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eundem.

1689-1694. and though he a little overpraises it as 'uncommonly magni'ficent,' moving thereby much wrath in Mr. Deane Swift, it Oxford ad was at least a timely service. Writing a few weeks afterwards to thank his uncle William for his care in sending him the certificate of his Dublin degree required for his ad eundem at Hart Hall, as Hartford College was then called, Swift remarks that he never was more satisfied than in the behaviour of the University of Oxford to him. He had, he

says, all the civilities he could wish for, and so many favours, Treatment that he was ashamed to have been more obliged in a few at English university. weeks to strangers than ever he was in seven years to Dublin

Earliest piece of !

verse.

Μ.Α. Hartford College.

and Sir William Temple.

College. It is his first known success, and much that is not with exactness known may have dated from it. If he did not now first break into verse, it is certain that he wrote at this time his earliest piece that has survived; and some of the lines of his eighteenth ode of the second book of Horace (of which a similar paraphrase is by far the most pleasing effort of Pope's boyhood) may possibly have been meant to involve an application to himself. He declares that he is content with what the gods have given him, and is unskilled to raise himself by unworthy arts. Thomas Swift obtained his master's degree at Balliol concurrently with his cousin Jonathan at Hart Hall, and, a little later, was for a time Temple's chaplain. Jonathan told his uncle William that he was not himself to take orders till the King gave him a prebendary.

The remark is sufficiently decisive of the altered footing on which he now stood at Moor Park. Of that dwelling and its celebrated master not much needs here be said. Temple's

part in public affairs was played out before Charles the The King Second's death; and through the tragedy of disaster which closed in the Revolution he was only a looker-on. But it was natural that the Prince of Orange, on his landing in England, should have turned to the author of the Triple Alliance, of the treaty that ended the second Dutch war, and above all of the marriage that had placed himself on the steps

Ет. 22-27.

of the English throne, as one of the first Englishmen from 1689-1694. whom it behoved him to ask counsel. Temple had been on familiar terms with him at the Hague; and though he declined to be Secretary of State, he gave his advice freely. He then lived at Sheen near Richmond, where, says Swift, to whom that earlier residence was also personally known,* the King visited his old friend often, and took his advice 'in 'affairs of greatest consequence.' There was additional attraction for the King when Temple finally changed Sheen for Moor Park, a place better suited to retirement, where, Temple at amid the heath and furze of one of the loneliest parts of Moor Park. Surrey, he had created what might have been the retreat of a Dutch burgomaster, with terrace and canal, clipped trees and grounds and flower-beds, laid out with quaint precision. If moralists ever helped themselves, Swift might have profited betimes by the moral he was wise enough to draw thus early, in a very good couplet, from such a close to a life so busy and aspiring.

'You strove to cultivate a barren Court in vain,
'Your Garden 's better worth your nobler pain.'

Macaulay's essay on Sir William Temple mentions the fact of his sister, Lady Giffard, living here with Temple and his wife after their son's melancholy death, and adds that there were others 'to whom a far higher interest belongs. 'An eccentric, uncouth, disagreeable young Irishman, who 'had narrowly escaped plucking at Dublin, attended Sir William as an amanuensis for board and twenty pounds a 'year, dined at the second table, wrote bad verses in praise ' of his employer, and made love to a very pretty, dark-eyed young girl who waited on Lady Giffard. Little did Temple 'imagine that the coarse exterior of his dependant concealed 'a genius equally suited to politics and to letters, a genius des'tined to shake great kingdoms, to stir the laughter and the

* See a note by Nichols in his second edition of the Works, i. 31.

Swift at (Macaulay).

Moor Park

1689-1694. 'rage of millions, and to leave to posterity memorials which

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can perish only with the English language. Little did he 'think that the flirtation in his servants' hall, which he per'haps scarcely deigned to make the subject of a jest, was the 'beginning of a long unprosperous love, which was to be as 'widely famed as the passion of Petrarch or of Abelard. Sir 'William's secretary was Jonathan Swift. Lady Giffard's 'waiting-maid was poor Stella.' What John Temple said, at

the close of his life, of the man with whom his family had Macaulay's bitterly quarrelled, is the sole authority for the opening lines authority. of this description, though even that does not justify the

insufficient

Inmates of Temple's house.

