CONTENTS. (continued 4)

How ill-requited Dryden was for these services appears but too clearly from evidence proving that, at this time, he was in great pecuniary difficulties. At the time when the king’s cast-off mistresses were receiving pensions of 10,000l. a-year, and when 130,000l. or more was squandered every year on secret court-purposes, Dryden’s salary as laureate remained unpaid for four years; and when, in consequence of his repeated solicitations, an order for part-payment of the arrears was at last issued in May 1684, it was for the miserable pittance of one quarter’s salary, due at midsummer 1680, leaving fifteen quarters, or 750l. still in arrears. It appears, however, from a document published for the first time by Mr. Bell, that an additional pension of 100l. a-year was at this time conferred on Dryden—that pension to date retrospectively from 1680, and the arrears to be paid, as convenient, along with the larger arrears of salary. How far Dryden benefited by this nominal increase of his emoluments from government, or whether any further portion of the arrears was paid up while Charles continued on the throne, can hardly be ascertained. Charles died in February, 1684-5, and Dryden, as in duty bound, wrote his funeral panegyric. In this Pindaric, which is entitled Threnodia Augustalis, the poet seems to hint, as delicately as the occasion would permit, at the limited extent of his pecuniary obligations to the deceased monarch.

If there was any literary man in whose favour James II., on his accession, might have been expected to relax his parsimonious habits, it was Dryden. The poet had praised him and made a hero of him for twenty years, and had during the last four years been working for him incessantly. In acknowledgment of these services, James could not do otherwise than continue him in the laureateship; but this was all that he seemed inclined to do. In the new patent issued for the purpose, not only was there no renewal of the deceased king’s private grant of 100l. a-year, but even the annual butt of sherry, hitherto forming part of the laureate’s allowance, was discontinued, and the salary limited to the precise money payment of 200l. a-year. If, as is probable, the salary was now more punctually paid than it had been under Charles, the reduction may have been of less consequence. In March 1685-6, however, James opened his purse, and, by fresh letters patent, conferred on Dryden a permanent additional salary of 100l. a-year, thus raising the annual income of the laureateship to 300l. The explanation of this unusual piece of liberality on the part of James has been generally supposed to lie in the fact that, in the course of the preceding year, Dryden had proved the thorough and unstinted character of his loyalty by declaring himself a convert to the king’s religion. That Dryden’s passing over to the Catholic church was contemporaneous with the increase of his pension is a fact; but what may have been the exact relation between the two events is a question which one ought to be cautious in answering. Lord Macaulay’s view of the case is harsh enough. “Finding,” he says, “that, if he continued to call himself a Protestant, his services would be overlooked, he declared himself a Papist. The king’s parsimony instantly relaxed Dryden was gratified with a pension of one hundred pounds a-year, and was employed to defend his new religion both in prose and verse.” Sir Walter Scott’s view is more charitable, and, we believe, more just. He regards Dryden’s conversion as having been, in the main, honest to the extent professed by himself, though his situation and expectations may have co-operated to effect it. In support of this view Mr. Bell points out the fact that the pension granted by James was, after all, only a renewal of a pension granted by Charles, and which, not being secured by letters patent, had lapsed on that king’s decease. Dryden, it is also to be remarked, remained sufficiently staunch to his new faith during the rest of his life, and seems even to have felt a kind of comfort in it. Probably, therefore, the true state of the case is that conformity to the Catholic religion, at the time when Dryden embraced it, was the least troublesome mode of systematizing for his own mind a number of diverse speculations, personal and political, that were then perplexing him, and that, afterwards, in consequence of the very obloquy which his change of religion drew upon him from all quarters, he hugged his new creed more closely, so as to coil round him, for the first time in his life, a few threads of private theological conviction. This is not very different from the notion entertained by Sir Walter Scott, who argues that Dryden’s conversion was not, except in outward profession, a change from Protestant to Catholic belief, but rather, like that of Gibbon, a choice of Catholicism as the most convenient resting-place for a mind tired of Pyrrhonism, and disposed to cut short the process of emancipation from it by taking a decisive step at once.

At all events, Dryden showed sufficient polemical energy in the service of the religion which he had adopted. He became James’s literary factotum, the defender in prose and in verse of the worst measures of his rule; and he was ready to do battle with Stillingfleet, Burnet, or anyone else that dared to use a pen on the other side. As if to make the highest display of his powers as a versifier at a time when his character as a man was lowest, he published in 1687 his controversial allegory of The Hind and the Panther, by far the largest and most elaborate of his original poems. In this poem, in which the various churches and sects of the day figure as beasts—the Church of Rome as a “milk-white hind,” innocent and unchanged; the Church of England as a “panther,” spotted, but still beautiful; Presbyterianism as a haggard ugly “wolf;” Independency as the “bloody bear;” the Baptists as the “bristled boar;” the Unitarians as the “false fox;” the Freethinkers as the “buffoon ape;” and the Quakers as the timid “hare”—Dryden showed that, whatever his new faith had done for him, it had not changed his genius for satire. In fact, precisely as during James’s reign Dryden appears personally as a solitary giant, warring on the wrong side, so this poem remains as the sole literary work of any excellence in which the wretched spirit of that reign is fully represented. Dryden himself, as if he had thrown all his force into it, wrote little else in verse till the year 1688, when, on the occasion of the birth of James’s son, afterwards the Pretender, he made himself the spokesman of the exulting Catholics, and published his Britannia Rediviva.

Within a few months after these lines were written, the father, the mother, and the baby, were out of England, Dutch William was king, and the Whigs had it all to themselves. Dryden, of course, had to give up the laureateship; and, as William had but a small choice of poets, Shadwell was put in his place.

The concluding period of Dryden’s career, extending from the Revolution to his death in 1701, exhibits him as a Tory patriarch lingering in the midst of a Whig generation, and still, despite the change of dynasty, retaining his literary pre-eminence. For a while, of course, he was under a cloud; but after it had passed away he was at liberty to make his own terms with the public. The country could have no literature except what he and such as he chose to furnish. Locke, Sir William Temple, and others, indeed, were now in a position to bring forward speculations smothered during the previous reigns, and to scatter seeds that might spring up in new literary forms. Burnet, Tillotson, and others might represent Whiggism in the Church. But all the especially literary men whose services were available at the beginning of the new reign were men who, whatever might be their voluntary relations to the new order of things, had been more or less trained in the school of the Restoration, and accustomed to the supremacy of Dryden. The Earl of Rochester, the Earl of Roscommon, the Duke of Buckingham, Etherege, and poor Otway, were dead; but Shadwell, Settle, Lee, Crowne, Tate, Wycherley, the Earl of Dorset, Tom D’Urfey, and Sir Charles Sedley, were still alive. Shadwell, coarse and fat as ever, enjoyed the laureateship till his death in 1692, when Nahum Tate was appointed to succeed him. Settle had degenerated in the City showman. Lee, liberated from Bedlam, continued to write tragedies till April 1692, when he tumbled over a bulk going home drunk at night through Clare Market, and was killed or stifled among the snow. “Little starched Johnny Crowne” kept up the respectability of his character. Wycherley lived as a man of fashion about town, and wrote no more. Sedley and the Earl of Dorset were also idle; and Tom D’Urfey made small witticisms, and called them “pills to purge melancholy.” Among such men Dryden, so long as he cared to be seen among them, held necessarily his old place. Nor were there any of the younger men, as yet known, in whom the critics recognised, or who recognised in themselves, any title to renounce allegiance to the ex-laureate. Thomas Southerne had begun his prolific career as a dramatist in 1682, when Dryden furnished him with a prologue to his first play; but, though after the Revolution he made more money by his dramas than ever Dryden had made by his, he was ashamed to admit the fact to Dryden himself. Matthew Prior, twenty-four years of age at the Revolution, had made his first literary appearance before it, in no less important a character than that of one of Dryden’s political antagonists; but, though The Town and Country Mouse had been a decided hit, and Dryden himself was said to have winced under it, no one pretended that the author was anything more than a clever young man who had sat in Dryden’s company and turned his opportunities to account. Five years after the Revolution, Congreve produced his first comedy at the age of twenty-four; but it was Congreve’s greatest boast in after life that that comedy had won him the warm praises of Dryden, and laid the foundation of the extraordinary friendship which subsisted between them during Dryden’s last years, when they used to walk together and dine together as father and son. During these last years Dryden, had he been willing to see merit in any other comedies than those of his young friend Congreve, might have hailed his equal in Vanbrugh, and his superior in Farquhar, then beginning to write for the stage. Among their coevals, destined to some distinction, he might have marked Colley Cibber, Nicholas Rowe, and John Philips, the pleasing parodist of Milton. Of the epics of Blackmore he had quite enough, at least three of those performances having been given to the world before Dryden died. At the time of Dryden’s death his kinsman, Jonathan Swift, was thirty-three years of age; Richard Steele was thirty; Daniel Defoe was thirty; Addison was twenty-nine; Shaftesbury, the essayist, was twenty-nine; Bolingbroke was twenty-two; and Parnell, the poet, twenty-one. With these men a new literary movement was to take its origin; but they had hardly yet begun their work; and there was not one of them, Swift excepted, that would not, in the height of his subsequent fame, have been proud to acknowledge his obligations to Dryden. Alexander Pope, the next Englishman that was to take a place in general literature as high as that occupied by Dryden, had been born only in the year of the Revolution, and was consequently but a precocious boy of thirteen when Dryden left the scene. Virgilium tantum vidit, as he used himself to say.

