for one, that fate wrested the prey out of his claws, and cut his wings and chained him. One can gaze, and not without awe and pity, at the lonely eagle chained behind the bars.

That Swift was born at No. 7, Hoey's-court, Dublin, on the 30th November, 1667, is a certain fact, of which nobody will deny the sister island the honour and glory; but, it seems to me, he was no more an Irishman than a man born of English parents at Calcutta is a Hindoo.' Goldsmith was an Irishman, and always an Irishman: Steele was an Irishman, and always an Irishman: Swift's heart was English and in England, his habits English, his logic.

1 Swift was by no means inclined to forget such considerations; and his English birth makes its mark, strikingly enough, every now and then in his writings. Thus in a letter to Pope (SCOTT's Swift, vol. xix. p. 97), he says—

"We have had your volume of letters Some of those who highly value you, and a few who know you personally, are grieved to find you make no distinction between the English gentry of this kingdom, and the savage old Irish (who are only the vulgar, and some gentlemen who live in the Irish parts of the kingdom); but the English colonies, who are three parts in four, are much more civilized than many counties in England, and speak better English, and are much better bred." And again, in the fourth Drapier's Letter, we have the following:

"A short paper, printed at Bristol, and reprinted here, reports Mr. Wood to say 'that he wonders at the impudence and insolence of the Irish, in refusing his coin.' When by the way, it is the true English people of Ireland who refuse it, although we take it for granted that the Irish will do so too whenever they are asked."— SCOTT's Swift, vol. iv. p. 143.

He goes further, in a good-humoured satirical paper, "On Barbarous Denominations in Ireland," where (after abusing, as he was wont, the Scotch cadence, as well as expression) he advances to the “Irish brogue," and speaking of the "censure" which it brings down, says :

"And what is yet worse, it is too well known that the bad consequence of this opinion affects those among us who are not the least liable to such reproaches farther than the misfortune of being born in Ireland, although of English parents, and whose education has been chiefly in that kingdom."-Ibid, vol. vii. p. 149.

But, indeed, if we are to make anything of Race at all, we must call that man an Englishman whose father comes from an old Yorkshire family, and his mother from an old Leicestershire one!

eminently English; his statement is elaborately simple; he shuns tropes and metaphors, and uses his ideas and words with a wise thrift and economy, as he used his money; with which he could be generous and splendid upon great occasions, but which he husbanded when there was no need to spend it. He never indulges in needless extravagance of rhetoric, lavish epithets, profuse imagery. He lays his opinion before you with a grave simplicity and a perfect neatness. Dreading ridicule, too, as a man of his humour-above all, an Englishman of his humourcertainly would, he is afraid to use the poetical power which he really possessed; one often fancies in reading him that he dares not be eloquent when he might; that he does not speak above his voice, as it were, and the tone of society.

1

His initiation into politics, his knowledge of business, his knowledge of polite life, his acquaintance with literature even, which he could not have pursued very sedulously during that reckless career at Dublin, Swift got under the roof of Sir William Temple. He was fond of telling in after life what quantities of books he devoured there,, and

1 "The style of his conversation was very much of a piece with that of his writings, concise and clear and strong. Being one day at a Sheriff's feast, who amongst other toasts called out to him, Mr. Dean, The trade of Ireland!' He answered quick: Sir, I drink no memories!' . . . . .

"Happening to be in company with a petulant young man who prided himself on saying pert things . . . . . and who cried out 'You must know, Mr. Dean, that I set up for a wit?' 'Do you so,' says the Dean, 'take my advice, and sit down again!'

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At another time, being in company, where a lady whisking her long train [long trains were then in fashion] swept down a fine fiddle and broke it; Swift cried out"Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremona !"

—Dr. DELANY. Observations upon Lord Orrery's “ Remarks, &c.” in Swift. London, 1754.

how King William taught him to cut asparagus in the Dutch fashion. It was at Shene and at Moor Park, with a salary of twenty pounds and a dinner at the upper servants' table, that this great and lonely Swift passed a ten years' apprenticeship-wore a cassock that was only not a livery-bent down a knee as proud as Lucifer's to supplicate my lady's good graces, or run on his honour's errands.' It was here, as he was writing at Temple's table, or following his patron's walk, that he saw and heard the men who had governed the great world-measured himself with them, looking up from his silent corner, guaged their brains, weighed their wits, turned them, and tried them, and marked them. Ah! what platitudes he must have heard! what feeble jokes! what pompous commonplaces! what small men they must have seemed under those enormous periwigs, to the swarthy, uncouth, silent Irish secretary. I wonder whether it ever struck Temple that that Irishman was his master? I suppose that dismal conviction did not present itself under the ambrosial wig, or Temple could never have lived with Swift. Swift sickened, rebelled, left the service-ate humble pie and came back again; and so for ten years went on, gathering learning, swallowing scorn, and submitting with a stealthy rage to his fortune.

