body of his multifarious knowledge concerning foreign countries, foreign trade, and foreign adventures, by sea and by land.

It is worthy of remark that he observes the cardinal rule of description, the inaugural presentation of a comprehensive view. He fills in the picture by degrees, but he begins by drawing the general outline. One of the first things that Robinson Crusoe does is to go to the top of a hill and view the country:—

"After I had with great labour and difficulty got to the top, I saw my fate, to my great affliction, viz., that I was in an island environed every way with the sea, no land to be seen except some rocks, which lay a great way off, and two small islands, less than this, which lay about three leagues to the west. I found also that the island I was in was barren, and, as I saw good reason to believe, uninhabited, except by wild beasts, of whom, however, I saw none."

Another thing worth observing in his descriptions is that he has a Herodotean knack of giving numerical measures of extent, and of indicating the lie of a country by a reference to the points of the compass. This is one of his arts for giving an air of reality

to his narratives.

The Narrative art of so successful a story-teller as Defoe deserves careful study. He chooses the simplest form of narration, the record by an individual of incidents that have happened within his personal knowledge. His narratives are all autobiographical. In his 'Memoirs of a Cavalier,' and others of his works, he mingles general accounts of public transactions that the Cavalier took part in with the narrative of personal adventures; but it is in the narrative of personal adventures that the interest of the work consists.

The question arises, Does he show any art beyond the accumulation of interesting incidents: does he show skill in the order of presenting them? Apart from the question of interest, which, it is superfluous to say, Defoe sustains with unique power, his narrative is eminently perspicuous. He has, to be sure, no complicated difficulties to overcome, but he observes all the conditions of perspicuity for the simple forms of narrative that he professes: when he shifts the scene, he gives the reader distinct intimation of the change; when new agents are introduced, their appearance is expressly announced; and he does not depart from the order of events without an apology and ample explanation. And as he is tolerably exact in his measurement of space, so he is tolerably exact in his measurement of time: the assigning of definite dates also helps to keep up the air of reality. We have mentioned these various items of lucidity without qualification: it should be added, that though Defoe observes these conditions in the main, his nar

ratives were for the most part written hurriedly, and the close reader finds an occasional confusion.

For popular Exposition, apart from his general felicity of language, Defoe had two strong cards: a multifarious, and, comparatively speaking, inexhaustible command of examples and comparisons. His Complete English Tradesman' is a manual of advice that still finds readers.

JONATHAN SWIFT, 1667-1745.

The author of 'Gulliver's Travels,' the eccentric Dean of St Patrick's in Ireland, has been all but universally acknowledged as the most vigorous and grammatical writer of English anterior to Johnson.

He was born in Dublin, the posthumous son of Jonathan Swift, a native of Yorkshire, said to be second cousin to the poet Dryden; and was educated by the charity of an uncle at the school of Kilkenny, and at Trinity College, Dublin. He entered the world, at the age of twenty-one, as private secretary to Sir William Temple, who had married a relative of his mother. This post he held, with a brief interval, for eleven years, remaining in the Moor Park family till the death of Sir William in 1699. Again thrown on his own resources, he was for a short time chaplain in the family of Lord Berkeley, and from him obtained in 1700 the livings of Laracor and Rathbeggin in the diocese of Meath. rose to no higher preferment till made Dean of St Patrick's by his Tory friends in 1713.

He

Like other literary men of the time, he took an interest in politics, and wrote with a political aim. His first publication, 'Dissensions in Athens and Rome,' appeared in 1701, when the author was thirty-four years of age: it relates the evil consequences of dissensions between Nobles and Commons in the ancient states, and points a moral against the quarrelsome behaviour of the English Commons. The anonymous Tale of a Tub,'-a satire on religious dissensions and the self-sufficiency of the different Churches, filled out with numerous satirical digressions on various subjects, was written about 1696, and first published in 1704. Along with the 'Tale of a Tub' appeared 'The Battle of the Books-a burlesque on Temple's opponents in the Ancient versus Modern controversy. In 1708 he took a leading place among the wits by his ridicule of John Partridge, the Philomath or Astrologer. This performance made the name of Isaac Bickerstaff one of the most popular in town, for which reason it was assumed by Steele when he began the 'Tatler.' From 1710 to 1714, the four last years of Queen Anne's reign, he was the chief

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 trag ical. 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. 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 contradiction 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.

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his

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 own schemes for the good of the party interested. As a clergyman, discharging his duties with punctuality," his ruïng 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. In 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.

,

Opinions.-Macaulay brands our author as "an apostate politi-" cian.' 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.