"I HAVE PERUSED MANY OF THEIR BOOKS, ESPECIALLY THOSE ON HISTORY AND MORALITY" "SHE HAD SOME FOREBODING OF WHAT WAS TO HAPPEN" "I OBSERVED THE NOISE AND FLUTTER OF WINGS" PAGE 160 166 168 "SOMEBODY CALLING THROUGH THE HOLE WITH A LOUD VOICE, IN THE ENGLISH TONGUE " "I COULD FORCE NOTHING ON HIM BUT A FOOTMAN'S TOOTH" "MY DAUGHTER KNEELED TO ASK MY BLESSING, BUT I COULD NOT SEE HER A VOYAGE TO LAPUTA. "I GOT DOWN INTO THE CANOE, WHILE THE DUTCHMAN LOADED ME WITH CURSES" "I PERCEIVED A VAST OPAQUE BODY BETWEEN ME AND THE SUN" "HIS MAJESTY WAS THEN DEEP IN A PROBLEM "HE BROUGHT MY CLOTHES VERY ILL MADE, AND QUITE OUT OF SHAPE" 185 188 193 197 202 205 "THE PEOPLE IN THE STREETS WALKED FAST, AND WERE GENERALLY IN RAGS" . "HE MADE ME OBSERVE THE SEVERAL METHODS USED BY FARMERS IN MANAGING THEIR LANDS" "HE CALLED ALOUD TO ME NOT TO DISTURB HIS WEBS "A SCHEME FOR ENTIRELY ABOLISHING ALL WORDS WHATSOEVER" “HAPPY PEOPLE, WHO ENJOY SO MANY LIVING EXAMPLES OF ANCIENT VIRTUE!” A VOYAGE TO THE HOUYHNHNMS. PAGE 276 278 281 "THIS ANIMAL SEEMED TO RECEIVE MY CIVILITIES WITH DISDAIN" SUCH MARKS OF A RATIONAL CREATURE" 285 289 297 "HE TOOK UP ALL MY CLOTHES IN HIS PASTERN, ONE PIECE AFTER ANOTHER" 292 "USED TO ALL KIND OF DRUDGERY TILL THEY DIED" "SINCE MONEY ALONE WAS ABLE TO PERFORM ALL THESE FEATS, OUR YAHOOS THOUGHT THEY COULD NEVER HAVE ENOUGH OF IT TO SPEND' "A REPRESENTATIVE COUNCIL OF THE WHOLE NATION". "HE DID ME THE HONOUR TO RAISE IT GENTLY TO MY MOUTH" 309 "ONE OF THE SEAMEN, IN PORTUGUESE, BID ME RISE, AND ASKED WHO I WAS " "THEY GIVE THE COUNTRY A NEW NAME; THEY TAKE FORMAL POSSESSION OF IT FOR THEIR KING" 341 349 HE life of Swift is a subject which the biographer approaches with a conflict of feelings. If he finds in it much to admire and even much to honour, he meets, too, with a great deal to censure and not a little to reprobate; acts that he cannot justify, motives that he cannot approve, and conduct that he can neither extenuate nor account for. There is little to excite his sympathy, less to claim his love, while he is often moved to sorrow, and sometimes to disgust. Yet to trace that eventful life, from its opening to its close, is no unprofitable or uninteresting task. From it we may draw many a lesson for the guidance of our own lives. We may learn how perseverance and application overcome the greatest difficulties, and raise men under the most unfavourable circumstances; how learning and genius may control the councils of a nation, and sway the minds and the passions of a people; how political integrity can no more be violated with impunity than morality or truth; how the disregard of the best and holiest instincts of our nature is likely to be avenged by a life comfortless and desolate, and a death miserable and humiliating. The family of Jonathan Swift was English, and of respectability.* We find them in Yorkshire in the sixteenth century, whence a branch passed into Herefordshire, where Thomas, the Dean's grandfather, who married a Dryden, possessed some property, and also held the vicarage of Goodrich, near Ross. He was a man of courage and loyalty to Charles I., in whose cause he endured much suffering, and made many sacrifices. His grandson * Mr. W. Monck Mason, in his "History and Antiquities of St. Patrick's Cathedral," gives the pedigree of the family from the fifteenth century. One of them was created Baron Carlingford in 1627. 45 པ་་ཅུ་ལས་; records that, after having been plundered by the Roundheads six-and-thirty times (some say fifty), he mortgaged his estate, and, sewing up the money in his waistcoat, got off to a town held for the king; where, being asked by the governor what he could do for his majesty, Swift said he would give the king his coat, and, stripping it off, presented it to the governor, who observing it to be worth little, Swift said, "Then take my waistcoat," which, when ripped, was found to contain three hundred broadpieces of gold. The vicar left a large family, and after the Restoration, Godwin, the eldest son, who had married a relative of the Duchess of Ormond, was appointed Attorney-General of the Palatinate of Tipperary, in Ireland, by the duke, when viceroy; and after he had established himself in that country he was followed by three of his brothers, one being Jonathan, the father of the Dean. We do not know much about this last, except that he was poor, and did not mend his fortunes by marrying a lady as poor as himself, though wellborn, Abigail Erick, of a Leicestershire family, who traced her descent from the time of William the Conqueror. Jonathan seems to have had some agencies, probably for English companies or landowners, and in 1665 obtained the post of steward, or under-treasurer, to the Society of the King's Inns in Dublin. He died about two years after this, not having lived to see his illustrious son. The widow was left almost