DEAN SWIFT'S DISEASE. 811 



Swift, indeed, complains bitterly of the impairment, as if memory- 

 were gone, and in his declining years of age and sickness it may have 

 been a dull function compared with the brilliant faculty he once pos- 

 sessed. But clearly the memory was still serviceable which enabled 

 him to compose, with wonderful vivacity, even such poetry as that 

 outburst against political and social corruption " The Legion Club " 

 which Jeffrey thinks " deserving of attention as the most thoroughly 

 animated, fierce, and energetic of all Swift's metrical compositions ; 

 and though the animation be altogether of a ferocious character, and 

 seems occasionally to verge upon absolute insanity, there is still a 

 force and a terror about it which redeems it from ridicule, and makes 

 us shudder at the sort of demoniacal inspiration with which the mali- 

 son is vented." This poem, written in 1736, was his last work ; its 

 appreciation by his most hostile critic will show how little he suffered 

 from loss of any mental faculty when he wrote it. That disease and 

 grief had made him irritable and passionate, and often desponding, is 

 clear enough from his correspondence and the accounts of him which 

 have come down to us ; but that there was any failure of mind this 

 " Legion Club " fully disproves ; and, if fiercely expressed hatred is 

 any evidence that an author is on the verge of insanity, Jeffrey must 

 have been curiously insensible to the testimony he was bearing against 

 his own soundness of mind in his criticism of the greater master of 

 his own art. 



Between 1736, when Swift wrote " The Legion Club," and 1741, 

 when the outbreak of insanity really took place, there can be no doubt 

 that he passed through a period of great wretchedness and depression 

 he was " miserably ill." He had lost to a great extent two of his 

 senses, for he was deaf and his eye-sight failed ; his dearest friends 

 had died before him, and his public sympathies were constantly out- 

 raged. 



In 1738 he wrote to Alderman Barker : " I have for almost three 

 years past been only the shadow of my former self, with years of 

 sickness and rage against all public proceedings, especially in this 

 miserably oppressed country. I have entirely lost my memory, ex- 

 cept when it is aroused by perpetual subjects of vexation." 



Two years later he wrote the following pathetic letter to his old 

 friend Mrs. Whiteway : 



" I have been very miserable all night, and to-day extremely deaf 

 and full of pain. I am so stupid and confounded that I can not ex- 

 press the mortification I am under, both of body and mind. All I 

 can say is that I am not in torture, but I daily and hourly expect it. 

 Pray let me know how your health is, and your family. I hardly 

 understand one word I write. I am sure my days will be very few ; 

 few and miserable they must be. I am for these few days yours 

 entirely, J. Swai t. 



" If I do not blunder it is Saturday." 



