One remaining marked resemblance between Swift and Sydney Smith was that each in his time stood forth a clerical champion of the political cause of Ireland. That cause in Swift's time included no recognition of even the existence of two millions, or thereabouts, of Irish Roman Catholic population; and that non-recognition has most absurdly been numbered amongst the political sins of Swift. But in Swift's day Irish Roman Catholics had no existence as a factor in English politics. James II. and Tyrconnel had annihilated for generations to come all chance of civil equality for Roman Catholics, whether in Ireland or England, by their insane conspiracy to use the wild Irish as armed auxiliaries against English Protestant liberties. Swift stood forward as champion of parliamentary and administrative autonomy for the English settled in Ireland,' drawing a hard and fast line of demarcation between them and the native 'Papists,' whom he described as being as inconsiderable, in point of power, as the women and children.' Not the less did the publication of his 'Drapier's Letters' raise for all Irishmen the first standard of self-assertion against mere Helot subjection to the selfish sway of English politicians and monopolists. Swift did not call the Irish Roman Catholics to his side; but they came without calling. The populace of Dublin were as warmly his allies as the parliamentary patriots of Stephen's Green. The ostensible cause of quarrel with Walpole's administration-Wood's halfpence-was, indeed, a trumpery one. But a government which could impose even a new copper coinage on its Irish subjects, without consulting their representative and administrative authorities, could impose anything else. That was the substantial and, in the later Drapier's Letters,' the avowed ground of Swift's resistance to Walpole in the name of the constitutional rights of Irish subjects. And the cause that triumphed in 1724 by the sole power of Swift's pen was the cause that again triumphed in 1782, when backed by the whole formidable armed force of the Irish volunteers. Alike at both epochs the rights or wrongs of Irish Roman Catholics, as such, were left altogether out of account. But not the less was the Irish Roman Catholic cause indirectly included in what appeared the exclusively Protestant agitations of the eighteenth century. And the first successful Irish agitator was Swift. No Irishman, by his own avowal, though born in Ireland, but not the less an idolised Irish popular leader. No advocate of 'Catholic emancipation' (such advocacy would have been an anachronism), but not the less a precursor of Sydney Smith and Daniel O'Connell.

And now, what are we finally to say of Swift, the Writer and

the

the Man, so far as the materials at present in our hands will carry us?

The first of Swift's critics whose judgment is of weightJohnson in his 'Lives of the Poets'-while more lenient than some of those who have followed to his character as a man, appreciates less adequately his distinctive qualities as a writer. Boswell remarks that his 'guide, philosopher, and friend' showed also some disposition to depreciate Swift in conversation; and suggests as a possible, perhaps unconscious, source of prejudice against him, that Swift failed to exert, or at least exert successfully, his influence to obtain for Johnson an honorary degree of Master of Arts from Dublin University, when he was seeking, in his early struggles, an appointment as the head of a school. However that may have been, his inadequate appreciation of Swift seems sufficiently accounted for by the genius of the two men having had more points of mutual repulsion than attraction. Johnson finds Swift's distinguishing quality to have been good sense, rather than wit, humour, poetical fancy or imagination! Such was his own distinguishing quality, and Swift doubtless also possessed it in large measure. But the wit and humourwe may add, the fancy and imagination, which Johnson was himself deficient in, he seems to have been unable adequately to appreciate in another. Swift never would have made (as Goldsmith said Johnson would have done) his little fishes talk like great whales;' and Johnson, who spoke slightingly of 'Gulliver's Travels,' as if their main merit consisted in having hit on the idea of little men and big men, would have been incapable of carrying out that idea, had he himself hit on it, with that curious felicity which imparts such truth to fiction in the minute touches of Swift. There was not much more of poetry in Johnson's soul than of humour. His verse, vigorous as it was, might be described as rhetoric in rhyme.

A biographer with far other power of sympathy (as being himself a poet) with the poetical sides of Swift's genius was Scott. There is a tradition that Dryden, who was a kinsman of Swift, once said to him on some early attempts of his at high Pindaric flights, Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet!' One can imagine Rubens saying to his pupil, the elder Teniers, ere the latter deserted 'high art,' and devoted himself to 'Dutch drolleries: Pupil David, you will never be a painter!' But David made himself and his son into most effective painters, though neither of them painted fleshy Flemish Madonnas or fleshy Flemish chivalry. Swift could not have written Alexander's Feast;'-granted. Could Dryden have written Cadenus and Vanessa,' or the 'Humble Petition of Frances Harris'? Had

Swift stuck to Pindaric odes, and panegyrics in pompous rhyme on Sir William Temple, it may be admitted that he never would have been a poet. When he struck into his own peculiar vein of fancy and humour, he became one. It is not the choice of subjects familiar or elevated that confers the title of poet; it is the inspiration of the poetical breath of life into the subjects chosen, whatsoever they may be.

Sir Walter Scott suggests the only possible circumstance which, as at present advised,' we can conceive admissible in part excuse of Swift's conduct to women. He suggests that disease, rather than selfishness, may have been, partly at least, to blame for that conduct. The continual recurrence of a distressing vertigo was gradually undermining his health. . . He might seek the society of Vanessa, without the apprehension of exciting passions to which he was himself insensible; and his separation from Stella after marriage might be a matter equally of choice or of necessity.'