Living, a hale patriarch, among these newer men, Dryden partly influenced them, and was partly influenced by them. On the one hand, it was from his chair in Will’s Coffee-house that those literary decrees were issued which still ruled the judgment of the town; and for a young author, on visiting Will’s, to receive a pinch from Dryden’s snuff-box was equivalent to his formal admission into that society of wits. On the other hand, the times were so changed and the men were so changed that Dryden, dictator though he was, had to yield in some points, and defend himself in others. His cousin Swift, whom he had offended by an unfavourable judgment given in private on some of his poems, was the only man who would have made a general attack upon his literary reputation; but the moral character of his writings was a subject on which adverse criticism was likely to be more general. At first, indeed, there was little perceptible improvement in the moral tone of the literature of the Revolution, as compared with that of the Restoration—the elder dramatists, such as Shadwell, still writing in the fashion to which they had been accustomed, and the younger ones, such as Congreve and Vanbrugh, deeming it a point of honour to be as immoral as their predecessors. In the course of a few years, however, what with the influence of a Whig court, what with other causes, a more delicate taste crept in, and people became ashamed of what their fathers had delighted in. Dryden lived to see the beginnings of this important change, and, with many expressions of regret for his own past delinquencies in this respect, to welcome the appearance of a purer literature.

Those of Dryden’s writings which were produced during the twelve years of his life subsequent to the Revolution constitute an important part of his literary remains, not merely in point of bulk, but also in respect of a certain general peculiarity of their character. They may be described as for the most part belonging to the department of pure, as distinct from that of controversial, literature. Dryden did not indeed wholly abandon satire and controversy after the Revolution; but his aim after that period seemed rather to be to produce such literature as would at once be acceptable to the public and earn for himself most money with the least trouble. Deprived of his laureateship, and so rendered almost entirely dependent on his pen at a time when age was creeping upon him and the expenses of his family were greater than ever, he was obliged to make considerations of economy paramount in his choice of work. As was natural, he fell back at first on the drama; and his five last plays, two of which are tragedies, one an opera, and two comedies, were all produced between 1689 and 1694. The profits of these dramas, however, were insufficient; and he was obliged to eke them out by all those devices of dedication to private noblemen, execution of literary commissions for elegiac poems, and the like, which then formed part of the professional author’s means of livelihood. Sums of 50l., 100l., and even, in one or two cases, 500l., were earned by Dryden in this disagreeable way from earls, squires, and clubs of gentlemen. His poem of Eleonora was a 500l. commission, executed for the Earl of Abingdon, who wanted a poem in memory of his deceased wife, and, without knowing anything of Dryden personally, applied to him to write it, just as now, in a similar case, a commission might be given to a popular sculptor for a post mortem statue. In spite of the utmost allowance for the custom of the time, no one knowing the circumstances, can read the poem now, without disgust; and it does show a certain lowness of mind in Dryden to have been able, under any pressure of necessity, to write for hire such extravagances as that poem contains respecting a person he had never seen. Far more honourable were Dryden’s earnings by work done for Jacob Tonson, the publisher. His dealings with Tonson had begun before the Revolution; but after the Revolution Tonson was his mainstay. First came several volumes of miscellanies, consisting of select poems, published and unpublished, with scraps of prose and translation. Then, catching at the hint furnished by the success of some of the scraps of translation from the Latin and Greek poets, Dryden and Tonson found it mutually advantageous to prosecute that vein. Juvenal and Persius were translated under Dryden’s care; and in 1697, after three years of labour, he gave to the world his completed translation of Virgil. Looking about for a task to succeed this, he undertook to furnish Tonson with so many thousands of lines of narrative verse, to be published under the title of Fables. Where the fables came from Tonson did not care, provided they would sell; and Dryden, with his rapid powers of versification, soon produced versions of some tales of Chaucer and Boccaccio which answered the purpose exceedingly well. They were printed in 1699. Of the other poems written by Dryden in his last years his Alexander’s Feast is the most celebrated. He continued his literary labours till within a few days of his death, which happened on the 1st of May, 1701.

When we inquire what it is that makes Dryden’s name so important as to entitle it to rank, as it seems to do, the fifth in the series of great English poets after Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, we find that it is nothing else than the fact, brought out in the preceding sketch, that, steadily and industriously, for a period of forty-two years, he kept in the front of the national literature, such as it then was. It is because he represents the entire literary development of the Restoration—it is because he fills up the whole interval between 1658 and 1701, thus connecting the age of Puritanism and Milton with the age of the Queen Anne wits—that we give him such a place in such a list. The reason is a chronological one, rather than one of strict comparison of personal merits. Though we place Dryden fifth in the list, after Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, it is not necessarily because we regard him as the co-equal of those men in genius; it is only because, passing onward in time, we find his the next name of very distinguished magnitude after theirs. Personally there is no one that would compare Dryden with Shakespeare or Milton; and there are not many now that would compare him with Chaucer or Spenser. On the whole, if the estimate is one of general intellectual strength, he takes rank only with the first of the second class, as with the Jonsons, the Fletchers, and others of the Elizabethan age; while, if the estimate have regard to genuine poetic or imaginative power, he sinks below even these. Yet, if historical reasons only are regarded, Dryden has perhaps a better right to his place in the list than any of the others. At least as strictly as Chaucer is the representative of the English literature of the latter half of the fourteenth century, far more strictly than Spenser and Shakespeare are the representatives of the literature of their times, and in a more broad and obvious manner than Milton is the literary representative of the Commonwealth, Dryden represents the literary activity of the reigns of Charles II. and James II., and of the greater part of that of William III. Davenant, Butler, Waller, Etherege, Otway, Wycherley, Southerne, Prior, and Congreve, are names leading us over the same period, and illustrating perhaps more exquisitely than Dryden some of its individual characteristics; but for a solid representative of the period as a whole, resuming in himself all its more prominent characteristics in one substantial aggregate, we are obliged to take Dryden. Twelve years of his literary life he laboured as a strong junior among the Davenants, the Butlers, and the Wallers, qualifying himself to set them aside; eighteen years more were spent in acknowledged lordship over the Ethereges, Otways, and Wycherleys, who occupied the middle of the period; and during the twelve concluding years he was a patriarch among the Southernes, and Priors, and Congreves, in whose lives the period wove itself into the next.

And yet, personally as well as historically, Dryden is a man of no mean importance. Not only is he the largest figure in one era of our literature; he is a very considerable figure also in our literature as a whole. To begin with the most obvious, but at the same time not the least noteworthy, of his claims, the quantity of his contributions to our literature was large. He was a various and voluminous writer. In Scott’s collected edition of his works they fill seventeen octavo volumes. About seven of these volumes consist of dramas, with accompanying prefaces and dedications, the number of dramas being in all twenty-eight. Two volumes more embrace the polemical poems, the satires, and the poems of contemporary historical allusion, written chiefly between 1681 and 1683. One volume is filled with odes, songs, and lyrical pieces, written at various times. The Fables, or Metrical Tales, redacted in his old age from Chaucer and Boccaccio, occupy a volume and a half. Three volumes and a half are devoted to the translations from the classic poets, including the Translation of Virgil. The remaining two volumes consist of miscellaneous prologues, epilogues, and witty pieces of verse, and of miscellaneous prose-writings, original and translated, including the critical Essay on Dramatic Poetry. Considered as a whole, the matter of the seventeen volumes is a goodly contribution from one man as respects both extent and variety. Spread over forty-two years, it does not argue that excessive industry which Scott, of all men in the world, has found in it; but it fairly entitles Dryden to take his place among those writers who deserve regard for the quantity of their writings, in addition to whatever regard they may be entitled to on the score, of quality. And it is a fact worth noting, and remarked by Scott more than once, that most writers who have taken a high place in literature have been voluminous—have not only written well, but also written much. Moreover there are two ways of writing much. One may write much and variously, or one may write much all of one kind. Dryden was various as well as voluminous.

