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the miserable poverty of the farmers, however, he found great difficulty in collecting his tythes and rents. On August 11th he wrote to Pope: "As to this country there have been three terrible years' dearth of corn, and every place strewed with beggars; but dearths are common in better climates, and our evils, here lie much deeper. Imagine a nation, the two-thirds of whose revenues are spent out of it, and who are not permitted to trade with the other third." He described in the sixth number of The Intelligencer a ride he took of sixty miles through the best part of the Kingdom. Everywhere wretchedness met his view. "In short," he concludes, "I saw not one single house in the best town I travelled through which had not manifest appearances of beggary and want.'

A few years later he wrote to Arbuthnot: "My Revenues by the miserable oppressions of this Kingdom are sunk to 300" a year; I live at two thirds cheaper here than I could there [in London]. . . . I can buy a Chicken for a Groat, and entertain three or four friends with so many dishes and two or three Bottles of French Wine for II shill. When I dine alone my Pint and Chicken with the Appendixes cost me about 15 pence." A little later still he wrote to Charles Ford: "I can hitherto dine on a morsel without running in debt, and I have been forced to borrow near 200l. to supply my small family of three servants and a half for want of any reasonable payments." The

miserable state of the country is shown by the following quotations from the Primate Boulter's letters to the English ministers :

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Feb. 24, 1727. When I went my visitation last year we met all the roads full of whole families

that had left their homes to beg abroad, since their neighbours had nothing to relieve them with. This summer must be more fatal to us than the last, when I fear many hundreds perished by famine.'

"July 16, 1728. I know some in Dublin who have occasion to pay workmen every Saturday night that are obliged to pay fourpence for every twenty shillings in silver they procure."

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May 2, 1730. Our manufactures and retail

trade are under the last distress for want of silver."

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April 21, 1731. The ordinary people here are under the last distress for want of copper money. Tradesmen that retail and poor people are forced to pay for getting their little silver changed into copper, and are forced to take raps or counterfeit half-pence, of little more than a quarter of the value of an English halfpenny, which has encouraged several such coiners."

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May 25, 1736. We are almost on the brink of ruin by the present unhappy state of our money." Wood's halfpence would have been far better than the scarcity and the "raps." At last Boulter was able to move the government to supply a remedy, as the two following entries show

"March 26, 1737. Two tons of our copper halfDean Swift has raised some pence are arrived. ferment about them here, but people of sense are very well satisfied of the want and goodness of them."

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May 16, 1737. Notwithstanding all the clamours of Dean Swift, the papists, and other discontented or whimsical people, our new copper halfpence circulate and indeed are most greedily received."

Mrs. Pendarves wrote in June, 1732: "The poverty of the people, as I have passed through the country, has made my heart ache; I never saw greater appearance of misery; they live in great extremes, either profusely or wretchedly." Nine months earlier, at a ball given at the Castle, she had found at supper everything prepared with great magnificence. "I never saw," she adds, "so much meat with so little confusion." In 1752 she wrote: High living is too much the fashion here. You are not invited to dinner to any gentleman of a £1,000 a year or less that does not give you seven dishes at one course, and Burgundy and Champagne; and these dinners they give once or twice a week that provision is now as dear as in London.'

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Swift always kept his servants on board wages "at the highest rate then known, which was four shillings a week." Their staying long in his service showed that with all his roughness he was not a bad master. There was one circumstance which grati

fied their pride. "The Dean's plain livery," we are told, "was a badge of greater distinction than that of the Lord-Lieutenant with all its finery." “He was served in plate, and used to say that he was the poorest gentleman in Ireland that ate upon plate, and the richest that lived without a coach."

His lawsuit, whatever it was, went on troubling him. Two years later he wrote to Gay: "I thought I had done with the lawsuit, and so did all my lawyers; but my adversary, after being in appearance a Protestant these twenty years, has declared he was always a Papist, and consequently by the law here cannot buy, nor, I think, sell; so that I am at sea again for almost all I am worth.”

LI.

Aug. 9th 1729.

S",-Your Lett' of July 30th I did not receive till this day. I am near 60 miles from Dublin, and have been so these 10 weeks. I am heartily sorry for the two ocassions of the Difficultyes you are under. I knew Mrs Chetwode from her Child-hood, and knew her mother and Sisters, and although I saw her but few times in my life, being in a different Kingdom, I had an old friendship for her, without entring into differences between you, and cannot but regret her death. As to Mr Jackman I have known him many years, he was a good

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