Jonathan Swift, therefore, was in no want of uncles and cousins. He was provided by his Uncle Godwin alone with eighteen cousins. It will be observed also, that his father came in direct descent from three generations of clergymen, and that the family traditions of the Civil War were strongly with the King against the Parliament. The Jonathan Swift who wrote "The Tale of a Tub" was essentially a Churchman, and his bias was on the side of authority.

Swift's father, from whom he inherited his name of Jonathan, was the seventh or eighth son of the Vicar of Goderich. He and his brothers Dryden, William, and Adam all came to seek fortune in Ireland, where their eldest brother, Godwin, had settled and prospered. Godwin was of Gray's Inn, and had been called to the Bar about the time of his father's death, in 1658. His nephew says of him that "he married a relation of the old Marchioness of Ormond, and upon that account, as well as his father's loyalty, the old Duke of Ormond made him his AttorneyGeneral in the palatinate of Tipperary. He had four wives. One of them, to the great offence of his family, was co-heiress to Admiral Deane, who was one of the Regicides. Her name was Hannah, daughter of Major Richard Deane. Godwin's third wife, by whom he had issue Deane Swift and several other children. His second wife, Catherine Webster, was the only one who did not bring him a dower.

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Jonathan had come to Ireland very soon after his eldest brother, Godwin. He had been about the law-courts of the King's Inns in Dublin for six or seven years, on the 25th of

January 1666; and had been admitted an attorney and a member of the Society in Hilary Term, 1665. On that 25th of January 1666 he was elected by the Benchers to be successor to Thomas Wale, their steward, who had lately died. With a newly-married wife from Leicester, Abigail Erick or Herrick-of the family of Herrick the poet-the young steward of the King's Inns began life as caterer for the Dublin lawyers. His own property-he was but twenty-four years old-bought an annuity of twenty pounds a year, which he settled upon his wife. When he died at the age of twenty-five, in the early spring of the next year, 1667, that little annuity was all he left her, with these exceptions -an infant daughter Jane; an unborn son; and a hundred and twenty pounds of money owing to the steward by those lawyers who were slow in paying for their commons. Seven or eight months after his father's death our Jonathan Swift was born, in No. 7 Hoey's Court, adjoining the Castle enclosure, a court now pulled down and included in the Castle grounds.

Born in Hoey's Court on St. Andrew's Day, the 30th November 1667, eight months after his father's death, Jonathan Swift was smuggled to Newhaven, as a baby, by a too affectionate nurse, who crossed the Channel on occasion of the death of a relation, and brought him back after two years, so well taught, for an infant, that Swift tells us he could read any chapter in the Bible when he was three years old. When he was six years old his mother returned to her relatives at Leicester, and left Jonathan to the care of his Uncle Godwin, who received him into his large family, and sent him to Kilkenny School, where, in his latter years, he had for a schoolfellow William Congreve, two years younger than himself.

Swift passed from the care of Mr. Ryder at Kilkenny to be entered on the 24th of April 1682, aged fourteen years and about five months, as a pensioner at Trinity College, Dublin. There he remained for the next seven years. In February 1685 at the examination for degrees, his Physics were registered as done "badly," his Greek and Latin "well," his Theme "negligently," and he barely passed "by special grace," although the "bene"

given for his classics was an approbation very sparingly conceded to the work in any subject of any of the hundred and nineteen men who were on the list at that examination. After this Jonathan Swift seems to have worked hard for his M.A. degree, but the state of Ireland in the days of the English Revolution of 1688-89 stopped nearly all work at Trinity College. Classes were broken up, and at the same time Swift had lost the support of his Uncle Godwin, who had crippled his means seriously before he fell into a state of idiocy. He died an idiot in 1688; so Jonathan Swift died in 1745; and so Swift had, for many years before the end, believed that he should die.

In the last months of his life at Trinity College, he was only saved from absolute want by an uncle, William, who had a home in Dublin. When the English, for fear of Tyrconnel, fled from Dublin, Swift could do no better than go home-then in his twenty-second year-to his mother at Leicester, and take counsel with her for the shaping of his future.

