and Gay, who were Tories. He was anxious to secure for the clergy of the Irish church the same pecuniary benefits which were enjoyed by the clergy of the English church, and took an interest in the attitude of the government towards ecclesiastical affairs. He began his series of pamphlets with the brilliant An Argument against Abolishing Christianity. He chooses as his basis the complacent indifference which he hates. He will not defend real Christianity, which is more or less gone by the board already, but maintains that even such Christianity as they now have has utility. There will, for example, if Christianity is abolished, be no topic for profane satirists, who might thus turn their attention to the ministry, an apparently easy subject for attack.

It soon becomes clear that Swift has nothing to expect from the ruling party, and in 1710 he definitely allied himself with the Tories. His reasons were that he found himself out of sympathy with the Whigs and saw hope for his political views and his personal ambitions with the other party. The years from 1710 to 1714 were to Swift the wonderful years. He was the friend and associate of the highest officers in the kingdom, and was the sword and buckler of the Tory party. He wrote his papers in The Examiner, his pamphlets in behalf of ending the war, and the violent papers against Thomas, Earl of Wharton, and those against his former friend Steele. It is the papers written at this time and the later Irish pamphlets which cause Swift to be described as the pamphleteer par excellence, comparable to "Junius," and the delight of Burke and Fox. This is the period covered by The Journal to Stella, and it has, therefore, an unusual personal interest. Evening by evening or morning by morning, usually while he was in bed, Swift poured out to his dear M.D., in the little language which had probably been retained since Stella's childhood, an

amazingly varied and particular account of his daily doings and sayings. The record, in spite of its playful tone, is not garrulous; it is compact and pointed in what it says, describing or characterizing in a few trenchant phrases the people he meets and the situations which confront him.

We have also Bishop Kennet's picture of him as a selfconstituted minister of requests in the ante-chamber at Windsor, securing a chaplain's place in the garrison at Hull for Mr. Fiddes, and the post as minister of the English church at Rotterdam for Mr. Thorold, stopping Mr. Gwynne on his way to the Queen with his red bag and telling him aloud that he had something to say to him from my Lord Treasurer, writing in his memoranda several things to be done for the son of Dr. Davenant, complaining that the courtiers have given him a watch that won't go right, and saying he must have 'em all subscribe for a translation of Homer by Mr. Pope, the best poet in England, who “shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him."

The Tories broke when the Queen died; Swift's hopes of further preferment were ended, and he returned like a doomed man to his despised native land. He was hated by the people of his own class in Ireland and suspected wrongly of Jacobitism. During the six years from 1714 to 1720 he wrote little; but the plans of the Scriblerus Club were no doubt still in his mind, and much of the materials subsequently issued may have been originated during this period. It was in 1720 that he was moved to write first on the Irish question. It has been thought that it was rather for the sake of annoying and embarrassing Sir Robert Walpole's government than out of sympathy for Ireland that he began what he did. Subsequently, no doubt, the fate of Ireland was a serious issue to him, and he came to regard himself as an upholder of human lib

erty. Swift's Irish pamphlets are a perfect example of the power of propaganda. He started literally from nothing, merely from a situation perceived. A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures recommends, on account of the unfair trade restrictions which were ruining Ireland, that a boycott should be established against English goods. When in 1722 the issue over Wood's halfpence arose, Swift had his chance to go further, and the great Drapier's Letters followed. From the very start Swift had sought to awaken in Ireland a spirit which would make Irishmen demand for themselves liberties equal to those enjoyed by Englishmen, and the whole miserable state of Ireland had, before the end, sunk more and more deeply into his soul. The last of the Drapier's Letters appeared at the end of 1724; but in 1729, as an after-thought of distilled bitterness, came A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents in the Country. In this widely known tract Swift has probably reached the ultimate which his gravely restrained but bitterly ironical style could

encompass.

In 1726 and 1727 came Swift's last visits to England, and in the former year he published Gulliver's Travels. After that he was in Ireland, dying, as he expressed it, "like a poisoned rat in a hole." He was, by virtue of his advocacy of the cause of Ireland, a good deal of a hero in his native land, and this honor he might have enjoyed but for his growing malady. One seems to feel his distraction in the works written after the death of Stella in 1727.

At some earlier time he had written his epitaph, and when he died in 1745, it was engraved upon his tomb. It at least expresses his conception of the value and significance of his life. From his point of view, it is the

perfect epitaph; but, after all, Swift's life meant more to him and to the world, both in performance and happiness, than the epitaph would claim:

HIC DEPOSITUM EST CORPUS
JONATHAN SWIFT, S.T.P.

HUJUS ECCLESIAE CATHEDRALIS

DECANI

UBI SAEVA INDIGNATIO
COR ULTERIUS LACERARE NEQUIT
ABI VIATOR

ET IMITARE SI POTERIS

STRENUUM PRO VIRILI LIBERTATIS VINDICEM

Pope and Arbuthnot would have felt its inadequacy and would have refuted its pessimism. Let us do so too. Here is a man whom we see struggling bravely against poverty, discouragement, and disease ("Don't you remember," he says to Stella, "how I used to be in pain when Sir W. Temple would look cold and out of humor for three or four days, and I used to suspect a hundred reasons?"), developing by hard study his mighty intellect, boldly challenging the insincerity of his age in the very profession where his hope of preferment lay, fighting like Ajax in the political field, taking counsel with the highest in the land, and producing works of consummate merit and startling effect; honored by everybody, loving his friends and loved by them ("Oh! if the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels."), having, too, the companionship and affection of women, and enjoying the gratitude of a world of poor poets, needy young clergymen, and of the weak and helpless generally; a born letter-writer, moreover, and a wit, a writer of nonsense, a pedestrian, and a social and domestic dictator. There must have been some fun in all this, and these things must have held him from the arms of misery the greater number of his actual hours and days. But let us grant that "there is nothing either

good or bad, but thinking makes it so," and that it is an immortal pity that Swift felt himself in a “foul and pestilent congregation of vapors"; but let us not forget that the objective facts; namely, his great and truly interesting life and the heritage of great books he has left behind, are quite otherwise. Let us join Pope and Arbuthnot in a respectful protest against his gloomy view of himself.

HARDIN CRAIG.