kept the Duchess of Kendall's pockets full too, he was content to allow his minister to manage affairs as he would. He couldn't speak any English, and Walpole couldn't speak a word of German, and their very limited intercourse was carried on in atrocious Latin. When George I died and George II came to the throne in 1727, it was merely changing a big, good-natured German for a little, waspish German, that was all. Walpole governed still. His long ministry is important in the development of English commerce, colonies, society; but it had little political history, and we may dismiss it altogether for it had almost no influence on literature. Walpole himself was a big, coarse, fox-hunting squire, who had no taste or knowledge of letters, and not a cent of money to waste on them. Swift and Gay and Pope discharged some of their fiercest satire upon him, but they might as well have tried to worry a rhinoceros with a popgun. Some contemptuous or indifferent reply was all the notice they could provoke from "Bob, the poets' foe." Letters fell at once into neglect, and it was under Walpole that Johnson slaved and Savage starved. Government patronage of men of letters and the close connection of politics with literature closed when Anne died; and I may therefore close my survey then.

TH

THE LIFE OF JONATHAN SWIFT

I

HE figure of Jonathan Swift has for the student of literary biography 1 an interest such as attaches to no other man of letters of the Queen Anne time. And this not merely because he was the most strenuous and original genius of that age. His public career abounds in striking dramatic situations, and provoked bitter controversy that has lasted ever since; while the story of his private life is tinged with some of the colors of romance, and ends at last in the most somber tragedy. To Swift himself his career seemed a series of defeats. Towards the close of his life he wrote to Bolingbroke, "I remember when I was a little boy I felt a great fish at the end of my line which I drew up almost on the ground; but it dropped in, and the disappointment vexes me to this very day, and I believe it was the type of all my future disappointments." In truth it would seem an ill star that presided over this man's nativity. With a native scorn and dread of dependence, he was born into the narrowest poverty. With abilities greater than those of any man of letters in his time, and social powers that made him admired even more than he was dreaded, he was nevertheless doomed to receive fewer of the rewards of life than fell to any of his rivals, and to pass the greater part of his days in a country he despised. With affections naturally strong and tender beyond most men's, he was destined by a cruel irony of fate to find those affections sought where they could never be bestowed, and to pass his days without the solace of the dearest relation

This essay on Swift, originally designed for the introduction to a projected volume of selections in the Athenæum Press Series, never published, has been slightly altered and rearranged to fit the present volume. [L. B. G.] 'April 5, 1729. Works (Scott's 2d ed., Edinburgh, 1824), Vol. XVII,

p. 253.

ship of life. With an almost extravagant admiration for sanity and homely vigor of thought, he lived all his life in terror of the inevitable advance of mental disease, and finally was forced to pass through the dismal stages of insanity and idiocy before the kindly dismissal of death.

II

Nor did Swift's ill-fortune end with his life. He has been very unlucky in his biographers, though their number and long succession attest to the interest the story of his life has always excited. The earlier attempts at a biography are especially inadequate and unjust. The Earl of Orrery, a priggish egotist, who made the acquaintance of Swift as late as 1732, published a vain and spiteful book, Remarks upon the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, only six years after the dean's death. Good, but rather dull, Dr. Delany came to the defense of Swift, in his Observations upon Lord Orrery's Remarks, published in 1754. Delany had known Swift intimately since about 1715, and his book is a valuable storehouse of characteristic anecdote and reminiscence; but it is a defense rather than a biography, and does not pretend to give a detailed account of Swift's life or an impartial estimate of his work. Dr. Hawkesworth, dullest and most pompous of essayists, prefixed to a new edition of Swift's Works a Memoir (1755) which contained no new facts and no valuable opinions. The same year, one Deane Swift, son-in-law of Mrs. Whiteway, Swift's cousin and housekeeper, answered both Orrery and Delany, in an uncommonly silly book, which is chatter from cover to cover. To complete the list of works written shortly after the dean's death, we must add the Memoirs (1748) of Mrs. Pilkington, a vulgar adventuress with a kittenish. vivacity and trickiness of manner, whose book is a curious farrago in which lie and truth are vexatiously mixed.