Of all that Dryden wrote, however, there is but a comparatively small portion that has won for itself a permanent place in our literature; and in this he differs from other writers that have been equally voluminous. It is indeed a significant fact about Dryden that the proportion of that part of his matter which survives, or deserves to survive, to that part which was squandered away on the age it was first written for, and there ended, is unusually small. In Shakespeare there is very little that is felt to be of such inferior quality as not to be worth reading in due time and place. In Milton there is, if we consider only his poetry, still less. All Chaucer, almost, is felt to be worth preservation by those who like Chaucer; all Wordsworth, almost, by those who like Wordsworth. But, except for library purposes, there is no admirer of Dryden that would care to save more than a small select portion of what he wrote. His satires and polemical poems; one or two of his odes; his Translation of Virgil; his fables; one of his comedies, and one of his tragedies, by way of specimen of his dramatic powers; a complete set of his prologues, for the sake of their allusions to contemporary manners and humours; and a few pieces of his prose, to show his style of criticism:—these would together form a collection not much more than a fourth part of the whole, and which would require to be yet farther winnowed, were the purpose to leave only what is sterling and in Dryden’s best manner. Mr. Bell’s edition, which comprise in three volumes all Dryden’s original non-dramatic poetry, and the best collection of his prologues and epilogues yet made, is itself a surfeit of matter. It is such an edition of Dryden as ought to be included in a series of the English poets intended to be complete; but even in it there is more of dross than of ore.

What is the reason of this? How is it that in Dryden the proportion of what is now rubbish to what is still precious as a literary possession is so much greater than in most other writers of great celebrity? There are two reasons for it. The first is, that originally, and in its own nature, much of the matter that Dryden put forth was not of a kind for which his genius was fitted. Whatever his own imagination constructed on the large scale was mean and conventional. Wherever, as in his translations of Virgil and his imitations of Chaucer and Boccaccio, he employed his powers of language and verse in refurbishing matter invented by others, the poetical substance of his writings is valuable; but the sheer produce of his own imagination, as in his dramas, is in general such stuff as nature disowns and no creature can take pleasure in. There is no fine power of dramatic story, no exquisite invention of character or circumstance, no truth to nature in ideal landscape: at the utmost, there is conventional dramatic situation, with an occasional flash of splendid imagery such as may be struck out in the heat of heroic declamation. Thus—

Dryden’s natural powers, as all his critics have remarked, lay not so much in the imaginative as in the didactic, the declamatory, and the ratiocinative. What Johnson claims for him, and what seems to have been claimed for him in his own lifetime, was the credit of being one of the best reasoners in verse that ever wrote. Lord Macaulay means very much the same thing when he calls Dryden a great “critical poet,” and the founder of the “critical school of English poetry.” Probably Milton meant something of the kind when he said that Dryden was a rhymer, but no poet. It was in declamatory and didactic rhyme, with all that could consist with it, that Dryden excelled. It was in the metrical utterance of weighty sentences, in the metrical conduct of an argument, in vehement satirical invective, and in such passages of lyric passion as depended for their effect on rolling grandeur of sound, that he was pre-eminently great. Even his imagination worked more powerfully, and his perceptions of physical circumstance became keener and truer, under the influence of polemical rage, the pursuit of terse maxim, or the passion for sonorous declamation. Thus—

Or, in his character of Shaftesbury,—

Or, in the lines which he sent to Tonson the publisher as a specimen of what he could do in the way of portrait-painting if Tonson did not send him supplies—

And, again, in almost every passage in the noble ode on Alexander’s Feast, e.g.—

In satire, in critical disquisition, in aphoristic verse, or in lyrical grandiloquence, Dryden was in his natural element; and one reason why, of all the matter of his voluminous works, so small a portion is of permanent literary value, is that, in his attempts after literary variety, he could not or would not restrict himself within these proper limits of his genius.

But, besides this, Dryden was a slovenly worker within his own field. Even of what he could do best he did little continuously in a thoroughly careful manner. In his best poem there are not twenty consecutive lines without some logical incoherence, some confusion of metaphor, some inaccuracy of language, or some evident strain of the meaning for the sake of the metre. His strength lies in passages and weighty interspersed lines, not in whole poems. Even in Dryden’s lifetime this complaint was made. It was hinted at in The Rehearsal; Rochester speaks of Dryden’s “slattern muse;” and Blackmore, who criticised Dryden in his old age, expresses the common opinion distinctly and deliberately—

This is true, though it was Blackmore who said it. Dryden’s slovenliness, however, consisted not so much in a disposition to spare pains as in a constitutional robustness which rendered artistic perfection all but impossible to him even when he laboured hardest to attain it. One’s notion of Dryden is that he was originally a robust man, who, when he first engaged in poetry, could produce nothing better than strong stanzas of rather wooden sound and mechanism, but who, by perseverance and continual work, drilled his genius into higher susceptibility and a conscious aptitude and mastery in certain directions, so that, the older he grew, he became mellower, more musical, and more imaginative, what had been robustness at first having by long practice been subdued into flexibility and nerve. It is stated of Dryden that, in his earlier life at least, he used, as a preparation for writing, to induce on himself an artificial state of languor by taking medicine or letting blood. The trait is characteristic. Dryden’s whole literary career was a metaphor of it. Had he died before 1670, or even before 1681, when his Annus Mirabilis was still his most ambitious production, he would have been remembered as little more than a robust versifier; but, living as he did till 1701, he performed work which has entitled him to rank among English poets. As a contributor to the actual body of our literature, and as a man who produced by his influence a lasting effect on its literary methods, Dryden’s place is certainly high.

DEAN SWIFT.

DEAN SWIFT.[7]

In dividing the history of English literature into periods it is customary to take the interval between the year 1688 and the year 1727 as constituting one of those periods. This interval includes the reigns of William III., Anne, and George I. If we do not bind ourselves too precisely to the year 1727 as closing the period, the division is proper enough. There are characteristics about the time thus marked out which distinguish it from previous and from subsequent portions of our literary history. Dryden, Locke, and some other notabilities of the Restoration, lived into this period, and may be regarded as partly belonging to it; but the names more peculiarly representing it are those of Swift, Burnet, Addison, Steele, Pope, Shaftesbury, Gay, Arbuthnot, Atterbury, Prior, Parnell, Bolingbroke, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, Rowe, Defoe, and Cibber. The names in this cluster disperse themselves over the three reigns which the period includes, some of them having already been known as early as the accession of William, while others survived the first George and continued to add to their celebrity during the reign of his successor; but the most brilliant portion of the period was from 1702 to 1714, when Queen Anne was on the throne. Hence the name of “Wits of Queen Anne’s reign,” commonly applied to the writers of the whole period.

