to bring to a close. He maintained the fight in the pages of the Examiner, a paper to which he continued to write from November, 1710, to June of the next year. During that period the paper became the chief political organ of the day. The successful fight which Swift maintained tided the Ministry over the critical period when they were still new to power: and the gratitude due to such a defender made Swift the chosen intimate and confidential adviser of Harley, St. John, and the Lord Chancellor, Harcourt.

Accident confirmed the success which Swift's pen had done so much to secure. A foreign adventurer, named Guiscard, who had intrigued alternately with French and English, and whose profligate life had brought him into some contact with St. John, had obtained, through the influence of the new Secretary of State, a pension from the Crown. It was insufficient, however, to extricate him from overwhelming money difficulties: and, beginning again his course of political intrigue, he was arrested on a suspicion of treason. Driven to frenzy, the poor wretch, during his examination before the Privy Council, attacked and wounded Harley. The wound and its consequences to Harley's health were sufficiently serious to produce an illness of some duration and although the incident had no possible political bearing, it was enough to increase Harley's popularity, and to establish more securely that success which the Ministry had, by Swift's help, already attained. It bound Swift to Harley by the new tie of solicitude for one by whom he had been kindly treated and for whom he had done much: and Swift became even more closely identified with the Ministry than he had hitherto been.

Harley 'had grown,' as Swift puts it, 'by persecutions, turnings out, and stabbings.' His influence was now, to all appearance, supreme: he was created Earl of Oxford, and immediately afterwards was named Lord Treasurer. His powers as a statesman were very limited, and scarcely extended beyond the art of political intrigue and the adroit management of party. He was hesitating in action, and confused in thought: but Swift valued him partly from his personal kindness to himself, and partly as the opponent of those against whom he was now feeling the utmost bitterness. Often as he was forced to chafe at lost opportunities,

and at the intrusion of petty motives into great affairs, Swift never visited upon his patron, either in word or in action, the provocation he felt.

It is hard to say whether the world has gained or lost more by Swift's engrossment, during three or four years, in the conduct of affairs. Undoubtedly it prevented the exercise of his genius in its most characteristic employment: and none of his greatest works dates from this time. But on the other hand, it enormously developed his knowledge of the world and of human motives: it sharpened his sarcastic incisiveness and extended his grasp of all forms of human baseness and folly and it may be doubted whether Gulliver could ever have been written had Swift not for some years stood where he commanded a view, at once comprehensive and minute, into the mechanism of public affairs. It is most certain that the Drapier letters, which have, by their living force, kept alive the memory of an obscure and unimportant episode of Irish politics, would have lost half their raciness had they not been inspired by the sting of party feeling which the experience of these four years of Queen Anne's reign had left rankling in Swift's mind.

But in the course of this period, Swift has left one monument, which he would not himself have recognised as of any literary value, but which the world, most assuredly, will never allow to die. This is the Journal to Stella: a continuous series of letters in which he depicts, for her who, in all his busy and bustling surroundings, ever occupied the place closest to his heart, the scenes in which he moved. Half the charm of the Journal lies in its absolute ease and unconsciousness of effort; in the humour alternately playful and sarcastic, in the pathos and the anger, in the fierce self-assertion which would not conceal itself, in the fidelity which made his genius the willing servant of smaller men who played the part of his patrons-in a word, in all those varying traits which reflect Swift's character so exactly, and which let us see him at once in his pride, and in his tenderness, in his power, and in his weakness. We see him as the confidant of ministers, and the dispenser of patronage: as the frequenter of the Court, and the companion of the great, and, again, as the boon companion of the victors and the vanquished

in the world of letters; as the friend of Addison, of Congreve, of Atterbury, of Arbuthnot, of Pope; as the protector of Parnell and others more obscure who had fallen into misfortune: and as the fierce combatant, who enjoyed recounting his triumphs to the one listener, so far removed, for whom all that affected him was the first interest of life.

The struggle which the Ministry were maintaining now turned on one absorbing question, that of Peace or War. The conduct of the war had not only carried on the traditions which the Whigs had received from William III, but had also shed lustre on that party by the victories of Marlborough. But these victories had, of late, been less conspicuous, and it was difficult to see how English interests were any longer involved in maintaining the cause of an aspirant to the Spanish throne whose claims were opposed by the voice of almost all the Spaniards, and whose accession would disturb the balance of power almost as seriously as that of Philip, the member of the Bourbon family whom we had spent so much treasure and so many lives to keep from a throne to which he was called by preponderating national feeling in the Spanish peninsula. The monied classes appeared to find their advantage in the war, and in the large extension it was giving to the national debt: but the landed classes found no profit to themselves in pursuing a contest in which the interests of our allies seemed to be so much more involved than our own. Much national feeling thus supported the Tory Ministers in their wish to bring to an end a war which was their inheritance from their predecessors, which was troublesome and costly, and the continuance of which would weigh in favour of the Whigs.

