BOOKS.

A NEW LIFE OF SWIFT.* PROBABLY no English writer, except Shakespeare, has been so much written about as Swift ; and certainly none has suffered more from the ravages of biography. That tremendous personality, so vitally present in all his pages, makes friends or enemies as it did in life ; devoted friends, bitter enemies. Thackeray's lurid and too famous sketch of him might seem unjustifiable; if you did not find a man so charitable as Stevenson calling the great satirist "a kind of human he-goat, leaping and shaking his scut on mountains of ordure." If Swift repels many, there are others whom he attracts as strongly. Not even Deane Swifte, his nephew and biographer, is more un- reserved in praise than several critics of our own time; the power to fascinate survives with the power to terrify or dis- gust; and among the whole array of writers it is rare to find one who is, like Mr. Ashe-King, at once sensible and sympa- thetic. Mr. King is Swift's apologist ; and one is always needed. While Swift lived, the charm of his manner, the warmth and unselfishness of his friendship, and his constant generosity, carefully though it was concealed, maintained a sufficient band of people to give the lie to his " inverted hypocrisy," and to excuse what in his writings needed forgive- ness. The apology for Swift's words is in his actions ; but the words remain written in that imperishable style, the kind and courageous actions are forgotten. Every one has read Gulliver ; every one knows some version of Stella's and Vanessa's history ; but of Swift's long life at the Deanery of St. Patrick's, of his long indomitable struggle with misgovern.

ment, few know anything except the tradition of some dubious and discreditable practical jokes ; and it is the work and writings of this period that Mr. King has taken in hand to illustrate. His book is merely concerned with Swift's political life ; the earlier chapters of course recapitulate the story of his youth, and touch upon several controverted points ; but they bring nothing new to the discussion except brevity and common-sense, of which the pages relating to Stella and Vanessa are a model. We are glad to claim Mr. King for Stella's faction, since on this matter we must all be partisans. Nothing, again, could be better and fairer than the opening sentence of his book ; yet, be it observed, Mr. King is angrily, indeed bitterly, Nationalist in tone :—

" Swift drew his first breath and his last in Ireland, spent in her the best years of his youth and of his maturity, owed her his literary education, and paid her with a political education by which she has never ceased to profit to this day; but in no sense was he an Irishman."

There is always something to cavil at in a general statement; and we think that Swift served his apprenticeship to litera-

ture at Moor Park in Temple's library. But that is perhaps not precisely what Mr. King refers to; and as to his antithesis there can be no manner of doubt. During four years Swift, as the adviser to Oxford and Bolingbroke, largely governed England ; yet those years were barren of results

The Peace of Utrecht marked no new departure in English policy ; England was willing and ready again to enter into

Continental quarrels. But in Ireland Swift, wielding no power but his pen, was not so much a leader of public opinion as its creator; and no one who knows. even vaguely, the state of Ireland one hundred and fifty years back, can deny that this was a great and a beneficent achievement.

Mr. King has been at much pains to defend Swift from the charge of political infidelity ; and, indeed, it is not difficult to show that he was constant to one principle, fidelity to the Church's interests as he conceived them. Temple's secretary naturally entered politics on the Whig side; if he left the Whigs it was because they refused what the Tories were willing to give, a concession to the Irish Church. No doubt Harley and St. John bribed Swift with power; but that is a bribe no man can be accused for taking, except at the

• Swift in Ireland. By B. Ache-King. London: Fisher trawia.

sacrifice of principle. What principle did Swift forsake by turning his back on Lord Somers ? Political parties were then held together by common interests or a personal attach- ment; the religious question alone involved a principle.

Personal friendship does not result from a series of unfulfilled promises, and that was the claim of the Whigs upon Swift ; but that he would make sacrifices for personal friendship he showed, and no man ever did so more conspicuously in an episode upon which Mr. King might have laid more stress. When the long internal struggle in the Tory party terminated in Oxford's disgrace, Swift, the one man who stood equally well

with both leaders, turned his back on Bolingbroke, the man he admired and believed in, the man who had the ball at his foot, and at a bare request followed into his retirement

Oxford, the man he loved. No one could have foreseen the Queen's fatal seizure which robbed Bolingbroke of his advan- tage two days after it was won ; and though Bolingbroke had Jacobite schemes, there is every reason to believe that Swift's repeated denial of the fact was sincere. Political methods had scarcely changed since Charles II. got Shaftesbury's signature to a false copy of the Treaty of Dover. Charles lost Shaftesbury's support when the truth was known, and we are very certain that any revelation of Bolingbroke's plans which should have seemed to endanger the Church of England would have turned Swift from an adherent into an enemy. But the fact that a man so deep in the Ministry's confidence should have been ignorant of Bolingbroke's main design, proves Bolingbroke's duplicity, not the unreality of Swift's influence. If Swift's pen had been for sale, Bolingbroke would have bid without stint for the man who wrote the Conduct of the Allies.

