Jonathan 1667-1745 Swift

During these four busy years of London life, Swift had entered deeply into the literary life of the period. He was treasurer and a leading member of the Brothers, a society of wits and states men which recalls the days of Horace and Maecenas. He pro moted the subscription for Pope's Homer, contributed some num bers to the Tatler, Spectator, and Intelligencer, and joined with Pope and Arbuthnot in establishing the Scriblerus Club, contribut ing to Martinus Scriblerus, his share in which can have been but small, as well as John Bull, where the chapter recommending the education of all blue-eyed children in depravity for the public good must surely be his. His miscellanies, such as A Meditation upon a Broomstick, and the poems Sid Hamet's Rod, The City Shower, The Windsor Prophecy, The Prediction of Merlin, and The His tory of V anbrugh's House, belong to this period. A more laboured work, his Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), in a letter to Harley, suggesting the regulation of the English language by an academy, is chiefly remarkable as a proof of the deference paid to French taste. His History of the Four Last Years of the Reign of Queen Anne is not on a level with his other political writings.

To

Swift the change from London to Dublin meant for the time the fall from unique authority to absolute insignificance. All share in the administration of even Irish affairs was denied him; every politician shunned him ; and his society hardly included a single author or wit. Before and after his elevation to the deanery of St. Patrick's, Esther Johnson and Mrs. Dingley continued to reside near him, and superintended his household during his ab sence in London. He had offered no obstacle in 1704 to a match proposed for Stella to Dr. William Tisdall of Dublin. Whatever the cause, his conduct proved the fatal embitterment of his life and Stella's and yet another's. He had always been unlucky in his relations with women. Esther Vanhomrigh, "Vanessa" (b. Feb. 14, 1690), the daughter of a Dublin merchant of Dutch origin, had become known to Swift at the height of his political influence. He lodged close to her mother, and Vanessa insensibly became his pupil, while he became the object of her impassioned affection.

But Swift was devoid of passion. Of friendship, even of tender regard, he was fully capable, but not of love, and Vanessa's ardent and unreasoning display of passion was beyond his com prehension. Yet Vanessa assailed him on a very weak side. The strongest of all his instincts was the thirst for imperious domina tion. Vanessa hugged the fetters to which Stella merely sub mitted. Flattered to excess by her surrender, yet conscious of his binding obligations and his real preference for Stella, he could neither discard the one beauty nor desert the other. When Vanessa's mother died (1714), she followed him to Ireland, tak ing up her abode at Celbridge within ten miles of Dublin. Unable

to marry Stella without destroying Vanessa, or openly to welcome Vanessa without destroying Stella, he was thus involved in the most miserable embarrassment; he continued to temporize. Had the solution of marriage been open Stella would undoubtedly have been Swift's choice, but some mysterious obstacle intervened.

Meanwhile Swift's efforts were directed to soothe Miss Van homrigh, to whom he addressed Cadenus [Decanus] and Vanessa, the history of their attachment and the best example of his serious poetry, and for whom he sought to provide honourably in marriage, without succeeding either in his immediate aim or in thereby opening her eyes to the hopelessness of her passion. Worn out with his evasions, she at last (1723) took the desperate step of writing to Stella or, according to another account, to Swift himself, demanding to know the nature of the connection with him, and this terminated the melancholy history as with a clap of thunder. Stella sent her rival's letter to Swift, and retired to a friend's house. Swift rode down to Marley Abbey with a terrible countenance, petrified Vanessa by his frown, and departed without a word, flinging down a packet which only contained her own letter to Stella. Vanessa died within a few weeks. She left the correspondence for publication, but it was suppressed until it was published by Sir Walter Scott. Five years after Vanessa's death Stella died, on Jan. 28, 1728.

Between the death of Vanessa and the death of Stella came the greatest political and the greatest literary triumph of Swift's life. Although he was not an Irish patriot in the strict sense of the word, his pride and sense of equity alike revolted against the stay-at-home Englishmen's contemptuous treatment of their own garrison, and he delighted in finding a point in which the tri umphant faction was still vulnerable. His Proposal for the Uni versal Use of Irish Manufactures, published anonymously in 172o, urging the Irish to disuse English goods, became the sub ject of a prosecution, which at length had to be dropped. A greater opportunity was at hand. A patent for supplying Ireland with a coinage of copper halfpence was accorded to William Wood on such terms that the profit accruing from the difference between the intrinsic and the nominal value of the coins, about 4o%, was mainly divided between him and George L's favourite duchess of Kendal, by whose influence Wood had obtained the privilege. Swift now had his opportunity, and the famous six letters signed M. B. Drapier (April to Dec. 1724) soon set Ireland in a flame. Every effort was used to discover, or rather to obtain legal evi dence against, the author, but none could be procured ; the public passion swept everything before it; the patent was cancelled.