LESSONS IN ENGLISH I 



poverty, privation, and embarrassment. Hi* education he 

 received first at a grammar school at Kilkenny, and sub- 

 Here ho not only failed 



ii !iim-vi' l>v i-o or attainiuonU, but 



seeing t a very unfavourable impression of hit* u 



i L'S Bruins waa very slow in showing itself : he was 

 aa remarkable an example of late mental development a* his 



and fellow-workor, Pope, was of intellectual precocity. 

 Swift waa distantly connected by family with Sir William 

 Templo; mill not long ai'tvr taking his degree, he entered tho 



' >f that statesman, then living in luxurious and lettered 

 ease at his country seat in Surrey. Swift's employment in 

 's service was an ambiguous one, something between 

 secretary, literary assistant, and humble hanger-on ; and it may 

 easily bo conceived how acutely painful such a position must 

 have been to Swift's proud, sensitive, and not very generous 

 naturo. There was everything, in fact, in Swift's early life and 

 training to embitter such a disposition as his. And the facts of 

 his history go tar to explain how ono capable of the depth of 

 tciuli-rnoss and affection which Swift could show, could yet 

 have entertained that hatred and contempt for mankind which 



his satiro not severe merely, but positively savage and 



LOUS. 



It was while in Temple's service that Swift first met Esther 

 Johnson then a very young girl, passing as the daughter of 

 Temple's steward, though probably, in reality, a natural 

 daughter of tho old man himself. She was the Stella whoso 

 name must always remain associated with Swift's, and whose 

 sad story is ono of the most touching in the whole hiutory of 

 literature. An attachment seems early to have sprung up 

 between Swift and her : on her side it ripened into an absolute 

 and life-long devotion ; on his side there was, as his Journal to 

 Stella shows, an affection, a tenderness of the rarest kind; 

 though with that strange, unaccountable cruelty, which was a 

 part of his nature, he broke her heart through doubt, delay, 

 and uncertainty, and married her only on her deathbed. 



After the death of Sir William Temple, in 1699, it fell to the 

 lot of Swift to collect and edit the works of his patron ; and 

 this appears to have been Swift's first public appearance in the 

 paths of literature. He soon afterwards went to Ireland in the 

 capacity, in the first instance, of chaplain to the then Lord 

 Deputy, and was in time appointed to the living of Laracor in 

 the county of Me&th. This was now his home for some years ; 

 bnt his visits to London were frequent, where his great powers 

 gradually became known, and his society proportionately culti- 

 vated among the wits and literary men of the metropolis. 



His connection with Temple had naturally introduced him 

 into political lift as a Whig ; but Swift's political principles 

 were probably never very rigid, and before very long he took 

 service under the Tory banner, and at once became the most 

 powerful literary champion of the party of Harley and Boling- 

 broke. 



It was during these constant visits to London that Swift's 

 touching Journal to Stella was written, she remaining at that 

 time near his home in Ireland. It was also during one of these 

 visits that he became acquainted with the second victim of 

 his affections, Esther Vanhomrigh, the daughter of a wealthy 

 London merchant, who, under the poetical name of Vanessa 

 criven her by Swift, has become scarcely less famous than the 

 unhappy Stella. Being left, by her father's death, with a 

 competent independence, she also followed Swift to Ireland. 

 Driven at last to desperation by doubt and jealousy, she sought 

 to learn the truth about her rival, Stella (who was then, in 

 truth, in her last illness, and whom Swift about the same time 

 married), with a directness which excited his anger, and alienated 

 him from her for ever. She died soon after, evidently under the 

 influence of disappointed and wounded affection. 



In 1713 Swift had been appointed to the Deanery of St. 

 Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin ; the character of his writings, and 

 the personal enmity which his satire had in some instances 

 excited, being an obstacle to that higher promotion to an 

 English bishopric, which he so ardently desired and so con- 

 fidently expected. During his residence in Dublin as dean, 

 Swift showed his great powers as a satirist and party-leader in 

 their most conspicuous light, and became almost in a moment 

 the idol of the Irish nation. It had been determined by the 

 Government to introduce a large quantity of a new copper 

 coinage into Ireland; and an English manufacturer, named 



1 Wood, had obtained tho contract for the production of tho new 

 Wood'H halfpence were from tho tint regarded a* * 

 wrong and a fraud. But Bwif t took up th* quarrel, and wrote 

 his famous series of latter* known as " Drapier's Letters," 

 from their having been published under the sigaatere of "M. 

