the next year, George I. died, the Opposition hoped great things from the change. Pulteney had tried to get Swift's powerful help for the Craftsman, the Opposition organ; and the Opposition hoped to upset Walpole. Swift, who had thought of going to France for his health, asked Mrs. Howard's advice. She recommended him to stay; and he took the recommendation as amounting to a promise of support. He had some hopes of obtaining English preferment in exchange for his deanery in what he calls (in the date to one of his letters 1) "wretched Dublin in miserable Ireland." It soon appeared, however, that the mistress was powerless; and that Walpole was to be as firm as ever in his seat. Swift returned to Ireland, never again to leave it: to lose soon afterwards his beloved Stella, and nurse an additional grudge against courts and favourites. The bitterness with which he resented Mrs. Howard's supposed faithlessness is painfully illustrative, in truth, of the morbid state of mind which was growing upon him. "You think," he says to Bolingbroke in 1729, "as I ought to think, that it is time for me to have done with the world; and so I would, if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole." That terrible phrase expresses but too vividly the state of mind which was now becoming familiar to him. Separated by death and absence from his best friends, and tormented by increasing illness, he looked out upon a state of things in which he could see no ground for hope. The resistance to Wood's halfpence had staved off immediate ruin, but had not cured the fundamental evil. Some tracts upon Irish affairs, written after the Drapier's Letters, sufficiently indicate his despairing vein. "I am," he says in 1737, when proposing some remedy for the swarms of beggars in Dublin, “a desponder by nature;" and he has found out that the people will never stir themselves to remove a single grievance. His old prejudices were as keen as ever, and could dictate personal outbursts. He attacked the bishops bitterly for offering certain measures which in his view sacrificed the permanent interests of the Church to that of the actual occupants. He showed his own sincerity by refusing to take fines for leases which would have benefited himself at the expense of his successors. With equal earnestness he still clung to the Test Acts, and assailed the Protestant Dissenters with all his old bitterness, and ridiculed their claims to . To Lord Stafford, November 26, 1725. brotherhood with Churchmen. To the end he was a Churchman before everything. One of the last of his poetical performances was prompted by the sanction given by the Irish Parliament to an opposition to certain "titles of ejectment." He had defended the right of the Irish Parliament against English rulers; but when it attacked the interests of his Church his fury showed itself in the most savage satire that he ever wrote, the Legion Club. It is an explosion of wrath tinged with madness: "Could I from the building's top Quite destroy the harpies' nest, How might this our isle be blest!" What follows fully keeps up to this level. Swift flings filth like a maniac, plunges into ferocious personalities, and ends fitly with the execration "May their God, the devil, confound them!" He was seized with one of his fits whilst writing the poem, and was never afterwards capable of sustained composition. Some further pamphlets - especially one on the State of Ireland -repeat and enforce his views. One of them requires special mention. The Modest Proposal (written in 1729) for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country - the proposal being that they should be turned into articles of food-gives the very essence of Swift's feeling, and is one of the most tremendous pieces of satire in existence. It shows the quality already noticed. Swift is burning with a passion the glow of which makes other passions look cold, as it is said that some bright lights cause other illuminating objects to cast a shadow. Yet his face is absolutely grave, and he details his plan as calmly as a modern projector suggesting the importation of Australian meat. The superficial coolness may be revolting to tender-hearted people, and has, indeed, led to condemnation of the supposed ferocity of the author almost as surprising as the criticisms which can see in it nothing but an exquisite piece of humour. It is, in truth, Yet we can forgive and even sympathize the most complete expression fearful to read even now. when we take it for what it really is of burning indignation against intolerable wrongs. It utters, indeed, a serious conviction. "I confess myself," says Swift in a remarkable paper,1 "to be touched with a very sensible pleasure when I hear of a mortality in any country parish or village, where the wretches are forced to pay for a filthy cabin and two ridges of potatoes treble the worth; brought up to steal and beg for want of work; to whom death would be the best thing to be wished for, on account both of themselves and the public.' He remarks in the same place on the lamentable contradiction presented in Ireland to the maxim that the "people are the riches of a nation," and the Modest Proposal is the fullest comment on this melancholy reflection. After many visionary proposals he has at last hit upon the plan, which has at least the advantage that by adopting it "we can incur no danger of disobliging England. For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender a consistence to admit a long continuance in