October 1745, and was buried in St. Patrick's, where an epitaph still tells us that his grave is a place where cruel indignation has no longer and writings have ever since

[graphic]

power to lacerate the heart. His character, person, been the objects of a curiosity which shows no signs of being either satisfied or exhausted.

FROM "A TALE OF A TUB."

I am now trying an experiment very frequent among modern authors, which is to write upon nothing; when the subject is utterly exhausted, to let the pen still move on by some called the ghost of wit, delighting to walk after the death of its body. And to say the truth, there seems to be no part of knowledge in fewer hands than that of discerning when to have done. By the time that an author has written out a book he and his readers are become old acquaintance, and grow very loth to part; so that I have sometimes known it to be in writing as in visiting, where the ceremony of taking

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