Born, in Dublin, 30 Nov. 1667. At school at Kilkenny, 1673–82. Matric., Trin. Coll., Dublin, as Pensioner, 24 April 1682; B.A. 1686. Emigrated to England, and joined his mother at Leicester, 1688. Lived in house of Sir W. Temple, at Moor Park, as his Secretary, and Tutor to Esther Johnson, 1689–92. Entered at Hart Hall, Oxford, 14 June 1692; M.A., 5 July 1692. Ordained Deacon, 18 Oct. 1694; Priest, 13 Jan. 1695. Prebend of Kilroot, Ireland, 1695. Returned to Moor Park, 1696–98. To Dublin, as Chaplain to Earl of Berkeley, 1699; Rector of Agher, and Vicar of Laracor and Rathbeggan, March 1699. Prebend of Dunlavin, 1700. Returned to England with Earl of Berkeley, 1701. B.D. and D.D., Dublin, 1702. Subsequent life spent partly in Ireland, partly in England. Edited “The Examiner,” Nov. 1710 to June 1711. Founded the Brothers’ Club, 1711; the Scriblerus Club, 1712. Dean of St. Patrick’s, 23 Feb. 1713. Friendship with Esther Johnson (“Stella”) begun, 1700. Friendship with Esther Vanhomrigh (“Vanessa”) begun, 1710; she died, 1723. Contributed to “London,” 1734. Mind began to give way, 1737. Died, in Dublin, 19 Oct. 1745. Buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Works: “A Discourse of the Contests … between the Nobles and the Commons, etc.” (anon.), 1701; “A Tale of a Tub” (anon.), 1704; “Predictions” (under pseud.: “Isaac Bickerstaff”), 1707; “Vindication” of preceding, 1709; “Meditation upon a Broomstick” (anon.), 1710; “A New Journey to Paris” (under pseud. “Sieur Du Baudrier”), 1711; “Miscellanies, 1711; “The Conduct of the Allies” (anon.), 1711; “Some Advice … to the Members of the October Club” (anon.), 1712; “Letter to the Lord High Treasurer,” 1712; “A Proposal for Correcting … the English Tongue,” 1721; “Some Reasons to prove that no person is obliged, by his principles as a Whig, to oppose Her Majesty” (anon.), 1712; “The Publick Spirit of the Whigs” (anon.), 1714; “A Preface to the B——p of S—r—m’s Introduction” (under pseud. “Gregory Misosarum”), 1713; “The Conduct of the Purse of Ireland,” 1714; “Essays,” 1714; “The Art of Punning,” 1719; “Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacturers” (anon.), 1720; “Defence of English Commodities,” 1720; “Right of Precedence” (anon.), 1720; “The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders” (anon.) [1720?]; “Letter of Advice to a Young Poet,” 1721; “Letter to a Gentleman lately entered into Holy Orders,” 1721; “The Journal” (anon.), 1722; “Letter from a Lady of Quality” (anon.), 1724; Two Letters under pseud. “M. B. Drapier,” 1724; “Gulliver’s Travels” (anon.), 1726; “Cadenus and Vanessa” (anon.), 1726; “The Intelligencer” (with Sheridan), 1729; “The Journal of a Modern Lady” (anon.), 1729; “Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor from Being a Burthen, etc.” (anon.), 1730; “The Presbyterians’ plea … examined” (anon.), 1731; “The Advantages proposed by repealing the Sacramental Test, etc.,” 1732; “On Poetry” (anon.), 1733; “Scheme for a Hospital for Incurables” (anon.), 1733; “Poems on Several Occasions,” 1734; “Proposals for erecting a Protestant Nunnery in the City of Dublin” (anon.), 1736; “The Beast’s Confession to the Priest,” 1738; “Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation” (under pseud. “Simon Wagstaff”), 1738; “An Imitation of the Sixth Satire of the Second Book of Horace,” 1738; “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, written by himself,” 1739; “Some Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs” (anon.), 1741; “Literary Correspondence,” 1741; “Three Sermons,” 1744; “The Difficulty of Knowing One’s Self,” 1745. [Also a number of small controversial tracts, anonymous ballads printed on single sheets, etc.] Posthumous: “Brotherly Love,” 1754; “History of the Four Last Years of the Queen,” 1758; “Letters” (3 vols.), 1767; “Letters” (6 vols.), 1761–69; “Sermons” [1790?]. He edited: Sir W. Temple’s Letters, 1700; Sir W. Temple’s Works, 1720; Arbuthnot and Pope’s “Miscellaneous Works,” 1742. Collected Works: ed. by Sir Walter Scott (19 vols.), 1814. Life: by H. Craik, 1882; by J. Churton Collins, 1895.

Personal

	Hic depositum est corpus
	JONATHAN SWIFT, S. T. D.
	Hujus Ecclesiæ Cathedralis
	Decani
	Ubi sæva indignatio
	Ulterius
	Cor lascerare nequit.
	Abi Viator
	Et imitare, si potesis,
	Strenuum pro virili
	Libertatis vindictatorem.
	Obiit 19o die mensis Octobris,
	A. D. 1745. Anno Ætatis 78.

  Hee has latine and greek, some french, writes a very good and current hand, is very honest and diligent.

  Now, I know a learned man at this time, an orator in the Latin, a walking Index of books, who has all the libraries in Europe in his head, from the Vatican at Rome to the learned collection of Doctor Salmon at Fleet Ditch; but he is a cynic in behaviour, a fury in temper, unpolite in conversation, abusive in language, and ungovernable in passion. Is this to be learned? Then may I still be illiterate.

  Swift came into the coffee-house, and had a bow from everybody but me. When I came to the antechamber to wait before prayers Dr. Swift was the principal man of talk and business, and acted as Minister of Requests. He was soliciting the Earl of Arran to speak to his brother, the Duke of Ormond, to get a chaplain’s place established in the garrison of Hull for Mr. Fiddes, a clergyman in that neighbourhood, who had lately been in jail, and published sermons to pay fees. He was promising Mr. Thorold to undertake with my Lord Treasurer that according to his petition he should obtain a salary of 200l per annum, as minister of the English Church at Rotterdam. He stopped F. Gwynne, Esq., going in with the red bag to the Queen, and told him aloud he had something to say to him from my Lord Treasurer. He talked with the son of Dr. Davenant to be sent abroad, and took out his pocket-book and wrote down several things as memoranda to do for him. He turned to the fire, and took out his gold watch, and telling him the time of day, complained it was very late. A gentleman said, “it was too fast.” “How can I help it,” says the Doctor, “if the courtiers give me a watch that won’t go right?” Then he instructed a young nobleman that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope (a Papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into English verse for which, he said, he must have them all subscribe. “For,” says he, “the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.” Lord Treasurer, after leaving the Queen, came through the room, beckoning Dr. Swift to follow him; both went off just before prayers.

  I could never impute your silence to want of friendship in one whose goodness to me has always been abundantly more than I could deserve. And I do assure you, from the bottom of my heart, there is not a person living I have a greater friendship for than yourself, and shall have to the end of my life.

  Dr. Swift has an odd blunt way, that is mistaken, by strangers, for ill-nature.—’Tis so odd that there’s no describing it but by facts.—I’ll tell you one that just comes into my head. One evening Gay and I went to see him: you know how intimately we were all acquainted. On our coming in; “Hey-day, gentlemen,” says the Doctor, “what’s the meaning of this visit? How come you to leave all the great lords, that you are so fond of, to come hither to see a poor Dean?”—Because we would rather see you than any of them.—“Ay, any one that did not know you so well as I do, might believe you. But, since you are come, I must get some supper for you, I suppose?”—No, Doctor, we have supped already.—“Supped already! that’s impossible: why, ’tis not eight o’clock yet.”—Indeed we have.—“That’s very strange: but if you had not supped, I must have got something for you.—Let me see, what should I have had? a couple of lobsters? ay, that would have done very well;—two shillings: tarts; a shilling. But you will drink a glass of wine with me, though you supped so much before your usual time, only to spare my pocket?”—No, we had rather talk with you, than drink with you.—“But if you had supped with me, as in all reason you ought to have done, you must have drank with me.—A bottle of wine; two shillings.—Two and two, is four; and one is five: just two and sixpence a piece. There, Pope, there’s half-a-crown for you; and there’s another for you, sir: for I won’t save anything by you I am determined.” This was all said and done with his usual seriousness on such occasions; and in spite of everything we could say to the contrary, he actually obliged us to take the money.

  Violent party-men, who differed in all things besides, agreed in their turn to show particular respect and friendship to this insolent derider of the worship of his country, till at last the reputed writer is not only gone off with impunity, but triumphs in his dignity and preferment.

  The day before we came out of town we dined at Doctor Delany’s, and met the usual company. The Dean of St. Patrick’s was there in very good humour; he calls himself “my master,” and corrects me when I speak bad English or do not pronounce my words distinctly. I wish he lived in England, I should not only have a great deal of entertainment from him, but improvement.

  When people ask me how I governed Ireland, I say that I pleased Dr. Swift.

  Dean Swift has had a statute of lunacy taken out against him. His madness appears chiefly in most incessant strains of obscenity and swearing,—habits, to which the more sober parts of his life were not absolutely strangers, and of which his writings themselves have some tincture.

  He assumed more the air of a patron than of a friend. He affected rather to dictate than advise…. His hours of walking and reading never varied. His motions were guided by his watch, which was so constantly held in his hand, or placed before him on his table that he seldom deviated many minutes in the daily revolution of his exercises and employments.

  My lord when you consider Swift’s singular, peculiar, and most variegated vein of wit, always rightly intended (although not always so rightly directed), delightful in many instances, and salutary even where it is most offensive; when you consider his strict truth; his fortitude in resisting oppression and arbitrary power; his fidelity in friendship; his sincere love and zeal for religion; his uprightness in making right resolutions, and his steadiness in adhering to them;… his invincible patriotism, even to a country which he did not love; his very various, well-devised, well-judged, and extensive charities throughout his life, and his whole fortune (to say nothing of his wife’s) conveyed to the same Christian purposes…. To conclude. No man ever deserved better of his country than Swift did of his. A steady, persevering, inflexible friend; a wise, a watchful, and a faithful counsellor, under many severe trials and bitter persecutions, to the manifest hazards both of his liberty and fortune. He lived a blessing, he died a benefactor, and his name will ever live an honour, to Ireland.

  I know the Dean well, though I never was within-side of his house, because I could not flatter, cringe, or meanly humour the extravagances of any man…. I had him often to myself in his rides and walks, and have studied his soul when he little thought what I was about. As I lodged for a year within a few doors of him, I knew his time of going out to a minute, and generally nicked the opportunity. He was fond of company on these occasions, and glad to have any rational man to talk to; for whatever was the meaning of it, he rarely had any of his friends attending him at his exercises…. What gave me the easier access to him was my being tolerably well acquainted with our politics and history, and knowing many places, &c., of his beloved England…. We talked generally of factions and religion, states, revolutions, leaders and parties: sometimes we had other subjects. Who I was he never knew. Nor did I seem to know he was Dean for a long time, not till one Sunday evening that his verger put me into his seat at St. Patrick’s prayers, without my knowing the Doctor sat there…. The Dean was proud beyond all other mortals that I have seen, and quite another man when he was known.

  He could not endure to be treated with any sort of familiarity, or that any man living, his three or four acquaintances with whom he corresponded to the last only excepted, should rank himself in the number of his friends.

  N. I remember as I and others were taking with him an evening walk, about a mile from Dublin, he stopped short; we passed on; but perceiving he did not follow us, I went back, and found him fixed as a statue, and earnestly gazing upward at a noble elm, which in its uppermost branches was much withered and decayed. Pointing at it, he said, “I shall be like that tree, and shall die at the top.”

  The person of Swift had not many recommendations. He had a kind of muddy complexion, which, though he washed himself with Oriental scrupulosity, did not look clear. He had a countenance sour and severe, which he seldom softened by any appearance of gaiety. He stubbornly resisted any tendency to laughter…. His beneficence was not graced with tenderness of civility; he relieved without pity, and assisted without kindness; so that those who were fed by him could hardly love him…. Of Swift’s general habits of thinking, if his letters can be supposed to afford any evidence, he was not a man to be either loved or envied. He seems to have wasted life in discontent, by the rage of neglected pride, and the languishment of unsatisfied desire. He is querulous and fastidious, arrogant and malignant; he scarcely speaks of himself but with indignant lamentations, or of others but with insolent superiority when he is gay, and with angry contempt when he is gloomy.

  Swift was a wild-beast, who worried and baited and worried all mankind almost, because his intolerable arrogance, vanity, pride, and ambition were disappointed.

  Though the greatness of Swift’s talents was known to many in private life, and his company and conversation much sought after and admired, yet was his name hitherto little known in the republic letters. The only pieces which he had then published, were “The Battle of the Books,” and “The Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome,” and both without a name. Nor was he personally known to any of the wits of the age, excepting Mr. Congreve, and one or two more, with whom he had contracted an acquaintance at Sir William Temple’s. The knot of wits used at this time to assemble at Button’s coffee-house: and I had a singular account of Swift’s first appearance there from Ambrose Philips, who was one of Mr. Addison’s little senate. He said that they had for several successive days observed a strange clergyman come into the coffeehouse, who seemed utterly unacquainted with any of those who frequented it; and whose custom it was to lay his hat down on a table, and walk backward and forward at a good pace for half an hour or an hour, without speaking to any mortal, or seeming in the least to attend to anything that was going forward there. He then used to take up his hat, pay his money at the bar, and walk away without opening his lips. After having observed this singular behaviour for some time, they concluded him to be out of his senses; and the name that he went by among them, was that of “the mad parson.” This made them more than usually attentive to his motions; and one evening, as Mr. Addison and the rest were observing him, they saw him cast his eyes several times on a gentleman in boots, who seemed to be just come out of the country, and at last advanced towards him as intending to address him. They were all eager to hear what this dumb mad parson had to say, and immediately quitted their seats to get near him. Swift went up to the country gentleman, and in a very abrupt manner, without any previous salute, asked him, “Pray, sir, do you remember any good weather in the world?” The country gentleman, after staring a little at the singularity of his manner, and the oddity of the question, answered, “Yes, sir, I thank God I remember a great deal of good weather in my time.”—“That is more,” said Swift, “than I can say; I never remember any weather that was not too hot, or too cold; too wet or too dry; but however God Almighty contrives it, at the end of the year ’tis all very well.” Upon saying this, he took up his hat, and without uttering a syllable more, or taking the least notice of any one, walked out of the coffeehouse; leaving all those who had been spectators of this odd scene staring after him, and still more confirmed in the opinion of his being mad.

  There remains a conjecture which can only be intimated, but which, if correct, will explain much of Swift’s peculiar conduct in his intercourse with the female sex. During that period of life when the passions are most violent, Swift boasts of his “cold temper.” Since that time, the continual recurrence of a distressing vertigo was gradually undermining his health. It seems, in these circumstances, probable, that the continence which he observed, may have been owing to physical, as well as moral causes. Were such the case, he might seek the society of Vanessa, without the apprehension of exciting passions, to which he was himself insensible; and his separation from Stella, after marriage, might be a matter equally of choice, or of necessity. This much, at least, is certain, that if, according to a saying which Swift highly approved, desire produces love in man, we cannot find any one line in Swift’s writings or correspondence, intimating his having felt such a source of passion; nor indeed is there a single anecdote of his life recorded, which indicates his having submitted to what he irreverently terms “that ridiculous passion which has no being but in playbooks or romances.” In youth he sought female society merely as a relaxation from unpleasant thoughts…. Swift was in person tall, strong and well made, of a dark complexion, but with blue eyes, black and bushy eyebrows, nose somewhat aquiline, and features which remarkably expressed the stern, haughty, and dauntless turn of his mind. He was never known to laugh, and his smiles are happily characterized by the well-known lines of Shakspeare. Indeed, the whole description of Cassius might be applied to Swift:

	He reads much,
	He is a great observer, and he looks
	Quite through the deeds of men.—
	Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort,
	As if he mock’d himself, and scorned his spirit
	That could be moved to smile at anything.
	*        *        *        *        *

His manners in society were, in his better days, free, lively, and engaging, not devoid of peculiarities, but bending them so well to circumstances, that his company was universally courted. When age and infirmity had impaired the elasticity of his spirits and the equality of his temper his conversation was still valued, not only on account of the extended and various acquaintance with life and manners, of which it displayed an inexhaustible fund, but also for the shrewd and satirical humour which seasoned his observations and anecdotes.

  His character seems to have been radically overbearing and tyrannical;—for though, like other tyrants, he could stoop low enough where his interests required it, it was his delight to exact an implicit compliance with his humours and fancies, and to impose upon all around him the task of observing and accommodating themselves to his habits, without the slightest regard to their convenience or comfort…. Born almost a beggar, and neither very industrious nor very engaging in his early habits, he attained, almost with his first efforts, the very height of distinction, and was awarded by appointments, which placed him in a state of independence and respectability for life. He was honoured with the acquaintance of all that was distinguished for rank, literature, or reputation;—and, if not very generally beloved, was, what he probably valued far more, admired and feared by most of those with whom he was acquainted. When his party was overthrown, neither his person nor his fortune suffered;—but he was indulged, through the whole of his life, in a licence of scurrility and abuse, which has never been permitted to any other writer,—and possessed the exclusive and devoted affection of the only two women to whom he wished to appear interesting. In this history, we confess we see but little apology for discontent and lamentation;—and in his conduct, there is assuredly still less for misanthropy.