salt, although, perhaps, I could name a country which would be glad to eat up a whole nation without it." 66 Swift once asked Delany 2 whether the "corruptions and villanies of men in power did not eat his flesh and exhaust his spirits?' "No," said Delany. "Why, how can you help it?" said Swift. Because," replied Delany, "I am commanded to the contrary · fret not thyself because of the ungodly." That, like other wise maxims, is capable of an ambiguous application. As Delany took it, Swift might perhaps have replied that it was a very comfortable maxim—for the ungodly. His own application of Scripture is different. It tells us, he says, in his proposal for using Irish manufactures, that "oppression makes a wise man mad." If, therefore, some men are not mad, it must be because they are not wise. In truth, it is characteristic of Swift that he could never learn the great lesson of submission even to the inevitable. He could not, like an easy-going Delany, submit to oppression which might possibly be resisted with success; but as little could he submit when all resistance was hopeless. His rage, which could find no better outlet, burnt inwardly and drove him mad. It is very interesting to compare Swift's wrathful denunciations with Berkeley's treatment of the same before in the Querist (1735–’37). Berkeley is 1 Maxims Controlled in Ireland. 2 Delany, p. 148. full of luminous suggestions upon economical questions which are entirely beyond Swift's mark. He is in a region quite above the sophistries of the Drapier's Letters. He sees equally the terrible grievance that no people in the world is so beggarly, wretched, and destitute as the common Irish. But he thinks all complaints against the English rule useless, and therefore foolish. If the English restrain our trade ill-advisedly, is it not, he asks, plainly our interest to accommodate ourselves to them? (No. 136.) Have we not the advantage of English protection without sharing English responsibilities? He asks "whether England doth not really love us and wish well to us as bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh? and whether it be not our part to cultivate this love and affection all manner of ways?" (Nos. 322, 323.) One can fancy how Swift must have received this characteristic suggestion of the admirable Berkeley, who could not bring himself to think ill of any one. Berkeley's main contention is, no doubt, sound in itself, namely, that the welfare of the country really depended on the industry and economy of its inhabitants, and that such qualities would have made the Irish comfortable in spite of all English restrictions and Government abuses. But, then, Swift might well have answered that such general maxims are idle. It is all very well for divines to tell people to become good, and to find out that then they will be happy. But how are they to be made good? Are the Irish intrinsically worse than other men, or is their laziness and restlessness due to special and removable circumstances? In the latter case is there not more real value in attacking tangible evils than in propounding general maxims and calling upon all men to submit to oppression, and even to believe in the oppressor's good-will, in the name of Christian charity? To answer those questions would be to plunge into interminable and hopeless controversies. Meanwhile, Swift's fierce indignation against English oppression might almost as well have been directed against a law of nature for any immediate result. Whether the rousing of the national spirit was any benefit is a question which I must leave to others. In any case, the work, however darkened by personal feeling or love of class-privilege, expressed as hearty a hatred of oppression as ever animated a human being. II DAVID MASSON (1822) DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS: CLASSIFICATION AND REVIEW [Chapter XII. of the Life of De Quincey in the English Men of Letters] How are De Quincey's writings to be classified? His own classification, propounded in the General Preface to the edition of his Collected Works, was to the effect that they might be distributed roughly into three sorts, - first, those papers of fact and reminiscence the object of which was primarily to amuse the reader, though they might reach to a higher interest, e.g. the Autobiographic Sketches; secondly, essays proper, or papers addressing themselves purely or primarily to "the understanding as an insulated faculty," e.g. The Essenes, The Casars, and Cicero; and, thirdly, that "far higher class of compositions" which might be considered as examples of a very rare kind of "impassioned prose," e.g. large portions of The Confessions of an Opium-Eater and the supplementary Suspiria de Profundis. This classification, though not quite the same as Bacon's division of the "parts of learning" (by which he meant "kinds of literature") into History or the Literature of Memory, Philosophy or the Literature of Reason, and Poetry or the Literature of Imagination, is practically equivalent. Hence, as Bacon's classification is the more scientific and searching, and also the most familiar and popular, we shall be pretty safe in adopting it, and dividing De Quincey's writings into: -(I.) Writings of Reminiscence, or Descriptive, Biographical, and Historical Writings; (II.) Speculative, Didactic, and Critical Writings; (III.) Imaginative Writings and Prose-Poetry. It is necessary, above all things, to premise that in De Quincey the three sorts of writing shade continually into each other. Where this |