rapture of returning reason, as the first, the best, the mightiest of her sons. The long arrears of gratitude to the only true disinterested champion of her people will then be paidthe long-deferred apotheosis of the patriot-divine will then take place the shamefully-forgotten debt of glory which the lustre of his genius shed around his semi-barbarous countrymen will be deeply and feelingly remembered; the old landmark of genuine worth will be discovered in the ebbing of modern agitation, and due honour will be rendered by a more enlightened age to the keen and scrutinizing philosopher, the scanner of whate'er lies hidden in the folds of the human heart, the prophetic seer of coming things, the unparing satirist of contemporary delinquency, the stern Rhadamanthus of the political and of the literary world, the star of a benighted land, the lance and the buckler of Israel "We ne'er shall look upon his like again."* And still why must I recall (what I would fain obliterate) the ever-painful fact,-graven, alas! too indelibly on the stubborn tablets of his biographers, chronicled in the annals of the country, and, above all, firmly and fatally established by the monumental record of his own philanthropic munificence, the disastrous fact, that ere this brilliant light of our island was quenched in death, towards the close of the year 1745-long before that sad consummation, the flame had wavered wild and flickered fitfully in its lamp of clay, casting around shadows of ghastly form, and soon assuming a strange and melancholy hue, that made every well-wisher hail as a blessing the event of its *Note in Prout's handwriting: "Doyle, of Carlow, faintly resembles him. Bold, honest, disinterested, an able writer, a scholar, a gentleman; a bishop, too, in our church, with none of the shallow pedantry, silly hauteur, arrant selfishness, and anile dotage, which may be sometimes covered, but not hidden, under a mitre. Swift demolished, in his day, Woods and his bad halfpence; Doyle denounced Daniel and his box of coppers. A provision for the starving Irish was called for by the Dean,' and was sued for by J. K. L.' Alas! when will the Government awaken to the voice of our island's best and most enlightened patriots? Truly, it hath 'Moses and the prophets'-doth the Legis. lature wait until one come from the dead ?" Doyle is since dead-but "defunctus adhuc loquitur !"—O. Y. final extinction in the cold and dismal vaults of St. Patrick's? In what mysterious struggle his gigantic intellect had been cloven down, none could tell. But the evil genius of insanity had clearly obtained a masterdom over faculties the most powerful, and endowments the highest, that have fallen to the lot of man. 66 66 We are told of occasional hours of respite from the fangs of his tormenting dauw, we learn of moments when the mens divinior" was suffered to go loose from its gaoler, and to roam back, as it were on parole," into the dominions of reason, like the ghost of the murdered king, allowed to revisit, for a brief space, the glimpses of our glorious firmament, but such gleams of mental enlightenment were but few, and short in their duration. They were like the flash that is seen to illumine the wreck when all hope is gone, and, fiercely bursting athwart the darkness, appears. but to seal the doom of the cargo and the mariners-intervals of lugubrious transport, described by our native bard as "That ecstasy which, from the depths of sadness, Glares like the maniac's moon, whose light is madness." Alas! full rapidly would that once clear and sagacious spirit falter and relapse into the torpor of idiocy. His large, expressive eyes, rolling wildly, would at times exhibit, as it were, the inward working of his reason, essaying in vain to cast off the nightmare that sat triumphant there, impeding that current of thought, once so brisk and brilliant. Noble and classic in the very writhings of delirium, and often sublime, he would appear a living image of the sculptured Laocoon, battling with a serpent that had grasped, not the body, but the mind, in its entangling folds. Yet must we repeat the sad truth, and again record in sorrow, that the last two or three years of Jonathan Swift presented nothing but the shattered remnants of what had been a powerfully organized being, to whom it ought to have been allotted, according to our faint notions, to carry unimpaired and undiminished into the hands of Him who gave such varied gifts, and formed such a goodly intellect, the stores of hoarded wisdom and the overflowing measure of talents well employed: but such was not the counsel of an inscrutable Providence, whose decree was to be fulfilled in the prostration of a mighty understanding Διος δ' ετελείετο βουλη. And here let me pause-for a sadly pleasing reminiscence steals across my mind, a recollection of youthful days. 1 love to fix, in its flight, a transitory idea; and I freely plead the privilege of discursiveness conceded to the garrulity of old age. When my course of early travel led me to wander in search of science, and I sought abroad that scholastic knowledge which was denied to us at home in those evil days; when, by force of legislation, I became, like others of my clerical brethren, a" peripatetic" philosopher-like them compelled to perambulate some part of Europe in quest of professional education, the sunny provinces of southern France were the regions of my choice; and my first gleanings of literature were gathered on the banks of that mighty stream so faithfully characterised by Burdigala's native poet Ausonius, in his classic enumeration: "Lentus Arar, Rhodanusque celer, PLENUSque GARUMNA.” One day, a goatherd, who fed his shaggy flock along the river, was heard by me, as, seated on the lofty bank, he gazed on the shining flood, to sing a favourite carol of the country. 