  He moves laughter, but never joins in it. He appears in his works such as he appeared in society. All the company are convulsed with merriment, while the dean, the author of all the mirth; preserves an invincible gravity, and even sourness of aspect; and gives utterance to the most eccentric and ludicrous fancies, with the air of a man reading the commination-service.

  The disease under which he laboured so long, and which we have ventured to term “cerebral congestion,” might, from the symptoms, be styled by some pathologists “epileptic vertigo,” such as that described by Esquirol—an affection to which, it is well known, many men of strong intellect have been subject. For the last few years of his embittered existence, from his seventy-fifth to his seventy-eight year, his disease partook so much of the nature of senile decay, or the dementia of old age, that it is difficult, with the materials now at command, to define by any precise medical term his actual state.

  From Laracor, Swift’s remove was to Dublin, where he spent the remainder of his life. Here the deanery has been quite removed, and a modern house occupies its place. The old Cathedral of St. Patrick is a great object connected with his memory here. Though wearing a very ancient look, St. Patrick’s was rebuilt after its destruction in 1362, and its present spire was added only in 1750. In size and proportion the cathedral is fine. It is three hundred feet long, and eighty broad. It can not boast much of its architecture, but contains several monuments of distinguished men; among them, those of Swift and Curran. These two are busts. Aloft in the nave hang the banners of the Knights of St. Patrick; and again, in the choir, hang newly-emblazoned banners of the knights; and over the stalls which belong to the knights are fixed gilt helmets, and by each stall hangs the knight’s sword. The whole fabric is now undergoing repair, and not before it was needed. Of course, the monuments of highest interest here are those of Swift and Stella. These occupy two contiguous pillars on the south side of the nave. They consist of two plain slabs of marble, in memory of the dean and Mrs. Johnson—Stella. The inscription on the dean’s slab is expressive “of that habit of mind which his own disappointments and the oppressions of his country had produced.” It was written by himself.

  Would you have liked to be a friend of the great Dean?… If you had been his inferior in parts (and that, with a great respect for all persons present, I fear is only very likely), his equal in mere social station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you; if, undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would have quailed before you, and not had the pluck to reply, and gone home, and years after written a foul epigram about you—watched for you in a sewer, and come out to assail you with a coward’s blow and a dirty bludgeon. If you had been a lord with a blue riband, who flattered his vanity, or could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company in the world. He would have been so manly, so sarcastic, so bright, odd, and original, that you might think he had no object in view but the indulgence of his humour, and that he was the most reckless, simple creature in the world. How he would have torn your enemies to pieces for you! and made fun of the opposition! His servility was so boisterous that it looked like independence; he would have done your errands, but with the air of patronizing you, and after fighting your battles masked in the street or the press, would have kept on his hat before your wife and daughters in the drawing-room, content to take that sort of pay for his tremendous services as a bravo.

  He was born in Ireland, but would have thought himself insulted if he had been called an Irishman…. Was at heart the haughtiest, the most aspiring, the most vindictive, the most despotic of men.

  That eccentric and scarcely intelligible man, whose conduct even when kind always differed from that of others in the mode of displaying it.

  A man strangely compounded of contrary extremes, uniting many natures within his own…. A strenuous and even merciless defender of the Church as by law established, he sometimes brought discredit upon his profession, and upon the institution he so much revered, by the freedom of his behaviour and the recklessness of his wit. A vehement lover of liberty, he was guilty of no compassion for hostile scribblers, whose arrest and punishment he often urged on the Tory leaders; while he constantly inveighed against any relaxation of the disabilities that shut out Dissenters from offices under the Crown. A friend to the principles of the Revolution in the State, he cleaved to the principles of the reaction in the Church; Somers was his friend, while Sacheverell seemed his exemplar. A man of piquant and at times charming manner, of social sensibilities, enjoying company, tolerant of foibles, he was nevertheless a stern censor and an unsparing censurer of the race, which he hated and contemned. A despiser of mankind, incessantly aflame with rage against the cruelties of the dominant and the cowardice of the subject, he was full of good works, such as only the truest and largest benevolence could dictate. A student of economy, parsimonious to a fault in private affairs, in philanthropic and literary relations he was a very Mæcenas for his generous munificence; and many men owed their fortune to one who neither sued nor intrigued for himself. An ardent admirer and tender friend of not a few women, he disappointed the love of two who were deeply and fatally devoted to him, and heartily despised the sex. A marvel of cold purity in his personal life, in his poems and satires he rushed repeatedly into grossness and downright filthiness worthy only of a man who had passed the stage in vice at which sexual pleasures cease to give the desired satisfaction to the appetites. A coward in many trivial matters of daily incident—dreading smallpox and other such mischances of our civilisation—in his public life he was fearless, when freedom of speech brought him face to face with an enraged and tyrannical law…. A lover of anonymity, a courtier of obscurity, a despiser of pretence, a hater of show, his genius made him the familiar of Princes, the friend and counsellor of Ministers, the pride of a whole country, the peculiar trust and boast of the poor within its borders. In two things alone was he throughout consistent: in the thorough and even offensive personal independence, into which the unhappy experience of his youth but too harshly trained him; and in the unextinguishable love of liberty, the incorruptible patriotism, that guided his political career from the first to the last.

  When one thinks of the man, the sermons of Dean Swift, although in themselves excellent, seem to be a mockery, and we can fancy them written by the author of a “Tale of a Tub” with a grin of derision on his face.

  He seemed to look upon himself as a superior being, exempt from the necessity of ceremony, entitled to homage, caring neither for sex, rank, nor fame, whose business is to protect and destroy, distributing favours, insults, and pardons…. If ever a soul was saturated with the joy of tearing, outraging, and destroying, it was his. Excess of scorn, implacable irony, crushing logic, the cruel smile of the foeman, who sees beforehand the mortal spot in which he will strike his enemy, advances towards him, tortures him deliberately, eagerly, with enjoyment,—such were the feelings which had leavened him, and which broke from him with such harshness that he hindered his own career; and that of so many high places for which he stretched out his hands, there remained for him only a deanery in poor Ireland.

  The portrait of him now painted by Jervas confirms the general statement at the time, that his personal appearance was very attractive. Features regular yet striking, forehead high and temples broad and massive, heavy-lidded blue eyes, to which his dark complexion and bushy black eyebrows gave unusual capacity for sternness as well as brilliance, a nose slightly aquiline, mouth resolute with full-closed lips, a handsome dimpled double chin, and over all the face the kind of pride not grown of superciliousness or scorn, but of an easy, confident, calm superiority. Of the dullness which Pope saw sometimes overshadow the countenance of his friend, of the insolence which Young declares was habitual to it, of the harsh, unrelenting severity which it assumes in Bindon’s picture at the deanery, there is no trace at present. By one who loved him he was said to have a look of uncommon archness in eyes quite azure as the heavens; and he was himself told by one who did not love him less, that he had a look so awful it struck the gazer dumb; but only the first is in Jervas’s picture, the years that are to bring the last being still to come.

  Jonathan Swift remains what he was a century ago, the sphinx of English literature. Prominent in his own line, as probably no other author ever was before; the observed of all, as the bosom friend of the leading wits and statesmen of the most classic modern age; the most illustrious polemic that the modern world has ever seen, he yet stands to this day, the greatest mystery among distinguished men of letters. Even the secret of Junius, yields, in importance and interest, to that which attaches to the name of the Dean of St. Patrick’s. Gifted with the capacity to entrance the intellect of men, and inthrall the passions of women, he seems to have been at home in ridiculing the former, and bringing down the love of the latter to despair. Who, on regarding the portrait of him left by Jervas, which exhibits a noble and placid expanse of brow, serene eyes, and a mouth not noticeable for its bitterness or agitation, could imagine that one of the most restless spirits which ever inhabited a human breast found lodgment there?

  We confess to a kindness for Swift. We are not blind to his faults, but to our thinking they are amply redeemed by two valuable traits in his character—namely, the courage he had of his opinions, and the unswerving honesty with which he clung to them. In those characteristics we may perhaps find the clue to the hitherto apparent cruelty with which Swift dwelt with the affections of two such lovable women as Esther Johnson, otherwise Stella, and Esther Vanhomrigh, alias Vanessa…. Henceforth Swift’s life is like that serenade which Don Juan, disguised, sings under a balcony, a melancholy and piteous song, breathing sorrow, distress, misjudged love, but the accompaniment to which is lively, strident, staccato; still the song struggles on, wailing, making itself heard above the false instrument, whose mocking tones want to turn it into derision, and seems to jeer at being obliged to go so slowly and mournfully. Nay, in a measure Swift becomes Don Juan himself, with whom the marble statue, just returned from the graves of Vanessa and Stella, sits down to supper. The Dean remains calm, collected, for some time, but the statue asks his hand; and when with an assumed indifference he has given it, the man is seized with a mortal chill, and falls into convulsions. They get more frequent, and at last send him raving mad, the intervals of frenzy leaving him a mere pitiable idiot. He is like the man who boasted of being inaccessible to superstitious fear, and dreading nothing. One night his friends placed a skeleton in his bed, then went into an adjacent apartment to watch the effect. They heard nothing; but the following morning, when they entered the room, they found him seated playing with the bones. He had lost his reason. Swift had been insensible to all the softer feelings. Memory placed their skeleton in his bed, he played with the bones for more than three years, unconscious of what passed around him. Upon the 19th of October, 1745, God mercifully removed the terrible spectacle, and released the sufferer from his misery, degradation, and shame.

  Here was a man endued with an intellect pellucid as well as brilliant; who could not only conceive but see also—with some fine instincts too; whom fortune did not flout; whom circumstances fairly served; but who, from first to last, was miserable himself, who made others miserable, and who deserved misery…. He was a man whose mind was never fixed on high things, but was striving always after something which, little as it might be, and successful as he was, should always be out of his reach. It had been his misfortune to become a clergyman, because the way to church preferment seemed to be the readiest. He became, as we all know, a dean—but never a bishop, and was therefore wretched.

  However Jonathan Swift’s biographers may explain or apologize for him, I have never yet seen a woman who did not feel for his character both contempt and detestation. A man who could deliberately and for years outrage the feelings and lacerate the hearts of two women whose worse weakness was in the fact that they devotedly loved him, can be looked at in no amiable light by any woman with any chivalry for her sex.

  No man had stronger affections than Swift; no man suffered more agony when they were wounded; but in his agony he would commit what to most men would seem the treason of cursing the affections instead of simply lamenting the injury, or holding the affection itself to be its own sufficient reward. The intense personality of the man reveals itself alternately as selfishness and as “altruism.” He grappled to his heart those whom he really loved “as with hoops of steel;” so firmly that they became a part of himself; and that he considered himself at liberty to regard his love of friends as he might regard a love of wine, as something to be regretted when it was too strong for his own happiness. The attraction was intense, but implied the absorption of the weaker nature into his own. His friendships were rather annexations than alliances…. Swift showed a complete absence of the ordinary touchiness of authors. His indifference to literary fame as to its pecuniary rewards was conspicuous. He was too proud, as he truly said, to be vain. His sense of dignity restrained him from petty sensibility. When a clergyman regretted some emendations which had been hastily suggested by himself and accepted by Swift, Swift replied that it mattered little, and that he would not give grounds, by adhering to his own opinion, for an imputation of vanity. If Swift was egotistical, there was nothing petty even in his egotism.

  The last indignity was reserved for our own century and for philosophers in the Flying Island of the British Association. In 1835, in making alterations under the aisle of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the coffins of Swift and Stella were found side by side. The British Association was holding its meeting in Dublin, and, as the genius of irony would have it, phrenology was then the fashion. Doubtless with the permission of Swift’s successor at that day in the deanery of the Cathedral, two dainty toys were provided for the perambulating professors and their fair entertainers. The skulls of Swift and of Esther Johnson went the rounds of the drawing-rooms; they were patted and poised and peeped at; pretty, sentimental speeches and ponderous scientific phrases flew to right and left; here hung “only a woman’s hair,” and there the condyloid processes projected into the foramen magnum of the occipital bone. The bumps of veneration and amativeness were measured, and it was ascertained that wit was small. Drawings and casts were made. Finally when all the pretty speeches had run dry; and the spectacles were all taken off, and wisdom had departed from the land, the desecrated bones were restored to darkness, to be once more discovered within a few days past, but not again to have their nakedness exposed to the gaping inhabitants of Laputa.

	Thou sawest from far the curse thou might’st not stay,
	Most mighty spirit, strong to love and hate.
	For what great sin, sinned in some former state,
	Was thy soul forced to contemplate that day
	Which should not at one blow take life away,
	But on each vital sense shut gate by gate,—
	Until thy lord’s unfathomable hate,
	Supreme, relentless, and which none gainsay,
	Left thy great brain confounded in black night,
	And wild with pain?

  “Cadenus.”—“Mr. Dean.”—“The English Rabelais.”—“This Impious Buffoon.”—“Presto.”—“The Rabelais of Good Society.”

  If Jonathan Swift had entered the room while the Lecture upon him was going forward, he would have eaten William Makepeace Goliath, white waistcoat and all.

  No one who is acquainted with the character of Swift, with his character as it appears in his own writings, as it has been illustrated in innumerable anecdotes, and as it has been delineated by those who were familiar with him, can fail to see that he belonged to the kings of humankind. Like Innocent III, and like Chatham, he was one of those men to whom the world pays instinctive homage. Everything about him indicated superiority. His will was a will of adamant; his intellect was an intellect the power and keenness of which impressed or awed every one who approached him. And to that will and to that intellect was joined a temper singularly stern, dauntless, and haughty…. Into a particular account of Swift’s last years it would be almost agony to enter. Nothing in the recorded history of humanity, nothing that the imagination of man has conceived, can transcend in horror and pathos the accounts which have come down to us of the closing scenes of his life. His memory was gone, his reason was gone; he recognised no friend; he was below his own Struldbrugs. Day after day he paced his chamber, as a wild beast paces its cage, taking his food as he walked, but refusing to touch it as long as any one remained in the room. During the autumn of 1742 his state was horrible and pitiable beyond expression. At last, after suffering unspeakable tortures from one of the most agonising maladies known to surgery, he sank into the torpor of imbecility. By the mercy of Providence it generally happens that man so degraded is unconscious of his degradation. But this mercy was withheld from Swift. On one occasion he was found gazing at his image in a pier-glass and muttering piteously over and over again, “Poor old man!” On another he exclaimed, frequently repeating it, “I am what I am.” “He never talked nonsense,” says Deane Swift, “nor said a foolish thing.” In this deplorable condition he continued for two years, and then maintained unbroken silence till death released him from calamity.

  It was, no doubt, a case of what you call fatuity, and what doctors call dementia—that is, loss of mental power. There was no delusion, so far as I remember; but there was this peculiarity—the inability to find words for the expression of the poor remains of thought, although phrases did now and then find utterance under unwonted stimulus. It was, in fact, a case of aphasia with dementia, leading to the expectation that, if one could have seen the brain, a clot, or the effects or remains of a clot, would have been found on or about the third frontal convolution…. A. There is sufficient evidence to render a correct diagnosis of Swift’s mental disease possible. B. There are records of numerous cases in which the phenomena are parallel. C. It is not physically possible that Swift’s fatuity at 75 originated from a surfeit of green fruit when he was 23. D. The sane part of Swift’s life was not likely to have been affected by the latent presence of the insanity.