Sir William Temple was then living, withdrawn from political life, at Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey. His age was sixtyone, his political opinions were those which prevailed after the expulsion of the Stuarts, and in 1668 he had with straightforwardness as a statesman gone to De Witt and settled in five days the triple alliance of England, Holland, and Sweden against the aggressive ambition of France. He stood high in the regard of William III. and the Whig statesmen of the English Revolution. They would have made him a Secretary of State, but he declined the offer. He had in the days of Charles the Second given up the statesman's occupation in despair. Build what he would, if it was good for anything, the King, who was good for nothing, would destroy it. Sir William was plagued also with the gout. He needed rest, and had a taste for literature, and wrote essays, and had in writing as in statesmanship a clear and direct style. Gout grew more troublesome; peaceful life at Moor Park, with gardens to improve, a study in which his mind could rest or work at will, with pleasant home companionship, with now and then also a friendly call made by the King, or by some politician who

would chat with the veteran on state affairs, made pleasant close to his life's more strenuous labours, and there were to be ten years yet before Sir William died.

When Mrs. Swift, early in 1689, advised her son Jonathan to seek his friendship, Sir William Temple lived at Moor Park with his wife and his widowed sister, Martha, Lady Giffard, whose early love had ended in marriage with Sir William Giffard when he was at the point of death, that she might as his widow succeed to his estate. Sir William Temple's wife, who died some five years later, in 1694, had been Dorothy, daughter of Sir Peter Osborne. William Temple, as a young man of twenty, when on his way to France, had found Dorothy and her brother at an inn in the Isle of Wight. One of the young men wrote Royalist lines on a window, for which the whole party was arrested till Dorothy Osborne obtained their release by taking the offence upon herself; and then began young Temple's course of love, that was crossed by many troubles. There was some relationship between Swift's mother and Lady Temple. Sir William Temple's father, as Master of the Irish Rolls, had been in friendly relation with Swift's uncle, Godwin, and Sir William Temple had succeeded his father in that sinecure Irish office. Here was ground enough for the letter of introduction with which Swift went to Moor Park in the summer of 1689, hoping to establish with Sir William such relations of patron and client as would secure the great man's future influence on his behalf. The visit was not made in vain. Swift was received into Sir William Temple's house. He had not then completed his twenty-second year, and he found in the house a little girl between seven and eight years old (he remembered her age afterwards as six) named Esther Johnson, who in her womanhood became the "Stella" of his after years.

Esther Johnson's mother was confidential servant or companion to Lady Giffard, with whom she remained till Lady Giffard died, in 1722, at the age of eighty-four. Mrs. Johnson, who lived sometimes in the house at Moor Park and sometimes in a cottage near by, was a widow with two daughters, Esther or Hetty, the elder, and Anne. Jonathan Swift, aged twenty-two,

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took to the child of seven, who was then not strong in health and not good-looking. He made himself her tutor; he so taught her to write that her handwriting in after life was very like his own; and he talked playfully with her in baby words that survived to later years as their "Little Language." "Do you know what," he wrote to her long afterwards, "when I am writing in our language I make up my mouth just as if I were speaking it. I caught myself at it just now; "-as when he prayed God bless poodeerichar M.D.,' bidding her be merry and 'get oo health."" The meeting with this child was the beginning of the slow growth of a love that pierced afterwards to the quick of Jonathan Swift's life.

About this time also of his first coming to Moor Park, and first meeting with little Hetty as pupil and playfellow, Swift was first touched by an ailment which was the beginning of the slow growth of a brain disease that afterwards quenched his reason and destroyed his life. The beginning was with fits of giddiness, at a time variously stated as a little before or a little after his first settlement with Sir William Temple. At first he did not know what it meant, and ascribed it to an indigestion caused by a surfeit of apples. He never lost this symptom of the slowlygrowing brain disease that, about four years after the first attack, became asociated with attacks of deafness.

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In May 1690, when Swift had not been a year at Moor Park, failure of health, and perhaps also some restlessness of temper, led to suggestion that he might get better in his native air. Robert Southwell going then to Ireland as Secretary of State, Temple sent Swift to him with a letter of recommendation. The letter offered him for Sir Robert's service in Ireland, and said: "He was born and bred there (though of a good family in Herefordshire), was near seven years in the College of Dublin, and ready to take his degree of Master of Arts, when he was forced away by the desertion of that College upon the calamities of the country. Since that time he has lived in my house, read to me, writ for me, and kept all accounts as far as my small occasions required. He has Latin and Greek, some French, writes a very good and current hand, is very honest and diligent, and has good