FROM SOLOMON. To-morrow comes: 'tis noon, 'tis night To-morrow, till to-night he dies. Our hopes like towering falcons aim HENRY AND EMMA. That air and harmony of shape express 271 FROM SOLOMON. SOLOMON'S CONTEMPLATION OF THE FUTURE STATE OF THE WORLD. How can he bind or limit his decree, By what our ear has heard, or eye may see? Beyond the islands, and the mid-land1 coast? Where, by the strength of this idea charm'd, 1 The Mediterranean. Long shall Britannia (that must be her name) FROM ALMA. THE STOMACH THE SEAT OF THE SOUL. I say, whatever you maintain Of Alma' in the heart or brain, From hence she sends out those supplies, 1 The Mind. Strange product of a cheese-cake diet! As in a watch's fine machine, From that which simply points the hour. (Quare2 would not swear, but Quare would say) 2 The infant Achilles was fed by the Centaur Chiron on the marrow of lions and wild boars. See Apollod. Biblioth. iii. c. 12, § 6. The story of his seclusion, in the court of Lycomedes, king of the Isle of Scyros, by the care of his mother, to avert his prophesied fate in the Trojan War, is well known. See Appollod. iii. c. 12, § 8.-Stat. Achill. i. 560-673. Thracian seems an inadvertency. a Probably a watchmaker of the time. FROM ALMA. However more reduced and plain, The whole stands still, or breaks to pieces; But 'tis the stomach's solid stroke Your clock, though plain, would still go on: The jest, alas! is at an end: Soon ceases all the worldly bustle, And you consign the corpse to Russel.' 273 JONATHAN SWIFT, D.D. PERHAPS no character of the times in which he lived is more remarkable than that of Dean Swift. At once haughty and overbearing, yet winning hearts by the invincible attraction of his manners: delighting in his writings in the expression of coarse and filthy ideas; yet also painting elegance, grace, and beauty with the keenest relish; steadfast in friendship, inexorably merciless to foes: saturnine, misanthropic, yet a coryphæus of wit and gaiety: a strict churchman, yet writing so as to draw on himself the accusations of profanity and atheism : serving with powerful effect opposite political parties, yet able to obtain preferment for everybody but himself; parsimonious to meanness, yet extensive and beneficent in his charities, and utterly regardless of profit from his literary labours; expressing the most devoted affection, yet leaving its objects to die in withering broken-heartedness ;-such are some of the anomalies which Swift's character and history present. He was born, a posthumous child, at Dublin in 1667. His family was of respectable connections, but his father's death had left his mother in great poverty. He felt in his youth the bitterness of dependent bread; 1 Evidently an undertaker. and his biographers trace to this experience the apparent avarice of his future years. He left Trinity College, Dublin, without much academical reputation and, on the death of an uncle who had supported him, joined his mother in England. He was taken into the family of Sir W. Temple, a relation of his mother's. During his residence with Temple, he applied himself to severe study. He was introduced to King William, who sometimes visited Temple, but instruction in the Dutch mode of eating asparagus was all the benefit Swift reaped from this acquaintanceship. In 1692 he went to Oxford, and took his degree. A coldness sprung up between him and his patron, Temple, and Swift proceeded to Ireland, took orders in the church, and obtained the prebend of Kilroot, worth 100 a year. He wearied of this obscure country life, and returned to England in 1695, residing with Sir Wiliam Temple till his death. After Temple's death in 1699, Swift, losing patience at the tardy fulfilment of King William's promises, accepted the situation of Secretary to the Earl of Berkeley, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. On being tricked out of this office, he subsequently obtained the livings of Laracor and Rathbeggin, in the diocese of Meath. He settled at Laracor with the feelings of an exile, for he bore the utmost dislike to Ireland. He was joined here by Miss Hester Johnson, whom he has immortalized under the appellation of Stella. This young lady was the daughter of Temple's house-keeper, and is believed to have been a natural child of Sir William. Swift had been her early companion and preceptor. In Ireland she resided in his neighbourhood and in the parsonage during his absence. He is said to have fulfilled his clerical office with great exemplariness. From this period (1700) till about 1710, Swift acted with the Whig party. Disappointed, however, by the treatment of the Whigs, by whom he deemed himself neglected, and now in high reputation from the publication of some of his celebrated prose works, he gladly seized the opportunity of being employed on an ecclesiastical mission to the new (Tory) administration to visit England (1710). He had disapproved of much of the political conduct of the Whig ministries; the disappointment of his expectations from them, moreover, inclined him to a junction with their opponents. He was soon therefore an avowed Tory, and actively supported that party