  A dim light was burning in the back room of a first-floor in Bury Street, St. James’s. The apartment it illumined was not a spacious one; and the furniture, adequate rather than luxurious, had that indefinable lack of physiognomy which only lodging-house furniture seems to acquire. There was no fireplace; but in the adjoining parlour, partly visible through the open door, the last embers were dying in a grate from which the larger pieces of coal had been lifted away, and carefully ranged in order on the hobs. Across the heavy high-backed chairs in the bedroom lay various neatly-folded garments, one of which was the black gown with pudding sleeves usually worn in public by the eighteenth-century clergyman, while at the bottom of the bed hung a clerical-looking periwig. In the bed itself, and leaning towards a tall wax candle at his side (which, from a faint smell of burnt woollen still lingering about the chamber, must have recently come into contact with the now tucked-back bed-curtain), was a gentleman of forty or thereabouts, writing in a very small hand upon a very large sheet of paper, folded, for greater convenience, into one long horizontal slip. He had dark, fierce-looking eyebrows, a slightly aquiline nose, full-lidded and rather prominent clear eyes, a firmly-cut handsome mouth, and a wide, massive forehead, the extent of which, for the moment, was abnormally exaggerated by the fact that, in the energy of composition, the fur-lined cap he had substituted for his wig had been slightly tilted backwards. As his task proceeded his expression altered from time to time, now growing grave and stern, now inexpressibly soft and tender. Occasionally, the look almost passed into kind of a grimace, resembling nothing so much as the imitative motion of the lips which one makes in speaking to a pet bird. He continued writing until, in the distance, the step of the watch-man, first pausing deliberately, then passing slowly forward for a few paces, was heard in the street below. “Past twelve o’clock!” came a wheezy cry at the window. “Paaaaast twelvvve o’clock” followed the writer, dragging out his letters so as to reproduce the speaker’s drawl…. The personage thus depicted was Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Divinity, vicar of Laracor by Trim, in the diocese of Meath in the kingdom of Ireland, and Prebendary of Dunlavin in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

  Gradually my eyes became accustomed to the subdued light, and right at my feet I saw a large brass plate set in the floor and on it only this:

	SWIFT
	Died Oct. 19, 1745
	Aged 78

On the wall near is a bronze tablet, the inscription of which, in Latin, was dictated by Swift himself: “Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, Dean of this Cathedral, where fierce indignation can no longer rend his heart. Go! wayfarer, and imitate, if thou canst, one who, as far as in him lay, was an earnest champion of liberty—” Above this is a fine bust of the Dean and to the right is another tablet: “Underneath lie interred the mortal remains of Mrs. Hester Johnson, better known in the world as Stella, under which she is celebrated in the writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of this Cathedral. She was a person of extraordinary endowments and accomplishments, in body, mind, and behavior; justly admired and respected by all who knew her on account of her eminent virtues as well as for her great natural and acquired perfections.”… In 1835 the graves were opened and casts taken of the skulls. The top of Swift’s skull had been sawed off at the autopsy, and a bottle in which was a parchment setting forth the facts was inserted in the head that had conceived “Gulliver’s Travels.” I examined the casts. The woman’s head is square and shapely. Swift’s head is a refutation of phrenology, being small, sloping, and ordinary. The bones of Swift and Stella were placed in one coffin and now rest under three feet of concrete, beneath the floor of St. Patrick’s.

  He was a man, I think, who would have infinitely scorned and revolted at many of the apologies that have been made for him…. And in that great Court of Justice—which I am old-fashioned enough to believe will one day be held—where juries will not be packed, and where truth will shine, by its own light, withstanding all perversion—and where opportunities and accomplishments will be weighed in even scales against possible hindrances of moral or of physical makeup—there will show, I am inclined to think, in the strange individuality of Swift, a glimmer of some finer and higher traits of character than we are accustomed to assign him.

  He was a profoundly sensitive man, yet he was also matter-of-fact. His honest recognition of things as they were was mitigated by no intervening haze of romance, and no spiritual revelation of distant hopes…. His was not a temperament to manufacture ideals; and the times had no ideals to offer. What wonder if fierce wrath filled his great, sad soul; if the worlds of politics, of society, of the great mass of men, seemed to him equally contemptible and pitiful…. The social sarcasm of Swift is unequaled in fervor of ironic power, but is also alone among the chief satires of England in the bitterness of its tone. The terrible epitaph which, by his own command, was placed over his tomb speaks of the only peace possible to him.

  Probably no prominent character has been more cruelly misjudged. Popular opinion has been guided by the superficial sketches of Macaulay, Thackeray, and Taine, and has not stopped to consider that a brilliant presentment is not necessarily an historical portrait. One has only to study Swift’s letters to realize how utterly mistaken is the common view. To estimate him merely by his satires and political writings is to measure a brain and leave out body and soul. In his literary works he is all intellect—cold, even cruel intellect—and the milk of human kindness is turned sour. It is no wonder that the author of “A Tale of a Tub” and “Gulliver’s Travels” has acquired the reputation of the bitterest cynic and misanthrope in all literature. It is the merit and virtue of the letters that they reveal the heart of one who in his public writings is mere head.

  The two, like so many others coupled in history, were in truth of opposed temperaments. Prior was vain, Swift proud; Swift uncompromising, Prior accommodating; Prior fanciful, Swift imaginative. Swift was the same electric force whether business or pleasure engaged him. Prior was solemn (“Dutch,” De Torcy afterwards termed him) in routine, madcap—indeed reckless—over his cups. Outward appearance heightened the contrast. Swift was of middle height, inclined to be stout, darkly sanguine in complexion, with arch eyes of a piercing blue. He walked “like lightning” to be lean. Prior was tall and thin, lantern-jawed and cavernous. His eyes were dreamy, though his expression was alert. His visage seemed carved out of wood, and he coughed much as he went. He walked to be fat. Swift was a stoic aflame; Prior, an epicurean with dashed ambitions. In Swift’s heart of hearts hid Stella, and already lurked Vanessa; in Prior’s, Mrs. Anne Durham and the marionettes of vulgar intrigue whom he dignified as “Chloes.” Pangs tortured the one, while the other sighed sentiment. Both cried “Vive la bagatelle,” but Prior’s “bagatelle” was a bubble, Swift’s a bullet. In four things, however, the comrades were united—in devotion to the Church interest, in detestation of democratic clamour, in the endowment of a signal style, and in personal admiration for Harley and St. John.

Stella

  This day, being Sunday, January 28, 1727–8, about eight o’clock at night, a servant brought me a note, with an account of the death of the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend, that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with. She expired about six in the evening of this day; and as soon as I am left alone, which is about eleven at night, I resolve, for my own satisfaction, to say something of her life and character…. She was sickly from her childhood, until about the age of fifteen; but then grew into perfect health, and was looked upon as 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…. Never was any of her sex born with better gifts of the mind, or who more improved them by reading and conversation. Yet her memory was not of the best, and was impaired in the latter years of her life. But I cannot call to mind that I ever once heard her make a wrong judgment of persons, books, or affairs. Her advice was always the best, and with the greatest freedom, mixed with the greatest decency. She had a gracefulness, somewhat more than human, in every motion, word, and action. Never was so happy a conjunction of civility, freedom, easiness, and sincerity. There seemed to be a combination among all that knew her, to treat her with a dignity much beyond her rank; yet people of all sorts were never more easy than in her company…. All of us who had the happiness of her friendship agree unanimously, that, in an afternoon or evening’s conversation, she never failed, before we parted, of delivering the best thing that was said in the company. Some of us have written down several of her sayings, or what the French call bons mots, wherein she excelled beyond belief. She never mistook the understanding of others; nor ever said a severe word, but where a much severer was deserved.

  Stella was the concealed but undoubted wife of Dr. Swift, and if my informations are right, she was married to him in the year 1716 by Dr. Ash, then Bishop of Clogher…. Stella was a most amiable woman both in mind and person: She had an elevated understanding, with all the delicacy, and softness of her own sex. Her voice, however sweet in itself, was still rendered more harmonious by what she said. Her wit was poignant without severity: Her manners were humane, polite, easy and unreserved.—Wherever she came, she attracted attention and esteem. As virtue was her guide in morality, sincerity was her guide in religion. She was constant, but not ostentatious in her devotions: She was remarkably prudent in her conversation; She had great skill in music; and was perfectly well versed in all the lesser arts that employ a lady’s leisure. Her wit allowed her a fund of perpetual cheerfulness within proper limits. She exactly answered the description of Penelope in Homer.

	“A woman, loveliest of the lovely kind,
	In body perfect, and compleat in mind.”

  The general rule, I think, between him and Mrs. Johnson was this: when the Doctor was absent from home she lived at his house; but when he was at home she lodged either somewhere at Trim, or was resident at the house of Dr. Raymond, the vicar of Trim, a gentleman of great hospitality, a friend of Dr. Swift, a man of learning and fine address, with the advantage of a tall, handsome, and graceful person.

  I was informed by the relict of Bishop Berkeley that her husband had assured her of the truth of Swift’s marriage, as the Bishop of Clogher, who had performed the ceremony, had himself communicated the circumstance to him.

  Immediately subsequent to the ceremony Swift’s state of mind appears to have been dreadful. Delany, (as I have learned from a friend of his relict), being pressed to give his opinion on this strange union, said, that about the time it took place, he observed Swift to be extremely gloomy and agitated; so much so that he went to Archbishop King to mention his apprehensions. On entering the library, Swift rushed out with a countenance of distraction, and passed him without speaking. He found the Archbishop in tears, and upon asking the reason, he said, “You have just met the most unhappy man on earth; but on the subject of his wretchedness you must never ask a question.” Swift secluded himself from society for some days. When he reappeared, his intercourse with Stella and Mrs. Dingley was resumed, with the same guarded and cautious attention to prevent the slightest suspicion of a more intimate union with the former; as if such intimacy had not now been legal and virtuous. Stella, therefore, continued the beloved and intimate friend of Swift, the regulator of his household and table on public days, although she only appeared there as an ordinary guest; the companion of his social hours, and his comforter in sickness; but his wife only in name, and even that nominal union a secret from the world.

  Notwithstanding Dr. Delany’s sentiments of Swift’s marriage, and notwithstanding all that Lord Orrery and others have said about it, there is no authority for it but a hearsay story, and that very ill-founded. It is certain that the Dean told one of his friends, whom he advised to marry, that he himself never wished to marry at the time he ought to have entered into that state; for he counted upon it as the happiest condition, especially towards the decline of life, when a faithful, tender friend, is most wanted. While he was talking to this effect, his friend expressed his wishes to have seen him married: the Dean asked why? “Because,” replied the other, “I should have the pleasure of seeing your offspring; all the world would have been pleased to have seen the issue of such a genius.” The Dean smiled, and denied his being married, in the same manner as before, and said he never saw the woman he wished to be married to. The same gentleman, who was intimate with Mrs. Dingley for ten years before she died, in 1743, took occasion to tell her that such a story was whispered of her friend Mrs. Johnson’s marriage with the Dean, but she only laughed at it as an idle tale, founded only on suspicion…. Had he been married, he could not have lived in a state of separation from her, he loved her so passionately; for he admired her upon every account that can make a woman amiable or valuable as a companion for life. Is it possible to think that an affectionate husband could first have written, and then have used, those several prayers, by a dying wife with whom he never cohabited, and whose mouth must have been filled with reproaches for denying her all conjugal rights for a number of years, nay, from the very period (1716) that is pretended to be the time of the marriage?

  An eccentric, uncouth, disagreeable young Irishman, who had narrowly escaped plucking at Dublin, attended Sir William as an amanuensis, for twenty pounds a year and his board, dined at the second table, wrote bad verses in praise of his employer, and made love to a very pretty dark-eyed young girl who waited on Lady Giffard. Little did Temple imagine that the coarse exterior of his dependant concealed a genius equally suited to politics and to letters;—a genius destined to shake great kingdoms, to stir the laughter and the rage of millions, and to leave to posterity memorials which can perish only with the English language. Little did he think that the flirtation in his servants’ hall, which he perhaps scarcely deigned to make the subject of a jest, was the beginning of a long unprosperous love which was to be as widely famed as the passion of Petrarch or of Abelard. Sir William’s secretary was Jonathan Swift, Lady Giffard’s waiting-maid was poor Stella.

  Two women whom he loved and injured are known by every reader of books so familiarly that if we had seen them, or if they had been relatives of our own, we scarcely could have known them better. Who has not in his mind an image of Stella? Who does not love her? Fair and tender creature: pure and affectionate heart! Boots it to you now that you have been at rest for a hundred and twenty years, not divided in death from the cold heart which caused yours, whilst it beat, such faithful pangs of love and grief—boots it to you now, that the whole world loves and deplores you? Scarce any man, I believe, ever thought of that grave, that did not cast a flower of pity on it, and write over it a sweet epitaph. Gentle lady!—so lovely, so loving, so unhappy. You have had countless champions, millions of manly hearts mourning for you. From generation to generation we take up the fond tradition of your beauty; we watch and follow your story, your bright morning love and purity, your constancy, your grief, your sweet martyrdom. We knew your legend by heart. You are one of the saints of English story.

  Happy as Swift might have been, his felicity was troubled by an occurrence on which, for a brief space, the fate of poor Stella hung. After her arrival in Ireland she received an offer of marriage. The suitor was a clergyman, a friend of Swift’s, named Tisdale, and to his honourable suit there was not a single objection. He was a man of character and talent. Swift’s heart beat uneasily at this new difficulty. The proposal was made to him, as the guardian of the blooming Stella. He must, he perceived, either lay it before her, with all its advantages, or offer to her himself. Was there a struggle in that selfish remorseless heart? Let us hope so. To lose Stella must have been terrible. She was then, at eighteen, in the full perfection of a beauty enhanced by intelligence and sweetness. Her hair, raven black, set off the finest features and complexion in the world; and her figure, with a girlish tendency to embonpoint was perfect. Poor fated being! She was in Swift’s hands, and his empire over her was strengthened, and for ever, by this untoward event. She consented, however, it appears to receive Tisdale as her suitor; but Swift, as her guardian exacted such exorbitant terms for Stella’s dower, in case of widowhood, that Tisdale could not comply. His honourable attachment was unsuccessful, and Stella became the enthralled victim of one, who, whilst he often declared he loved “her better than his life a thousand millions of times,” took advantage of her unprotected situation to interfere with her best interests. Swift and Tisdale continued, nominally, friends; yet the perfidious Jonathan did not scruple to amuse his friends with epigrams, at the expense of one who had so nearly carried away Stella from her bondage; Swift excusing himself by saying that Tisdale went from house to house to show his wit upon him.

  It may be interesting enough to mention that in the year 1791 (you will see that I am anything but young, and perhaps admire the memory of a man now in his eighty-eight year), when I was fifteen, and tolerably observant of things said or done before me, I heard a then aged man, the Rev. Dr. Ashe, the rector of Clonard, in the county of Meath, and the descendant (lineally or collaterally) of the Bishop of Clogher (ob. 1717), speak of the Dean’s marriage to Stella as having been solemnised by the bishop: this on the family tradition of his lordship’s personal statements.

  That Esther Johnson was a beautiful woman, no one who looks upon the portrait will deny. That Swift loved her with all the strength and tenderness of such love as he could feel for woman, no one can doubt. Let the agony of grief and remorse, which thenceforth made his inner life desolate—even when the popular plaudits were ringing around him, and his voice and his pen were controlling measures and baffling governments—win our pity, though they cannot extenuate his faults.

  He married Miss Johnson from duty, but in secret, and on condition that she should only be his wife in name. She was twelve years dying.

  One final consideration is that the oppressive and disabling nature of Swift’s life-long disease has been greatly underrated in the more severe of the criticisms which have been made with regard to his conduct to Esther Johnston. I do not know that labyrinthine vertigo would necessarily incapacitate a man for the performance of marital duties, but it certainly might be a barrier to them more formidable than unprofessional critics are likely to suppose possible. Dr. Beddoes suggested that Swift was impotent from youthful dissipation, of which there is not a tithe of evidence. May not the great and grave disease of which I have adduced such copious evidence have been the real reason why Swift did not live with the woman whom it was certain that he loved with the most tender and persistent devotion?

  The relation between the two was from the first, so far as the world was concerned, free from all doubt or ambiguity. Stella shared in all Swift’s interests, remained his constant companion, and by degrees became the centre of his circle. But they never met alone: they never lived in the same house: and though all his thoughts and cares were shared by her, the bond was never in reality a closer one. And these strict limits of their friendship were so carefully maintained, that slander never ventured to assert otherwise, except in some vulgar outbursts which forgot even appropriateness of attack. Strange and abnormal as were its conditions, fettered and cramped as it was by Swift’s pride and waywardness, or by the mysteries of disease, the romance of that mutual devotion still forms one of the threads of the deepest interest running through Swift’s dark and sombre life.

  There has hardly ever been in the world, or out of it, in the illimitable kingdoms of fancy, a more famous pair of lovers than these two. Leila and Majnun, Romeo and Juliet, Petrarch and Laura—repeat what names we may of famous lovers that the fancies of poets have ever adored by the Tigris, or the Avon, or in the shadows of Vaucluse, the names of Swift and Stella are found to appeal no less keenly to heart and brain, to the imagination and to pity. Happy they were not, and could not be. When we read of Swift and Stella the mind naturally turns to that luckless pair of lovers whom Dante saw in the third circle of hell, blown about forever on the racking wind, and finding comfort through the lapse of eternal twilight in the companionship of their common doom: They, too—Swift and Stella—seem driven by the pitiless wind of fate; they have fallen upon evil days; they are greatly gifted, noble, greatly unhappy; they are sustained by their strange, exquisite friendship, by the community of genius, by a tender affection which was out of tune with the time and with their troubled lives…. There is nothing in literature more profoundly melancholy than Swift’s own eloquent tribute to the memory of his dead wife, written in a room to which he has removed so that he may not see the light burning in the church windows, where her last rites are being prepared.

  In Swift’s private life Stella and Vanessa occupy a place curiously similar to that held by Oxford and Bolingbroke in his public career. The brilliancy and culture of the first of each pair pleased his imagination. The honesty and plainness of the others won his heart. For a parallel for Swift’s affection for Stella there is no better one than that of Hamlet for Ophelia. The Danish prince found in the simplicity and naturalness of the one a relief from the corruption and hollowness of a depraved court. Swift, in the straightforward character, and unassuming devotion of the other, obtained consolation for the folly, perverseness and deceit which his “savage indignation” led him to regard as the dominating qualities of all mankind.

