Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 55.djvu/225

 20 July 1726). He returned to Dublin to find her rather better. He was welcomed with popular enthusiasm; bells were rung and bonfires lighted; the harbour covered with wherries on his arrival; the corporation went to meet him; and he was taken in triumph to the deanery (, p. 227).

In 1727 he made another visit to England, leaving Dublin in April, and staying most of his time with Pope at Twickenham. He thought of trying the waters at Aix-la-Chapelle, and Voltaire sent him introductions to friends. Bolingbroke (24 June 1727) dissuaded him, on the ground that it might injure his prospects in England. Mrs. Howard also told him that he ought to stay, and he afterwards resented her advice, which he had taken as a hint that he was wanted and would be patronised at home. The death of George I (11 June) now raised for a time the hopes of his friends Pulteney and Bolingbroke; but it soon appeared that Walpole was to be supported by the new queen, and that Mrs. Howard's influence was of no account. Swift was welcomed at Leicester House, the centre of the opposition which gathered round the new Prince of Wales, and was asked to join in the ‘Craftsman.’ His health, however, was weak, and his gloom deep. It was made deeper still in August by reports that Stella was sinking. He left Pope's house abruptly at the end of August. He could not bear society, and yet could not bear to be present in the ‘very midst of grief’ at Dublin. He scarcely dared to open letters from Ireland; he was very ill, though he might escape this time, and could hardly travel. ‘I am able,’ he tells Sheridan (2 Sept. 1727), ‘to hold up my sorry head no longer.’ He is still anxious that the death may not take place at the deanery. He thinks of going to France, but finally resolves to start for Ireland. He reached Dublin in the beginning of October (a fragment of a journal of his journey to Holyhead is printed by Sir Henry Craik, App. ix., from the original in the Forster Library). Stella still lingered till 28 Jan. 1727–8. Swift had some one with him at the deanery when the news was brought to him at eight in the evening. He could not be alone till eleven P.M., when he sat down to begin writing the remarkable ‘Character of Mrs. Johnson.’ She was buried in St. Patrick's on the 30th, but he was too ill to be present. An envelope, with a lock of her hair, belonged, says Scott, to Dr. Tuke of St. Stephen's Green, on which Swift had written the famous words, ‘Only a woman's hair.’ To interpret them rightly is to understand Swift.

Swift never again left Ireland. He wrote occasional pamphlets, expressing the old views with growing bitterness. He repeats the list of Irish wrongs, and traces all the sufferings of the country to the oppression of the English rulers. The most famous is the ‘Modest Proposal’ (1729) for preventing the children of the poor from being burdensome by using them as articles of food. A similar tract is an ‘Answer to the Craftsman’ (1730), in which Swift argues that the Irish should be permitted to join the French army, because it will lead to depopulation, which is the one end of English policy. Swift received the freedom of Dublin in 1729, and, in returning thanks, accepted the authorship of the ‘Drapier's Letters.’ Lord Allen, a silly Irish peer, protested against the action of the corporation, and was bitterly satirised by Swift as ‘Traulus.’ He wrote against the proposed repeal of the Test Act, and in 1731 he attacked two bills for enforcing residence on the clergy and dividing large benefices. Swift described them afterwards (to Sterne, July 1733) as ‘two abominable bills for enslaving and beggaring the clergy, which took their birth from hell.’ They were thrown out. In 1733 and afterwards bills were introduced for commuting the tithe, which Swift took to be an attack upon the church by the landlords. He fiercely denounced the measures, and attacked the Irish parliament in the most savage of all his satires in verse, ‘The Legion Club’ (1736). (For the impression made upon Tennyson by this poem, see ‘Memoir of Tennyson,’ 1897, ii. 73.). While writing this he was seized with a fit of giddiness which prevented its completion (, p. 245), and he was never afterwards fit for serious work.

Swift was the most thoroughgoing of pessimists. Do not the corruptions of men in power ‘eat your flesh and exhaust your spirits?’ he asked a friend (, p. 148). His so-called patriotism, he declares, is ‘perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly, and baseness’ (to Pope, 1 June 1728). He feared that he should die at Dublin in a rage, ‘like a poisoned rat in a hole’ (to Bolingbroke, 21 March 1728–9). Bolingbroke (18 July 1732) offered to procure him an exchange for the rectory of Binfield in Berkshire, which Swift declined as inadequate. He continued, however, to write to his friends Bolingbroke, Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot in letters touching from the evident desire for affection, and showing increasing symptoms of decay. He is querulous over old grievances: the 1,000l. owing to him from the crown when he accepted the deanery, and