by his influence and his pen. The value of his party services may be estimated by the prodigious effect of his pamphlet entitled "Conduct of the Allies." It completely turned the tide of popular feeling against the war in whose triumphs the nation had so long gloried, and contributed materially to the temporary strength of the Tory governFrom his new patrons Swift received his deanery of St. Patrick's in Dublin, with a gulp of discontent at a second condemnation to exile in Ireland, and at the comparative slenderness of the preferment; the personal dislike of the queen had precluded him from a bishopric: he owed this to the "Tale of a Tub." "Swift now," says Johnson, "much against his will, commenced Irishman for life." But he had scarcely arrived in Ireland when he was recalled to heal by his influence the growing differences between his friends Bolingbroke and Oxford. was unsuccessful; the death of the queen broke up the Tory government, and Swift retired to his deanery, from what Johnson calls "the implacability of triumphant whiggism.' But his residence in England at this period is important in the formation of his acquaintance with Miss Esther Vanhomrigh, his poetical Vanessa. His visits to this young lady's family rapidly ripened on her part into an ardent and romantic attachment to Swift, though he was now about forty-four years of age. He was con ment. He scious that his relations with Stella precluded the idea of his honourably uniting himself with any other lady, yet he was imprudent or cruel enough to feed the passion of Miss Vanhomrigh, till she herself declared it, and received from Swift the announcement of his engagement with Stella. The latter had for years sighed over Swift's unfulfilled promises; her jealousy was effectually roused and her affliction sharpened by the rumours of Swift's new attachment, and by the arrival of Vanessa in Ireland, who had followed Swift thither after her mother's death, ostensibly to enter into possession of an estate in that country to which she now became heiress. The grief and importunity of Stella are said to have extorted Swift's consent to his marriage with her, "provided it should remain a strict secret from the public, and that they should continue to live separately, and in the same guarded manner as formerly." But it is very doubtful whether any marriage ever took place. He laboured to confine the flame of Vanessa's passion within the limits of simple friendship. This the unhappy lady found to be impossible; she wrote to Stella, and the immediate cause of her death is ascribed to the effects of the expression of Swift's anger on his ascertaining this fact. The conduct of Swift towards these two females, whom he so ardently loved, yet both of whose hearts he broke, may possibly be ascribed, not to selfish and deliberate cruelty, but, as his biographers are charitably inclined to hope, to the incipient action of the terrible malady that ultimately shattered his intellect.1 After the final settlement of Swift in Ireland, he pursued, as occasion presented, his career as a political writer, and that chiefly in the cause of the country which he disliked, and which had at first treated him with rejection and contumely. The English legislature in these days was too apt to view and to treat Ireland merely as a conquered appendage of England. Swift's daring opposition to the ruin of the Irish woollen manufactures, and especially to the imposition on the kingdom of Wood's copper money, raised him to the highest pitch of popularity. Few men have possessed so formidable a personal influence on any people as Dean Swift swayed over the Irish. His exertions were not without serious danger to himself. He was already by the Whig government a marked man, from his connections with the last ministry of Queen Anne. Twice were his printers prosecuted; but though the authorship of the obnoxious publications was transparent to all, the secret was faithfully kept. In 1726 he visited England for the publication of the celebrated Travels of Gulliver. His health was now breaking; in the midst of a paroxysm of his disease he was recalled to Ireland by the threatening illness of Stella. On her recovery he had again an opportunity, but for the last time, of enjoying the society of Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, the friends of his happier days. He returned to Ireland to lay Stella in the grave; she died in 1727 of consumption, at the age of 47, and Swift was inconsolable. From this period there is little in his life that is interesting. He continued occasionally to interfere in public affairs, and to correspond with his literary friends in England. From about the year 1736 his constitution became less and less able to resist his terrible malady. In his writings occur some presentiments of his tendency to insanity; and as early as the year 1717, on noticing while walking with a friend a beautiful elm whose uppermost branches were decayed—“ I shall be like . 1 For the singular relation in which Swift stood to Miss Vanhomrigh, see his poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa."-Cadenus is an anagram of Decanus, Dean. |