Temple's style is the perfection of practised and easy good-breeding. If he does not penetrate very deeply into a subject, he professes a very gentlemanly acquaintance with it; if he makes rather a parade of Latin, it was the

1 "Don't you remember how I used to be in pain when Sir William Temple would look cold and out of humour for three or four days, and I used to suspect a hundred reasons? I have plucked up my spirits since then, faith; he spoiled a fine gentleman."-Journal to Stella

custom of his day, as it was the custom for a gentleman to envelope his head in a periwig and his hands in lace ruffles. If he wears buckles and square-toed shoes, he steps in them with a consummate grace, and you never hear their creak, or find them treading upon any lady's train or any rival's heels in the Court crowd. When that grows too hot or too agitated for him, he politely leaves it. He retires to his retreat of Shene or Moor Park; and lets the King's party, and the Prince of Orange's party battle it out among themselves. He reveres the sovereign (and no man perhaps ever testified to his loyalty by so elegant a bow): he admires the Prince of Orange; but there is one person whose ease and comfort he loves more than all the princes in Christendom, and that valuable member of society is himself, Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat; between his study-chair and his tulip beds,' clipping his apricots and pruning his essays,

"The Epicureans were more intelligible in their notion, and fortunate in their expression, when they placed a man's happiness in the tranquillity of his mind and indolence of body; for while we are composed of both, I doubt both must have a share in the good or ill we feel. As men of several languages say the same things in very different words, so in several ages, countries, constitutions of laws and religion, the same thing seems to be meant by very different expressions; what is called by the Stoics apathy, or dispassion; by the sceptics, indisturbance; by the Molinists, quietism; by common men, peace of conscience, seems all to mean but great. For this reason Epicurus passed his life wholly in his garden: there he studied, there he exercised, there he taught his philosophy; and, indeed, no other sort of abode seems to contribute so much to both the tranquillity of mind and indolence of body, which he made his chief ends. The sweetness of the air, the pleasantness of smell, the verdure of plants, the cleanness and lightness of food, the exercise of working or walking; but, above all, the exemption from cares and solicitude, seem equally to favour and improve both contemplation and health, the enjoyment of sense and imagination, and thereby the quiet and ease both of the body and mind.. Where Paradise was has been much debated, and little agreed; but what sort of place is meant by it may perhaps easier be conjectured. It seems to have been a Persian word, since Xenophon

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the statesman, the ambassador no more; but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or dallies by the south wall with the ruddy nymph of gardens.

Temple seems to have received and exacted a prodigious deal of veneration from his household, and to have been coaxed, and warmed, and cuddled by the people round about him, as delicately as any of the plants which he loved. When he fell ill in 1693, the household was aghast at his indisposition; mild Dorothea his wife, the best companion of the best of men

"Mild Dorothea, peaceful, wise, and great,

Trembling beheld the doubtful hand of fate."

As for Dorinda, his sister

"Those who would grief describe, might come and trace

Its watery footsteps in Dorinda's face.

To see her weep, joy every face forsook,

And grief flung sables on each menial look.

The humble tribe mourned for the quickening soul,

That furnished life and spirit through the whole."

Is not that line in which grief is described as putting the

and other Greek authors mention it, as what was much in use and delight among the kings of those eastern countries. Strabo describing Jericho: 'Ibi est palmetum, cui immixtæ sunt etiam aliæ stirpes hortenses, locus ferax palmis abundans, spatio stadiorum centum, totus irriguus, ibi est Regis Balsami paradisus.'”—Essay on Gardens.

In the same famous essay Temple speaks of a friend, whose conduct and prudence he characteristically admires.

. . . . "I thought it very prudent in a gentleman of my friends in Staffordshire, who is a great lover of his garden, to pretend no higher, though his soil be good enough, than to the perfection of plums; and in these (by bestowing south walls upon them) he has very well succeeded, which he could never have done in attempts upon peaches and grapes; and a good plum is certainly better than an ill peach."