'Twas but a simple ballad; yet it struck me as a neat illustration of the ancient parallel between the flow of human life and the course of the running waters; and thus it began: So "Salut! O vieux fleuve, qui coulez par la plaine! Tous deux nous fournissons la même carrière ; sang the rustic minstrel. But it has occurred to me, calmly and sorrowfully pondering on the fate of Swift, that although this melancholy resemblance, so often alluded to in Scriptural allegory, may hold good in the general fortunes of mankind, still has it been denied to some to complete ir their personal history the sad similitude; for not a few, and these some of the most exalted of our species, have been forbidden to glide into the Ocean of Eternity bringing thereunto the fulness of their life-current with its brimming banks undrained. Who that has ever gazed on the glorious Rhine, coeval in historic memory with the first Cæsar, and boasting much previous traditionary renown, at the spot where it gushes from its Alpine source, would not augur to it, with the poet, an uninterrupted career, and an ever-growing volume of copious exuberance? "Au pied du Mont Adulle, entre mille roseaux, BOILEAU. Whence if it is viewed sweeping in brilliant cataracts through many a mountain glen, and many a woodland scene, until it glides from the realms of romance into the business of life, and forms the majestic boundary of two rival nations, conferring benefits on both-reflecting from the broad expanse of its waters anon the mellow vineyards of Johannisberg, anon the hoary crags of Drachenfels-who then could venture to foretell that so splendid an alliance of usefulness and grandeur was destined to be dissolved-that yon rich flood would never gain that ocean into whose bosom a thousand rivulets flow on with unimpeded gravitation, but would disappear in the quagmires of Helvoetsluys, be lost in the swamps of Flanders, or absorbed in the sands of Holland ? Yet such is the course of the Rhine, and such was the destiny of Swift,-of that man the outpourings of whose abundant mind fertilized alike the land of his fathers* and the land of his birth: that man the very overflowings of whose strange genius were looked on by his contemporaries with delight, and welcomed as the inundations of the Nile are hailed by the men of Egypt. *Prout supposes Swift to have been a natural son of Sir William Temple. We believe him in error here.-O. Y. A deep and hallowed motive impels me to select that last and dreary period of his career for the subject of special analysis; to elucidate its secret history, and to examine it in all its bearings; eliminating conjecture, and substituting fact; prepared to demolish the visionary superstructure of hypothesis, and to place the matter on its simple basis of truth and reality. It is far from my purpose and far from my heart to tread on such solemn ground save with becoming awe and with feet duly unshodden. If, then, in the following pages, I dare to unseal the long-closed well, think not that I seek to desecrate the fountain: if it devolves on me to lift the veil, fear not that I mean to profane the sanctuary: tarry until this paper shall have been perused to its close; nor will it fall from your grasp without leaving behind it a conviction that its contents were traced by no unfriendly hand, and by no unwarranted biographer: for if a bald spot were to be found on the head of Jonathan Swift, the hand of Andrew Prout should be the first to cover it with laurels. pure There is a something sacred about insanity: the traditions of every country agree in flinging a halo of mysterious distinction around the unhappy mortal stricken with so sad and so lonely a visitation. The poet who most studied from nature and least from books, the immortal Shakespeare, has never made our souls thrill with more intense sympathy than when his personages are brought before us bereft of the guidance of reason. The grey hairs of King Lear are silvered over with additional veneration when he raves; and the wild flower of insanity is the tenderest that decks the garland of Ophelia. The story of Orestes has furnished Greek tragedy with its most powerful emotions; and never did the mighty Talma sway with more irresistible dominion the assembled men of France, than when he personated the fury-driven maniac of Euripides, revived on the French stage by the muse of Voltaire. We know that among rude and untutored nations madness is of rare occurrence, and its instances few indeed. But though its frequency in more refined and civilised society has taken away much of the deferential homage paid to it in primitive times, still, in the palmiest days of Greek and Roman illumination, the oracles of Delphi found their fitting organ in the frenzy of the |