  If there was any person entitled to speak with authority on the subject, that person was assuredly Mrs. Dingley. For twenty-nine years, from the commencement, that is to say, of Swift’s intimate connection with Stella till the day of Stella’s death, she had been her inseparable companion, her friend and confidante. She had shared the same lodgings with her; it was understood that Swift and Esther were to have no secrets apart from her. When they met, they met in her presence; what they wrote, passed, by Swift’s special request, through her hands. Now it is well known that Mrs. Dingley was convinced that no marriage had ever taken place. The whole story was, she said, an idle tale. Two of Stella’s executors, Dr. Corbet and Mr. Rochford, distinctly stated that no suspicion of a marriage had ever even crossed their minds, though they had seen the Dean and Esther together a thousand times. Swift’s housekeeper, Mrs. Brent, a shrewd and observant woman, who resided at the deanery during the whole period of her master’s intimacy with Miss Johnson, was satisfied that there had been no marriage. So said Mrs. Ridgeway, who succeeded her as housekeeper, and who watched over the Dean in his declining years. But no testimony could carry greater weight than that of Dr. John Lyon. He was one of Swift’s most intimate friends, and, when the state of the Dean’s health was such that it had become necessary to place him under surveillance, Lyon was the person selected to undertake the duty. He lived with him at the deanery; he had full control over his papers; he was consequently brought into contact with all who corresponded with him, and with all who visited him. He had thus at his command every contemporary source of information. Not long after the story was first circulated, he set to work to ascertain, if possible, the truth. The result of his investigations was to convince him that there was absolutely no foundation for it but popular gossip, unsupported by a particle of evidence.

Vanessa

	Hail, blushing goddess, beauteous spring!
	Who in thy jocund train dost bring
	Loves and graces—smiling hours—
	Balmy breezes—fragrant flowers;
	Come, with tints of roseate hue,
	Nature’s faded charms renew!
	Yet why should I thy presence hail?
	To me no more the breathing gale
	Comes fraught with sweets, no more the rose
	With such transcendent beauty blows,
	As when Cadenus blest the scene,
	And shared with me those joys serene.
	When, unperceived the lambent fire
	Of friendship kindled new desire;
	Still listening to his tuneful tongue,
	The truths which angels might have sung,
	Divine imprest their gentle sway,
	And sweetly stole my soul away.
	My guide, instructor, lover, friend,
	Dear names, in one idea blend;
	Oh! still conjoined, your incense rise,
	And waft sweet odours to the skies!

  Near twenty years ago I heard from a gentleman now living, with whom Vanessa lived, or lodged, in England, an account of the Dean’s behaviour to the unhappy woman, much less to his reputation than the account my Lord [Orrery] gives of that affair. According to this gentleman’s account she was not the creature that she became when she was in Ireland, whither she followed him, and, in hopes to make herself an interest with his vanity, threw herself into glare and expense; and, at last, by disappointment, into a habit of drinking, till grief and the effects of that vice destroyed her. You may gather from that really pretty piece of his, Cadenus and Vanessa, how much he flattered her, and that he took great pains to gloss over that affair. I remember once to have seen a little collection of letters and poetical scraps of Swift’s, which passed between him and Mrs. Van Homrigh, this same Vanessa, which the bookseller then told me were sent him to be published, from the originals by this lady, in resentment of his perfidy.

  Though all will confess that the two devoted women, who fell victims to his barbarous selfishness, and whose names are eternally linked with the history of our literature, are far more interesting, from their ill-bestowed, ill-requited, and passionate attachment to him than by anything he ever sung or said of them. Nay, his longest, his most elaborate, and his most admired poem,—the avowed history of one of his attachments—with its insipid tawdry fable, its conclusion, in which nothing is concluded, and the inferences we are left to draw from it, would have given but an ignominious celebrity to poor Vanessa, if truth and time, and her own sweet nature, had not redeemed her.

  His affection was never free from the egoistic element which prevented him from acting unequivocally, as an impartial spectator would have advised him to act, or as he would have advised another to act in a similar case. And therefore, when the crisis came, the very strength of his affection produced an explosion of selfish wrath, and he escaped from the intolerable position by striking down the woman whom he loved, and whose love for him had become a burden. The wrath was not the less fatal because it was half composed of remorse, and the energy of the explosion proportioned to the strength of the feeling which had held it in check.

  He lodged close to her mother, and was a frequent guest at her table. 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 never set foot. As a friend he must have greatly preferred Stella to Vanessa; and from this point of view his loyalty to the original object of his choice, we may be sure, never faltered. 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 evasions, in fortuitous circumstance.

Battle of the Books, 1697?–1704

	Swift for the Ancients has argued so well,
	’Tis apparent from thence that the Moderns excel.

  A piece exhibiting, perhaps, more than any of his writings, the original vein of humour which distinguishes its author.

  Of all that constituted once the so famous controversy, its prodigious learning and its furious abuse, this triumphant piece of humour alone survives. It was circulated widely before Temple died, and not until four years later appeared in print, as portion of a volume which weakened the side of which the writer had engaged as much as it strengthened that of the enemy. Swift could not help himself. The ancients could show no such humour and satire as the “Tale of a Tub” and the “Battle of the Books.”

  So purely popular that it lost nothing by being whetted on the wrong edge.

  The “Battle of the Books” is the best of the travesties. Nor in the brilliant assault upon great names do we at present see anything more than the buoyant consciousness of power, common in the unsparing judgments of youth, nor edged as yet by any real bitterness. Swift has found out that the world is full of humbugs; and goes forth hewing and hacking with superabundant energy, not yet aware that he too may be conceivably a fallible being, and still less that the humbugs may some day prove too strong for him.

  Its object is satire, not criticism. Where it touches on the points in dispute, it is in such broad and far-reaching metaphor as that by which he illustrates the “sweetness and light” of the ancients through the fable of the Spider and the Bee, which has supplied a telling phraseology to a phase of latter-day criticism. Like all the satire that Swift ever wrote, it goes directly to the point by its personal reference. For Swift the main issue is one between Temple and Bentley, between the Christchurch wits and Wotton, not between the arguments of the critics. His preference for the ancients was thorough and sincere: but it went deeper than literary criticism.

Tale of a Tub, 1704

  I am of your mind as to the Tale of a Tub. I am not alone in the opinion, as you are there; but I am pretty near it, having but very few on my side, but those few are worth a million. However, I have never spoke my sentiments, not caring to contradict a multitude. Bottom admires it, and cannot bear my saying I confess I was diverted with several passages when I read it, but I should not care to read it again. That he thinks not commendation enough.

  I beg your Lordship (if the book is come down to Exon), to read “The Tale of a Tub,” for, bating the profaneness of it, it is a book to be valued, being an original of its kind, full of wit, humour, good sense, and learning. It comes from Christ Church, and a great part of it is written in defence of Mr. Boyle against Wotton and Bentley. The town is wonderfully pleased with it…. The author of “A Tale of a Tub” will not as yet be known; and if it be the man I guess, he hath reason to conceal himself because of the profound strokes in that piece, which would do his reputation and interests in the world more harm than the wit can do him good. I think your lordship hath found out a very proper employment for your pen, which he would execute very happily. Nothing can please more than that book doth here at London.

  He seemed to me to have an unaccountable prejudice against Swift; for I once took the liberty to ask him, if Swift had personally offended him, and he told me, he had not. He said to-day, “Swift is clear, but he is shallow. In coarse humour, he is inferior to Arbuthnot; in delicate humour, he is inferior to Addison. So he is inferior to his contemporaries; without putting him against the whole world. I doubt if the ‘Tale of a Tub’ was his: it has so much more thinking, more knowledge, more power, more colour, than any of the works which are indisputably his. If it was his, I shall only say, he was impar sibi.”

  The “Tale of a Tub” is a work, of perhaps greater felicity of wit, and more ludicrous combinations of ideas, than any other book in the world. It is however, written in so strange a style of “banter,” to make use of one of the author’s words, or rather in so low and anomalous a slang, which perhaps Swift considered as the necessary concomitant of wit; that it is by no means proper to be cited as an example of just composition.

  The literary merit of the “Tale of a Tub” is great, and, in this respect, exceeding everything which he afterwards produced. The style has more nerve, more imagery, and spirit, than any other portion of his works: the wit and humour are perfectly original, and supported throughout with undiminished vigour; but, it must be confessed, occasionally coarse and licentious; and the digressions exhibit erudition of no common kind, though not always applied in illustration of that side of the question on which justice and impartiality have since arranged themselves.

  With this for my whole fortune, I was trudging through Richmond in my blue smock-frock, and my red garters tied under my knees, when, staring about me, my eyes fell upon a little book in a bookseller’s window, on the outside of which was written “The Tale of a Tub, price threepence.” The title was so odd that my curiosity was excited. I had the threepence; but, then, I could not have any supper. In I went and got the little book, which I was so impatient to read, that I got over into a field at the upper corner of Kew Gardens, where there stood a haystack. On the shady side of this I sat down to read. The book was so different from any thing I had ever read before, it was something so new to my mind, that, though I could not understand some parts of it, it delighted me beyond description, and produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on until it was dark without any thought of supper or bed…. My “Tale of a Tub,” which I carried about with me wherever I went, and when I—at about twenty years old—lost it in a box that fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy, in North America, the loss gave me greater pain than I have since felt in losing thousands of pounds.

  “The Tale of a Tub” is, in my apprehension, the masterpiece of Swift; certainly Rabelais has nothing superior, even in invention, nor anything so condensed, so pointed, so full of real meaning, of biting satire, of felicitous analogy.

  An astonishing production, of which the fervid vehement style, sparkling wit, and vivacity of genius, seem to distinguish it above the happiest efforts even of his own restless pen.

  It is certainly his most astonishing production. You see a “virgin mind crumbling down with its own riches.” It is the wildest, wittiest, wickedest, wealthiest book of its size in British literature.

  Although the object of the “Tale of a Tub” was undoubtedly to defend the Church of England, and to ridicule its opponents, it would be difficult to find in the whole compass of literature any production more utterly unrestrained by considerations of reverence or decorum. Nothing in Voltaire is more grossly profane than the passages in Swift about the Roman Catholic doctrine concerning the Sacrament, and the Calvinistic doctrine concerning inspiration. And although the “Tale of a Tub” is an extreme example, the same spirit pervades many of his other performances. His wit was perfectly unbridled. His unrivalled power of ludicrous combination seldom failed to get the better of his prudence; and he found it impossible to resist a jest. It must be added that no writer of the time indulged more habitually in coarse, revolting, and indecent imagery; that he delighted in a strain of ribald abuse peculiarly unbecoming in a clergyman; that he lived in an atmosphere deeply impregnated with scepticism; and that he frequently expressed a strong dislike for his profession.

  Swift had, indeed, little enough in common with the philosophy of Lucretius. But in both we have the same gloom of cynicism. In both there is the same profound scorn of superstition, and yet the same belief that in superstition we must find the main source of most human action. In Swift as in Lucretius, the literary instinct has made the general and wide-reaching satire far more strong in its impression than the ostensible object of the book. If we read the “Tale of a Tub” with understanding of its real meaning, we have as little impression, at the end, of the quarrels of Peter and Martin and Jack, as we have, after reading the poem of Lucretius, of the niceties of the Epicurean system. Divided by eighteen centuries, there is yet much in the mental attitude of the two men that brings them close together. Swift’s supposed debt to Rabelais is almost proverbial. But, after all, it is more in the following of a recognised vehicle of satire, than in anything else. Swift read Rabelais, as the acknowledged master of a peculiar style of sarcasm. The style has already become antiquated: and yet his adoption of it leaves the essential qualities of the “Tale of a Tub” absolutely unimpaired.

  In style, and as an artistic whole, the “Tale of a Tub” is Swift’s masterpiece. The satire is more pointed and concise than in “Gulliver,” the thought more full and vigorous, the ideas and language more sustained and nervous. But to our modern taste there is much in the story of the three brothers that is painful and repellent.

  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 humor, 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 very extraordinary treatise called “A Tale of a Tub” is allowed to rank among the first of its author’s productions. It displays his finest qualities of imagination and irony when they were in their freshest and most ebullient condition…. The reader is carried along so gaily on this buoyant tide of wit, that he puts the book down with regret to find it ended, when it seemed but just begun. In this, “A Tale of a Tub” forms a surprising contrast to almost all the prose which had preceded it for half a century, the writers of the Restoration, even where they are most correct and graceful, being devoid of this particular sparkle and crispness of phrase…. In “A Tale of a Tub” the intellectual interest never halts for a moment. There is infinite variety, and the reader is tantalised by the prodigality of wit, never fatigued for a moment by its expression. In pure style Swift never excelled this his first important essay.

  The reader of such vigorous and effective English, employed with so much directness and point, cannot but sympathize with the feeling which prompted him to say in his old age, when his mind was gradually failing, “Good God, what a genius I had when I wrote that book!” Not only is the book his masterpiece, but it is also his best allegory; indeed one would hazard little in making the assertion that it is the best sustained allegory that ever was written.

  I have been wandering through Swift a good deal. The hearty cursing in his “Tale of a Tub” goes straight to my midriff—so satisfying, the best of tonics. For absolute splendour too, commend me to his chapters about the Aeolists!

  It is a mad, strange, often foul-mouthed book, with thrusts in it that go to the very marrow of all monstrous practices in all ecclesiasticisms; showing a love for what is honest and of good report, perhaps; but showing stronger love for thwacking the skulls of all sinners in high places; and the higher the place the harder is the thwack.

The Examiner

  No modern leader-writer, however common-place, would write such heavy stuff now.

  At the beginning of November Swift undertook the editorship of the “Examiner,” and for upwards of three years he fought the battles of the Ministry as no one had ever yet fought the battles of any Ministry in the world. With a versatility unparalleled in the history of party warfare, he assailed his opponents in almost every form which satire can assume; in Essays which are still read as models of terse and luminous disquisition; in philippics compared with which the masterpieces of Cicero will, in point of vituperative skill, bear no comparison; in pamphlets which were half a century afterwards the delight of Burke and Fox: in ribald songs, in street ballads, in Grub-street epigrams, in ludicrous parodies. He had applied his rare powers of observation to studying the peculiarities of every class in the great family of mankind, their humours, their prejudices, their passions; and to all these he knew how to appeal with exquisite propriety. He was a master of the rhetoric which casts a spell over senates and tribunals, and of the rhetoric which sends mobs yelling to the tar-barrel or the clubstick. With every weapon in the whole armoury of scorn he was equally familiar. In boisterous scurrility he was more than a match for Oldmixon. In delicate and subtle humour he was more than a match for Addison. In an age when the bad arts of anonymous polemics had been brought to perfection, his lampoons achieved a scandalous pre-eminence. His sarcasm and invective were terrific. His irony made even the Duchess of Marlborough quail; his pasquinades drove Eugene in ignominy from our shores; his broadsides made it perilous for the Opposition to show their faces in the streets. But however remarkable were his abilities as an unscrupulous assailant, his abilities as an unscrupulous advocate were not less consummate. Where his object was persuasion, he was indifferent to everything but effect. He hesitated at nothing. When the testimony of facts was against him, he distorted them beyond recognition. When testimony was wanting, he invented it. When the statements of his opponents admitted of no confutation, he assumed the air of an honest and stout-hearted Englishman who refused to be duped. His diction—plain, masculine, incisive—came home to every one; and the monstrous effrontery of his assumptions was seldom suspected by readers whose reason was enthralled by the circumstantial conclusiveness with which he drew his deductions. In truth, of all writers who have ever entered the arena of party politics, Swift had, in a larger measure than any, the most invaluable of all qualifications—the art of making truth assume the appearance of elaborate sophistry, and the art of making elaborate sophistry assume the appearance of self-evident truth.

  The style of Swift’s “Examiners” is perfect of its kind and for its purpose. His own rather bald definition of a good style—“proper words in proper places”—expresses the form of these papers precisely, while their matter like the lead of a bullet, is calculated nicely, and only to serve a single object—to go straight and strong and true to its mark. The admiration Swift’s political tracts excites is of the kind excited by a steam-engine—admiration of power, precision, and such exquisite adaptation of means to a single end that there is neither waste nor want, friction nor dispersion.

Conduct of the Allies, 1711

  The book is, in truth, a miracle of clear and forcible logic.

