appointed one of the Lords Justices of Ireland, of accompanying him as his private secretary. Even of the advantages of this post he was deprived by the intrigues of a certain Bush, who persuaded the Lord Justice that the duties could only be properly performed by a layman, and so obtained the office for himself. Swift was therefore obliged to remain in Lord Berkeley's household as chaplain. The ill-treatment he had received had not yet destroyed the gaiety of his humour, and though he vented his spleen in several contemptuous copies of verse on Lord Berkeley, Mrs. Harris's Petition-the style of which is apparently suggested by Gammer Gurton's Needleshows the delight he took at that period in imitating the inconsequent ramblings of uneducated minds.

Next year he had to put up with fresh disappointments, first in failing to obtain the deanery of Derry, which had become vacant and was in the gift of Lord Berkeley, and next in being obliged to content himself with the two small livings of Laracor and Rathbeggan in Meath. Here he continued punctually to discharge his duties as parish priest: at the same time, the constant claims of his clerical office tended to alienate him from the Whigs, with whom he had hitherto acted in politics, but whom he now saw to be drifting into an alliance with the Dissenters and Latitudinarian Freethinkers, and into an antagonism to the plain interests of the Established Church. His gradual detachment from the Whigs is disclosed in his Sentiments of a Church-of-England Man, his pamphlet Against Abolishing Christianity, and his defence of the Sacramental Test, all published in 1708. In 1710, having been entrusted by Archbishop King with an embassy to England, on behalf of some rights claimed by the Irish Church, he formed a firm alliance with the Tories, under the leadership of Harley and St. John, and, by his pamphlets and personal influence, became by degrees the most powerful instrument in shaping the conduct of his new party.

The political biography of Swift during these years. does not fall within the scope of this History, except in

so far as it illustrates his poetry; but it is of importance to note that his humour during the years 1708-14 is in its happiest vein, whether of prose or verse. Then were produced the Argument against Abolishing Christianity; the Discourse on Freethinking; the various papers against Partridge; and such poems as Baucis and Philemon, the City Shower; the various imitations of Horace in octosyllabic verse; and Cadenus and Vanessa. Doubtless the sense of his extraordinary influence with the nation, and the consciousness that all his intellectual faculties were working harmoniously towards definite aims, mitigated the saeva indignatio which lacerated his heart in later years, when he was a forced exile from the English political world, and when his disappointment could find vent only in bitter vilification of the men in power.

A new phase in his literary life begins with the reign of George I. Appointed Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, in 1713, he settled himself in Ireland after the death of Queen Anne, and for some ten years the verse that he produced was written, almost entirely, in a tone of domestic familiarity, and consisted for the most part of birthday addresses to "Stella" (Esther Johnson, to whom he was probably privately married in 1716), and ludicrous Epistles to Dr. Sheridan and Dr. Delany, his two most intimate friends. His attacks of giddiness became frequent, and his deafness increased, but, judging by his poetry, he does not seem to have been unhappy; and, though his contempt for human nature in the mass embodies itself in his South Sea Project (1721), his kindly feeling for "John, Peter, and Thomas," as individuals, is reflected in Mary the Cook-maid's Letter, written in the Gammer-Gurton style of Mrs. Harris's Petition.

In 1723, however, his feelings were exposed to a severe shock. In that year died Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he had eulogised in 1713 as Vanessa. As his pupil she had excited his admiration, but she desired his love; and in time the torment of her feelings induced her to write to Stella, enquiring as to the truth of the report about her marriage with Swift. This led to an irreparable

breach between Miss Vanhomrigh and the Dean; and when the former died she left instructions that Cadenus and Vanessa should be published. Delany says: "The Dean made a tour to the south of Ireland, for about two months, at this time, to dissipate his thoughts and give place to obloquy." It was probably a relief to him to have the opportunity, in the following year, of once more entering the political arena, when the introduction of Wood's halfpence into Ireland gave occasion for the issue of the famous Drapier's Letters. But his private sorrows increased. In 1726 Stella became seriously ill, and it is evident, from the tone of Swift's verses to her, on her birthday in that year, that he was attempting to put away from his imagination the possibility of losing her. His letter concludes :

O then, whatever Heaven intends,
Take pity on your pitying friends!
Nor let your ills affect your mind,
To fancy they can be unkind.
Me, surely me, you ought to spare,

Who gladly would your suffering share;

Or give my scrap of life to you,

And think it far beneath your due
You, to whose care so oft I owe

That I'm alive to tell you so.

