tics. 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 idolized 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 man, so far as the materials at present in our hands will carry us? The first of Swift's critics whose judgment is of weight - Johnson 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 humour- we 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 Va 99 66 nessa," or the "Humble Petition of Fran- | of philandering. It was a license he had ces Harris"? Had Swift stuck to Pin- allowed himself from early manhood. Foldaric odes, and panegyrics in pompous lowing out Sainte-Beuve's personal and rhyme on Sir William Temple, it may be physiological method of criticism, we admitted that he never would have been a should say that Swift's "vice or weakpoet. When he struck into his own pe- ness (the great French critic adds, culiar vein of fancy and humour, he be- "every man has such") was the not uncame one. It is not the choice of subjects common one of a self-indulgent propensity familiar or elevated that confers the title to engage female sympathy, without makof poet; it is the inspiration of the poet- ing the return for that sympathy demanded ical breath of life into the subjects chosen, by female affection. And on that point, whatsoever they may be. habemus confitentem reum. In a letter Sir Walter Scott suggests the only pos- written before he took orders, Swift resible circumstance which, "as at present plied as follows to some advice of a Leiadvised," we can conceive admissible incester clergyman, whom he calls his "good part excuse of Swift's conduct to women. cousin," referring to certain recent pasHe suggests that disease, rather than self-sages of love-making with one of his feishness, may have been, partly at least, to male acquaintances there. He wrote that.— 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 rôle, 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, *We must admit that "philander" is a verb unrecognized by Johnson or Webster. We turned, therefore, for it to a quarter where the most out-of-the-way English words are sure to be found-an English-German Dictionary. In Flügel's Dictionary, "to philander" is Germanized as "Den Schäfer spielen, liebeln, den Vertrauten machen" - precisely the ways with women of which we complain in Swift. 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 might lead people, in regard to such matters, same time he admits he has failings that 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 excuse — whatever that might be worth of thoughtlessness. Swift, like Goethe, was exceedingly susceptible of female influences, but, like • Forster's "Life," pp. 64, 65. Goethe, reserved an interior self, which | Forster is almost the first of Swift's biogremained impassible to them. Each ex- raphers or critics who takes real pains to erted the powers of pleasing which each explore all the sources of fresh informapossessed to attract female affections, tion on his subject which have been which neither was prepared to reciprocate opened to him by others, or which personto the extent of undivided devotion to one al research and inquiry have opened for object; and the result in both cases was himself. Johnson slighted Mr. Deane what we must call tragical. Swift had to Swift's offer to aid him with family tradicomplain, in his later joyless years, that tions and documents. Scott worked up his female friends had forsaken him, and very readably in his short memoir all the Goethe-after tearing himself loose from materials which came readily to hand, but an honourable love on very small motives does not seem to have thought it worth suffered a woman every way his infe- while to look far afield for more matter rior, whom he himself acknowledged to be than he could bring within the compass of a "poor creature," to throw herself into that memoir. Jeffrey in his "Essay on his arms unconditionally, and fasten for Swift," which he twice reprinted from his life her vulgarity on the ultra-refinement review, did his worst to wash on again of his studiously composed existence.† the party blacking which he thought Scott Such were the fruits, in each case of over- had been rather too disposed to wash off calculation or over-fastidiousness - in the character of a Whig convert to Toryshort, selfishness. In Swift's case there ism. Macaulay and Thackeray had their is still an element of mystery, for the so- own political and literary humours to vent lution of which, if any more complete so- at Swift's expense; and both, as regarded lution is possible, we have some right to facts, were content with that à-peu-près, look, and shall look with curiosity and in- which was Sainte-Beuve's special horror, terest, to the sequel of Mr. Forster's vig- and with which, we may add, Mr. Forster is orous and sympathetic Apologia for the much too thorough-going in his championgenius and character of the extraordinary ship of Swift's good fame to content himman he has made his subject. self. We must refer our readers to the preface of his present volume for the long list of tributaries, noble, reverend, collegiate, lettered, and bibliopolic from whom Mr. Forster acknowledges aids, or access to aids, in the shape of original documents illustrative of his subject which had hitherto been buried from the public eye in private repositories. Of these a portion only was available for the present volume; enough, however, to whet our appetite for more in the volumes which will complete the work. If finished with the industry and literary discrimination with which it has been begun, this new "Life of Swift" will be the most valuable of the many services which Mr. Forster has already rendered to lovers of English literature. In the mean while 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. 