  Swift was now called upon to perform the greatest service ever rendered to an English government by a man of letters. In November, 1711, six weeks after the secret preliminaries had been signed, whilst the States of the confederacy were still doubtful as to the propriety of entering a congress on the base proposed, and whilst the public was still, as he complains, “half bewitched” against a peace,—at the end of November, the meeting of Parliament being three times postponed to allow the utmost care to be bestowed on the work, and its statements with the conclusions founded on them to sink deeply into the public mind, appeared Swift’s political masterpiece, “The Conduct of the Allies.”… It is impossible to exaggerate the effect produced and the service rendered by the publication of this tract. Written with simple eloquence, presenting throughout its course an unbroken chain of argument in which—granting the author’s premise—no flaw could be detected, and enlivened here and there with a touch of his peculiar humour, it had the merit of bringing an abstruse political question down to the level of the plainest understanding. It was disseminated with the utmost industry by the agents of Government. The first edition was all exhausted in a couple of days; the second in five hours; the third and fourth within the week. By the end of the year, a month after its first appearance, it was computed that eleven thousand copies had passed into some reader’s hand; and its author relates in his correspondence with pardonable complacency how nothing of the kind had ever made so many converts; how, in the debates that followed, all the Government orators drew their arguments from it; how “every one agreed it was my book” which spirited up the court to its severe resolution against the allies; and how, on the return of peace, the first ambassador accredited to St. James’s by the Bourbon King of Spain, on reaching London, “asked to be presented to Dr. Swift,” as the man to whom “in all Europe” his royal master and the most Christian King were most indebted.

  The style and tone of this masterly pamphlet are adapted with great skill both to the popular taste and to the reason of thoughtful men.

  Never did publicist render any party such yeoman service as Swift rendered the Tories, and rarely did anyone meet with such scant reward. More than anything else, his “Conduct of the Allies” made the peace of Utrecht acceptable to the nation.

Drapier Letters, 1724

  A proclamation for discovering ye Author of ye Pamphlet intitled A letter to ye whole people of Ireland, by M. B. Drapier, author of the letter to the shopkeepers, &c.

	£300 REWARD.
	By the Lord Lieutenant and Council of Ireland.
	A PROCLAMATION.

Content:
  Whereas a wicked and malicious pamphlet, intitled A letter to the whole people of Ireland, by M. B. Drapier, author of the letter to the shopkeepers, &c., printed by John Harding, in Molesworth’s Court, in Fishamble Street, Dublin, in which are contained several seditious and scandalous paragraphs highly reflecting upon his Majesty and his ministers, tending to alienate the affections of his good subjects of England and Ireland from each other, and to promote sedition among the people, hath been lately printed and published in this kingdom: We, the Lord Lieutenant and Council do hereby publish and declare that, in order to discover the author of the said seditious pamphlet, we will give the necessary orders for the payment of three hundred pounds sterling, to such person or persons as shall within the specified six months from this date hereof, discover the author of the said pamphlet, so as he be apprehended and convicted thereby….

GOD save the KING.

	Let Ireland tell, how wit upheld her cause,
	Her trade supported, and supplied her laws;
	And leave on Swift this grateful verse engraved,
	“The rights a Court Attacked, a poet saved.”
	Behold the hand that wrought a nation’s cure,
	Stretched to relieve the idiot and the poor,
	Proud vice to brand, or injured worth adorn,
	And stretch the ray to ages yet unborn.

  True patriot, her [Ireland’s] first, almost her last.

  His object was, not to do good to Ireland, but to vex and annoy the English ministry. To do this however with effect, it was necessary that he should speak to the interests and feelings of some party who possessed a certain degree of power and influence. This unfortunately was not the case in that day with the Catholics; and though this gave them only a stronger title to the services of a truly brave or generous advocate, it was sufficient to silence Swift. They are not so much as named above two or three times in his writings—and then only with scorn and reprobation. In the topics which he does take up, it is no doubt true, that he frequently inveighs against real oppression and acts of indisputable impolicy; yet it is no want of charity to say, that it is quite manifest that this were not his reasons for bringing them forward, and that he had just as little scruple to make an outcry, where no public interest was concerned, as where it was apparent. It was sufficient for him, that the subject was likely to excite popular prejudice and clamour,—or that he had some personal pique or animosity to gratify. The Drapier’s letters are sufficient proof of the influence of the former principle.

  Believing, however erroneously, that Swift had delivered them from a great public danger, their gratitude to him knew no bounds, nor ended even with his powers of mind. “The sun of his popularity,” says a great poet, “remained unclouded, even after he was incapable of distinguishing its radiance.” The Drapier’s Head became a favourite sign; his portrait, we are told, was engraved, woven upon handkerchiefs, and stuck upon medals (not of copper I presume). His health was quaffed at every banquet, his presence everywhere welcomed with blessings by the people. They bore with all the infirmities of genius, all the peevishness of age. In vain did he show contempt and aversion to those who thus revered him: in vain did he deny them even the honour of his birth-place, frequently saying, “I was not dropped in this vile country, but in England.” In vain did he sneer at the “savage Old Irish.” No insult on his part could weaken their generous attachment. Even at this day, as I am assured, this grateful feeling still survives; and all parties in Ireland, however estranged on other questions, agree in one common veneration for the memory of Swift.

  Is it fair to call the famous “Drapier’s Letters” patriotism? They are masterpieces of dreadful humour and invective: they are reasoned logically enough too, but the proposition is as monstrous and fabulous as the Lilliputian island. It is not that the grievance is so great, but there is his enemy—the assault is wonderful for its activity and terrible rage. It is Samson with a bone in his hand, rushing on his enemies and felling them: one admires not the cause so much as the strength, the anger, the fury of the champion.

  Because Swift takes the Irish, not the English, view of the question,—because he goes to battle armed with the strength of his genius, the fire of his indignation,—he is therefore no patriot! What is it to be a patriot? To sit in the chimney-corner and make fine phrases about loving your country, or to go out and do battle for her? There was nothing in Ireland, in Swift’s day, to which the affections could cling. The first thing to be done was to constitute a state worthy of love, the first steps to that end were in resistance to oppressive measures; the first feeling to be encouraged was hatred of the oppressor. It is true that Swift often spoke with contempt of the Irish, and that he regarded his appointment to the Deanery of St. Patrick’s as a decree of banishment from civilization and friendship. He showed little sentimental patriotism; but he understood the duties of a patriot, and did his best to discharge them. He may sometimes have displayed the temper of Coriolanus; but, unlike the Roman, he endured unto the end.

  The public joy knew no bounds. In a few hours Dublin presented the appearance of a vast jubilee. In a few days there was scarcely a town or a village in Ireland which was not beside itself with exultation. The whole island rang with the praises of the Drapier. It was the Drapier, they cried, who had saved them, it was the Drapier who had taught them to be patriots. Had Swift rescued the country from some overwhelming calamity, had he done all and more than all that the Œdipus of story is fabled to have done for the city of Amphion, popular gratitude could not have gone further. Medals were struck in his honour. A club, the professed object of which was to perpetuate his fame, was formed. His portrait stamped on medallions, or woven on handkerchiefs, was the ornament most cherished by both sexes. When he appeared in the streets all heads were uncovered. If for the first time he visited a town, it was usual for the Corporation to receive him with public honours. Each year, as his birthday came round, it was celebrated with tumultuous festivity. “He became,” says Orrery, “the idol of the people of Ireland to a degree of devotion that in the most superstitious country scarcely any idol ever attained.” “Spirit of Swift!” exclaimed Grattan on that memorable day when he brought forward his Declaration of Legislative Independence, “Spirit of Swift! your genius has prevailed; Ireland is now a nation.” Even now no true Irishman ever pronounces his name without reverence.

  “The Drapier’s Letters” are epoch-making in that they first taught Ireland the policy and the power of union, of dogged inert resistance, and of strategically organized and directed agitation. Their effect was, in fact, commensurate with their power, and their power of its kind was supreme. It is the power of a deft, vigorous, intent and unerring-eyed wielder of a hammer, who hits each nail on the head and home without one single feint, or flourish, or one single short, or weak, or wasted stroke. Swift’s consummate mastery of the art which conceals art was never shown to such perfection as in these letters, whose naked simplicity is so like naked truth as to be confounded with it…. It is, in fact, incontestable that Swift’s service to Ireland deserves the distinction he gives it in his epitaph. Look at it how you will, either from the point of view of the need of the service, or of its righteousness, or of its greatness, or of its difficulty, and Swift’s work in Ireland is his supreme achievement. When “in the reign of Queen Anne he dictated for a time the policy of the English nation,” he had at his back a powerful and compact party, all the influence (then enormous) of the Court, Harley’s serviceable cunning and the brilliant intellect of Bolingbroke. But of his work in Ireland he might say with literal truth, “Alone I did it!”

  The “Drapier’s Letters” are as much superior to Junius as Junius is superior to Wilkes.

Gulliver’s Travels, 1726

  Here is a book come out, that all our people of taste run mad about; ’tis no less than the united work of a dignified clergyman, an eminent physician, and the first poet of the age; and very wonderful it is, God knows!—great eloquence have they employed to prove themselves beasts, and shew such veneration for horses, that since the Essex quaker, nobody has appeared so passionately devoted to that species; and to say truth, they talk of a stable with so much warmth and affection, I cannot help suspecting some very powerful motive at the bottom of it.

  “Gulliver’s Travels,” I believe, will have as great a run as John Bunyan. It is in everybody’s hands. Lord Scarborough, who is no inventor of stories, told me that he fell in company with a master of a ship, who told him that he was very well acquainted with Gulliver; but that the printer had mistaken; that he lived in Wapping, and not in Rotherhithe. I lent the book to an old gentleman who went immediately to his map to search for Lilliput.

  About ten days ago a book was published here of the Travels of one Gulliver, which has been the conversation of the whole town ever since: the whole impression sold in a week; and nothing is more diverting than to hear the different opinions people give of it, though all agree in liking it extremely. ’Tis generally said that you are the author, but I am told the bookseller declares he knows not from what hand it came. From the highest to the lowest it is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery. You may see by this you are not much injured by being supposed the author of this piece. If you are, you have disobliged us, and two or three of your best friends, in not giving us the least hint of it. Perhaps I may all this time be talking to you of a book you have never seen, and which has not yet reached Ireland; if it have not I believe what we have said will be sufficient to recommend it to your reading, and that you will order me to send it to you.

  “Gulliver’s Travels” is a book in which the author seems to have called up all his vigilance and skill in the article of style: and, as the plan of his fiction led to that simplicity in which he delighted, no book can be taken as a fairer specimen of the degree of cultivation at which the English language had at that time arrived. Swift was perhaps the man of the most powerful mind of the time in which he lived.

  This singular work displays a most fertile imagination, a deep insight into the follies, vices, and infirmities of mankind, and a fund of acute observation on ethics, politics, and literature. Its principal aim appears to have been to mortify the pride of human nature, whether arising from personal or mental accomplishments: the satire, however, has been carried too far, and degenerates into a libel on the species. The fourth part, especially, notwithstanding all that has been said in its defence by Sheridan and Berkeley, apparently exhibits such a malignant wish to degrade and brutalize the human race, that with every reader of feeling and benevolence it can occasion nothing but a mingled sensation of abhorrence and disgust. Let us hope, though the tendency be such as we have described, that it was not in the contemplation of Swift; but that he was betrayed into this degrading and exaggerating picture, by that habitual and gloomy discontent which so long preyed upon his spirits, which at length terminated in insanity, and which forever veiled from his eyes the fairest portion of humanity.

  The genius of Swift converted the sketch of an extravagant fairy tale into a narrative, unequalled for the skill with which it is sustained, and the genuine spirit of satire of which it is made the vehicle.

  It would, perhaps, be too much to say that the author had an express design to blacken and culminate human nature, but at least his work displays evident marks of a diseased imagination and a lacerated heart—in short, of that frame of mind which led him in the epitaph he composed for himself, to describe the tomb as the abode, Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit. We rise, accordingly, from “Gulliver’s Travels,” not as from the work of De Foe, exulting in our nature, but giddy, and selfish, and discontented, and, from some parts, I may almost say brutified. The general effect, indeed, of works of satire and humour is perhaps little favourable to the mind, and they are only allowable, and may be read with profit, when employed as the scourges of vice or folly.

  He has taken a new view of human nature, such as a being of a higher sphere might take of it; he has torn the scales from off his moral vision; he has tried an experiment upon human life, and sifted its pretensions from the alloy of circumstances; he has measured it with a rule, has weighed it in a balance, and found it, for the most part, wanting and worthless, in substance and in show. Nothing solid, nothing valuable is left in his system but virtue and wisdom. What a libel is this upon mankind! What a convincing proof of misanthropy! What presumption and what malice prepense, to show men what they are, and to teach them what they ought to be! What a mortifying stroke, aimed at national glory, is that unlucky incident of Gulliver’s wading across the channel and carrying off the whole fleet of Blefuscu! After that, we have only to consider which of the contending parties was in the right. What a shock to personal vanity is given in the account of Gulliver’s nurse Glumdalclitch! Still, notwithstanding the disparagement to her personal charms, her good nature remains the same amiable quality as before. I cannot see the harm, the misanthropy, the immoral and degrading tendency of this. The moral lesson is as fine as the intellectual exhibition is amusing.

  I think “Gulliver’s Travels” the great work of Swift.

  When I was a child scarce any book delighted me more than “Gulliver’s Travels;” I have never read it since. I suppose that the charm was in the wonders that it related. Swift’s style is plain, and without simile or metaphor, which is a great merit; no author whose power is in the original thought resorts to simile or metaphor.

  The part of Dean Swift’s satire which relates to the “Stulbrugs” may possibly occur to some readers as bearing upon this topic. That the staunch admirers of that singularly-gifted person should have been flung into ecstasies on the perusal of this extraordinary part of his writings, need not surprise us. Their raptures were full easily excited; but I am quite clear they have given a wrong gloss to it, and heaped upon its merits a very undeserved praise. They think that the picture of the Stulbrugs was intended to wean us from a love of life, and that it has well accomplished its purpose. I am very certain that the dean never had any such thing in view, because his sagacity was far too great not to perceive that he only could make out this position by a most undisguised begging of the question. How could any man of the most ordinary reflection expect to wean his fellow-creatures from love of life by describing a sort of persons who at a given age lost their faculties and became doting, drivelling idiots? Did any man breathing ever pretend that he wished to live, not only for centuries, but even for threescore years and ten, bereaved of his understanding, and treated by the law and by his fellowmen as in hopeless incurable dotage? The passage in question is much more likely to have proceded from Swift’s exaggerated misanthropy, and to have been designed as an antidote to human pride, by showing that our duration is necessarily limited,—if, indeed, it is not rather to be regarded as the work of mere whim and caprice.

  The most admirable satire ever conveyed in a narrative, and the most plausible disguise that fiction ever bore. So well is the style of the old English navigators copied—so much does there seem of their honest simplicity and plain common sense—so consistent is every part of the story—so natural all the events after the first improbability,—that the fable, even in its wildest flights, never loses an air of real truth.

	Ever and mightiest, breathes from a great Poet’s lute!
	Lo! that grim Merriment of Hatred,—born
	Of him,—the Master-Mocker of Mankind,
	Beside the grin of whose malignant spleen,
	Voltaire’s gay sarcasm seems a smile serene,—
	Do we not place it in our children’s hands,
	Leading young Hope through Lemuel’s fabled lands?

  Undoubtedly the greatest and most durable monument of Swift’s style and originality of conception. “Gulliver” being a work of universal satire, will be read as long as the corruptions of human nature render its innumerable ironic and sarcastic strokes applicable and intelligible to human beings; and even were the follies and basenesses of humanity so far purged away that men should no longer need the sharp and bitter medicine of satire, it would still be read with little less admiration and delight for the wonderful richness of invention it displays, and the exquisite art with which the most impossible and extravagant adventures are related—related so naturally as to cheat us into a momentary belief in their reality.

  What a surprising humour there is in these descriptions! How noble the satire is here! How just and honest! How perfect the image! Mr. Macaulay has quoted the charming lines of the poet, where the king of the pigmies is measured by the same standard. We have all read in Milton of the spear that was like “the mast of some tall amiral,” but these images are surely likely to come to the comic poet originally. The subject is before him. He is turning it in a thousand ways. He is full of it…. As for the humour and conduct of this famous fable, I suppose there is no person who reads but must admire; as for the moral, I think it horrible, shameful, unmanly, blasphemous; and giant and great as this Dean is, I say we should hoot him. Some of this audience may not have read the last part of Gulliver, and to such I would recall the advice of the venerable Mr. Punch to persons about to marry and say “Don’t.”

  With what power, what genius in ludicrous invention, these stories are written, no one needs to be reminded. Schoolboys, who read for the story only, and know nothing of the satire, read “Gulliver” with delight; and our literary critics, even while watching the allegory and commenting on the philosophy, break down in laughter from the sheer grotesqueness of some of the fancies, or are awed into pain and discomfort by the ghastly significance of others. Of Swift we may surely say, that, let our literature last for ages, he will be remembered in it, and chiefly for his fictions, as one of the greatest and most original of our writers—the likest author we have to Rabelais, and yet with British differences. In what cases one would recommend Swift is a question of large connexions. To all strong men he is and will be congenial, for they can bear to look round and round reality on all sides, even on that which connects us with the Yahoos. Universality is best.

  The reason few persons were angry at Gulliver was that the satire was seldom felicitous enough to wound. Sometimes it is obscure, sometimes revolting and extravagant, and is invariably feeblest when most elaborate. The genius of the book is in the original and diverting incidents, and especially in the skill with which the fabulous is converted into the real. This must always have been the charm of the work, which flags, as Jeffrey remarked, whenever the satire predominates over the story.

