JONATHAN SWIFT, Dean of St. Patrick’s, and the most remarkable of all satirists, was born at Dublin, November 30th, 1667. In 1688, after taking his degree speciali gratia at Trinity College, Dublin, he went to England and became secretary to Sir William Temple, serving in this position for about a year, after which he returned to Ireland. He did not remain very long, however, for in 1696, after taking a degree at Oxford and orders in the English Church, he returned to Sir William Temple’s service and remained in it until January, 1699. It was during this period that he first became attached to Esther Johnson, the “Stella” to whom it is said that he was privately married in 1716. His “Tale of a Tub” and “Battle of the Books” both appeared in 1704. “Gulliver’s Travels,” his greatest work,—the greatest satire ever written,—did not appear until 1726, when a long list of essays, pamphlets, poems, and miscellanies of almost every conceivable description, including the celebrated Drapier letters, had already made him one of the foremost men of letters of his generation. All his other works are so far eclipsed by “Gulliver’s Travels” that, full of his genius as they are, they might be completely forgotten without jeopardizing his place in literature. He was associated intimately with Steele, Addison, Pope, Congreve, Gay, and other noted writers of his day. All of them he surpassed in force, and had it not been impaired by bitterness, it would have made him the most effective prose writer of modern times. The same bitterness, however, which finally brought him insanity and death, shows in his best work to such an extent that he fails most in persuading where he succeeds best in compelling admiration. In his political affiliations from 1710 to his death (October 19th, 1745) he was ostensibly a Tory, but he was really the greatest Radical of his day. His “Argument against Abolishing Christianity” and the frightful irony of his proposal that the starving peasantry of Ireland should relieve the English government of embarrassment by eating their own children, suggest the “cruel indignation” which almost robbed him of his reason when he saw the enormous injustices to which the helpless classes of the eighteenth century were subjected. “Ubi sæva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit” is part of the noble epitaph over the tomb in St. Patrick’s Cathedral where his body was laid to rest in the same coffin with that of “Stella.” He wrote the epitaph himself:—“Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, S. T. P., Dean of this Cathedral—where cruel indignation can lacerate his heart no longer!” The lines are an autobiography. They tell more of the reality of his life than any one else can ever put into words.