For, even if every one may not agree with us that Swift's is the greatest prose style in English, few would deny that

he is the ideal journalist. Whether you take him for the

Government, advocating a policy as in the Conduct of the Allies, or restraining indiscreet supporters as in the Letter to the Gentlemen of the October Club ; or in Opposition, as in the Drapier Letters and the Maxims Controlled in Ireland, he sets the standard for literature designed for an immediate purpose and upon an immediate occasion. Weighty, eloquent, homely, or ironic at will, he is never rhetorical, never drops out of the key of speech. Other writers may be persuasive, Swift is con- vincing; it is impossible to resist his simple straightforward manner. Curiously enough, criticism has neglected to in- quire into the models which Swift undoubtedly had. "I have written and burnt," he says, ",and written and burnt again more tban perhaps any man in England." In the Tale of a Tub, with its long sentences, recalling the seventeenth century, and its fantastic buffoonery intermingled with the sedate irony which became the author's habitual manner, Swift's style is seen in the making. And in the " Author's Apology " prefixed to that work occur the words, " We still read Marvel's answer to Parker with pleasure, tho' the book it answers be sunk ago." Unhappily, the Rehearsal Transprosed is now read seldom, and then with more curiosity than pleasure ; it is a superannuated joke, and a joke in some five hundred pages. Yet though the bulk of it is in the clowning vein, which theological controversy in those days so strangely affected, there are serious passages more like Swift's manner than anything else we know. Here and there we come upon

a S wiftian turn of thought,—"No naturalist has determined the certain time of a mountain's pregnancy, how long it goes to be delivered, but one has told us what manner of child it always produces." Here, again, is a curious passage, freely rendered by Marvel from Julian's Keiterapic, which recalls Peter's form of general absolution in the Talc of a Tub :- " Let all men take notiee, of whatsoever condition and quality, whether they be adulterers or murtherers, or guilty of any other immorality, vice, or debauchery, that hereby they are warranted and invited to continue boldly and confidently in the same, and I declare that upon dipping themselves only in this water they are, and shall be so reputed, pure and blameless to all intents and purposes. And moreover, as oft as they shall renew and frequent such other vices, immoralities, or debaucheries, I do hereby give and grant to them, and every one of them respectively, that by thumping his breast or giving but himself a pat on the forehead, he shall thereupon be immediately discharged, and absolved of all guilt and penalty therefore incurred, any law or statute to the contrary notwithstanding."

Bnt it is in the first half-dozen pages of Marvel's attack upon Dr. Turner, Mr. Bmirke, the Divine in Mode, that the resem-

blance becomes unmistakeable; this is not only Swift's

style, but Swift's irony, the manner of his graver pamphlets and sermons:- " It hath been the good nature (and politicians will have it the wisdom) of most governors to entertain the people with public recreations ; and therefore to encourage such as could best con- tribute to their divertisement. And hence doubtless it is, that our ecclesiastical governors also (who, as they yield to none for prudence, so in good humour they exceed all others) have not disdained of late years to afford the laity no inconsiderable pastime. Yea, so great hath been their condescension, that rather than fail, they have carried on the merriment by men of their own faculty, who might otherwise, by the gravity of their calling, have claimed an exemption from such offices. They have ordained from time to time several of the most ingenious and pregnant of their clergy to supply the press continually with new books of ridiculous and facetious argument. Wherein divers of them have succeeded even to admiration ; insomuch that by the reading thereof the ancient sobriety and seriousness of the English nation bath been in good measure discussed and worn out of fashion. Yet, though the clergy have hereby manifested that nothing comes amiss to them, and particularly that, when they give their minds to it, no sort of men are more proper or capable to make sport for spectators ; it hath so happened by the rewards and promotions bestowed upon those who have laboured in this province, that many others, in hopes of the like preferment, although otherwise by their parts, their complexion, and education, unfittted for this jocular divinity have in order to it wholly neglected the more weighty cares of their function."

Here we must stop the quotation; but there are six pages of the passage, one more like Swift than the other. One other sentence we must, have. " It is no small trust reposed in him to whom the Bishop shall commit ornate et omnimodum suum ingeniam, tam temporale quam spirituale ; and however it goes

with excommunication, they should take good heed to what manner of person they delegate the keys of laughter."

We commend this point to Mr. King's consideration in a new edition, which we hope may be less defaced with misprints than the first. The publisher also, having repro. duced for chapter headings initial letters from an old Irish missal, should see to it that the ink is properly applied to them. And we have one other quarrel with the book. Mr.

King, working for the New Irish Library, aims at making Swift better known among the less educated classes of Ireland. Yet he quotes from several languages, and does

not translate. Why did be not at least render the epitaph,

which fits his purpose so well ? For Mr. King seeks to establish that Swift's work for Ireland condones such

offences against humanity as the Voyage to the Houyhulinms, which he condemns even too strongly; yet he might easily have shown, at least, that Gulliver is not what SWift sought

to be remembered by. "Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, Dean of this cathedral "—so runs the inscription in St. Patrick's—" where savage indignation can no longer lacerate the heart." That is the satirist's epitaph ; he has shaken off the prompting that drove him to see deformity and depict it, as other artists are urged to see, and render, loveliness ; and he rests in peace. All the world knows these words ; but the lines that follow are forgotten. " Depart, traveller, and imitate, if you can, one who, to a man's uttermost, was the strenuous champion of liberty." First, and by nature, a satirist ; but last, and on resolute principle, a redresser of Irish wrongs. Mr. King's book calls back to us the aide of Swift's life and work by which Swift desired to be re- membered.