A while ago this used to be spoken of as the Golden or Augustan age of English literature. We do not talk in that manner now. We feel that when we get among the authors of the times of Queen Anne and the first George we are among very pleasant and very clever men, but by no means among giants. In coming down to this period from those going before it, we have an immediate sensation of having left the region of “greatness” behind us. We still find plenty of good writing, characterized by certain qualities of trimness, artificial grace, and the like, to a degree not before attained; here and there also, we discern something like real power and strength, breaking through the prevailing element; but, on the whole, there is an absence of what, except by a compromise of language, could be called “great.” It is the same whether we regard largeness of imaginative faculty, loftiness of moral spirit, or vigour of speculative capacity, as principally concerned in imparting the character of “greatness” to literature. What of genius in the ideal survived the seventeenth century in England contented itself with nice little imaginations of scenes and circumstances connected with the artificial life of the time; the moral quality most in repute was kindliness or courtesy; and speculation did not go beyond that point where thought retains the form either of ordinary good sense, or of keen momentary wit. No sooner, in fact, do we pass the time of Milton than we feel that we have done with the sublimities. A kind of lumbering largeness does remain in the intellectual gait of Dryden and his contemporaries, as if the age still wore the armour of the old literary forms, though not at home in it; but in Pope’s days even the affectation of the “great” had ceased. Not slowly to build up a grand poem of continuous ideal action, not quietly and at leisure to weave forth tissues of fantastic imagery, not perseveringly and laboriously to prosecute one track of speculation and bring it to a close, not earnestly and courageously to throw one’s whole soul into a work of moral agitation and reform, was now what was regarded as natural in literature. On the contrary, he was a wit, or a literary man, who, living in the midst of the social bustle, or on the skirts of it, could throw forth in the easiest manner little essays, squibs, and jeux d’esprit, pertinent to the rapid occasions of the hour, and never tasking the mind too long or too much. This was the time when that great distinction between Whiggism and Toryism which for a century-and-a-half has existed in Great Britain as a kind of permanent social condition, affecting the intellectual activity of all natives from the moment of their birth, first began to be practically operative. It has, on the whole, been a wretched thing for the mind of England to have had this necessity of being either a Whig or a Tory put so prominently before it. Perhaps, in all times, some similar necessity of taking one side or the other in some current form of controversy has afflicted the leading minds, and tormented the more genial among them; but we question if ever in this country in previous times there was a form of controversy, so little to be identified, in real reason, with the one only true controversy between good and evil, and so capable, therefore, of breeding confusion and mischief, when so identified in practice, as this poor controversy of Whig and Tory which came in with the Revolution. To be called upon to be either a Puritan or a Cavalier—there was some possibility of complying with that call and still leading a tolerably free and large intellectual life; though possibly it was one, cause of the rich mental development of the Elizabethan era that the men of that time were exempt from any personal obligation of attending even to this distinction. But to be called upon to be either a Whig or a Tory—why, how on earth can one retain any of the larger humanities about him if society is to hold him by the neck between two chairs such as these, pointing alternately to the one and to the other, and incessantly asking him on which of the two he means to sit? Into a mind trained to regard adhesiveness to one or other of these chairs as the first rule of duty or of prudence what thoughts of any high interest can find their way? Or, if any such do find their way, how are they to be adjusted to so mean a rule? Now-a-days, our higher spirits solve the difficulty by kicking both chairs down, and plainly telling society that they will not bind themselves to sit on either, or even on both put together. Hence partly it is that, in recent times, we have had renewed specimens of the “great” or “sublime” in literature—the poetry, for example, of a Byron, a Wordsworth, or a Tennyson. But in the interval between 1688 and 1727 there was not one wit alive whom society let off from the necessity of being, and declaring himself to be, either a Whig or a Tory. Constitutionally, and by circumstances, Pope was the man who could have most easily obtained the exemption; but even Pope professed himself a Tory. Addison and Steele were Whigs. In short, every literary man was bound, by the strongest of all motives, to keep in view, as a permanent fact qualifying his literary undertakings, the distinction between Whiggism and Toryism, and to give to at least a considerable part of his writings the character of pamphlets or essays in the service of his party. To minister by the pen to the occasions of Whiggism and Toryism was, therefore, the main business of the wits both in prose and verse. Out of those occasions of ministration there of course arose personal quarrels, and these furnished fresh opportunities to the men of letters. Critics of previous writings could be satirized and lampooned, and thus the circle of subjects was widened. Moreover, there was abundant matter, capable of being treated consistently with either Whiggism or Toryism, in the social foibles and peculiarities of the day, as we see in the Tatler and the Spectator. Nor could a genial mind like that of Steele, a man of taste and fine thought like Addison, and an intellect so keen, exquisite, and sensitive as that of Pope, fail to variegate and surround all the duller and harder literature thus called into being with more lasting touches of the humorous, the fanciful, the sweet, the impassioned, the meditative, and the ideal. Thus from one was obtained the character of a Sir Roger de Coverley, from another a Vision of Mirza, and from the third a Windsor Forest, an Epistle of Héloïse, and much else that delights us still. After all, however, it remains true that the period of English literature now in question, whatever admirable characteristics it may possess, exhibits a remarkable deficiency of what, with recollections of former periods to guide us in our use of epithets, we should call great or sublime.

With the single exception of Pope, and that exception made from deference to the peculiar position of Pope as the poet or metrical artist of his day, the greatest name in the history of English literature during the early part of last century is that of Swift. In certain fine and deep qualities, Addison and Steele, and perhaps Farquhar, excelled him, just as in the succeeding generation Goldsmith had a finer vein of genius than was to be found in Johnson with all his massiveness; but in natural brawn and strength, in original energy, force, and imperiousness of brain, he excelled them all. It was about the year 1702, when he was already thirty-five years of age, that this strangest specimen of an Irishman, or of an Englishman born in Ireland, first attracted attention in London literary circles. The scene of his first appearance was Button’s coffee-house: the witnesses were Addison, Ambrose Philips, and other wits belonging to Addison’s little senate, who used to assemble there.

“They had for several successive days observed a strange clergyman come into the coffee-house, 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 advance 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 anyone, walked out of the coffee-house; 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.”—Dr. Sheridan’s Life of Swift, quoted in Scott’s Life.

If the company present had had sufficient means of information, they would have found that the mad parson with the harsh, swarthy features, and eyes “azure as the heavens,” whose oddities thus amused them, was Jonathan Swift, then clergyman of Laracor, a rural parish in the diocese of Meath in Ireland. They would have found that he was an Irishman by birth, though of pure English descent; that he could trace a relationship to Dryden; that, having been born after his father’s death, he had been educated, at the expense of his relatives, at Trinity College, Dublin; that, leaving Ireland in his twenty-second year, with but a sorry character from the College authorities, he had been received as a humble dependent into the family of Sir William Temple, at Sheen and Moorpark, near London, that courtly Whig and ex-ambassador being distantly connected with his mother’s family; that here, while acting as Sir William’s secretary, amanuensis, librarian, and what not, he had begun to write verses and other trifles, some of which he had shown to Dryden, who had told him in reply that they were sad stuff, and that he would never be a poet; that still, being of a restless, ambitious temper, he had not given up hopes of obtaining introduction into public employment in England through Sir William Temple’s influence; that, at length, at the age of twenty-eight, despairing of anything better, he had quarrelled with Sir William, returned to Ireland, taken priest’s orders, and settled in a living; and that again, disgusted with Ireland and his prospects in that country, he had come back to Moorpark, and resided there till 1699, when Sir William’s death had obliged him finally to return to Ireland, and accept first a chaplaincy to Lord Justice Berkeley, and then his present living in the diocese of Meath. If curious about the personal habits of this restless Irish parson, they might have found that he had already won the reputation of an eccentric in his own parish and district: performing his parochial duties when at home with scrupulous care, yet by his language and manners often shocking all ideas of clerical decorum and begetting a doubt as to his sincerity in the religion he professed; boisterous, fierce, overbearing, and insulting to all about him, yet often doing acts of real kindness; exact and economical in his management of his income to the verge of actual parsimony, yet sometimes spending money freely, and never without pensioners living on his bounty. They would have found that he was habitually irritable, and that he was subject to a recurring giddiness of the head, or vertigo, which he had brought on, as he thought himself, by a surfeit of fruit while he was staying with Sir William Temple at Sheen. And, what might have been the best bit of gossip of all, they would have found that, though unmarried, and entertaining a most unaccountable and violent aversion to the very idea of marriage, he had taken over to reside with him, or close to his neighbourhood, in Ireland, a certain young and beautiful girl, named Hester Johnson, with whom he had formed an acquaintance in Sir William Temple’s house, where she had been brought up, and where, though she passed as a daughter of Sir William’s steward, she was believed to be, in reality, a natural daughter of Sir William himself. They would have found that his relations to this girl, whom he had himself educated from her childhood at Sheen and Moorpark, were of a very singular and puzzling kind; that on the one hand she was devotedly attached to him, and on the other he cherished a passionate affection for her, wrote and spoke of her as his “Stella,” and liked always to have her near him; yet that a marriage between them seemed not to be thought of by either; and that, in order to have her near him without giving rise to scandal, he had taken the precaution to bring over an elderly maiden lady, called Mrs. Dingley, to reside with her as a companion, and was most careful to be in her society only when this Mrs. Dingley was present.