In the autumn of 1711 there appeared the most important contribution to the controversy which was now dividing the nation, on the subject of Peace or War. This was Swift's Conduct of the Allies. It was the most powerful political tract which he had yet written and little as it is burdened with facts or statistics, it is clear that Swift had made abundant and careful use of the official documents which had been placed at his command. These gave to the pamphlet much of its strength and telling force: but its chief quality is the unrelenting in

dignation with which it is inspired, and which is all the more telling from the rapidity with which it was written. Its first note is struck when he appeals from the 'Echo of the London Coffee-house' to the 'Voice of the Nation.' 'We have been principals,' he says, 'when we ought to have been auxiliaries : we have fought where we ought not, and have abstained where our interests were at stake: we have allowed those allies, who charge us with deserting them, to be false to every engagement made with us. We have persevered, until we lie under the burden of fifty millions of debt. We have gained victories, which have brought to us nothing but barren renown, and now we are expiring "of a hundred good symptoms." The blind prosecution of a war that cost us much, but brought us nothing, he ascribes to the rapacious greed of Marlborough: to the grasping of the monied classes, to the anxiety of the Whig clique to cling to emolument and office. 'We, the Tories, are the faithful steward, resolved to put an end to the thoughtless extravagance of a young heir, whose folly had been encouraged, until now, by venal agents.' The suspicions of a plot in favour of Marlborough, to which popular credence was given, helped Swift in pressing home his points. But the Ministry was weak in the House of Lords; and there very serious opposition had to be met. Swift was almost ready to despair. But Oxford maintained his outward coolness, and events seemed to justify it. The unpopularity of Marlborough increased: and on the 30th of December he was deprived of his appointments. The creation of new peers secured for the Ministers a majority in the House of Lords, and Swift and those whom he supported breathed more freely in the downfall of their most formidable enemy.

The negotiations for peace now proceeded more rapidly; and as the crisis approached, the bitterness of party feeling, in which Swift was deeply involved, continued to increase. Baffled in the struggle, the Whigs sought to prove that the Peace was only a convenient cloak for such concessions to France as might bring about a Jacobite restoration. So far as Swift, at least, was concerned, any thought of such a restoration was entirely imaginary: but he repudiated what was untrue so far as he was personally concerned, with too much confidence as

regarded some of the Ministers. Whatever change may have come over Swift's party allegiance, he had not lessened by one jot his attachment to the Protestant succession. But Jacobite intentions were certainly not absent from the minds of some amongst his political and literary friends: and Swift's fierce repudiation argues rather his ignorance of some of their designs, than any absolute knowledge that these designs were not cherished.

At length, in April, 1713, the Peace of Utrecht was signed. For the moment all seemed favourable for the Ministry. Swift had borne the burden and heat of the day. Like many men so employed, he found the chief triumph reaped by others, and he had only the somewhat barren satisfaction of being treated with distinction and deference by those whose battle he had fought. He had used his influence in many acts of kindness to struggling brother-authors. In the midst of his hardest and most exciting efforts he had cherished friendships that had sweetened his life above all he had kept up an unbroken intercourse with the lonely home at Trim, where she who remained closest to his heart was staying. Now that the struggle was over, Swift was anxious to shake off the dust of the turmoil, and return to Stella and he justly claimed that reward, in the form of clerical promotion, to which he felt that he was entitled. He was growing contemptuous of the empty civilities of ministers; 6 more of your lining, and less of your dining,' he grumbles, in the Journal. But he found that influences were at work against him, and had prejudiced him in the mind of the Queen. He now pressed for a decision, and threatened his immediate departure for Ireland, if his claims were not met. Some preferments were vacant, and it was clear that, now or never, the Ministers must pay their debt. The vacilation continued for some days: the Lord Treasurer pretended an earnestness which was perhaps not quite sincere, and Swift's vexation almost overcame his attachment to his patron. It was not until the 23rd of April, that the warrant for his appointment to the Deanery of St. Patrick's, which has become inseparably linked with his name, was signed.

It is idle to blame Swift for this imperious claim of eccle