state of separation." Swift himself constantly abused the country in which he was born. "You all live,"

he wrote, "in a wretched, dirty doghole and prison, but it is a place good enough to die in." "I am become an obscure exile in a most obscure and enslaved country. . . . I would prefer living among the Hottentots, if it were in my power."

How much an Irish squire was King over his own district" Arthur Young showed fifty-four years later. "A landlord in Ireland," he wrote, "can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer, or cottar dares to refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but an unlimited submission. Disrespect, or anything tending towards sauciness, he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security. . . . . It must strike the most careless traveller to see whole strings of cars whipt into a ditch by a gentleman's footman to make way for his carriage."

"Bussy Rabutin," writes Swift, "the politest person of his age, when he was recalled to Court after a long banishment, appeared ridiculous there." His maxim of life was no doubt contained in his Discours à ses enfants sur le bon usage des adversitez.

Swift showed that he was "an Enemy to Lime and Stone" when he wrote to a friend who was building: "I reckon you are now deep in mire and mortar, and are preparing to live seven years hence." Johnson was astonished that his friend, Dr. Taylor, should begin to build in his old age,

"and should condemn part of his remaining life to pass among ruins and rubbish."

Swift, "who was nervously apprehensive of infectious diseases," had written to Stella from London in 1710: "We are terribly afraid of the plague; they say it is at Newcastle. I begged Mr. Harley,

for the love of God, to take some care about it, or we are all ruined. You remember I have been afraid these two years." In 1720 it had devastated Marseilles. Pope celebrated the devotion of the bishop:

"Why drew Marseilles' good bishop purer breath,
When nature sickened, and each gale was death?"

The bishop's devotion, however, increased the mischief, for he gathered the people in crowds into the churches, and scared them with the Day of Judgment. Ramicus, Bishop of Arusiens in Dacia, in his Regimen contra Epidimiam siue Pestem, had shown far greater wisdom. This little treatise was translated into English early in the sixteenth century, under the title of A passing gode lityll Boke necessarye and bekouefull azenst the Pestilence. Among other remedies, cleanliness, constant washings, and temperance are strictly enjoined, and the good bishop, well knowing how much the wellbeing of the body depends upon the ease of the mind, tells his patients that "to be mery in the herte is a grete remedie for helth of the body; therefore in time of this grete infirmite beware ye drede not

death, but lyue merely and hope to lyue longe." At Oxford there had been talk about the spread of the pestilence. Hearne recorded on January 21, 1720-1: "I have been told that in the last great plague at London none that kept tobacconists' shops had the plague. I remember that I heard formerly Tom Rogers, who was yeoman beadle, say, that when he was that year, when it raged, a schoolboy at Eaton; all the boys of that school were obliged to smoak in the school every morning, and that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoaking." Whipping in times of plague was not confined to schoolboys. By an act of James I., "if any person infected with the plague, or dwelling in any infected house, being commanded by the mayor or constable to keep his house, goes abroad and converses in company, if he has no plague sore upon him, he shall be punished as a vagabond by whipping; but if he has any infectious sore upon him uncured, he then shall be guilty of felony."

Under the dread of the plague spreading from Marseilles an Act was passed by the English Parliament in 1721 for the building of pest-houses, to which not only the infected, but even the healthy members of an infected family were to be removed. Round every town or city visited by the plague lines were to be drawn which no one was to pass. vain it was objected that "two hundred thousand men would not be sufficient to guard such great

In

cities as London and Westminster." A clause was added "impowering the King to order his officers to fire upon and sink any ship coming from an infected place." Happily the British Isles escaped the visitation. "The two pair of Shoes extraordTM " which Swift bespoke were, no doubt, by way of preparation for the worst. If the plague came he would do his best to preserve his health by exercise. Twelve years later he wrote to a London merchant : "Oppressed beggars are always knaves; and I believe there hardly are any other among us. They had rather gain a shilling by knavery than five pounds by honest dealing. They lost £30,000 a year for ever in the time of the plague at Marseilles, when the Spaniards would have bought all their linen from Ireland; but the merchants and the weavers sent over such abominable linen, that it was all returned back, or sold for a fourth part of the value."

[Indorsed,

66

XXV.

a very merry pleast letter."]

DUBLIN. Mar 13th 1721-2.

SIR, I had a letter from you some time ago, when I was in no Condition for any Correspondence or Conversation; But I thank God for some time I am pretty well recovered, and am able to hear my Friends without danger of putting

past

them into Consumptions. My Remedy was given me by my Tayler, who had been four years deaf, and cured himself as I have done, by a Clove of Garlick Steeped in Honey, and put into his Ear, for Wch I gave him half a Crown after it had cost me 5 or 6 Pounds in Drugs and Doctors to no PurposeSurely you in the Country have got the London Fancy, that I am Author of all the Scurvy Things that come out here; the Slovenly Pages called the Benefit of was writt by one Dobbs a Surgeon. Mr Sheridan sometimes entertains the World and I pay for all. So that they have a Miscellany of my works in England, whereof you and I are equally Authors. But I lay all those Things at the Back of my Book, which swells so much, that I am hardly able to write any thing on the Forepart. I think we are got off the Plague, tho I hear an Act of Parlm was read in Churches (not in mine) concerning it, and the Wise say, we are in more danger than ever, because infected Goods are more likely to be brought us. For my Part, I have the Courage of a Coward, never to think of Dangers till they arrive, and then I shall begin to squeak. The Whigs are grown such disaffected People that I dare not converse with them; and who your Britton Esq' is, I cannot tell. I hear there is an Irish Paper called the Reformer. I saw part of one Paper, but