  What Swift has really done is to provide for the man who despises his species a number of exceedingly effective symbols for the utterance of his contempt. A child is simply amused with Bigendians and Littleendians; a philosopher thinks that the questions really at the bottom of Church quarrels are in reality of more serious import; but the cynic who has learnt to disbelieve in the nobility or wisdom of the great mass of his species finds a most convenient metaphor for expressing his disbelief. In this way “Gulliver’s Travels” contains a whole gallery of caricatures thoroughly congenial to the despisers of humanity.

  Chivalrous feeling could scarcely breathe in the same atmosphere as Gulliver.

  Swift, always among the most original of writers, is nowhere more thoroughly himself than in his enchanting romance of Lemuel Gulliver. Whether we read it, as children do, for the story, or as historians, for the political allusions, or as men of the world, for the satire and philosophy, we have to acknowledge that it is one of the wonderful and unique books of the world’s literature.

  Swift’s great work, after storming the outposts of human policy and human learning, breaks at last in a torrent of contempt and hatred on the last stronghold of humanity itself. The strength of Swift’s work as a contribution to the art of fiction lies in the portentous gravity and absolute mathematical consistency wherewith he develops the consequences of his modest assumptions. In the quality of their realism the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag are much superior to the two later and more violent satires; he was better fitted to ridicule the politics of his time than to attack the “men of Gresham,” of whose true aims and methods he knew little or nothing; and the imagination stumbles at many of the details of the last book. But the wealth of illustration whereby he maintains the interest of his original conception of pigmies and giants is eternally surprising and delightful.

  By a singular dispensation of Providence we usually read the “Travels” while we are children; we are delighted with the marvelous story, we are not at all injured by the poison.

  So ends “Gulliver’s Travels.” In the verses which he wrote on the subject of his own death, Swift said that perhaps he “had too much satire in his vein,” but added that:

	“His satire points at no defect
	But what all mortals may correct.”

  The imperfections and contradictions in the “Voyage to the Houyhnhnms” are obvious. There is a total want of probability in the general conception, and the Houyhnhnms are made to do many things which it was physically impossible for them to perform. It is difficult to believe that, as some have said, the Houyhnhnm represents Swift’s ideal of morality. Houyhnhnm and Yahoo are alike imperfect, and Swift falsely assumes that the natural affections are opposed to reason, instead of showing how the one should be influenced by the other. It is a counsel of despair.

  His modern fame mainly rests on “Gulliver’s Travels,” the object of which, as he said, apart from the three hundred pounds realized, was to vex the world. The sixth chapter of “A Voyage to Brobdingnag” in this immortal book stands unrivalled, unless by More’s “Utopia,” as an ironical description of English political institutions of the time.

  The book has maintained its popularity in spite of, rather than on account of its satire, and the first two voyages at least may be read with delight, even by those who know nothing of the persons and events which are held up to ridicule.

Journal to Stella

  It is a wonderful medley, in which grave reflections and important facts are at random intermingled with trivial occurrences and the puerile jargon of the most intimate tenderness.

  Never, surely, was there a stranger picture of human character than Swift’s daily record of his hopes and fears, his love and his ambition, his small miseries, strange affectations, and tender communings. But it is not an elevating picture as we look upon it; neither the reverend doctor nor the young lady to whom this journal is really addressed rises in our estimation. We are almost inclined to apologize even for the licentiousness of St. John, when we find it plainly recorded for the instruction and amusement of this young lady by her middle-aged companion. The explanation that the manners of Queen Anne’s reign were grosser than ours, and that people were much more accustomed to plain speaking, is not at all satisfactory. There are indelicate allusions enough in the Spectator, and in Lady Montague’s letters; but nothing like what we find in this journal, written in confidence to a young lady for whom Swift professed the most platonic affection. Coarse jokes and coarse oaths, the plainest allusions and double meanings of the broadest kind, are all mingled together in this strange medley of wit, vanity, affection, and secret history.

  The delightful, fantastic, secret, childish, infinitely tender babblement, never weary of repeating itself, welling up amidst and around the records of the ruggedest affairs of State, like perennial springs of pure sweet water in a region of savage rocks. He was fighting Titanically a Titanic battle; and night and morning, in bed before he rose, in bed before he slept, he found refreshment and peace in these infantine outpourings of innocent love. The sternest cynics have such soft places in their heart of hearts! incomparably softer than the softness of unctuous sentimentalists; liquid with living fountains where these are boggy with ooze.

  In reading the “Journal to Stella” we may fancy ourselves waiting in a parliamentary lobby during an excited debate. One of the chief actors hurries out at intervals; pours out a kind of hasty bulletin; tells of some thrilling incident, or indicates some threatening symptom; more frequently he seeks to relieve his anxieties by indulging in a little personal gossip, and only interjects such comments upon politics as can be compressed into a hasty ejaculation, often, as may be supposed, of the imprecatory kind. Yet he unconsciously betrays his hopes and fears; he is fresh from the thick of the fight, and we perceive that his nerves are still quivering, and that his phrases are glowing with the ardour of the struggle. Hopes and fears are long since faded, and the struggle itself is now but a war of phantoms. Yet, with the help of the “Journal” and contemporary documents, we can revive for the moment the decaying images, and cheat ourselves into the momentary persuasion that the fate of the world depends upon Harley’s success, as we now hold it to depend upon Mr. Gladstone’s.

  His “Journal to Stella” reminds one of Rousseau’s “Confessions.” The points of similarity between the French infidel and the English Dean are not infrequent.

  The “Journal” is almost priceless as a contribution to the literature of the political history of the times, but it possesses a still greater value as a revelation of Swift’s personal character…. The “Journal to Stella” is the key which opens the impassive mask of the satirist, behind which is disclosed the heart of the man who was sensitive to the delicate charm of a romantic passion, who was capable of disinterested acts of kindness, who was swayed by all those varied emotions which make the whole world kin.

  Its gossip, its nonsense, its freshness and ease of style, the tenderness concealed, or half-revealed, in its “little language,” and the illustrations it supplies incidentally of the manners of the court and town, these are some of the charms that make us turn again and again to its pages with ever-increasing pleasure. We enjoy Swift’s egotism and trivialities, as we enjoy the egotism of Pepys or Montaigne, and can imagine the eagerness with which the Letters were read by the lovely woman whose destiny it was to receive everything from Swift save the love which has its consummation in marriage. The style of the “Journal” is not that of an author composing, but of a companion talking; and it is all the more interesting since it reveals Swift’s character under a pleasanter aspect than any of his formal writings. We see in it what a warm heart he had for the friends whom he had once learnt to love, and with what zeal he exerted himself in assisting brother-authors, while receiving little beyond empty praise from ministers himself.

  Some seven years only divide the close of his almanac and the threshold of “The Journal to Stella,” but the gulf between them in attraction is immeasurable. Swift’s diary of two worlds—his own and hers whose letters have unfortunately perished—stands out unique, the most entrancing and the most tragic of all extant journals. It haunts one like a refrain. The mere step in style from the quaint affectations of Pepys and the colourless gravity of Evelyn to Swift’s nervous diction, his terse impetuosity, his repressed fondness, his emphasised hardness, his little pathetic language, his large indignant irony, is the step from still life to breathing, from lecture to literature, from what must always remain ancient to what will never cease to be modern.

Poems

  I heard my father say, that Mr. Elijah Fenton, who was his intimate friend, and had been his master, informed him that Dryden, upon seeing some of Swift’s earliest verses, said to him “Young man, you will never be a poet!”

  Swift, whose muse seems to have been mere misanthropy: he was a cynick rather than a poet; and his natural dryness and sarcastick severity would have been unpleasing had he not qualified them by adopting the extravagant humour of Lucian and Rabelais.

  His verse is only, apparently, distinguished by the accident of measure; it has no quality of poetry, and, like his prose, is remarkable for sense and wit.

  As a poet, Swift’s post is pre-eminent in the sort of poetry which he cultivated. He never attempted any species of composition, in which either the sublime or the pathetic were required of him. But in every department of poetry where wit is necessary, he displayed, as the subject chanced to require, either the blasting lightning of satire, or the lambent and meteor-like coruscations of frolicsome humour.

  His imitations of Horace, and still more his “Verses on his own Death,” place him in the first rank of agreeable moralist in verse. There is not only a dry humour, an exquisite tone of irony, in these productions of his pen, but there is a touching, unpretending pathos, mixed up with the most whimsical and eccentric strokes of pleasantry and satire. His “Description of the Morning in London,” and of a “City Shower,” which were first published in the “Tatler,” are among the most delightful of the contents of that very delightful work. Swift shone as one of the most sensible of the poets; he is also distinguished as one of the most nonsensical of them. No man has written so many lack-a-daisical, slip-shod, tedious, trifling, foolish, fantastical verses as he, which are so little an imputation on the wisdom of the writer; and which, in fact, only show his readiness to oblige others, and to forget himself. He has gone so far as to invent a new stanza of fourteen and sixteen syllable lines for Mary the cookmaid to vent her budget of nothings, and for Mrs. Harris to gossip with the deaf old housekeeper. Oh, when shall we have such another Rector of Laracor!

  Rhyme and rhythm are only business-like tools, which have served him to press and launch his thought; he has put nothing but prose into them: poetry was too fine to be grasped by those coarse hands. But in prosaic subjects, what truth and force! How this masculine nakedness crushes the artificial poetry of Addison and Pope! There are no epithets; he leaves his thought as he conceived it, valuing it for and by itself, needing neither ornaments, nor preparation nor extension; above the tricks of the profession, scholastic conventionalisms, the vanity of the rhymester, the difficulties of the art; master of his subject and of himself. This simplicity and naturalness astonish us in verse. Here, as elsewhere, his originality is entire, and his genius creative; he surpasses his classical and timid age; he tyrannises over form, breaks it, dare utter anything, spares himself no strong word. Acknowledges the greatness of this invention and audacity; he alone is a superior, who finds everything and copies nothing…. He drags poetry not only through the mud, but into the filth; he rolls in it like a raging madman, he enthrones himself in it, and bespatters all passers-by. Compared with his, all foul words are decent and agreeable.

  We can hardly assign a place amongst these canary-birds to the satanic muse of Swift. He was a bird of prey in comparison with them, and threw too much of passion and hatred into the most playful of his verses to be ranked with such singers. But what force and command of language, of metre, and of rhyme! what a mastery of all he touched!

  Swift’s poetry is perfect, exactly as the old Dutch artists were perfect painters. He never attempted to rise above this “visable diurnal sphere.” He is content to lash the frivolities of the age, and to depict its absurdities. In his too faithful representations, there is much to condemn and much to admire. Who has not felt the truth and humour of his “City Shower,” and his description of “Morning?” Or the liveliness of his “Grand Question Debated,” in which the knight, his lady, and the chambermaid, are so admirably drawn?

  Few give themselves the trouble to study his beginnings, and few, therefore, give weight enough to the fact that he made a false start. He, the ground of whose nature was an acrid commonsense, whose eye magnified the canker till it effaced the rose, began as what would now be called a romantic poet. With no mastery of verse, for even the English heroic (a balancing-pole which has enabled so many feebler men to walk the ticklish rope of momentary success) was uneasy to him; he essayed the Cowleian Pindarique, as the adjective was the rightly spelled with a hint of Parisian rather than Theban origin…. He who could not be a poet if he would, angrily resolved that he would not if he could. Full-sail verse was beyond his skill, but he could manage the simpler fore-and-aft rig of Butler’s octosyllabics. As Cowleyism was a trick of seeing everything as it was not, and calling everything something else than it was, he would see things as they were—or as, in his sullen disgust, they seemed to be,—and call them all by their right names with a resentful emphasis. He achieved the naked sincerity of a Hottentot—nay, he even went beyond it in rejecting the feeble compromise of the breech-clout. Not only would he be naked and not ashamed, but everybody else should be so with a blush of conscious exposure, and human nature should be stripped of the hypocritical fig-leaves that betrayed by attempting to hide its identity with the brutes that perish. His sincerity was not unconscious, but self-willed and aggressive. But it would be unjust to overlook that he began with himself.

  Generally careless, often harsh, his versification is seldom laboured; his pen may run till it wearies the reader; but we see no reason in fall of energy why Swift’s Hudibrastic jingle should cease, any more than why the waves of Spenser’s stanza should not roll for ever. The other merits of our author’s verse are those of his prose condensation, pith, always the effect, generally the reality, of sincere purpose, and with few exceptions, simplicity and directness Swift’s tendency to dwell on the meaner, and even the revolting facts of life, pardonable in his prose, is unpardonable in those tributes to Venus Cloacina, in which he intrudes on a lady’s boudoir with the eye of a surgeon fresh from a dissecting-room or an hospital. His society verses are like those of a man writing with his feet, for he delights to trample on what others caress. Often he seems, among singing birds, a vulture screeching over carrion.

  Swift’s originality appears in the very fact that he requires a new class to be made for him. He justified Dryden’s remark in so far as he was never a poet in the sense in which Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley or even Dryden himself were poets. His poetry may be called rhymed prose, and should, perhaps, be put at about the same level in the scale of poetry as “Hudibras.” It differs from prose, not simply in being rhymed, but in that the metrical form seems to be the natural and appropriate mode of utterance.

  As a Poet Swift has hardly been appreciated: he has disgusted many readers by his occasional coarseness: but that he was a real poet, and a master of verse, no one can dispute. What a history was his, of Genius crushed by neglect, at last asserting itself: then going out in the dreary, and dismal, light of Insanity. Strange that with his vast intellect, and great ambition, he should not see that, had he kept his writings within the bounds of decency, and had chosen on the whole more serious topics, he must have ranked among the first of British Poets.

  How admirable also is his poetry—easy, yet never slip-shod! It lacks one quality only—imagination. There is not a fine phrase, a magical line to be found in it such as may occasionally be found in—let us say—Butler. Yet as a whole, Swift is a far more enjoyable poet than Butler. Swift has unhappily written some abominable verses, which ought never to have been set up in type; but the “Legion Club,” the verses on his own death, “Cadenus and Vanessa,” the “Rhapsody on Poetry,” the tremendous lines on the “Day of Judgment,” and many others, all belong to enjoyable poetry, and can never lose their freshness, their charm, their vitality. Amongst the poets of the eighteenth century Swift sits secure, for he can never go out of fashion.

Cadenus and Vanessa, 1726

  Sr,—I have the Favor of y^r Lettr of the 7th instant. As to the Poem you mention, I know severall Copyes of it have been given about, and Ld. L^t. told me he had one. It was written at Windsor near 14 years ago, and dated: It was a Task performed on a Frolick among some Ladyes, and she it was addrest to dyed some time ago in Dublin, and on her Death the Copy shewn by her Executor. I am very indifferent what is done with it, for printing cannot make it more common than it is; and for my own Part, I forget what was in it, but believe it to be onely a cavalier Business, and they who will not give allowances may chuse, and if they intend it maliciously, they will be disappointed, for it was what I expected, long before I left Irel^d—Therefore what you advise me, about printing it my self is impossible, for I never saw it since I writ it, neither if I had, would I use shifts or Arts, let People think of me as they please. Neither do I believe the gravest Character is answerable for a Private humersome thing which by an accident inevitable, and the Baseness of particular Malice is made publick. I have borne a great deal more, and those who will like me less, upon seeing me capable of having writ such a Trifle so many years ago, may think as they please, neither is it agreeable to me to be troubled with such Accounts, when there is no Remedy and onely gives me the ungratefull Task of reflecting on the Baseness of Mankind, which I knew sufficiently before.

  This is thought one of Dr. Swift’s correctest pieces; its chief merit, indeed, is the elegant ease with which a story, but ill conceived in itself, is told.

  The “Cadenus and Vanessa” is, of itself, complete proof that he had in him none of the elements of poetry. It was written when his faculties were in their perfection, and his heart animated with all the tenderness of which it was ever capable—and yet it is as cold and as flat as the ice of Thulé. Though describing a real passion, and a real perplexity, there is not a spark of fire, nor a throb of emotion in it from one end to the other. All the return he makes to the warm-hearted creature who had put her destiny into his hands, consists in a frigid mythological fiction, in which he sets forth, that Venus and the Graces lavished their gifts on her in her infancy, and moreover got Minerva, by a trick, to inspire her with wit and wisdom. The style is mere prose—or rather a string of familiar and vulgar phrases tacked together in rhyme, like the general tissue of his poetry.

  In the walk of satire and familiar poetry, wit and knowledge of mankind, joined to facility of expression, are the principal requisites of excellence, and in these Swift shines unrivalled. Cadenus and Vanessa may be considered as his chief d’œuvres in that class of poems which is not professedly satirical. It is a poem on manners, and, like one of Marmontel’s Contes moraux, traces the progress and circulation of passion, existing between two persons in modern society, contrasted strongly in age, manners, and situation. Yet even here the satirical vein of Swift has predominated. We look in vain for depth of feeling or tenderness of sentiment, although, had such existed in the poet’s mind the circumstances must have called it forth. The mythological fable, which conveys the compliments paid to Vanessa, is as cold as that addressed to Ardelia, or to Miss Floyd. It is in short a kind of poetry which neither affects sublimity nor pathos; but which, in the graceful facility of the poet, unites the acute observation of the observer of human nature, to commemorate the singular contest between Cadenus and Vanessa, as an extraordinary chapter in the history of the mind.