In the next generation Dr. Johnson's Life (1781) in the Lives of the Poets, is stiff, unsympathetic, and adds little to our information; but at all events it contains no nonsense

and still may be called one of the best of the shorter sketches. Then in 1785, with great flourish of trumpets as the final life, appeared the Life by Thomas Sheridan. This Sheridan was the son of an old friend of Swift, and the father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan: he seems to have had his father's blundering arrogance and his son's shiftlessness without the brains of either one. His Life is a tedious, inaccurate, garrulous book. If to this list we add a short Inquiry into the Life of Swift (1789) by George Monck Berkeley,grandson of Bishop Berkeley,-we shall have most of the books upon Swift written during the eighteenth century. All of them, with the exception of Johnson's, were written by persons of mediocre ability, and no one of them can take rank as an adequate and impartial life.

In 1814 appeared the Life by Walter Scott, forming afterwards the first volume of his edition of Swift's works. Scott's clear and flowing narrative continued to be until quite recently the best account of Swift's career; but, while he had gathered considerable new matter, Scott was too much in haste to test his facts or to digest them, and his work, therefore, is occasionally inaccurate, and on most of the disputed questions of Swift's life, it shows hesitation or uncertainty of opinion. A few years later, 1819, a valuable life of Swift was written by William Monck Mason of Dublin. Mason effectually consigned his work to oblivion by writing it in villainous English, choking a thin strip of text in a thicket of notes, and then thrusting the whole into the middle of a stodgy quarto, The History and Antiquities of the Church of St. Patrick. But he was a laborious and accurate scholar, and his portentous body of notes is a storehouse of facts of the utmost importance to the student of the life of Swift. Mason was an enthusiastic defender of Swift: but the general verdict was still the other way. The essayistssave Hazlitt-and the historians have every one his fling at the great satirist. Jeffrey sums him up with ready assurance as "an apostate in politics, indifferent in religion, a defamer of humanity, the slanderer of the statesmen who served him, the destroyer of the women who loved him." "Essentially

irreligious from a vulgar temperament," says De Quincey with his usual recklessness of phrase, "an abominable, onesided degradation of humanity." "The haughtiest, the most vindictive of mortals," says Macaulay. "He had," says Lord Stanhope, tartly, "a thorough knowledge of the baser parts of human nature-for they were his own." Even so kindly a cynic as Thackeray belabors the dean with such epithets as "bully," "bravo," "outlaw," "Yahoo," and believes that he was tormented with a life-long consciousness of his own religious insincerity.

But, in the long run, posterity is just. A change in the judgment upon Swift is marked by the appearance of the first and only-volume of the Life by John Forster, in 1875. Mr. Forster's style is sometimes operose, and his vast admiration for his subject leads him occasionally into a kind of Boswellian diffuseness and detail; but his patient industry in the collecting and sifting of materials, and his evident determination not to be misled either by prejudice or by enthusiasm in his search for the exact truth, promised to make his book the standard life of Swift. Unfortunately, he died shortly after the issue of his first volume. The materials he had gathered were, however, put at the disposal of Sir Henry Craik for his Life of Jonathan Swift (1882). Sir Henry Craik has reached conclusions different from those of Mr. Forster on a few matters,-especially on the vexed question of the marriage to Stella,—but on the whole he gives the same favorable estimate of Swift's character that Mr. Forster had promised. That estimate has been repeated by later writers, like Mr. Moriarty and Mr. Churton Collins. In fact it has now become the general one. Few critics to-day would repeat the reckless charges of political treachery, religious hypocrisy, general misanthropy so freely made against the great dean seventy-five years ago.

III

Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, November 30, 1667. Both his parents were of English stock; and he always pro