There was mystery and romance enough, therefore, about the wild, black-browed Irish parson, who attracted the regards of the wits in Button’s coffee-house. What had brought him there? That was partly a mystery too; but the mystery would have been pretty well solved if it had been known that, uncouth-looking clerical lout as he was, he was an author like the rest of them, having just written a political pamphlet which was making or was to make a good deal of noise in the world, and having at that moment in his pocket at least one other piece which he was about to publish. The political pamphlet was an Essay on the Civil Discords in Athens and Rome, having an obvious bearing on certain dissensions then threatening to break up the Whig party in Great Britain. It was received as a vigorous piece of writing on the ministerial side, and was ascribed by some to Lord Somers, and by others to Burnet. Swift had come over to claim it, and to see what it and his former connexion with Temple could do for him among the leading Whigs. For the truth was, an ambition equal to his consciousness of power gnawed at the heart of this furious and gifted man, whom a perverse fate had flung away into an obscure vicarage on the wrong side of the channel. His books, his garden, his canal with its willows at Laracor; his dearly-beloved Roger Coxe, and the other perplexed and admiring parishioners of Laracor over whom he domineered; his clerical colleagues in the neighbourhood; and even the society of Stella, the wittiest and best of her sex, whom he loved better than any other creature on earth: all these were insufficient to occupy the craving void in his mind. He hated Ireland, and regarded his lot there as one of banishment; he longed to be in London, and struggling in the centre of whatever was going on. About the date of his appointment to the living of Laracor he had lost the rich deanery of Derry, which Lord Berkeley had meant to give him, in consequence of a notion on the part of the bishop of the diocese that he was a restless, ingenious young man, who, instead of residing, would be “eternally flying backwards and forwards to London.” The bishop’s perception of his character was just. At or about the very time when the wits at Button’s saw him stalking up and down in the coffee-house, the priest of Laracor was introducing himself to Somers, Halifax, Sunderland, and others, and stating the terms on which he would support the Whigs with his pen. Even then, it seems, he took high ground, and let it be known that he was no mere hireling. The following, written at a much later period, is his own explanation of the nature and limits of his Whiggism at the time when he first offered the Whigs his services:—

“It was then (1701-2) I began to trouble myself with the differences between the principles of Whig and Tory; having formerly employed myself in other, and, I think, much better speculations. I talked often upon this subject with Lord Somers; told him that, having been long conversant with the Greek and Latin authors, and therefore a lover of liberty, I found myself much inclined to be what they call a Whig in politics; and that, besides, I thought it impossible, upon any other principles, to defend or submit to the Revolution; but, as to religion, I confessed myself to be a High-Churchman, and that I could not conceive how anyone who wore the habit of a clergyman could be otherwise; that I had observed very well with what insolence and haughtiness some lords of the High-Church party treated not only their own chaplains, but all other clergymen whatsoever, and thought this was sufficiently recompensed by their professions of zeal to the Church: that I had likewise observed how the Whig lords took a direct contrary measure, treated the persons of particular clergymen with particular courtesy, but showed much contempt and ill-will for the order in general: that I knew it was necessary for their party to make their bottom as wide as they could, by taking all denominations of Protestants to be members of their body: that I would not enter into the mutual reproaches made by the violent men on either side; but that the connivance or encouragement given by the Whigs to those writers of pamphlets who reflected upon the whole body of the clergy, without any exception, would unite the Church to one man to oppose them; and that I doubted his lordship’s friends did not consider the consequences of this.”

Even with these limitations the assistance of so energetic a man as the parson of Laracor was doubtless welcome to the Whigs. His former connexion with the stately old Revolution Whig, Sir William Temple, may have prepared the way for him, as it had already been the means of making him known in some aristocratic families. But there was evidence in his personal bearing and his writings that he was not a man to be neglected. And, if there had been any doubt on the subject on his first presentation of himself to ministers, the publication of his Battle of the Books and his Tale of a Tub in 1703 and 1704 would have set it overwhelmingly at rest. The author of these works (and, though they were anonymous, they were at once referred to Swift) could not but be acknowledged as the first prose satirist, and one of the most formidable writers, of the age. On his subsequent visits to Button’s, therefore (and they were frequent enough; for, as the Bishop of Derry had foreseen, he was often an absentee from his parish), the mad Irish parson was no longer a stranger to the company. Addison, Steele, Tickell, Philips, and the other Whig wits came to know him well, and to feel his weight among them in their daily convivial meetings. “To Dr. Jonathan Swift, the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of the age” was the inscription written by Addison on a copy of his Travels presented to Swift; and it shows what opinion Addison and those about him had formed of the author of the Tale of a Tub.

Thus, passing and repassing between Laracor and London, now lording it over his Irish parishioners, and now filling the literary and Whig haunts of the great metropolis with the terror of his merciless wit and with talk behind his back of his eccentricities and rude manners, Swift spent the interval between 1702 and 1710, or between his thirty-sixth and his forty-fourth year. His position as a High-Church Whig, however, was an anomalous one. In the first place, it was difficult to see how such a man could honestly be in the Church at all. People were by no means strict in those days in their notions of the clerical character; but the Tale of a Tub was a strong dose even then to have come from a clergyman. If Voltaire afterwards recommended the book as a masterly satire against religion in general, it cannot be wondered at that an outcry arose among Swift’s contemporaries respecting the profanity of the book. It is true, Peter and Jack, as the representatives of Popery and Presbyterianism, came in for the greatest share of the author’s scurrility; and Martin, as the representative of the Church of England, was left with the honours of the story; but the whole structure and spirit of the story, to say nothing of the oaths and other irreverences mingled with its language, were well calculated to shock the more serious even of Martin’s followers, who could not but see that rank infidelity alone would be a gainer by the book. Accordingly, despite all that Swift could afterwards do, the fact that he had written this book left a public doubt as to his Christianity. It is quite possible, however, that, with a very questionable kind of belief in Christianity, he may have been a conscientious High-Churchman, zealous for the social defence and aggrandisement of the ecclesiastical institution with which he was connected. Whatever that institution was originally based upon, it existed as part and parcel of the commonwealth of England, rooted in men’s habits and interests, and intertwined with the whole system of social order; and, just as a Brahmin, lax enough in his own speculative allegiance to the Brahminical faith, might still desire to maintain Brahminism as a vast pervading establishment in Hindostan, so might Swift, with a heart and a head dubious enough respecting men’s eternal interest in the facts of the Judæan record, see a use notwithstanding in that fabric of bishoprics, deaneries, prebends, parochial livings, and curacies, which ancient belief in those facts had first created and put together. This kind of respect for the Church Establishment is still very prevalent. It is a most excellent thing, it is thought by many, to have a cleanly, cultured, gentlemanly man invested with authority in every parish throughout the land, who can look after what is going on, fill up schedules, give advice, and take the lead in all parish business. That Swift’s faith in the Church included no more than this perception of its uses as a vast administrative and educational establishment we will not say. Mr. Thackeray, indeed, openly avows his opinion that Swift had no belief in the Christian religion. “Swift’s,” he says, “was a reverent, was a pious spirit—he could love and could pray;” but such religion as he had, Mr. Thackeray hints, was a kind of mad, despairing Deism, and had nothing of Christianity in it. Hence, “having put that cassock on, it poisoned him; he was strangled in his bands.” The question thus broached as to the nature of Swift’s religion is too deep to be discussed here. Though we would not exactly say, with Mr. Thackeray, that Swift’s was a “reverent” and “pious” spirit, there are, as he phrases it, breakings out of “the stars of religion and love” shining in the serene blue through “the driving clouds and the maddened hurricane of Swift’s life;” and this, though vague, is about all that we have warrant for saying. As to the zeal of his Churchmanship, however, there is no doubt at all. There was not a man in the British realms more pugnacious in the interests of his order, more resolute in defending the prerogatives of the Church of England against Dissenters and others desirous of limiting them, or more anxious to elevate the social position and intellectual character of the clergy, than the author of the Tale of a Tub. No veteran commander of a regiment could have had more of the military than the parson of Laracor had of the ecclesiastical esprit de corps; and, indeed, Swift’s known dislike to the military may be best explained as the natural jealousy of the surplice at the larger consideration accorded by society to the scarlet coat. Almost all Swift’s writings between 1702 and 1710 are assertions of his High-Church sentiments and vindications of the Establishment against its assailants. Thus in 1708 came forth his Letter on the Sacramental Test, a hot High-Church and anti-Dissenter pamphlet; and this was followed in the same year by his Sentiments of a Church of England man with respect to Religion and Government, and by his ironical argument, aimed at free-thinkers and latitudinarians, entitled Reasons against Abolishing Christianity. In 1709 he published a graver pamphlet, under the name of A Project for the Advancement of Religion, in which he urged certain measures for the reform of public morals and the strengthening of the Establishment, recommending in particular a scheme of Church-extension. Thus, with all his readiness to help the Whigs politically, Swift was certainly faithful to his High-Church principles. But, as we have said, a High-Church Whig was an anomaly which the Whigs refused to comprehend. Latitudinarians, Low Churchmen, and Dissenters, did not know what to make of a Whiggism in state-politics which was conjoined with the strongest form of ecclesiastical Toryism. Hence, in spite of his ability, Swift was not a man that the Whigs could patronise and prefer. They were willing to have the benefit of his assistance, but their favours were reserved for men more wholly their own. Various things were, indeed, talked of for Swift—the secretaryship to the proposed embassy of Lord Berkeley in Vienna, a prebend of Westminster, the office of historiographer-royal; nay, even a bishopric in the American colonies: but all came to nothing. Swift, at the age of forty-three, and certified by Addison as “the greatest genius of the age,” was still only an Irish parson, with some 350l. or 400l. a year. How strange if the plan of the Transatlantic bishopric had been carried out, and Swift had settled in Virginia!

