he was too fast.

How can I help it,' says the

doctor, if the courtiers give me a watch that won't go right?' Then he instructed a young nobleman that the best poet in England was Mr. Pope, (a Papist), who had begun a translation of Homer into English verse, for which he must have them all subscribe; for,' says he, the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him.' Lord Treasurer, after leaving the Queen, came through the room, beckoning Dr. Swift to follow."

Swift, in the height of his power, recorded one day in his Journal: “The Duke of Marlborough was at Court to day, and nobody hardly took notice of him." The wheel had come full circle, and Swift was as insignificant as the great Duke.

He wrote to a friend on December 24, 1736: "When, upon the Queen's death, I came to my Banishment I hardly knew two faces in the nation. . . . I I cannot blame you for carrying your Son to Engl, which hath been chiefly your home, as it was many years mine, and might still be so had the late Queen lived two months longer."

The singing men" of his cathedral gave him some trouble. "My amusements," he wrote to Pope, "are defending my small dominions against the archbishop and endeavouring to reduce my rebellious choir." In a letter written many years later, he said: "I am Lord Mayor of 120 houses,

I am absolute lord of the greatest cathedral in the kingdom, am at peace with the neighbouring princes, the Lord Mayor of the city and the Archbishop of Dublin; only the latter, like the King of France, sometimes attempts encroachments on my dominions, as old Lewis did upon Lorraine."

Dr. Arbuthnot, who had lost his post of Court Physician, writing to Swift about "the terrible shock," given by the Queen's death, said: “I consider myself as a poor passenger; and that the earth is not to be forsaken, nor the rocks removed from me. But you are certainly some first minister of a great monarch, who for some misbehaviour are condemned, in this revolution of things, to govern a chapter and a choir of singing men."

The Dean's difficulty about getting a good horse lasted many years longer. He must have mentioned it to his friends in England, for in 1718 Arbuthnot wrote to him: to him: "There are twenty lords, I believe, would send you horses, if they knew how." In 1720 Swift wrote: "I hunted four years for horses, gave £26 for one of three years and a half old, have been eighteen months training him, and when he grew fit to ride, behold my groom gave him a strain in the shoulder, he is rowelled and gone to grass. Show me a misfortune greater in its kind." The price he paid seems high when the difference in the value of money is reckoned. Twenty years earlier, when he was a poorer man, he bought a horse for £12. In the same year, as

his account-book shows, his clothes and linen cost him 18, and his washing £4. For a man who was distinguished for "the oriental scrupulosity" with which he kept himself clean, the last item seems low. In the same account "shoes and books" are entered as costing £3. These WO articles seem so strangely jumbled together that I suspect "books" is a misreading of "boots."

For providing post-horses he knew of a simple expedient. More than a century later Miss Edgeworth accompanied Sir Walter Scott and his son the captain on a tour in Ireland. "When some difficulty occurred about horses Sir Walter said, 'Swift in one of his letters, when no horses were to be had, says, "If we had but a captain of horse to swear for us we should have had the horses at once;" now here we have the captain of horse, but the landlord is not moved even by him.""

Prince Butler was Brinsley Butler. He and his brother Theophilus (afterwards first and second Barons of Newtown) were at Trinity College, Dublin, with Swift. "Brinsley" was cut down to "Prince," and "Theophilus Theophilus" to "Ophy." His sayings seem to have passed current. The Duchess of Ormond, in a letter to Swift, said: "Whether there were reason or not, or as Prince Butler said, crime or no crime, the man was condemned, and a price set upon his head." Sir Walter Scott in a note describes him as "a madman who used to go about London."