"The chief end I purpose to myself in all my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it; and if I could compass that design without hurting my own person or fortune, I would be the most indefatigable writer you have ever seen without reading." Swift wrote thus to Pope on the 29th of September 1725, and he added, "I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals." There is more truth in the second of these statements than in the first.

Swift was no lover of men in general, for he saw all their faults and follies and little besides. It never seems to have occurred to him that there was a beautiful side to human nature, or that the manifest evil was only a relative thing— a lesser good or a blundering effort after good. Carlyle, like Swift, exposed the faults and follies of men, but he did not lose sight of their possibilities for better things. He blamed them for their badness because they were capable of goodness. Swift had scarcely enough respect for men even to blame them. Man was to him as an unclean beast, loathsome evermore. "Principally I hate and detest that animal called man," he said. He scorned men for doing wrong, but never spurred them to do right or held up ideals of heroism for their contemplation. While the study of his works is healthy as an occasional mental and moral tonic, it would not be good as daily food.

Swift was a man of facts, not of ideas. His mind was deep, not broad. His sympathies were confined within exceedingly narrow limits. His effort to write history was a conspicuous failure, because, like Macaulay, he could not

weigh and judge impartially. He could see well into a thing, but not over or around it. Consequently, his strong common-sense and his wonderful intellect were compelled to serve the interests of party and not of mankind. He had no high aims.

Yet he had no low aims either. He maintained his integrity in the midst of a dissolute age, and if he did not use his great powers for the noblest causes, he certainly was not guilty of prostituting them. Whatever his limitations and defects might be, he never pretended to be better than he was. He was a hater of shams, and the only sham he himself was ever guilty of was the appearance of being worse than he really was. Those who did not look below the surface saw only a hater of men, a party politician, a selfseeker, a clergyman without religion who cared for his office only for its emoluments, a man, hard, grasping, illnatured and insolent. Those who did look below the surface found that the real Swift was a very different person. He loved his mother with more than common devotion. He was an unswerving friend. When he had influence with the Government he did far more for persons who were not even his friends than he ever did for himself. So far from being malicious, he could do a good turn even for his enemies, as, witness, the aid he gave Steele after Steele had quarrelled with him. After he had settled in Dublin, his acts of private benevolence were immense. One of his servants, whose drunkenness and inattention he had long submitted to, he dismissed summarily and never forgave, because he insolently refused to attend to the request of a needy old woman. He was almost too susceptible to kindness, for his estimate of individual men was often based on their personal treatment of him and of those belonging to him. The letters

which make up the Journal to Stella must have been written by a man of an affectionate and generous disposition.

Swift was not a professional man of letters. He did not write either for profit or from a love of literature. The pen, to him, was an efficient weapon for ulterior ends—political, ecclesiastical, or personal. With few exceptions (such as some of his contributions to the Tatler) his style was free from the fashionable graces, or fopperies, of the period. He wrote for publication with simple directness, as if he were writing a letter. His language was that of a man who would, at all times, unblushingly call things by their real names. When he expressed himself coarsely, whether from rage or in jest, he did so openly, and not as if with a snigger and a wink. His writings were almost wholly occasional to meet a need of the hour: to defend or destroy a ministry, to secure a a measure, to discredit a policy, or to whip some misbehaviour. Yet, so slowly do we move, that they possess not only historical but much living interest to-day.

The works of Swift contained in the present volume are given as he wrote them, without omission or alteration. In choosing the pieces my aim has been to exhibit the author in his varying moods. No doubt some readers will look, first of all, for Gulliver's Travels, and will wonder that they do not find it. It is not printed here because it is already so well-known and so easily obtainable elsewhere. Moreover, it is not Swift's best or most representative work. Great as are its merits, it lacks that constructive unity which is so characteristic of his other leading pieces. It is like a number of distinct pieces strung rather loosely together. The book actually was written at different times,

wtih long intervals between. It ranks below the Tale of a Tub, concerning which Swift, re-reading it in his old age, exclaimed, "Good God! what a genius I had when I wrote that book." If I could, I would gladly have given both; but as, to the necessary limits of space one piece or the other had to be sacrificed, I think I was right to prefer the Tale of a Tub to Gulliver. In this way I am able to give in addition, not only the Battle of the Books and the so-called Fragment, but a number of shorter pieces which probably the majority of my readers have never seen before, and some of which are no less interesting and important than Swift's more famous works. They will all repay perusal.

were

The Tale of a Tub appears to have been written about 1696, but it was not published until 1704. Three editions exhausted during the year; the fourth edition was published in 1705, and the fifth edition, with the "Author's Apology" prefixed, in 1710. The explanation of the title is given in the "Author's Preface." The reader will hardly fail to see that the Tale is not an attack on religion, but on abuses and absurdities which have grown up in the name of religion. The tone is that of a man little given to superstition of any kind, and perhaps not possessed of a very large amount of veneration. Swift himself states in his "Apology," that at the time the Tale was written, "the author was then young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head. By the assistance of some thinking and conversation he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could; I say real ones, because under the notion of prejudices he knew to what dangerous heights some men have proceeded. Thus prepared, he thought the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning

might furnish matter for a satire that would be useful and diverting "

The Battle of the Books and the Discourse concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit appeared with the Tale. The former, as I have stated already, had been written and circulated while Swift was living with Temple. The Argument against abolishing Christianity, which appeared in 1708, is in Swift's best style. The satire is keen and free from all trace of irritation, and accordingly the more effective. Of the Art of Political Lying, he wrote to Stella"Arbuthnot has sent me, from Windsor, a pretty discourse upon lying; and I have ordered the printer to come for it." Swift's remarks are not, however, always to be taken literally. The same subject was treated in No. 15 of The Examiner.

The Examiner was a weekly sheet established to support the Tory Government of the day. The first number appeared on the 3rd of August 1710. Among the earliest writers were Atterburry, St. John (afterwards Viscount Bolingbroke), and Prior. Swift's first contribution was No. 14, dated the 2nd of November. His second is printed here. He continued to write the paper regularly for about eight months, his last essay being No. 45, dated the 7th of June 1711, and his last contribution, a brief address in No. 46; after which, as he relates, he "let it fall into other hands, who held it up in some manner until Her Majesty's death." Most of these papers, like Swift's other political writings, have of course, as regards their design, lost some of their original interest, but they always have historical value, and they are worthy of attention as specimens of their author's directness and vigour of expression. This and something more is true of the essay which formed No. 15. The force of its moral is not yet spent.