Meanwhile, though neglected by the English Whigs, Swift had risen to be a leader among the Irish clergy, a great man in their convocations and other ecclesiastical assemblies. The object which the Irish clergy then had at heart was to procure from the Government an extension to Ireland of a boon granted several years before to the clergy of England: namely, the remission of the tax levied by the Crown on the revenues of the Church since the days of Henry VIII. in the shape of tenths and first-fruits. This remission, which would have amounted to about 16,000l. a year, the Whigs were not disposed to grant, the corresponding remission in the case of England not having been followed by the expected benefits. Archbishop King and the other prelates were glad to have Swift as their agent in this business; and, accordingly, he was absent from Ireland for upwards of twelve months continuously in the years 1708 and 1709. It was during this period that he set London in a roar by his famous Bickerstaff hoax, in which he first predicted the death of Partridge, the astrologer, at a particular day and hour, and then nearly drove the wretched tradesman mad by declaring, when the time was come, that the prophecy had been fulfilled, and publishing a detailed account of the circumstances. Out of this Bickerstaff hoax, and Swift’s talk over it with Addison and Steele, arose the Tatler, prolific parent of so many other periodicals.

The year 1710 was an important one in the life of Swift. In that year he came over to London, resolved in his own mind to have a settlement of accounts with the Whigs, or to break with them for ever. The Irish ecclesiastical business of the tenths and first-fruits was still his pretext, but he had many other arrears to introduce into the account. Accordingly, after some civil skirmishing with Somers, Halifax, and his other old friends, then just turned out of office, he openly transferred his allegiance to the new Tory administration of Harley and Bolingbroke. The 4th of October, not quite a month after his arrival in London, was the date of his first interview with Harley; and from that day forward till the dissolution of Harley’s administration by the death of Queen Anne, in 1714, Swift’s relations with Harley, St. John, and the other ministers, were more those of an intimate friend and adviser than a literary dependent. How he dined almost daily with Harley or St. John; how he bullied them, and made them beg his pardon when by chance they offended him—either, as Harley once did, by offering him a fifty-pound note, or, as St. John once did, by appearing cold and abstracted when Swift was his guest at dinner; how he obtained from them not only the settlement of the Irish business, but almost everything else he asked; how he used his influence to prevent Steele, Addison, Congreve, Rowe, and his other Whig literary friends, from suffering loss of office by the change in the state of politics, at the same time growing cooler in his private intercourse with Addison and poor Dick, and tending more to young Tory writers, such as Pope and Parnell; how, with Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, Harley, and St. John, he formed the famous club of the Scriblerus brotherhood, for the satire of literary absurdities; how he wrote squibs, pamphlets, and lampoons innumerable for the Tories and against the Whigs, and at one time actually edited a Tory paper called the Examiner: all this is to be gathered, in most interesting detail, from his epistolary journal to Stella, in which he punctually kept her informed of all his doings during his long three years of absence. The following is a description of him at the height of his Court influence during this season of triumph, from the Whiggish, and therefore somewhat adverse, pen of Bishop Kennet:—

“When I came to the antechamber [at Court] to wait before prayers, Dr. Swift was the principal man of talk and business, and acted as master 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 the 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 he 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 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.”

Let us see, by a few pickings from the journal to Stella, in what manner the black-browed Irish vicar, who was thus figuring in the mornings at Court as the friend and confidant of Ministers, and almost as their domineering colleague, was writing home from his lodging in the evenings to the “dear girls” at Laracor.

Dec. 3, 1710. “Pshaw, I must be writing to those dear saucy brats every night whether I will or no, let me have what business I will, or come home ever so late, or be ever so sleepy; but it is an old saying and a true one, ‘Be you lords or be you earls, you must write to naughty girls.’ I was to-day at Court, and saw Raymond [an Irish friend] among the beefeaters, staying to see the Queen; so I put him in a better station, made two or three dozen bows, and went to church, and then to Court again to pick up a dinner, as I did with Sir John Stanley: and then we went to visit Lord Mountjoy, and just left him; and ’tis near eleven at night, young women, and methinks this letter comes very near to the bottom,” &c. &c.

Jan. 1, 1711. Morning. “I wish my dearest pretty Dingley and Stella a happy new year, and health, and mirth, and good stomachs, and Fr’s company. Faith, I did not know how to write Fr. I wondered what was the matter; but now I remember I always write Pdfr [by this combination of letters, or by the word Presto, Swift designates himself in the Journal] * * Get the Examiners, and read them; the last nine or ten are full of reasons for the late change and of the abuses of the last ministry; and the great men assure me that all are true. They were written by their encouragement and direction. I must rise, and go see Sir Andrew Fountain; but perhaps to-morrow I may answer M.D.’s [Stella’s designation in the Journal] letter: so good morrow, my mistresses all, good morrow. I wish you both a merry new year; roast beef, minced pies, and good strong beer; and me a share of your good cheer; that I was there or you were here; and you’re a little saucy dear,” &c. &c.

Jan. 13, 1711. “O faith, I had an ugly giddy fit last night in my chamber, and I have got a new box of pills to take, and I hope shall have no more this good while. I would not tell you before, because it would vex you, little rogues; but now it is better. I dined to-day with Lord Shelburn,” &c. &c.

Jan. 16, 1711. “My service to Mrs. Stode and Walls. Has she a boy or a girl? A girl, hmm!, and died in a week, hmmm!, and was poor Stella forced to stand for godmother?—Let me know how accounts stand, that you may have your money betimes. There’s four months for my lodging; that must be thought on too. And zoo go dine with Manley, and lose your money, doo extravagant sluttikin? But don’t fret. It will just be three weeks when I have the next letter: that is, to-morrow. Farewell, dearest beloved M.D., and love poor, poor Presto, who has not had one happy day since he left you, as hope to be saved.”

March 7, 1711. “I am weary of business and ministers. I don’t go to a coffee-house twice a month. I am very regular in going to sleep before eleven. And so you say that Stella’s a pretty girl; and so she be; and methinks I see her just now, as handsome as the day’s long. Do you know what? When I am writing in our language [a kind of baby-language of endearment used between him and Stella, and called ‘the little language’] I make up my mouth just as if I was speaking it. I caught myself at it just now. * * Poor Stella, won’t Dingley leave her a little daylight to write to Presto? Well, well, we’ll have daylight shortly, spite of her teeth; and zoo must cly Zele, and Hele, and Hele aden. Must loo mimitate Pdfr, pay? Iss, and so la shall. And so leles fol ee rettle. Dood Mollow. [You must cry There and Here and Here again. Must you imitate Pdfr, pray? Yes, and so you shall. And so there’s for the letter. Good morrow.]”