  His best piece, “Cadenus and Vanessa,” is a poor, threadbare allegory.

  That exquisitely graceful and original poem which has made the name of Hester Vanhomrigh deathless. She could there read how Venus, provoked by the complaints which were daily reaching her about the degeneracy of the female sex; resolved to retrieve the reputation of that sex, how, with this object, she called into being a matchless maid, who to every feminine virtue united every feminine grace and charm; how, not content with endowing her paragon to all that is proper to woman, the goddess succeeded by a stratagem in inducing Pallas to bestow on her the choicest of the virtues proper to man; how Pallas, angry at being deceived, consoled herself with the reflection that a being so endowed would be likely little to prove obedient to the goddess who had created her; how Vanessa—for such was the peerless creature’s name—did not for a while belie the expectations of Pallas, but how at last she was attacked by treacherous Cupid in Wisdom’s very stronghold. The flattered girl could then follow in a transparent allegory the whole history of her relation with her friend, sketched so delicately, and at the same time so humorously, that it must have been impossible for her either to take offence or to miss his meaning.

Letters

  Dean Swift’s also are unaffected; and as a proof of their being so, they exhibited his character fully, with all its defects; though it were to be wished, for the honour of his memory, that his epistolary correspondence had not been drained to the dregs, by so many successive publications as have been given to the world.

  Swift’s masculine power is manifest in his letters, for affection, unless the affection of rudeness, came not nigh him. There is, too, in his letters, a sad reality, from the connection with that strange control which his stern nature gained over the affections of two women at the same time; his mysterious marriage with one, and the final heart-breaking of them both.

  Swift’s own letters, however, have the true genius ring. In so far as he came under the spirit of the age, and found himself in correspondence with men who would have shuddered at incorrect syntax or bad logic, they are careful compositions. But he was an exceedingly quick writer; and, as most of his letters are addressed to friends of tried fidelity, they afford us a real insight into the man and his being. They describe his manner of life: they show how the solitary chafed against exile without being able to summon up strength to quit it; and they enable us to trace his gradual decline, from attempted resignation, into a bitterness which no philosophy could soothe.

General

  To Jonathan Swift, the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age, this work is presented by his most humble servant the author.

	O Swift! if fame be life (as well we know
	That bards and heroes have esteem’d it so),
	Thou canst not wholly die. Thy works will shine
	To future times, and life in fame be thine.

  This gentleman has the honour (in common with Rabelais) of being a priest, and like him laughs at every thing. But in my humble opinion, the title of the English Rabelais, which is given the dean, is highly derogatory to his genius…. Dean Swift is Rabelais in his senses, and frequenting the politest company. The former indeed is not so gay as the latter, but then he possesses all the delicacy, the justness, the choice, the good taste, in all which particulars our giggling rural vicar Rabelais is wanting. The poetical numbers of Dean Swift are of a singular and almost inimitable taste; true humour, whether in prose or verse, seems to be his peculiar talent; but whoever is desirous of understanding him perfectly, must visit the island in which he was born.

  The Spectators, though there are so many bad ones among them, make themselves read still. All Addison’s are allowed to be good, and many of Steele’s.—Gulliver was received but indifferently, at first, among us; but pleased much after people had entered more into the humour of it.

  Has stolen all his humour from Cervantes and Rabelais.

  There is just published Swift’s History…. Pope and Lord Bolingbroke always told him it would disgrace him, and persuaded him to burn it. Disgrace him indeed it does,—being a weak libel, ill written for style, uninformed, and adopting the most errant mob stories. He makes the Duke of Marlborough a coward, Prince Eugene an assassin, my father remarkable for nothing but impudence, and would make my Lord Somers anything but the most amiable character in the world, if unfortunately he did not praise him while he tries to abuse.

  His delight was in simplicity…. His style was well suited to his thoughts, which are never subtilised by nice disquisitions, decorated by sparkling conceits, elevated by ambitious sentences, or variegated by far-sought learning…. He always understands himself; and his readers always understand him: the peruser of Swift wants little previous knowledge; it will be sufficient that he is acquainted with common words and common things; he is neither required to mount elevations nor to explore profundities; his passage is always on a level along solid ground, without asperities, without obstruction.

	“Now mark, Serena!” (the mild guide began)
	“The proudest Phantom of the gloomy clan,
	Appointed by this surly Monarch’s grace,
	High-priest of all this Misanthropic race!
	See o’er the crowd a throne of vapour lift
	That strange and motly form, the shade of SWIFT!”
	“Now shalt thou view” (the guardian Sprite pursues)
	“His horrid penance, that each day renews;
	Perchance its terrors may o’erwhelm thy sense,
	But trust my care to bear thee safely hence!”

	Nature imparting her satiric gift,
	Her serious mirth, to Arbuthnot and Swift,
	With droll sobriety they rais’d a smile
	At folly’s cost, themselves unmov’d the while.
	That constellation set, the world in vain
	Must hope to look upon their like again.

  A writer who, with a rich fund of humour, an easy and flowing style, perhaps more correct than that of any of his contemporaries, with habits of observation, and a keen discernment of folly and weakness, was nevertheless ill qualified for this species of composition. His wit was so licentious, that no subject however sacred, and no character however amiable, were safe; his invective has more malignity than virtuous indignation: his characters are drawn in hideous distortion; and perhaps no man ever attempted to ridicule vice or folly with less of the salutary and gentle spirit of correction…. SWIFT’S style was, beyond all precedent, pure and precise, yet void of ornament or grace, and partook in some instances of the pride and dogmatism of its author: nor does his Biographer seem to be aware, that his most incorrect composition is his “Proposal for correcting the English tongue.”

	Peace to Swift’s faults! his wit hath made them pass,
	Unmatch’d by all, save matchless Hudibras!

  Without being distinguished by imagination, subtlety, comprehension, or refinement, he possessed a degree of masterly and correct good sense, almost as rare as genius; if, indeed, we be authorised to withhold the name of genius from so large a measure of any important mental power. Wit was, in him, not so much the effort or the sport of fancy, as the keen edge of that exquisite good sense which laid bare the real ridicule and deformity existing in human life. The distinguishing feature of his moral character was a strong sense of justice, which disposed him to exact with rigour, as well as in general scrupulously to observe, the duties of society. These powerful feelings, exasperated probably by some circumstances of his own life, were gradually formed into an habitual and painful indignation against triumphant wrong, which became the ruling principle of his character and writings. His anger and disgust extended to every physical and moral deformity which human effort could remove; and it cannot be doubted that his severity materially corrected many of them.

  With a quick and sagacious spirit, and a bold and popular manner, he joins an exact knowledge of all the strong and weak parts of every cause he has to manage; and without the least restraint from delicacy, either of taste or of feeling, he seems always to think the most effectual blows the most advisable, and no advantage unlawful that is likely to be successful for the moment. Disregarding all the laws of polished hostility, he uses, at one and the same moment, his sword and his poisoned dagger—his hands, and his teeth, and his envenomed breath,—and does not even scruple, upon occasion, to imitate his own yahoos, by discharging on his unhappy victims a shower of filth, from which neither courage nor dexterity can afford any protection.—Against such an antagonist, it was, of course, at no time very easy to make head; and accordingly his invective seems, for the most part, to have been as much dreaded, and as tremendous as the personal ridicule of Voltaire. Both were inexhaustible, well directed, and unsparing; but even when Voltaire drew blood, he did not mangle the victim, and was only mischievous when Swift was brutal. Any one who will compare the epigrams on M. Franc de Pompignan with those on Tighe or Bettesworth, will easily understand the distinction.

  In Swift’s writings there is a false misanthropy, grounded upon an exclusive contemplation of the vices and follies of mankind, and this misanthropic tone is also disfigured or brutalized by his obtrusion of physical dirt and coarseness…. Swift’s style is, in its line, perfect; the manner is a complete expression of the matter, the terms appropriate, and the artifice concealed. It is simplicity in the true sense of the word.

  It is certainly not difficult to perceive throughout all the writings and conduct of Swift, that his avowed dislike to his species was not such a feeling as could lead him to prefer their unhappiness to their welfare, but was a qualified sentiment arising from a quick sense of their vices, follies, and absurdities, which it was his object to correct by a moral caustic; in the same manner as we may presume that in some of his most indelicate poems, his object was not to disgust his readers, but to recommend that due attention to decency and cleanliness, for which he was himself so remarkable.

  Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco,—the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place.

  The apostate politician, the ribald priest, the perjured lover—a heart burning with hatred against the whole human race—a mind richly stored with images from the dunghill and the lazarhouse.

  Jonathan Swift has been most inappropriately called by Voltaire the English Rabelais. Voltaire relished only the impieties of Rabelais, and his humour, when it is good; but the deep satire on society and man, the lofty philosophy, the grand style, of the curé of Mendon, escaped his notice, as he saw only the weak side of Christianity, and had no idea of the intellectual and moral revolution effected in mankind by the gospel…. The ages in which the two writers lived produce, moreover, a wide difference between them: Rabelais began his language; Swift finished his.

  By far the greatest man of that time, I think, was Jonathan Swift; Dean Swift, a man entirely deprived of his natural nourishment, but of great robustness; of genuine Saxon mind, not without a feeling of reverence, though, from circumstances, it did not awaken in him, for he got unhappily, at the outset, into the Church, not having any vocation for it. It is curious to see him arranging, as it were, a little religion to himself…. He saw himself in a world of confusion and falsehood. No eyes were clearer to see into it than his. He was great from being of acrid temperament: painfully sharp nerves in body as well as soul, for he was constantly ailing, and his mind, at the same time, was soured with indignation at what he saw around him. He took up therefore, what was fittest for him, namely, sarcasm, and he carried it quite to an epic pitch. There is something great and fearful in his irony, for it is not always used for effect, or designedly to depreciate. There seems often to be a sympathy in it with the thing he satirizes; occasionally it was even impossible for him so to laugh at any object without a sympathy with it, a sort of love for it; the same love as Cervantes universally shows for his own objects of merit.

  For the qualities of sheer wit and humour, Swift had no superior, ancient or modern. He had not the poetry of Aristophanes, or the animal spirits of Rabelais; he was not so incessantly witty as Butler; nor did he possess the delicacy of Addison, or the good nature of Steele or Fielding, or the pathos and depth of Sterne; but his wit was perfect, as such; a sheer meeting of the extremes of difference and likeness; and his knowledge of character was unbounded. He knew the humour of great and small, from the king down to the cook-maid.

  Of all men of supereminent genius, Swift appears to have had the least sympathy with what is beautiful, the least enthusiasm for what is sublime. The very force and might of his style consists in its being level, plain, prosaic, logical, and unimaginative. But his taste for images of absolute physical filthiness we believe to be peculiar to him: the physiologist might discover its cause.

  At Court the Doctor had no eyes but for the very greatest. Lord Treasurer and Sir John used to call him Jonathan; and they paid him with this cheap coin for the service they took of him. He writ their lampoons, fought their enemies, flogged and bullied in their service, and, it must be owned, with a consummate skill and fierceness. ’Tis said he hath lost his intellect now, and forgotten his wrongs and his rage against mankind. I have always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of that age. I have read his books (who doth not know them?) here in our calm woods, and imagine a giant to myself as I think of him,—a lonely fallen Prometheus, groaning as the vulture tears him. Prometheus I saw; but, when first I ever had any words with him, the giant stepped out of a sedan-chair in the Poultry, whither he had come with a tipsy Irish servant parading before him, who announced him,—brawling out his Reverence’s name whilst his master below was as yet haggling with his chairmen. I dislike this Mr. Swift…. If the greatest satirist the world ever hath seen had writ against Harley, and not for him, what a history had he left behind of the last years of Queen Anne’s reign! But Swift, that scorned all mankind, and himself not the least of all, had this merit of a faithful partisan, that he loved those chiefs who treated him well, and stuck by Harley bravely in his fall, as he gallantly had supported him in his better fortune.

  It was a stripped, concentred, irresistible force which dwelt in him—fed, too, by unutterable misery; and hence his power, and hence his pollution. He was strong, naked, coarse, savage, and mud-loving, as one of the huge primeval creatures of chaos. Jeffrey’s sense of polish, feeling of elegance and propriety, consciousness of inferiority in most things, and consciousness of superiority in some, all contributed to rouse his ire at Swift; and, unequal as on the whole the match was, the clever Scotchman beat the monster Paddy. One is reminded of Gulliver’s contest with some of the gigantic reptiles and wasps of Brobdingnag. Armed with his hanger, that redoubtable traveler made them resile, or sent them wounded away. And thus the memory of Swift bears Jeffrey’s steel-mark on it, and shall bear it for ever.

  How realistic or materialistic in treatment of his subject is Swift. He describes his fictitious persons as if for the police.

  The best and most perfect specimen of ill-humour.

  Indubitably one of the most robust minds of his age, Swift, in the first place, went wholly along with his age, nay, tore it along with him faster than it could decorously go, in its renunciation of romance and all “the sublimities.” He, a surpliced priest (as Rabelais had also been), a commissioned expositor of things not seen, was an expositor of things not seen; but it was of those that are unseen because they have to be dug for down in the concealing earth, and not of those that fill the upward azure, and tremble by their very nature beyond the sphere of vision. The age for him was still too full of the cant of older beliefs, preserved in the guise of “respectabilities;” and, to help to clear it of this, he would fix its gaze on its own roots, and on the physical roots of human nature in general, down in the disgusting and the reputedly bestial. I say this not in the way of judgment, but of fact. It is what we all know of Swift—they who see good in his merciless method, as well as they who abhor it.

  Swift was neither a Cervantes nor a Rabelais; but yet, with something that was peculiar to himself, he combined considerable portions of both. He had more of Cervantes than Rabelais had, and more of Rabelais than was given to Cervantes. There cannot be claimed for him the refinement, the humanity, the pathos, the noble elevation of the Spaniard—all that irradiates and beautifies his satire and drollery as the blue sky does the earth it bends over; neither, with all his ingenuity and fertility, does our English wit and humorist anywhere display either the same inexhaustible abundance of grotesque invention, or the same gayety and luxuriance of fancy, with the historian of the Doings and Sayings of the Giant Gargantua. Yet neither Cervantes nor Rabelais, nor both combined, could have written “The Tale of a Tub,” or the “Battle of the Books.” The torrent of triumphant merriment is broader and more rushing than anything of the same kind in either.

  Of the intellectual grandeur of his career it is needless to speak. The chief sustainer of an English Ministry, the most powerful advocate of the Peace of Utrecht, the creator of public opinion in Ireland, he has graven his name indelibly in English history, and his writings, of their own kind, are unique in English literature. It has been the misfortune of Pope to produce a number of imitators, who made his versification so hackneyed that they produced a reaction against his poetry in which it is often most unduly underrated. Addison, though always read with pleasure, has lost much of his old supremacy. A deeper criticism, a more nervous and stimulating school of political writers have made much that he wrote appear feeble and superficial, and even in his own style it would be possible to produce passages in the writings of Goldsmith and Lamb that might be compared without disadvantage with the best papers of the “Spectator.” But the position of Swift is unaltered. “Gulliver” and the “Tale of a Tub” remain isolated productions, unrivalled, unimitated, and inimitable.

	Will nothing but from Greece or Rome
	Please me? Is nothing good at home?
	Yes; better; but I look in vain
	For a Molière or La Fontaine.
	Swift, in his humour, was as strong,
	But there was gall upon his tongue.
	Bitters and acids may excite,
	Yet satisfy not appetite.

  As a man of letters, Swift occupies a high place. The testimony on this subject is ample, sometimes generously offered, sometimes unwillingly extorted. As a satirist and a wit, his power was tremendous. He wielded the thunder-bolt that felled to the earth, and the lightning-flash that scathed, and burned, and shrivelled up its victim. Compared with him Junius is feeble…. Swift, too, was an original genius, and no writer was ever less indebted to others, either for the thoughts that he put forward or the style in which he clothed them. And yet few authors were ever less anxious for fame than he: he wrote for an object totally independent of fame, and that object accomplished, he cared little for the means which he had used.

  It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literatures on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind. Unhappily the bit of mother from Swift’s vinegar-barrel has had strength enough to sour all the rest.

  Our greatest English satirist.

  A hedgehog rolling in filth…. Manners of a hangman, the misanthropy of a hypochondriac, and the grin of a tyrant.

  Swift has the style of a surgeon and a judge, cold, grave, solid, unadorned, without vivacity or passion, manly and practical. He desired neither to please, nor divert, nor to carry people away, nor to touch; he never hesitated, nor was redundant, nor was excited, nor made an effort. He expressed his thoughts in a uniform tone, with exact, precise, often harsh terms, with familiar comparisons, levelling all within reach of his hand, even the loftiest things—especially the loftiest—with a brutal and always haughty coldness. He knows life as a banker knows accounts; and his total once made up, he scorns or knocks down the babblers who dispute it in his presence…. He employs the whole force of an excellently armed mind and an excellently tempered character in denying and destroying: all his works are pamphlets.