 B., Drapior." Tho okill with which these letter* were framed 

 waa consummate, and their effect extraordinary. The people of 

 Dublin, indeed of all Ireland, were excited to frenzy ; the conv 

 age had to bo withdrawn ; and though Swift WM well known 

 to be the author of the letters, the Government did not dare to 

 attack him, and proceedings which had been commenced against 

 tho printer were discreetly abandoned. Thus did Swift " hie 

 wronged country's copper chains unbind." 



But Swift's heart was never in Ireland. He was never an 

 Irishman in real sympathy, and never loved to be thought one 

 in any sense at all. London was the place to which his thoogbte 

 and wishes really turned ; there he reigned supreme. He was 

 courted by all the leading political men on both sides, and 

 might have sold his services to either almost at his ow:. 

 In society his bitter and brilliant speech, and the dren 

 powerful and somewhat unscrupulous pen, secured him that 

 power which probably he valued more than affection. 

 literary world he could have no rivals, except Pope and Addison. 

 And Addison and Swift, though on opposite aides in polities, 

 always treated one another at least with respect, a respect which 

 Swift showed for few ; and with Pope Swift lived on terms of 

 close intimacy and genuine friendship. 



Swift probably not only suffered throughout much of his 

 life, but had even been conscious of a tendency to mental 

 disorder ; a tendency which may very probably be the true key 

 to much of what is most strange and most painful in his very 

 painful career. He had foretold in bitterness of spirit that he 

 would " die at top first." And so it was. Disease of tho brain 

 began to show itself in him in about 1741; and for the last 

 four years of his life he waa reduced to a state of absolute 

 idiotcy, in which he died in 1745. He waa buried in St. 

 Patrick's Cathedral. By a strange freak of feeling, showing 

 alike what the end he anticipated was, and how oddly that 

 anticipation worked upon his mind, he left the bulk of his 

 fortune to found an asylum for tho insane in the city of Dublin, 

 which still exists there under the name of Swift's Hospital. 



To examine Swift's works with anything like the complete* 

 ness which they deserve, would demand far more apace than we 

 can possibly give to them in these lessons. His poems are 

 numerous, chiefly mere jeux d'esprit occasional verses on the 

 most trivial subjects. It is impossible that such a man as 

 Swift can write anything that shall not have merit of a certain 

 kind ; but these aro rather the works of a wit than of a poet. 



Upon political and party questions Swift was a most powerful 

 and not very scrupulous pamphleteer ; though it must be 

 admitted, that after he had once chosen the Tory aide he 

 remained faithful to that party. The moat important of his 

 controversial writings of this class is the celebrated pamphlet 

 on "The Conduct of the Allies," published in 1712, a work 

 which contributed largely to the fall of the Whig party, the 

 abandonment of the Whig policy, and the triumph of Harley 

 and Bolingbroke. 



Others, again, of Swift's works seem to be almost purposeless, 

 to be written in the very wantonness of satire, merely because 

 it was a pleasure to " laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair," 

 because he loved to show us the world turned upside down, to 

 startle us with paradox, to shock our sensibilities, to bring all 

 that is most venerable into contact with the most contemptible 

 associations. Of this class are his "Argument against Abolish. 

 irg Christianity," his " Modest Proposal to the Public," ana 

 his ' Directions to Servants." 



But there are three in particular of Swift's works upon which 

 his fame with posterity mainly rests: "The Battle of the 

 Books," "Tho Tale of a Tub," both published in 1704; and 

 " Gulliver's Travels," published in 172U. 



The " Battle of the Books " is one of the many valuable piece? 

 which we owe to the great discussion then at its height of 

 which the celebrated Boyle and Bentley controversy was an 

 episode aa to the relative merits of the ancients and the 

 moderns in the field of literature. Sir William Temple had 

 entered the arena aa a champion of the ancients, and Swift, aa 

 became his humble dependent, was bound to take the same side. 

 His work, regarded aa a serious contribution to the literature 