'second' or 'servants' table; and a date will dispose of its closing statement, as far as relates to the first residence. When Swift went to Moor Park, Esther Johnson was little over seven years old. He spoke of her afterwards as only six, which was the old impression about her always in his mind; but she was really in her eighth year. Her mother was something more than waiting-woman, having rather the character of governess or companion ('friend and companion' Scott believed her to have been), to Lady Giffard, with whom she remained so connected until that lady's death, and long after Swift had reached his highest fame. Two daughters, 'Hetty' and a younger sister, Ann, whose attractive appearance and modest manners find mention in the Journal to Esther, lived with her in the house; and there is no evidence of either of them having 'waited' on anybody but themselves. Proof is equally wanting that anything 'eccentric' had yet shown itself in Swift. At no time can it fairly have been said of him that he was 'uncouth.' And 'disagreeable' as he doubtless had the power to be, his not less remarkable power of making himself agreeable was more likely to have impressed itself on the persons named, at the time the description refers to. If he had little help from fortune, he had from nature a supreme gift, a charm in personal intercourse that none could resist, and which attracted to him in especial the favour and desire of women. But if he was

really making love at this time, it was not to 'Stella;' and 1689-1694. it was rather his misfortune than his fault to be writing bad

verses.

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Оссира-
tions of
Swift.

1

Of Hetty Johnson he became first the playfellow and soon the volunteer teacher, and remembered long how he had guided the little hand in writing, and how his mind had given to hers its first impress. 'I met Mr. Harley in the 'court of requests,' he wrote to her when great ministers f were his obedient servants, 'and he asked me how long I 'had learnt the trick of writing to myself. He had seen 'your letter through the glass case at the coffee-house, and 'would swear it was my hand; and Mr. Ford, who took and 'sent it me, was of the same mind. I remember others have 'formerly said so too. I think I was little MD's writing- Hetty's writing'master?' Not less was he trying to be agreeable to his master. employer if he wrote verses to him, however indifferent; and the poetical eulogy of Temple has at least this much value for us, angry as poor Swift would have been to think that any one should connect it with his memory. No doubt it is bad, as are other things of the kind then also written. An Ode to Sancroft, on the archbishop becoming a nonjuror; an Ode to the King, on his reduction of Ireland to obedience; Earliest and an Ode to the Athenian Society, on Dunton the book- verseseller setting up in a corner of his shop that now forgotten rival to the Royal Society; are all of them productions which he seems to have had no part in preserving or publishing. Poetry at first is of necessity imitative; and it was Swift's misfortune to have turned from the strong to the weak side of Cowley.

'Forgot his Epic, his Pindaric art,
'But still we love his language of the heart.'

It was his language of the heart Swift had been studying at
the age of fifteen, as we have noticed; but now a suggestion
from those he desired most to please had directed him to
Cowley's odes, and under encouragement from Sir William

making.

1689-1694. and Lady Temple he attempted his Pindaric flights.* He Ет. 22-27. would hardly otherwise have permitted Dunton to advertise

Pindaric flights.

A letter from Leicester,

him among the wits as an inmate of Moor Park and a friend of its master. That notorious person printed what was sent him with a letter signed Jonathan Swift, which described the writer's having heard of the society as he passed through Oxford, and his having 'a while after come to this place 'upon a visit to Sir William Temple.' Such a letter from a man living in the servants' hall on a wage of twenty pounds a year, might indeed entitle him to be called 'eccentric.'

Three days before its date he had replied to some advice sent him by a clergyman of Leicester whom he calls his good cousin, in regard to some former love-making with one of his female acquaintance there; and the letter exhibits his cha

racter, and touches some points in his life. Mr. Kendall having Jan. 1692. heard of an improvement in his prospects, seems to have thought

there was danger of his getting into a marriage entanglement in ignorance of rumours that were abroad about the lady. The people is a lying sort of beast, says Swift as to this, and particularly in Leicester; yet they seldom talk without some glimpse of reason. But as to marriage, he does not belong to the kind of persons, of whom he has known a

Swift's

reply.

* 'The undertaking,' says Scott,
speaking of the Pindaric odes, 'is
'said to have been pressed upon him
'by Sir William and Lady Temple,
'who were admirers of Cowley.'
'On the
Another poem 'On the Burning of
Burning of 'Whitehall (1697),' alleged to have
Whitehall.' been written in his later time with

Temple, I cannot bring myself im-
plicitly to believe in. Scott received
it from an executor of Dr. Lyon,
Mr. Thomas Steele (O'Connell's friend),
with some undoubtedly genuine letters
and pieces by Swift, and printed it as
found 'in his handwriting and with
'his corrections; but he does not
say that he saw the MS. himself, and
its two allusions to Charles the First

appear to me to be decisive against it.
There is nothing in Swift's expressed
opinions at any period of his life to
render conceivably his a description
of that king's death as 'fifty tyrants
'executing one' amid 'eternal accla-
'mations.' I should otherwise have re-
joiced to give Swift the credit of such
vigorous verse as this-

'Down come the lofty roofs, the cedar * burns,

'The blended metal to a torrent turns. The carvings crackle and the marbles rive, The paintings shrink, vainly the Henries 'strive,

'Propt by great Holbein's pencil, down 'they fall,

'The fiery deluge sweeps and swallows

'all

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