She died on 28th January 1728.

This was the last birthday letter Stella received from the Dean. Swift, who had just been astonishing the world with Gulliver's Travels, had been in England for some months in 1727, as the guest of Pope, and having kissed the hands of George II. and Queen Caroline three days after their accession, was looking forward to the renewal of Court favour, and a possible return from his Irish exile. The tidings of Stella's hopeless condition were a stunning blow to him. Fresh attacks of giddiness seized him; he left Pope's house abruptly, and hastened back to Ireland, where he arrived about two months before Stella's death. From this time onward almost all his verse seems to reflect the deepening gloom which was settling on his spirit. His attacks on Walpole, now Prime Minister, grew more virulent; his

reflections on the Queen, whom he accused of breaking her promises to him, more severe; he refused to receive his old acquaintance at his table, and complained at the same time, in his lines On the Death of Dr. Swift, that he had no friends left to care for him. As late as 1736 he was able to compose; but in that year, being seized with a severe fit of giddiness while writing The Legion Club, he gave over all attempts to think regularly, and sinking into a state of semi-imbecility, in the midst of which he exhibited a few transient gleams of reason, he died in October 1745.1

Great injustice is done to the genius of Swift, if we consider it in its singularity, and without reference to the character of his age. "Whatever he did," says Johnson, "he seemed willing to do in a manner peculiar to himself, without sufficiently considering that singularity, as it implies a contempt of the general practice, is a kind of defiance which justly provokes the hostility of ridicule; he, therefore, who indulges peculiar habits is worse than others, if he be not better." In the same spirit Johnson comments on Swift's propensity to "predominate over his companions"; a censure which is to some extent confirmed by Lord Orrery, who says, "He assumed more the air of patron than a friend: he affected rather to dictate than advise";2 and by Young, who told Spence that "Swift had a mixture of insolence in his conversation." 3 The defect, for such it undoubtedly was, grew upon him with his years; but, in judging it, allowance should be made for the unbroken series of disappointments which contributed to distort Swift's whole view of life, and which would have caused him to assert himself against a man like Orrery, eminent by the mere accident of birth, and perhaps to treat with undisguised contempt one who owed his success, as, in his opinion, Young did, to the arts of flattery. There was no affectation of singularity in Swift's intercourse with Addison, while Fortune seemed to smile on his genius; there is no approach to

1 Swift's history can be best followed in the excellent Life by Sir Henry Craik (1894). 2 Remarks (1753), p. 29. 3 Anecdotes, p. 334.

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"insolence" in his correspondence with Bolingbroke, Pope, and Gay-men whom in some departments of action he was ready to recognise as his intellectual equals, or even as his superiors. Nor, again, could he have exercised so unrivalled an influence on the course of public opinion, if he had sought in his political pamphlets to sway the minds of his readers by arguments of mere eccentricity.

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The "singularity" of Swift's thought and style was, in fact, justified by the superiority of his understanding. Beyond all his contemporaries, even including Prior, Swift was penetrated with the philosophical scepticism arising out of the conflict between the Scholastic Philosophy and the New Learning, which we have seen operating so often and so powerfully on men of imagination through the seventeenth century. Beyond them all he understood the nature of the political change which the Revolution had wrought, in shifting the centre of sovereignty from the Crown to the People. But just because he had an unrivalled insight into the frail nature of the popular opinion, on which the Government now rested, he was moved by a passionate desire to maintain the established Constitution in Church and State, which he saw to be the sole safeguard for the preservation of what he valued above all things, Liberty. Hence, Pyrrhonist though he was, his hatred for the race of Freethinkers and small wits, who sought to bring themselves into notice by dialectical attacks on orthodox Christianity; hence, too, his ever-growing dislike of the Whigs, who were ready to sacrifice all constitutional safeguards to the promotion of their party interests.

Swift's irony, in which so much of the "singularity" of manner noticed by Johnson consists, ought therefore to be considered apart from the saeva indignatio which inspires all the utterances of his later years. He felt that safety lay in "the common sense of most," within the limits of the Constitution, provided that the people were enabled to judge fairly of social facts. "God," says he, "has given the bulk of mankind a capacity to understand