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 of years 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 them I was double their age, which now I am not." Of all who have written, and written well on 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 66 poor creature" took to drinking. Goethe's relations to women, the only one we have met Swift has undergone the fate of all men whose characters have exhibited very pronounced features, rendered more pronounced, and more unpleasing, by age. He has been viewed at his worst. After his death, as before it, his genius has suffered sorrowful eclipse in misanthroto have Py and mania. There seems been something the matter with his head almost all through his life; and the final autopsy revealed hydrocephalus. But, as inveterate readers of Swift, we are grateful to Mr. Forster for reminding the world that in his better days there was something else than water on his brain, or misanthropy in his heart. Swift, the author, must ever rank amongst the perennial hon- | but there was something there she did not ours of English literature; and the work choose him to know. He was too candid before us, when completed, will, we are confident, place Swift the man-if not on so lofty a moral pedestal as seems designed for him by his biographer at least in a position to engage a larger share of human sympathy than has hitherto been accorded him by the common run of readers; a generation of whom it may be said, at the present day, that they know not Jonathan. From Temple Bar. HER DEAREST FOE. CHAPTER XXXII. WHEN Hugh Galbraith turned away from the dwelling where he had known the most of pleasure that had ever brightened his somewhat sombre life, nearly five months before this stage of our story, he felt strangely sore and stunned, yet not indignant. He had always accepted the position of "a fellow women did not care about" with great philosophy, returning their indifference with full measure, yet not the least resentment. But this practical proof of his own unattractiveness struck home. Worst of all, it lent the additional charm of being out of reach to the woman who had so fascinated him. She was a lady in the fullest acceptation of the word; delicate, refined. The attendant circumstances of keeping a shop must be repulsive to her, yet she preferred battling with the difficulties of such a life to accepting the position, the ease, the security she might enjoy as his wife. Nevertheless he loved her the more for her unwavering honesty; and, as he walked miserably to and fro, seeking to while away the weary hours till it was time to go to bed (for there were no more trains that day), he cursed his own precipitancy in having thus suddenly cut himself off from all chance of any more play in the game on which he had staked so much. He had not diverged from his original route with any intention of proposing to Mrs. Temple; he only wished to satisfy his eyes with the sight of her, and gladden his heart with the sound of her voice; and then in a moment a wave of passion carried him over the border of polite seeming into the reality of confession! Yet, after all, he did not know what was beneath the cards. He could not for a moment believe that Kate Temple's past contained any page she need desire to obliterate or conceal, to attribute his rejection to this reason. He recognized her actual indifference, while he recalled with a certain degree of painful gratitude the kindly emotion in her voice as she spoke her adieux. "I suppose it will come all right," thought Galbraith, with a dreary effort at manful, reasonable resignation. "I suppose the time will come when I shall think I have had a narrow escape from a piece of folly, for it is about the last sort of marriage I ever contemplated; but it's infernally bitter to give it up at present. Still, I supI pose it is better for me in the end. Might I not have repented had she said 'Yes' instead of 'No'?" But even while he strove to argue himself into composure, the recollection of. Kate's great lustrous eyes, dewy with unshed tears, her expressive mouth, the rich red lips tremulous with kindly sympathy in the pain she inflicted, came back to him so vividly that he longed with a passion more ardent, more intense than he had ever felt before, to hold her in his arms and press his lips to hers. The Grange, as it was familiarly called - or Kirby Grange, to give the full appellation- the old house of the Galbraiths, was even more desolate than Sir Hugh expected to find it. His boyish reminiscences presented him with a lonely picture enough, but not equal to the reality. Yet he soon grew to be at home there. Galbraith, though essentially an aristocrat, was not in the least a fine gentleman; the plainest food, the simplest accommodation sufficed for him. His soldier-servant, a man in the stables, an old woman and her daughter to keep the house, formed an ample retinue. Some modern additions to such portions of the antiquated, mouldy furniture as could still