destitute; considerable arrears, it is true, were due by persons who dined at the Bench table, but then the treasurer owed £12 to the Inns, which the benchers took care to stop out of the arrears. Godwin Swift, her brother-in-law, came to the relief of the poor widow, took her to his home, and mainly supported her. And under such circumstances it was that, on the 30th of November, 1667, the subject of our memoir was born. The house in which this event took place, in Hoey's Court,* was standing a few years ago. The locality, though once fashionable, has long been given up to the poorest mechanics; its very existence is unknown except to those who take a short cut from Ship Street to Castle Street. To the distinguished antiquary, Sir William R. Wilde, we are indebted for having procured, for the first time, a drawing of the house, and preserved it for posterity. A strange destiny-if one could believe in prognostics-seems to have determined from the first that his life should be passed partly in the land of his forefathers. His nurse, who was an Englishwoman, requiring to go to her native land, actually stole the child rather than part with him, and during three years reared and educated him with the greatest care. A year after his return, when he was six Sir W. Wilde, following Scott and Mason, gives it as No. 7; Mr. Gilbert, in his excellent "History of Dublin," states it to be No. 9. The change in the numbering will account for this difference, but of the identity of the house there could be no doubt. The hale and venerable sexton of St. Wesburgh's, Mr. P. Flanagan, now eighty-five years of age, whose recollection of the locality goes back to the last century, lately pointed out to me the site. years old, his uncle sent him to the collegiate school of Kilkenny, where he remained till his fourteenth year, when he entered Trinity College, Dublin, as a pensioner under Sir George Ashe, on the 24th of April, 1682. Neither at school nor while in college did Swift give any indications of his future celebrity. Whether, in the latter instance, this was owing to the peculiar course of study then prescribed in the university, being uncongenial to his nature, is not worth discussing. It is probable that, like Goldsmith, while he neglected the curriculum of the college, his reading was diverted into channels of discursive and varied knowledge, which he brought forth in after life with great effect. Ere he graduated, the slender support which his uncle Godwin supplied was withdrawn by his death, and but for the interposition of his uncle Dryden, he would have been unable to continue his course. But the assistance which this poor but amiable man was able to render was of the most limited amount, and Swift had the utmost difficulty in maintaining himself. It was then that he contracted those habits of frugality which he retained through life, and, however commendable at first, became penurious when his means were ampler. The eccentric and learned Dr. John Barrett, Vice-Provost of Trinity College, better known to those who still remember that strange being as "Jackey Barrett," in his "Essay on the Earlier Part of the Life of Swift," has laboriously brought to light everything that could be discovered upon the subject. From him we learn that, however little he profited by the logics, and mathematics, and physics which were offered to him, he did not violate those collegiate regulations which were then so strict, and at many of which-now happily abolished or disused he who reads the statutes will smile; accordingly, the awful calendars of crime, the registry books and the buttery books, record nothing in the way of fine or censure against him in his undergraduate course. And so he got somehow along, poor, obscure, undistinguished even by a row or a frolic, till the time came for his going up to answer for his degree, in February, 1685. And a sad hand he made of it. Probably he could not spare half a crown to buy one of those learned theses written by poor scholars and sold by the porters; and though no doubt shrewd enough at reasoning, he was woefully deficient in the barbarous rules of the old dialectics, and knew no more how to construct a syllogism than a chronometer; could not tell a major from a minor, a subject from a predicate. So the proctor had to come to his relief, and reduce his answers to orthodox ratiocination and unintelligibility; the result of which was that he got his degree, not as of right, but as of mercy—“Speciali gratiâ," as it is called-with two others who were in like woeful plight. can well understand this indignity sinking deep into the heart of this proud, poor, and sensitive young man; not breaking down his spirit, but irritating it to rebellion and contempt of discipline. Accordingly the black books, from this time, record him as an offender. We find him admonished "for notorious One |