literary support of the Tory Administration, writing the 'Conduct of the Allies,' the 'Letter to the October Club,' the 'Examiner,' and other telling compositions. His 'Journal to Stella' was written during his residence in London at this period. When George came to the throne, and the power of government passed to the Whigs, he retired to his Irish deanery. Ten years thereafter he made a great sensation in the political world, and gained unexampled popularity in Ireland, by his 'Drapier's Letters,' written against Wood's patent for a copper coinage. The letters raised such a commotion that the patent had to be revoked. 'Gulliver's Travels' was published in 1726-27, and "was received with such avidity that the price of the first edition was raised before the second could be made."

Swift's relations with Stella and Vanessa-Miss Johnson and Miss Vanhomrigh-are too complicated to be here entered upon at length. Stella passed as a daughter of Sir William Temple's steward, but was believed to be the natural daughter of Sir William himself. When Swift went to Ireland he persuaded her to come and live near him under the charge of Mrs Dingley, kept up with her all the intimacy of a Platonic friendship, and latterly was united to her by a private marriage, though the connection was for some reason or other never publicly acknowledged. His relations with Miss Vanhomrigh were less mysterious, but more tragical. As her literary tutor, he suffered or encouraged her to fall passionately in love with him. Warm-hearted and impetuous, she made him an offer of marriage; and when he equivocated and urged delay, she threw reserve aside, and pursued the unusual suit with warm entreaty and argument. She died of a broken heart, on discovering the Dean's intimacy with Stella.

Swift is described by Sir Walter Scott as "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."

It needed considerable constitutional strength to support the astonishing force of his character; yet there would seem to have been some radical disorder in his system. From our earliest records of his behaviour, he was excessively irritable, at times even savagely so. He could not endure to accommodate himself to people; he either gloomily held his tongue, or overbore opposition with fierce impatience. We can hardly explain this without supposing some radical distemper; it may have been the uneasy beginnings of the brain disease that afterwards unhinged his

reason.

Taken as a whole, his writings leave upon our minds a wonder.

ful impression of persistent originality, analogical power, effective eloquence, and wit. We feel his originality most vividly when we compare his works with the works of writers less powerful or less persistently concentrated; when, for example, we compare his Tale of a Tub' with Defoe's 'Shortest Way with Dissenters,' or his 'Gulliver's Travels' with Defoe's 'Voyage to the Moon.' Defoe's performances have the originality of first thoughts dashed off hastily originality, as it were, of the first remove. Swift's performances appear as the outcome of strong powers working up to a high ideal; remodelling first thoughts and still remaining unsatisfied; climbing, stage after stage, to a transcendently imposing altitude above the common level. A man with his quickness of thought would probably find some ludicrous parallel upon the first endeavour; but he was not content until he had discovered a parallel that should be supremely ludicrous. The surprising persistence and power of his efforts appears not less in the quantity than in the quality of his analogies. In the Tale of a Tub' and in 'Gulliver's Travels,' the multitude as well as the aptness of the parallels between the imaginary narrative and the facts allegorised are absolutely unrivalled among works of that nature, and could have been conceived only by the greatest powers at the maximum of intense concentration. He was famous for quick flashes of extempore wit; in an age of brilliant talkers, he held one of the highest places. But the requirements for his sustained compositions embraced something over and above this: Gulliver's Travels' needed steady application as well as quickness of analogical energy. There were men in the Queen Anne period that held their own with Swift in the social interchange of wit, as there were men more delicate in criticism and more sagacious in statecraft; but he stood alone in the rare combination of subtle wit with demoniac perseverance.

In some of his writings he displays intense feeling; we read hardly a page without encountering some stroke of passion. Strong egotism is more or less involved in all his emotional manifestations. He was, as we have said, savagely impatient of the slightest contradiction. If either a person or an institution jarred with his notions of what it ought to be or ought to do, his rage was instantaneous and irrepressible.1 In his Journal to Stella, indeed, he expressed himself with the most passionate fondness. But this was not inconsistent with the irritable egotism that elsewhere displayed itself as the ruling passion of his nature. It was, indeed, an outcome of the same passion in an allotropic form: intense affection for an intimate companion is describable as an

1 The gross violations of decency in his writings are referable to the same intense egotism; he delighted to shock conventional notions, and to brave con tradiction or rebuke.

expanded egotism. While Swift was in London, Stella was to him an alter ego, another self; there were none of the irritations of actual companionship to break the flow of his tenderness.

His conduct both in public and in private was determined by imperious irritable pride. He was immoderately fond of the exercise of power, and ungovernably restless under authority. He must have his own way for the moment, come what would. He has not been proved guilty of mean selfishness or of malice. On the contrary, he showed himself on several occasions publicspirited and charitable. But both his public spirit and his charity were to this extent egotistic that he insisted dictatorially upon his own schemes for the good of the party interested. As a clergyman, "discharging his duties with punctuality," his ruling passion came out in dictatorial schemes for improving the condition of his parishioners, and savage contempt for the idleness and overpopulating fecundity that marred his plans. During his four years' importance at Court, he is described as lording it over the highest officers of state, treating them with the air of a patron, affecting rather to dictate than advise." In private company, though esteemed the greatest wit of the age, he behaved at times with the same rude imperiousness. A story is told of his peremptorily bidding Lady Burlington "sing him a song," and, when she refused, threatening to make her sing when he bade her. the rampant moments of this towering egotism, he was blind to every other interest. When he suspected his patron Lord Berkeley, and Berkeley's secretary, Bushe, of playing false to him in the matter of a clerical presentation, he left their presence in a fury, crying- "God confound you both for a couple of scoundrels!" When his butler, who copied the Drapier Letters, seemed to presume upon his knowledge of the terrible secret, he dismissed the man with "Do the worst you dare, sir!"—an infuriated braving of consequences which it would be hard to parallel.

