you an epitaph for forty years hence in two words, 'Ultimus Britannorum.' You never forsook your party. You might often have been as great as the court can make any man so ; but you preserved your spirit of liberty when your former colleagues sacrificed theirs; and if it ever begin to breathe in these days, it must entirely be owing to yourself and one or two friends. But it is altogether impossible for any nation to preserve its liberty long under a tenth part of the present luxury, infidelity, and a million of corruptions. . . . But no more of this. I am as sick of the world as I am of age and disease, the last of which I am never wholly without."

If England was bad, Ireland was worse; and Swift hated the latter all the more, because a perverse fate had doomed him to spend so much of his life within her boundaries. March 23, 1734, he writes thus to a London merchant, Mr. Francis Grant:

"As to my native country, I happened indeed by a perfect accident to be born here, my mother being left here from returning to her house at Leicester, and I was a year old before I was sent to England; and thus I am a Teague, or an Irishman, or what people please, although the best part of my life was in England.

"What I did for this country, Ireland, was from perfect hatred of tyranny and oppression. . . .

"I have done some smaller services (besides the suppression of Wood's halfpence) to this kingdom, but I can do no more. I have too many years upon me, and have too much sickness. I am out of favour at court, where I was well received during two summers six or seven years ago. The governing people here do not love me. For, as corrupt as England is, it is a habitation of saints in comparison with Ireland. We are slaves, and knaves, and fools; and, all but bishops and people in employ

ments, beggars.

The few honest men among us

are dead-hearted, poor, and out of favour and power."

In the above illustrations of Swift's correspondence with his English friends, during the years 1727-1735, we have anticipated the order of events. The following chapter will be devoted to a brief consideration of Swift's position as a poet; and will contain a few extracts from poems which, though not readily lending themselves to quotation in a sketch of his career, are yet worthy of note. In the next and final chapter, we shall resume our history of Swift's life in Ireland from the year 1731, and follow it to its close in 1745.

CHAPTER XI.

SWIFT AS POET.

Merits of Swift's prose-Defects of his poetry-Its narrow scopeHomeliness-Futility of its passion-No sense of natural beauty or high emotion-Illustrations-" The Curate's Complaint of Hard Duty". "The Parson's Case "-"The Furniture of a Woman's Mind"-" The Journal of a Modern Lady"--The morning-Tea and scandal-Card-playing—“ Satirical Elegy on the Death of the Duke of Marlborough"-" The Beast's Confession" -Its moral-Swift's egoism--Poetical account of his promotion to the deanery of St. Patrick's-Of his daily life-Verses by himself "On the Death of Dr. Swift."

SWIFT's prose is marked by its affection for simple language and its constant use of logical sequences. He dislikes metaphors, and never troubles about graces of style; even when an appeal to the emotions is intended, it is always made through the reason first. As a result, Swift's prose stands pre-eminent in English literature for its clearness. No writer expresses his own ideas more exactly; no writer is more readily understood.

It has been well said that the merits of Swift's prose form the defects of his poetry. Poetry demands sentiment land pathos; to these Swift's genius was altogether alien. Poetry, at its best, takes for its subject the more tender notes of human feeling; Swift regarded them with undisguised contempt. Poetry ignores, or, at any rate, idealises vulgar necessities and mean ideas; Swift loved

to dwell on their naked reality with the intensity of a monomaniac. Poetry in its bolder flights welcomes extravagance of diction; Swift always abhorred it. Swift's poetry is thus nothing but his prose put into rhyme. The language is as simple, and the images as commonplace in the former as in the latter. None of the qualities of true poetry are to be found. Swift never has a refined simile. He goes out of his way to materialise. The coarser, one might add, the more || disgusting, a subject, the more he dwells upon it. He denies that poetry can spring from a natural aspiration for better things. In "The Progress of Poetry," he compares the poet to a goose, in its two stages of repletion and ravenousness. In the former it waddles about, feebly cackling; in the latter,

"Her body light, she tries her wings

And scorns the ground and upward springs,
While all the parish, as she flies,

Hear sounds harmonious from the skies."

Even so, the poet, when he makes some profits out of a successful drama, subsides into the joys of a greasy eating-house. When his money is gone, hunger comes, and the poet

"Rises like a vapour,

Supported high on wings of paper,

He singing flies and flying sings,

While here below all Grub Street rings."

Impossible to be more homely. From the fattened goose to the gin-sodden bard; from the parish, with its suggestion of frowsy parson and clod-pated squire, to Grub Street, with its threadbare ballad-mongers, all is gross. But for a higher conception of poetry one would seek in

vain. Swift's celebrated "Rhapsody on Poetry is merely advice to a huckster how to push his wares:

"Then poet, if you mean to thrive,
Employ your muse on kings alive;
With prudence gathering up a cluster,
Of all the virtues you can muster,
Which formed into a garland sweet,
Lay humbly at your monarch's feet,
Who as the odours reach his throne,

Will smile and think them all his own."

It may, indeed, be doubted whether Swift ever took a serious view of the power of poetry to arouse noble emotions. He himself uses it to illustrate his wit, or because it lends itself so well to the expression of satire. It is true that Swift's verse often reaches to the extreme of indignant passion. But passion, though always valuable as an index to character, can only excite real and abiding interest if aroused by an adequate cause. Read the following, from a diatribe against Joshua, Lord Allen:

"Let me now the vices trace

From the father's scoundrel race.

Hence the mean and sordid soul,
Like his body, rank and foul,
Hence that wild suspicious peep,
Like a rogue that steals a sheep;

Hence he learned the butcher's guile
How to cut your throat and smile."

This would have worth, if directed against Domitian or Caligula. It becomes verbiage when applied to an ignorant, commonplace, Irish squire of whom nothing would ever have been heard, had he not by an ordinary act of