be used made a few rooms habitable, and here Hugh Galbraith spent the summer, perhaps more agreeably than he would have done elsewhere. The land he had newly purchased gave him a good deal of employment. There were fresh leases to be granted on fresh terms; but some of his new acquisition he would keep in his own hands. Farming was exactly the employment that suited him. Moreover, Galbraith had been too long a poor gentleman, striving bravely and successfully to keep out of debt, not to have acquired a liking for money. To improve his property and add to it had become his day-dream. To this end he contented himself with a small personal expenditure, although when he first felt the unwonted excitement of comparative wealth he was | You are in no way shut in. The beauty tempted to many indulgences he scarcely and freedom of nature impress themselves cared for, the first taste of life as lord of upon you, and her awful power is out of the soil awakened in him a thirst to extend sight. The far-stretching purple distance, his domains. spread out in undulations, like billows arrested in their swell, gives the idea of a moorland ocean, with even a greater consciousness of liberty, for it needs no imprisoning ship; you may plunge yourself on any side over a boundless space of bloom and fragrance towards the distant blue : — In the long summer days his greatest resource was a small schooner, in which he passed many a thoughtful hour, and which formed the canvas or groundwork on which Lady Styles embroidered her fiction of a "splendid yacht." And now in front behold outspread, Those upper regions we must tread 'Mid hollows and clear healthy swells, The cheerful silence of the fells. Some two hours' march with serious air Through the deep noontide heats we fare; The red grouse springing at our sound, Skims now and then the shining ground; No life save his and ours intrudes Upon these breathless solitudes ! Neither Galbraith nor Upton were able to quote Matthew Arnold, yet both felt the influence of the scene; the breezy, healthy, life-giving atmosphere sent them back satisfied with themselves, and pleased with each other. In short, Galbraith went wisely and systematically to work to effect his own cure; nay, he sometimes thought he had succeeded. Perhaps for a few extra busy days the haunting, aching regret would be silenced or kept at bay; but when he most fancied the ghost was laid, a breath of mignonette wafted from the garden, a gleam of sunset over the sea, the coo of the wood-pigeon, or even a wild easterly gale dashing the storm-tossed waters with giant wrath against the dark cliffs that stood up with savage strength against them anything, everything would touch the electric chain of association and bring back those few weeks of strange companionship vividly before him. Again he would see Kate's eyes, the exact colour of which he never quite made out - dreamy, Colonel Upton's was a much lighter and earnest, tender, resentful- he knew them more complex nature than Galbraith's. in every change; and the rounded outlines "Enjoyment," it must be admitted, was of the pliant figure he had so often greed-"his end and way," and he had hitherto ily watched sinking down into attitudes of accomplished this end very successfully. natural, graceful repose, or rising into un- A little more of selfishness might have conscious stateliness-the restful man-made him odious; a trifle more lightner, the frank, unstudied talk-all would heartedness would have made him unincome back to him with painful intensity. But on the whole he gained ground. He thought, he hoped, these fever fits were growing fewer and further between. To complete his cure he seized gladly upon the opportunity offered by his friend, being so far on his way northward, when he found Upton was the guest of Lady Styles, and soon succeeded in persuading him to forsake the gaieties of Weston for the ruder hospitalities of Kirby Grange, much to her ladyship's indignation. It was September and the weather was glorious. Galbraith and his friend had had a long enjoyable day on the moors, which were a few miles inland from the Grange. They had not "made bags worthy of notice in the local papers, but they had had sufficient sport to give zest to their long tramp over the springy heather. teresting: but, for once, no ingredient preponderated, and a pleasanter, more popular fellow than Willie Upton never existed. No one would have thought of confiding any difficult or profound undertaking to his guidance, but of the pluck and dash that would carry him over any five-barred gate of obstacle at a bound he had plenty. When we add that he was Irish on his mother's side, the un-English facet of his nature is accounted for. The friends descended from the dogcart which had conveyed them to and from the scene of their sport, ravenously hungry and sufficiently tired to enjoy easychairs after a hearty repast in a window of the dining-room, from whence a glimpse of "the sea glittering in the moonlight could be caught. Here they smoked for a few minutes in silence; silence seldom lasted longer when Colonel Upton was present. "I think," said he, slowly waving his The wide horizon of the "fells" imparts cigar, and watching the curls of smoke — a sense of light and liberty which no rock-"I think a certain amount of roughness is bound valley, however beautiful, conveys. | necessary to perfect enjoyment." |