In

Opinions.-Macaulay brands our author as "an apostate politician." He coquetted with the Whigs, it is said, and went over to the Tories when the Whig leaders showed an imperfect respect for his powers. It is not pretended that he ever wrote for the Whigs, or ever received favours from them. In his choice of a party he probably was determined not a little by personal feelings and his natural love of opposition.

His religious sincerity has been questioned. The presumptions are drawn solely from the satirical and gross tone of his writings. Macaulay terms him "a ribald priest." Against the presumptions thus derived is the fact that he is often sarcastic with disbelievers in Christianity. His 'Tale of a Tub' supports the Church of England against Papist and Presbyterian.

We may quote one or two of his "Thoughts on various subjects":

"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love, one another."

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'When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it; when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad side."

"The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes."

"The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former."

"All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of next year's revenue.

"Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation to posterity, let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know."

“A very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.'

'Matrimony has many children; Repentance, Discord, Poverty, Jealousy, Sickness, Spleen, Loathing," &c.

In his letter to a Young Clergyman, he gives the following advice:

"I should likewise have been glad if you had applied yourself a little more to the study of the English language than I fear you have done; the neglect whereof is one of the most general defects among the scholars of this kingdom, who seem not to have the least conception of a style, but run on in a flat kind of phraseology, often mingled with barbarous terms and expressions peculiar to the nation. Proper words in proper places

make the true definition of a style."

ELEMENTS OF STYLE.

Vocabulary.-Swift's mastery of the language for purposes of ridicule is universally allowed to be unsurpassed. His range is indeed somewhat too wide for ordinary tastes; in the process of debasing and defiling," he sometimes condescends to use the language of the brothel. The propensity to shock decorum cost him the favour of Queen Anne and a bishopric.

His diction is praised for its grammatical purity. We have just seen that he was particular about not using barbarous terms. "He studied purity; and though perhaps all his strictures" [his syntax] "are not exact, yet it is not often that solecisms can be found; and whoever depends on his authority, may generally conclude himself safe."

Sentences and Paragraphs.-In point of syntax, our author is so much more correct than any writer before Johnson that he sometimes gets the credit of establishing modern grammar. Doubtless he profited greatly by his residence with the finically studious Temple. If his syntax is more uniformly correct than Temple's,

he certainly owes to Temple the habit of being particular in this matter. We can distinctly trace his master's influence in the finished compacting of his sentences.

It is matter of praise that no other peculiarity calls for special remark. He is neither strikingly periodic, nor strikingly loose, nor strikingly pointed. His education under Temple taught him the period and point; his natural love of simplicity kept him from pushing these forms to an extreme. The consequence is, that the reader's attention is not specially drawn to any one form, which is so far the perfection of sentence style. Farther, with his natural clearness, he is fairly attentive to the placing of words, and to the unity of his sentences.

From Temple also he learned to study method, both in the general arrangement of a discourse and in the disposition of paragraphs. Almost vehemently anxious to be followed and understood, he is explicit in referring us to what has been said, what is to come, and what is the connection of one thing with another.

One of his paragraph arts deserves to be exemplified. He often, but not obtrusively often, reserves a telling point for the end. This art is seen in the three following paragraphs from his letter of advice to a Young Lady on her marriage :—

"I must likewise warn you strictly against the least degree of fondness to your husband before any witness whatsoever, even before your nearest relations, or the very maids of your chamber. This proceeding is so exceeding odious and disgustful to all who have either good breeding or good sense, that they assign two very unamiable reasons for it; the one is gross hypoc risy, and the other has too bad a name to mention. If there is any difference to be made, your husband is the lowest person in company either at home or abroad, and every gentleman present has a better claim to all marks of civility and distinction from you. Conceal your esteem and love in your own breast, and reserve your kind looks and language for private hours; which are so many in the four-and-twenty, that they will afford time to employ a passion as exalted as any that was ever described in a French

romance.

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Upon this head I should likewise advise you to differ in practice from those ladies who affect abundance of uneasiness while their husbands are abroad; start with every knock at the door, and ring the bell incessantly for the servants to let in their master; will not eat a bit of dinner or supper if the husband happens to stay out; and receive him at his return with such a medley of chiding and kindness, and catechising him where he has been, that a shrew from Billingsgate would be a more easy and eligible companion. "Of the same leaven are those wives who, when their husbands are gone a journey, must have a letter every post, upon pain of fits and hysterics; and a day must be fixed for their return home, without the least allowance for business, or sickness, or accidents, or weather; upon which I can only say that in my observation those ladies who are apt to make the greatest chatter on such occasions, would liberally have paid a messenger for bringing them news that their husbands had broken their necks on the road."

Figures of Speech-Similitudes. -No general statement can be