It may here be observed that Scott assumes the fact of Swift's marriage to Stella. Mr. Forster sees no evidence for that marriage, and Scott admits that there is no direct evidence of it. All the evidence is circumstantial and traditionary. For our own part, we attach less importance to the fact, as hitherto accredited, of a merely formal marriage, than to the question of motive of Swift's entire conduct towards the other party-and a third party concerned-previously and subsequently to that supposed event. We are not amongst those who regard marriage as an imperative part of the whole duty of man. But we are amongst those who think that men who abstain from marrying should abstain from philandering.* Had Swift been a Roman Catholic priest, his role, as regarded women, would have been easier. Some Spanish or Italian mother (we forget at this moment who) said to her son that, if he remained a layman, he must beware of women; if he became a priest, they must beware of him.' Swift sought to cumulate the priestly privilege with the lay license. Not license in the sense of profligacy, but, as we have said, of philandering. It was a license he had allowed himself from early manhood. Following out SainteBeuve's personal and physiological method of criticism, we should say that Swift's 'vice or weakness' (the great French

We must admit that philander' is a verb unrecognised by Johnson or Webster. We turned, therefore, for it to a quarter where the most out-of-theway English words are sure to be found-an English-German Dictionary. In Flügel's Dictionary, 'to philander' is Germanised as Den Schäfer spielen, liebeln, den Vertrauten machen'-precisely the ways with women of which we complain in Swift.

critic adds, 'every man has such') was the not uncommon one of a self-indulgent propensity to engage female sympathy, without making the return for that sympathy demanded by female affection. And on that point, habemus confitentem reum. In a letter written before he took orders, Swift replied as follows to some advice of a Leicester clergyman, whom he calls his 'good cousin,' referring to certain recent passages of love-making with one of his female acquaintances there. He wrote that

'As to marriage, he does not belong to the kind of persons, of whom he has known a great number, that ruin themselves by it. A thousand household thoughts always drive matrimony out of his mind whenever it chances to come there; and his own cold temper and unconfined humour are of themselves a greater hindrance than any fear of that which is the subject of his friend's letter. "I am naturally temperate; and never engaged in the contrary, which usually produces those effects." At the same time he admits he has failings that might lead people, in regard to such matters, to suppose him serious, while he had no other design other than to entertain himself when idle, or when something went amiss in his affairs: a thing, indeed, so common with him, that he could remember twenty women in his life to whom he had behaved himself just the same way. "I shall speak plainly to you," he added. And then came words which certainly foreshadow, if they do not make intelligible, the fate that was to join his name so strangely, through all future time, to that of her who then lived under the same roof with him, a child of ten years old. "The very ordinary observations I made with going half a mile beyond the University have taught me experience enough not to think of marriage till I settle my fortune in the world, which I am sure will not be in some years; and even then I am so hard to please myself, that I suppose I shall put it off to the other world."'*

That habit of indecisive, inconclusive gallantry to amuse idle time-which, as we have seen, Swift wrote that should he enter the Church, he would not find it hard to lay down in the porch'-he did not lay down in the porch, but carried into years of mature clerical manhood, when it had lost the excusewhatever that might be worth-of thoughtlessness. Swift, like Goethe, was exceedingly susceptible of female influences, but, like Goethe, reserved an interior self, which remained impassible to them. Each exerted the powers of pleasing which each possessed to attract female affections, which neither was prepared to reciprocate to the extent of undivided devotion to one object; and the result in both cases was what we must call tragical. Swift had to complain, in his later joyless years, that.

*Forster's 'Life,' pp. 64, 65.

his female friends had forsaken him,* and Goethe-after tearing himself loose from an honourable love on very small motives— suffered a woman every way his inferior, whom he himself acknowledged to be a poor creature,' to throw herself into his arms unconditionally, and fasten for life her vulgarity on the ultra-refinement of his studiously composed existence.† Such were the fruits, in each case, of over-calculation or over-fastidiousness-in short, selfishness. In Swift's case there is still an element of mystery, for the solution of which, if any more complete solution is possible, we have some right to look, and shall look with curiosity and interest, to the sequel of Mr. Forster's vigorous and sympathetie Apologia for the genius and character of the extraordinary man he has made his subject.

In the meanwhile let us just remind those who, while enjoying Swift the writer, are unmeasured in their denunciations of Swift the man, that had not the man been what he was, the world never would have possessed the writer. If Swift had been a model of clerical decorum, the Tale of a Tub' must have remained unwritten; as, for that matter, so must 'Gulliver's Travels,' had Swift continued a staunch and satisfied Whig. The popular resurrection of Ireland would not have dated from the Drapier's Letters,' had not Walpole held Swift, like Bolingbroke, at arm's length, under the first Georges. Prince Posterity' must take the lot with all faults, and perhaps has no bad bargain.

We may say in conclusion, that Mr. Forster is almost the first of Swift's biographers or critics who takes real pains to explore all the sources of fresh information on his subject which have been opened to him by others, or which personal research and inquiry have opened for himself. Johnson slighted Mr. Deane Swift's offer to aid him with family traditions and documents. Scott worked up very readably into his short Memoir all the materials which came readily to hand, but does not seem to have thought it worth while to look far afield for more matter

* In one of Swift's later letters to Pope (February 7, 1736) we find the following passage, which is not without its pathos:- What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen cí vears ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was; which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I

am not.'

+ Of all who have written, and written well on Goethe's relations to women, the only one we have met with who performs fearlessly the whole moral anatomy of the man is Mr. R. H. Hutton, in his Literary Essays.' Mr. Hutton is of opinion that Goethe really loved Christiane Vulpius, whom, after cohabiting with her seventeen years, he married. If he did love her, it was a love compatible with slight esteem, and with tolerance of slight esteem of others for its object. The 'poor creature' took to drinking.

than