friends, though they have for the present lost their fortunes in Ireland; and his whole family having been long known to me, obliged me thus far to take care of him. If you please to accept him into your service, either as a gentleman to wait on you or as a clerk to write under you, and either to use him so if you like his service, or upon any establishment of the College to recommend him to a fellowship there, which he has a just pretence to, I shall acknowledge it as a great obligation to me as well as to him." Swift went to Ireland, but as he obtained no settlement there, and his health became worse for the change, he soon returned to his patron at Moor Park, and to his teaching of little Hetty.

Swift's uncle William in Dublin then obtained for him a certificate of his Dublin degree, and Sir William Temple's interest obtained for him an ad eundem at Oxford, which was extended to the grade of M.A. of Hart Hall, that is, Hartford College. This step was taken with a view to ordination, when, through Sir William Temple's influence, Swift should obtain a prebend from the King. The way of life he sought for himself was in the service of the Church. Complexities of Swift's political action in after years, become less intricate when we consider that his natural allegiance was to the Church, his bias was towards any statesman who appeared to him more likely than another to assist the Church. We have to remember also that, though bred as a Whig in Sir William Temple's household, his inclination in most matters of opinion was to the side of authority.

As to marriage, Swift wrote to a friend at Leicester in January 1692, when Hetty Johnson was but a child of nine years old, and his own age was a few weeks over twenty-four: "I shall speak plainly to you. 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."

Early in 1693 Sir William Temple gave his young client an

opportunity of showing his powers to the King. His Majesty, when visiting Moor Park, had met young Swift, had been friendly enough towards him to show him in the gardens the Dutch way of cutting asparagus, and when asked by Sir William to help him on in the world, had offered to make him captain of a troop of horse. King William, afraid of a proposed Bill for Triennial Parliaments, had sent the Earl of Portland to Moor Park to advise upon the matter with Sir William Temple. Sir William not having succeeded in his endeavour to show that there would be no danger from such a Bill, sent afterwards young Swift further to demonstrate his opinion to the Earl of Portland and to the King. Of this attempt Swift himself recorded that, being well versed in English history, he "gave the King a short account of the matter, and a more large one to the Earl of Portland, but all in vain: for the King, by ill advisers, was prevailed upon to refuse passing the Bill. This was the first time that Mr. Swift had ever any converse with courts, and he told his friends it was the first incident that helped to cure him of vanity."

At the beginning of May 1694 Swift's impatience for a settlement in life led to some quarrel with his patron. Sir Williamto whom he had become a little necessary-wished that Swift would stay with him until the King gave the expected prebend. Swift, in his twenty-seventh year, was tired of waiting. Sir William Temple, not soothed by his gout, grew angry. Swift must wait for his Church preferment, but if he was resolved to go, he might have at once a clerkship in the Irish Rolls of £120 a year. Swift said then he would have it as maintenance that would enable him to go to Ireland, take orders, and serve the Church without being driven to do so by the need of bread. He went home to Leicester resolved to be ordained, and he applied for ordination in September. It was required that he should produce a certificate of good conduct from Sir William Temple. He wrote therefore on the 6th of October a letter that had to include apologies for rudeness. It was replied to with prompt kindness. He obtained Deacon's orders on the 28th October 1694, and Priest's orders on the 13th of January 1695.

Family friends begged for Jonathan Swift from Lord Capel, then Lord Deputy of Ireland, a small prebend that would produce income of but a little more than a hundred a year.

It was

at Kilroot, not far from Belfast. An old college friend named Waring, who had in fact shared Swift's chamber as a student in Dublin, lived at Belfast. Swift renewed acquaintance with him, and found the dulness of Kilroot partly relieved by attentions to his sister. According to a fashion of the day he turned her name of Waring to Varina, and when, after a year at Kilroot, Sir William Temple invited Swift back to Moor Park, he wrote her a letter to which she could have replied by engaging herself to be married to him. But she did not. She had about a hundred a year of her own, and Swift had next to nothing but his doubtful prospects. Swift's regard for his friend's sister had been magnified in the haze of his uncertain fortune, as he chafed through restless solitary days. He had not yet put away all thought of marriage, and in that year, 1695, Stella was not yet a woman; she was a child of twelve. It was then impossible for Swift to know what she was afterwards to be to him.