  There is a remarkable determination of purpose in the style of Swift, with perfect transparency; and these are but the reflexes of the natural man, for these were the prominent features of his character. It will be observed that in his writings we rarely meet with a superfluous epithet…. Swift is the most English, the most thoroughly national in his diction of all our classic writers. On no occasion does he employ an exotic term, if one indigenous to the language be at hand. He is also sparing of connecting particles and introductory phrases and flourishes, using also the simplest forms of construction; and, moreover, he is master of the idiomatic peculiarities, and lurking, unapparent resources of the language to a degree of perfection that leaves him almost without a competitor.

  Taken as a whole, his writings leave upon our minds a wonderful impression of persistent originality, analogical power, effective eloquence, and wit.

  That writer had far too high a genius to be commonly understood. Hence many people abuse him instead of loving him; hence the words, beast, man-hater, foul-tongued fellow, applied to him. But Swift understood himself. In his “Tale of a Tub” and “Gulliver” he penned as fine satires as the world ever saw; but in his verses “On a Lady’s Bedchamber,” and others of the sort, he spoke dirt, and meant to speak dirt, and was too earnest to be satirical.

  In his works look wherever we may—whether those penned in his happiest, or his most diabolical, moods—he seems to us to be wearing a mask, and to be conscious that he is doing so. We do not refer to a mask which either prevents him from seeing the truth, or from going straight at it, in his writings, but a mask over the inner man, with its affections, its desires, and its ambitions. He appears to us to be constantly saying that everything, by which he is surrounded, is a sham, and that he is compelled, also, to follow the same course of false appearance. This absence of sincerity destroyed his happiness, as it does that of humbler men…. Jonathan Swift, though writing upon the gross side of human life, was a writer, nevertheless, who was conscious that he was treading the paths of greatness. Had he always received due encouragement, and had the burden of his life been lightened, there is no knowing of what height he could not have attained in the roll of letters. On the severe and thoroughly caustic side of satire, he has no equal; he is a giant wielding the weapons of ridicule; and had not his existence been so overshadowed by disappointments, it would be hazardous, we repeat, to affirm what triumphs he might not have achieved in English literature. As it is, he enjoys the position of one of its finest and most honored classics.

  One of the immortal of the noblest literature of earth, a master of expression, a satirist unequalled before his day and since, feared by his contemporaries and admired by all subsequent writers, he enriched his native tongue with productions distinguished in the last degree by intellectual force and pungency. But to all after-comers he looms up among the crowd of mediocrities, conspicuous no less for sorrows than for brilliant parts, leading the most bitter of lives, dying the most pathetic of deaths that are recorded in the varied tale of English literary history.

  The small morsel of literature known as “Swift’s Directions to Servants,” has had, and will continue to have, irresistible attractions to the curious and inquiring. Yet it may safely be said that no one can read it without feeling that, in doing so, he has brought on himself one of the minor misfortunes of life—a something that for some indefinite time will haunt him with such horror as a nightmare-dream may inflict on the first thoughts of morning. It is not that the object of the little book is revolting, or, indeed, anything but commendable. It touches upon morals only obliquely in dealing with the smaller affairs of life; but, so far as it goes, its object is to promote virtue. The preceptor is the absolute antithesis of one wallowing in filth, physical or moral. He is a clean man lifting up his testimony against the abominations that gather around to disgust and torture him. He is jeering and scolding a filthy world with all the vehemence of his rhetoric and sarcasm. But the inexorable logic of the form of irony assumed by him, drags him and his reader through every form of the filthy and the odious that poor fallen human nature is liable to suffer under in domestic life.

  His indulgence in revolting images is to some extent an indication of a diseased condition of his mind, perhaps of actual mental decay. Delany says that it grew upon him in his later years, and, very gratuitously, attributes it to Pope’s influence. The peculiarity is the more remarkable, because Swift was a man of the most scrupulous personal cleanliness. He was always enforcing this virtue with special emphasis. He was rigorously observant of decency in ordinary conversation. Delany once saw him “fall into a furious resentment” with Stella for “a very small failure of delicacy.” So far from being habitually coarse, he pushed fastidiousness to the verge of prudery. It is one of the superficial paradoxes of Swift’s character that this very shrinking from filth became perverted into an apparently opposite tendency. In truth, his intense repugnance to certain images led him to use them as the only adequate expression of his savage contempt…. His intensity of loathing leads him to besmear his antagonists with filth. He becomes disgusting in the effort to express his disgust. As his misanthropy deepened he applied the same method to mankind at large.

  And yet what contradictions! What Titanic pride to strive to see things as a god; to dwarf man’s glory or aggrandise his vices with planetary magnifying or diminishing glasses; to distort his features in the concave mirror of the heavens! The Houyhnhnms—Swift’s ideas of moral excellence—are calm, rational, benevolent creatures, devoid of passions: and he himself is devoured by scorn and hate. They have not learnt to say the thing that is not: and Swift does not scruple to print monstrous falsehoods for a party purpose. They are modest and cleanly: and Swift flings ordure in the faces of women and of little children. They have tranquil deaths, towards which they move with resignation: and he makes his exit in a rage.

  Of his ability it is hard to speak too highly.

  Swift’s satire is as enduring as our language, and will in turn delight and chill and terrify mankind so long as books have power. There is something in this satire that is alone and without exact parallel in literature. It is always in terrible earnest. We smile with Thackeray, for we feel that the humourist is ridiculing himself as much as anybody, and is laughing with us while he pretends to anathematize. With Swift it is no laughing matter. He hates and loathes the meannesses and unrealities of life with the fervour of a prophet of old; he denounces them with the Burden of Moab. Weakness and deception do not amuse but enrage him; he does not pity the feeble race that descends to shams and subterfuge, he despises it heartily…. His earnestness is reflected in his style. No English is so pointed and so direct as Swift’s. Every sentence is a keen knife that cuts straight to the core; there is no hesitation or swerving; there is never a word wasted. His sentences follow one another logically and equably, in the order dictated by the subject, without any apparent regard for the graces of expression, nor even, sometimes, for the ordinary rules of grammar.

  In originality and strength he has no superior, and in irony no equal. He had the genius of insult, as Shakespeare of poetry. Unscrupulous sarcasm and vituperation, crushing logic, knowledge of men and life, vehement expression, made him the most formidable pamphleteer that ever lived. He was deficient in refinement of taste and loftiness of imagination, and lacked the nobility of nature to become a true poet, philosopher, or reformer. The grandeurs of the human spirit escaped him. Palpable and familiar objects, common words, common things, were the sources of his inspiration. Several peculiarities contributed to produce his effect—skillful minuteness of narrative; power to give to fiction the air of truth; the habit of expressing sentiments, the most absurd or atrocious, or sober commonplaces; or relating the most ludicrous and extravagant fancies with an invincible gravity. As a man, he is the most tragic figure in our literature.

  Out of his prose, which fills fifteen volumes, only “Gulliver’s Travels,” the “Tale of a Tub,” and the “Journal to Stella,” have enough human interest to keep them fresh for many ages. His remaining works have been likened, not quite unjustly, to a row of rusty cannon in an old armoury. Once resistless to beat down and break in pieces, they move us now only by the faint remembrance of the havoc which they have made. Yet we must own that in controversy Swift was at home, and that the pamphlet was a form of expression well suited to his genius. Few men have joined so clear an intellect to a temper so combative. Fewer still who have felt such an agony of angry passion have been able to subdue it to an irony so grave and austere. Since Swift wrote, thousands of able men have used the pen as a weapon of political warfare, and a half-a-dozen of them have become famous. But which of the half-dozen shall we place even second to Swift? Compared with Swift, Junius is a commonplace rhetorician, Cobbett a sturdy clown, Sydney Smith a monotonous humourist…. He wrote his political pieces not with the left hand but with the right; and it was the right hand of Achilles.

  Swift is the one figure of colossal proportions in the age to which he belonged. Nay, we may go further. Among men whose fame depends mainly on their writings, there is, if we except Aristotle, Shakespeare, and perhaps Bacon, probably no man on record who impresses us with a sense of such enormous intellectual power. He has always the air of a giant sporting among pigmies, crushing or scrutinising, helping or thwarting them, as the mood takes him. Immense strength, immense energy, now frittering themselves away on trifles, now roused for a moment to concentrated action by passion, interest, or benevolence, but never assuming their true proportions, never developing into full activity—this is what we discern in Swift. We feel how miserably incommensurate was the part he played with the part which Nature had fitted him to play, how contracted was the stage, how mighty the capacities of the actor. In his pamphlets, in his two great satires, in his poems, in his correspondence, is the impression of a character which there is no mistaking. And it is not among philosophers, poets, and men of letters that we are to look for its analogy, but among those who have made and unmade nations—among men like Cæsar and men like Napoleon…. What figure in that eighteenth century of time is not dwarfed beside this Momus-Prometheus?… He was in temper all that Pindar symbolises in Typhon, and all that revolts Plato in the inharmonious and unmusical soul. And so, while his writings bear the impress of powers such as have rarely been conceded to man, they reflect and return with repulsive fidelity the ugliness and discord of the Titanism which inspired them. Without reverence and without reticence, he gloried in the licence which to the Greeks constituted the last offence against good taste and good sense, and out of the indulgence in which they have coined a synonym of shamelessness—the indiscriminate expression of what ought and what ought not to be said.

  There are few figures in history, and still fewer in literature, which have occupied so great a place in the world’s attention, or which retain so strong a hold upon its interests, as that of Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s.

  It may well be doubted whether in absolute command over language, any English prose author has ever equalled Swift. His style defies description or classification. It lends itself less than any, to imitation or to parody. It varies according to every mood. Its lucid simplicity is so perfect that its phrases once read, seemed to be only the natural utterances of careless thought, produced effort and without art. Its very neglect of rule, and its frequent defiance of grammatical regularity, help to give to it force and directness. But such a style refuses to transmit the secret of its power, and must needs remain unique and solitary in its kind.

  He was a misanthrope, with deep, though very limited affections, a man frugal to eccentricity, with a benevolence at once active and extensive. His powerful intellect compels our admiration, if not our sympathy. His irony, his genius for satire and humour, his argumentative skill, his language, which is never wanting in strength, and is as clear as the most pellucid of mountain streams—these gifts are of so rare an order, that Swift’s place in the literary history of his age must be always one of high eminence. Doubtless, as a master of style, he has been sometimes overpraised. If we regard the writer’s end, it must be admitted that his language is admirably fitted for that end. What more then, it may be asked, can be needed? The reply is, that in composition, as in other things, there are different orders of excellence. The kind, although perfect, may be a low kind, and Swift’s style wants the “sweetness and light,” to quote a phrase of his own, which distinguish our greatest prose writers. It lacks also the elevation which inspires, and the persuasiveness that convinces while it charms. With infinitely more vigour than Addison, Swift, apart from his Letters, has none of Addison’s attractiveness. No style, perhaps, is better fitted to exhibit scorn and contempt; but its author cannot express, because he does not possess, the sense of beauty.

  No fouler pen than Swift’s has soiled our literature. His language is horrible from first to last. He is full of odious images, of base and abominable allusions. It would be a labour of Hercules to cleanse his pages. His love-letters are defaced by his incurable coarseness. This habit of his is so inveterate that it seems a miracle he kept his sermons free from his blackguard phrases. It is a question not of morality, but of decency, whether it is becoming to sit in the same room with the works of this divine. How the good Sir Walter ever managed to see him through the press is amazing…. There are, we know, those in whose nature there is too much of the milk of human kindness to enable them to enjoy Swift when he shows his teeth; but however this may be, we confess, if we are to read at all, we must prefer Swift’s “Beasts’ Confession” to all the sixty-five fables of Gay put together.

  Swift’s irony, unsurpassable as it is, is cruel to excess, and has little that is Irish about it.

  The unity of Swift’s paragraphs is usually all that could be desired. Now and then, however, a paragraph will be so long as to obliterate, apparently, any sign of topic. These rare paragraphs are almost inexplicable when compared with his usual sections. Professor Cesare Lombroso would, I fear, find the eccentricity of madness in them, as he did in the inversions of the Dean’s conversation. Swift’s command of proportion by paragraph punctuation is small. It is noticeable that the proportion of very short sentences (sentences under 15 words) is not large—6.3 per cent. in the “Tale of a Tub,” 6.4 per cent. in “Gulliver.” The average of the sentence is constant, in works separated even by 28 years: the three books mentioned show a variation of less than a whole word in sentence average, though the paragraph-averages of different books differ enormously. The superb coherence and emphasis of Swift’s style are due largely to the straightforward, logical order of the thought, and the skilful placing of important words at the end of a sentence or paragraph. Swift is the first author to show in the paragraph much of what Wendell calls Mass. His sentences often fall at the close like taps of a steam-hammer, and sometimes the taps seem concentrated in one great blow at the end of the paragraph.

  Swift lacked diplomacy. When matters did not seem to progress he grew wrathful, seized his pen and stabbed with it. But as he wrote, the ludicrousness of the whole situation came over him and instead of cursing plain curses, he held his adversary up to ridicule. And this ridicule is so active, the scorn so mixed with wit, the shafts so finely feathered with truth, that it is the admiration of mankind. Vitriol mixed with ink is volatile. Then what? We just run Swift through a coarse sieve to take out the lumps of seventeen century refuse and then we give him to children to make them laugh. Surely no better use can be made of pessimists.

  It is, indeed, a long and not a very easy inquiry to determine the exact sources of the peculiar charmed sway which he exercises over the best minds; but they may be generally indicated as the combination in him of the wildest and most playful comedy with the sternest tragedy; of a grasp and comprehension of human folly, weakness, baseness, madness, which no man has ever excelled; of an unobtrusive but astonishingly perfect prose style suitable alike for argument, for narrative, for exposition, for invective, for light conversation and talk, and of a most strangely blended character.

  Was the keenest of political partisans, for his fierce and earnest personality made everything he did impassioned. But he was far more than a partisan. He was the most original prose writer of his time—the man of genius among many men of talent.

  While it is undeniable that Swift’s humour is generally devoid of any touch of sympathy, there is no author of whom it can be more confidently said that he never obtrudes his art…. He could easily sustain his style for any time at the same pitch, he could always closely accommodate his manner to his matter, and he could convey his ideas clearly and forcibly without distracting the reader’s attention to the excellence of their vehicle of expression. Yet, great as were his powers of shrewd penetration into character, Swift wanted the lighter graces necessary to the essayist. He loved to wage war on man rather than to instruct him, and used wit not to “enliven morality” but to increase the venom of his sting. The Laputans were attended by flappers who awaked them from their day-dreams by gently striking them with a bladder. As contrasted with Swift’s method, the methods of Steele and Addison are equally gentle, and yet, as an instrument of social and literary reform the laugh of Steele or the raillery of Addison was far more potent than the loaded bludgeon of Swift.

  Swift was a bundle of paradoxes—a great churchman who has left not a trace on our ecclesiastical system, an ardent politician who was never more than a fly on the wheel. He is immortal on the one side on which he believes his genius ephemeral; he survives solely, but splendidly, as a man of letters…. Swift is the typical instance of the powerlessness of pure intellect to secure any but intellectual triumphs. But even the victories of his brain were tainted; his genius left a taste of brass on his own palate…. With no apprenticeship in style, no relation of discipleship to any previous French or English writer, but steeped in the Latin classics, he produced, at the age of thirty, two of the most extraordinary masterpieces of humour and satire which were ever written, the “Tale of a Tub” and the “Battle of the Books.”

  Swift is perhaps the one supreme example of the pamphleteer, and his pamphlets satisfy the characteristic requirements of the form, as the earlier tracts of a time when prose moved less easily could not do.

  In spite of his failure to realise many of the Christian virtues, Swift’s churchmanship amounted to a genuine passion, without being, as his biographer tells us, “either intolerant or tantivy.” His Argument against the abolishing of Christianity brings us face to face with the Deistic movement, which, though it died out before the middle of the century, yet had a curiously lasting effect upon religion in England by virtue of the utilitarian spirit which it helped to engender among the leading Christian apologists, of which spirit Swift’s humorous Argument might almost seem to be a deliberate parody.

  Swift, indeed, cannot be imitated. It would be as hopeful to imitate Pindar. His humour is profound; but it is savage, unholy, and unclean. His style is clear, racy, and powerful; but it offers no points for the aspiring essayist. Its perfection is, if not uninteresting, at least uninstructive.

  Here is a temper cynical, bitter, often almost revolting; yet here again is a most astonishing power in the man to utter himself, and so a style which, with worldwide differences from Addison’s, is equally admirable. It is a naked, brawny, almost brutally frank English; but it is Jonathan Swift speaking right on. The ultimate rank of Swift’s writings must be measured principally by the permanent value of his truth and the permanent power of his emotion; but his style could hardly be better.