And so on, through a series of daily letters, forming now a goodly octavo volume or more, Swift chats and rattles away to the “dear absent girls,” giving them all the political gossip of the time, and informing them about his own goings-out and comings-in, his dinings with Harley, St. John, and occasionally with Addison and other old Whig friends, the state of his health, his troubles with his drunken servant Patrick, his lodging-expenses, and a host of other things. Such another journal has, perhaps, never been given to the world; and but for it we should never have known what depths of tenderness and power of affectionate prattle there were in the heart of this harsh and savage man.

Only on one topic, affecting himself during his long stay in London, is he in any degree reserved. Among the acquaintanceships he had formed was one with a Mrs. Vanhomrigh, a widowed lady of property, who had a family of several daughters. The eldest of these, Hester Vanhomrigh, was a girl of more than ordinary talent and accomplishments, and of enthusiastic and impetuous character; and, as Swift acquired the habit of dropping in upon the “Vans,” as he called them, when he had no other dinner engagement, it was not long before he and Miss Vanhomrigh fell into the relationship of teacher and pupil. He taught her to think and to write verses; and, as among Swift’s peculiarities of opinion, one was that he entertained what would even now be called very advanced notions as to the intellectual capabilities and rights of women, he found no more pleasant amusement, in the midst of his politics and other business, than that of superintending the growth of so hopeful a mind.

But, alas! Cupid got among the books.

Nay, more: one of Swift’s lessons to her had been that frankness, whether in man or women, was the chief of the virtues, and

“Then,” said the nymph,

She told her love, and fairly argued it out with the startled tutor, discussing every element in the question, whether for or against—the disparity of their ages, her own five thousand guineas, their similarity of tastes, his views of ambition, the judgment the world would form of the match, and so on; and the end of it was that she reasoned so well that Swift could not but admit that there would be nothing after all so very incongruous in a marriage between him and Esther Vanhomrigh. So the matter rested, Swift gently resisting the impetuosity of the young woman, when it threatened to take him by storm, but not having the courage to adduce the real and conclusive argument—the existence on the other side of the channel of another and a dearer Esther. Stella, on her side, knew that Swift visited a family called the “Vans”; she divined that something was wrong; but that was all.

That Swift, the Mentor of ministers, their daily companion, at whose bidding they dispensed their patronage and their favour, should himself be suffered to remain a mere vicar of an Irish parish, was, of course, impossible. Vehement and even boisterous and overdone as was his zeal for his own independence—“If we let these great ministers pretend too much, there will be no governing them,” was his maxim; and, in order to act up to it, he used to treat Dukes and Earls as if they were dogs—there were yet means of honourably acknowledging his services in a way to which he would have taken no exception. Nor can we doubt that Oxford and St. John, who were really and heartily his admirers, were anxious to promote him in some suitable manner. An English bishopric was certainly what he coveted, and what they would at once have given him. But, though the bishopric of Hereford fell vacant in 1712, there was, as Sir Walter Scott says, “a lion in the path.” Queen Anne, honest dowdy woman,—her instinctive dislike of Swift strengthened by the private influence of the Archbishop of York, and that of the Duchess of Somerset, whose red hair Swift had lampooned—obstinately refused to make the author of the Tale of a Tub a bishop. Even an English deanery could not be found for so questionable a Christian; and in 1713 Swift was obliged to accept, as the best thing he could get, the Deanery of St. Patrick’s in his native city of Dublin. He hurried over to Ireland to be installed, and came back just in time to partake in the last struggles and dissensions of the Tory administration before Queen Anne’s death. By his personal exertions with ministers, and his pamphlet entitled Public Spirit of the Whigs, he tried to buoy up the sinking Tory cause. But the Queen’s death destroyed all; with George I. the Whigs came in again; the late Tory ministers were dispersed and disgraced, and Swift shared their fall. “Dean Swift,” says Arbuthnot, “keeps up his noble spirit; and, though like a man knocked down, you may behold him still with a stern countenance, and aiming a blow at his adversaries.” He returned, with rage and grief in his heart, to Ireland, a disgraced man, and in danger of arrest on account of his connexion with the late ministers. Even in Dublin he was insulted as he walked in the streets.

For twelve years—that is, from 1714 to 1726—Swift did not quit Ireland. At his first coming, as he tells us in one of his letters, he was “horribly melancholy;” but the melancholy began to wear off; and, having made up his mind to his exile in the country of his detestation, he fell gradually into the routine of his duties as Dean. How he boarded in a private family in the town, stipulating for leave to invite his friends to dinner at so much a head, and only having two evenings a week at the deanery for larger receptions; how he brought Stella and Mrs. Dingley from Laracor, and settled them in lodgings on the other side of the Liffey, keeping up the same precautions in his intercourse with them as before, but devolving the management of his receptions at the deanery upon Stella, who did all the honours of the house; how he had his own way in all cathedral business, and had always a few clergymen and others in his train, who toadied him, and took part in the facetious horse-play of which he was fond; how gradually his physiognomy became known to the citizens, and his eccentricities familiar to them, till the “Dean” became the lion of Dublin, and everybody turned to look at him as he walked in the streets; how, among the Dean’s other oddities, he was popularly charged with stinginess in his entertainments and a sharp look-out after the wine; how sometimes he would fly off from town, and take refuge in some country-seat of a friendly Irish nobleman; how all this while he was reading books of all kinds, writing notes and jottings, and corresponding with Pope, Gay, Prior, Arbuthnot, Oxford, Bolingbroke, and other literary and political friends in London or abroad: these are matters in the recollection of all who have read any of the biographies of Swift. It is also known that it was during this period that the Stella-and-Vanessa imbroglio reached its highest degree of entanglement. Scarcely had the Dean located Stella and Mrs. Dingley in their lodging in Dublin when, as he had feared, the impetuous Vanessa crossed the Channel to be near him too. Her mother’s death, and the fact that she and her younger sister had a small property in Ireland, were pretext enough. A scrap or two from surviving letters will tell the sequel, and will suggest the state of the relations at this time between Swift and this unhappy and certainly very extraordinary, woman:—

Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh: London, Aug. 12, 1714. “I had your letter last post, and before you can send me another I shall set out for Ireland. * * * If you are in Ireland when I am there, I shall see you very seldom. It is not a place for any freedom, but where everything is known in a week, and magnified a hundred degrees. These are rigorous laws that must be passed through; but it is probable we may meet in London in winter; or, if not, leave all to fate.”

Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Dublin, 1714 (some time after August). “You once had a maxim, which was to act what was right, and not mind what the world would say. I wish you would keep to it now. Pray, what can be wrong in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman? I cannot imagine. You cannot but know that your frowns make my life unsupportable. You have taught me to distinguish, and then you leave me miserable.”

Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Dublin, 1714. “You bid me be easy, and you would see me as often as you could. You had better have said as often as you could get the better of your inclinations so much, or as often as you remembered there was such a one in the world. If you continue to treat me as you do, you will not be made uneasy by me long. It is impossible to describe what I have suffered since I saw you last. I am sure I could have bore the rack much better than those killing, killing words of yours. Sometimes I have resolved to die without seeing you more; but those resolves, to your misfortune, did not last long; for there is something in human nature that prompts one to find relief in this world. I must give way to it, and beg you’d see me, and speak kindly to me; for I am sure you’d not condemn any one to suffer what I have done, could you but know it. The reason I write to you is because I cannot tell it to you should I see you. For, when I begin to complain, then you are angry; and there is something in your looks so awful that it strikes me dumb.”