Swift had been absent a year and a half from Moor Park when he yielded to Sir William Temple's wish for a renewal of their old relations. Sir William said he would find him in England something better than Kilroot, and Swift returned to him, leaving a Mr. Winder, who had wife and children, to do duty in the prebend, which afterwards, in 1698, he resigned wholly in Mr. Winder's favour. Lord Sunderland, through whose influence Sir William Temple hoped to obtain better preferment for Swift, went out of office when the formalities connected with the resignation of Kilroot were within ten days of completion.

Swift returned to Moor Park in 1696, to stay there during the few remaining years of Temple's life. He was then in his twentyninth year. Hetty Johnson was about fourteen. Swift himself, when she had grown to be his lodestar, wrote afterwards of his early relations with her, "I knew her from six years old, and had some share in her education, by directing what books she should read, and perpetually instructing her in the principles of honour

and virtue, from which she never swerved in any one action or moment of her life. She was sickly from her childhood until about the age of fifteen, but then grew into perfect health, and was looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young women in London, only a little too fat. Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection. She lived generally in the country," at Moor Park, "with a family where she contracted an intimate friendship with another lady of more advanced years. Never was any of her sex born with better gifts of the mind, or who more improved them by reading and conversation." The "friend of more advanced years" was Rebecca Dingley, a poor relation of the Temples, who was also, in Swift's time, one of the Moor Park household. Though, no doubt, Swift often chafed at the long continuance of a relation of client and patron very slow in giving him the desired entry upon active life, his mind was well employed in full use of his genius; for we have now reached the time of his writing "The Tale of a Tub" and "The Battle of the Books." He was happy also in the unconscious and slow growth of a new interest in Hetty Johnson, whose recorded growth in beauty, after the age of fifteen, may be in part due to the eyes that came at last to see in her all beauty, grace, and wit. Seven years after Temple's death Swift wrote to one of his nephews thanks for a kind invitation to Moor Park, "which no time will make me forget and love less."

It was in 1697, in his thirtieth year, that Swift wrote "The Tale of a Tub" and "The Battle of the Books," which were not published until 1704. "The Tale of a Tub" was meant to be a plea for charity in argument of differences between Peter, the Church of Rome, Martin, the Church of England, and Jack, the Dissenter; but the strength of Swift's own feeling for Martin interfered a little with his charity towards Peter and Jack. "The Tale of a Tub" was an old phrase for a rambling story, and Ben Jonson had given that name to his last play, which had a Squire Tub of Tottenham Court for its hero, and its characters from Marylebone, Islington, Kentish Town, Kilburn, Hampstead, Chalcot, and Belsize. Swift's "Tale of a Tub" owes its great strength to the

fact that its wit and whim were spent on what were to its author questions that he cared about with all his heart, and that went to the heart also of the greatest question with which man can be concerned.

"The Battle of the Books" dealt with a more trivial argument which then occupied the minds of polite critics in France and England. It began in France with oppositions of opinion upon the relative merits of ancient and modern authors, but it had been swollen by a large affluent from argument begun in England with an attack on Richard Bentley by the Honourable Charles Boyle, grandson of Roger Boyle, first Earl of Orrery. Sir William Temple was led chiefly by Fontenelle's part in the French argument-his "Discours sur l'Eglogue" and his "Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes," which were both on the side of the moderns to write "An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning," which ended pleasantly with a saying of Alfonso, King of Aragon, that "among so many things as are by men possessed or pursued in the course of their lives, all the rest are baubles, besides old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read." Sir William elaborated his plea for the ancients with much faith in fiction. He thought there was probably little use to the world, though much honour to their authors, in the Copernican system, or in Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood; and then immediately asked, "What are become of the charms of music, by which men and beasts, fishes, fowls, and serpents were so frequently enchanted, and their very natures changed?" In one passage of this essay Sir William said that the two most ancient books he knew of in prose were Æsop's Fables" and "Phalaris's Epistles," "both living near the same time, which was that of Cyrus and Pythagoras." "The letters of Phalaris have," he said, "more force of wit and genius than any others I have ever seen, either ancient or modern." Then, after putting aside doubts of their genuineness and the opinions that ascribed them to Lucian, he proceeded with a sentence or two of high eulogium.

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The gentlemanly essay of Sir William Temple, published in