Here a gap intervenes, which record fills up with but an indication here and there. Swift saw Vanessa, sometimes with that “something awful in his looks which struck her dumb,” sometimes with words of perplexed kindness; he persuaded her to go out, to read, to amuse herself; he introduced clergymen to her—one of them afterwards Archbishop of Cashel—as suitors for her hand; he induced her to leave Dublin, and go to her property at Selbridge, about twelve miles from Dublin, where now and then he went to visit her, where she used to plant laurels against every time of his coming, and where “Vanessa’s bower,” in which she and the Dean used to sit, with books and writing materials before them, during those happy visits, was long an object of interest to tourists; he wrote kindly letters to her, some in French, praising her talents, her conversation, and her writing, and saying that he found in her “tout ce que la nature a donnée à un mortel, l’honneur, la vertu, le bon sens, l’esprit, la douceur, l’agrément et la fermeté d’âme.” All did not suffice; and one has to fancy, during those long years, the restless beatings, on the one hand, of that impassioned woman’s heart, now lying as cold undistinguishable ashes in some Irish grave, and, on the other hand, the distraction, and anger, and daily terror, of the man she clung to. For, somehow or other, there was an element of terror mingled with the affair. What it was is beyond easy scrutiny, though possibly the data exist if they were well sifted. The ordinary story is that some time in the midst of those entanglements with Vanessa, and in consequence of their effects on the rival-relationship—Stella having been brought almost to death’s door by the anxieties caused her by Vanessa’s proximity, and by her own equivocal position in society—the form of marriage was gone through by Swift and Stella, and they became legally husband and wife, although with an engagement that the matter should remain secret, and that there should be no change in their manner of living. The year 1716, when Swift was forty-nine years of age, and Stella thirty-two, is assigned as the date of this event; and the ceremony is said to have been performed in the garden of the deanery by the Bishop of Clogher. But more mystery remains. “Immediately subsequent to the ceremony,” says Sir Walter Scott, “Swift’s state of mind appears to have been dreadful. Delany (as I have learned from a friend of his widow) said that about the time it was supposed to have taken 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.’” What are we to make of this? Nay more, what are we to make of it when we find that the alleged marriage of Swift with Stella, with which Scott connects the story, is after all denied by some as resting on no sufficient evidence: even Dr. Delany, though he believed in the marriage, and supposed it to have taken place about the time of this remarkable interview with the archbishop, having no certain information on the subject? If we assume a secret marriage with Stella, indeed, the subsequent portion of the Vanessa story becomes more explicable. On this assumption we are to imagine Swift continuing his letters to Vanessa, and his occasional visits to her at Selbridge on the old footing, for some years after the marriage, with the undivulged secret ever in his mind, increasing tenfold his former awkwardness in encountering her presence. And so we come to the year 1720, when, as the following scraps will show, a new paroxysm on the part of Vanessa brought on a new crisis in their relations.

Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Selbridge, 1720. “Believe me, it is with the utmost regret that I now write to you, because I know your good-nature such that you cannot see any human creature miserable without being sensibly touched. Yet what can I do? I must either unload my heart, and tell you all its griefs, or sink under the inexpressible distress I now suffer by your prodigious neglect of me. It is now ten long weeks since I saw you, and in all that time I have never received but one letter from you, and a little note with an excuse. Oh, have you forgot me? You endeavour by severities to force me from you. Nor can I blame you; for, with the utmost distress and confusion, I behold myself the cause of uneasy reflections to you. Yet I cannot comfort you, but here declare that it is not in the power of art, time, or accident, to lessen the inexpressible passion I have for ——. Put my passion under the utmost restraint, send me as distant from you as the earth will allow; yet you cannot banish those charming ideas which will ever stick by me whilst I have the use of memory. Nor is the love I bear you only seated in my soul; for there is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended with it. Therefore do not flatter yourself that separation will ever change my sentiments; for I find myself unquiet in the midst of silence, and my heart is at once pierced with sorrow and love. For Heaven’s sake, tell me what has caused this prodigious change in you which I have found of late.”

Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Dublin, 1720. * * “I believe you thought I only rallied when I told you the other night that I would pester you with letters. Once more I advise you, if you have any regard for your quiet, to alter your behaviour quickly; for I do assure you I have too much spirit to sit down contented with this treatment. Because I love frankness extremely, I here tell you now that I have determined to try all manner of human arts to reclaim you; and, if all these fail, I am resolved to have recourse to the black one, which, it is said, never does. Now see what inconveniency you will bring both yourself and me unto * *. When I undertake a thing, I don’t love to do it by halves.”

Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh: Dublin, 1720. “If you write as you do, I shall come the seldomer on purpose to be pleased with your letters, which I never look into without wondering how a brat that cannot read can possibly write so well. * * Raillery apart, I think it inconvenient, for a hundred reasons, that I should make your house a sort of constant dwelling-place. I will certainly come as often as I conveniently can; but my health and the perpetual run of ill weather hinder me from going out in the morning, and my afternoons are taken up I know not how; so that I am in rebellion with a hundred people besides yourself for not seeing them. For the rest, you need make use of no other black art besides your ink. It is a pity your eyes are not black, or I would have said the same; but you are a white witch, and can do no mischief.”

Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh: Dublin, 1720. “I received your letter when some company was with me on Saturday night, and it put me in such confusion that I could not tell what to do. This morning a woman who does business for me told me she heard I was in love with one, naming you, and twenty particulars; that little master —— and I visited you, and that the Archbishop did so; and that you had abundance of wit, &c. I ever feared the tattle of this nasty town, and told you so; and that was the reason why I said to you long ago that I would see you seldom when you were in Ireland; and I must beg you to be easy, if, for some time, I visit you seldomer, and not in so particular a manner.”

Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Selbridge, 1720. * * “Solitude is unsupportable to a mind which is not easy. I have worn out my days in sighing and my nights in watching and thinking of ——, who thinks not of me. How many letters shall I send you before I receive an answer? * * Oh that I could hope to see you here, or that I could go to you! I was born with violent passions, which terminate all in one—that inexpressible passion I have for you. * * Surely you cannot possibly be so taken up but you might command a moment to write to me and force your inclinations to so great a charity. I firmly believe, if I could know your thoughts (which no human creature is capable of guessing at, because never anyone living thought like you), I should find you had often in a rage wished me religious, hoping then I should have paid my devotions to Heaven. But that would not spare you; for, were I an enthusiast, still you’d be the deity I should worship. What marks are there of a deity but what you are to be known by? You are present everywhere; your dear image is always before my eyes. Sometimes you strike me with that prodigious awe I tremble with fear; at other times a charming compassion shines through your countenance, which revives my soul. Is it not more reasonable to adore a radiant form one has seen than one only described?”

Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh: Dublin, October 15, 1720. “All the morning I am plagued with impertinent visits, below any man of sense or honour to endure, if it were any way avoidable. Afternoons and evenings are spent abroad in walking to keep off and avoid spleen as far as I can; so that, when I am not so good a correspondent as I could wish, you are not to quarrel and be governor, but to impute it to my situation, and to conclude infallibly that I have the same respect and kindness for you I ever professed to have.”

Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh: Gaullstoun, July 5, 1721. * * “Settle your affairs, and quit this scoundrel-island, and things will be as you desire. I can say no more, being called away. Mais soyez assurée que jamais personne au monde n’a été aimée, honorée, estimée, adorée par votre ami que vous.”

Vanessa did not quit the “scoundrel-island;” but, on the contrary, remained in it, unmanageable as ever. In 1722, about a year after the date of the last scrap, the catastrophe came. In a wild fit Vanessa, as the story is, took the bold step of writing to Stella, insisting on an explanation of the nature of Swift’s engagements to her; Stella placed the letter in Swift’s hands; and Swift, in a paroxysm of fury, rode instantly to Selbridge, saw Vanessa without speaking, laid a letter on her table, and rode off again. The letter was Vanessa’s death-warrant. Within a few weeks she was dead, having previously revoked a will in which she had bequeathed all her fortune to Swift.

Whatever may have been the purport of Vanessa’s communication to Stella, it produced no change in Swift’s relations to the latter. The pale pensive face of Hester Johnson, with her “fine dark eyes” and hair “black as a raven,” was still to be seen on reception-evenings at the deanery, where also she and Mrs. Dingley would sometimes take up their abode when Swift was suffering from one of his attacks of vertigo and required to be nursed. Nay, during those very years in which, as we have just seen, Swift was attending to the movements to and fro of the more imperious Vanessa in the background, and assuaging her passion by visits and letters, and praises of her powers, and professions of his admiration of her beyond all her sex, he was all the while keeping up the same affectionate style of intercourse as ever with the more gentle Stella, whose happier lot it was to be stationed in the centre of his domestic circle, and addressing to her, in a less forced manner, praises singularly like those he addressed to her rival. Thus, every year, on Stella’s birth-day, he wrote a little poem in honour of the occasion. Take the one for 1718, beginning thus:—

Stella would reciprocate these compliments by verses on the Dean’s birth-day; and one is struck with the similarity of her acknowledgments of what the Dean had taught her and done for her to those of Vanessa. Thus, in 1721,—