A valiant knight lay dying-a step-dame by his side Won him to wrong his first-born-the child of her who died. That scroll his goodly birthright gave to a younger son, And when 'twas written, signed, and sealed, the step-dame's work was done Why paused that clerk ?-a shadow upon his work was cast, A small hand o'er the parchment dimly and swiftly passed. ""Tis weary work," he murmured, "'gainst Death to drive the quill.” 1 He wrote on; but the parchment with white light seemed to blaze, That hand! no pulse was beating beneath its dazzling hue- The light bright foam that rideth upon the billow's crown? Unmoved it lay before him, the chill hand of the dead! The clerk look'd up, beside him there smiled an angel's face, The lustre of the night-queen streams softened thro' the cloud; Her voice-the young clerk heard it—and with his heart he heard, "I am that young child's mother, whom thy swift pen would wrong, The love I bear my first-born was lulled by Death to sleep; Lo! in the dim old chancel in holy trance I lie, The moonbeams glance around me-meet haunters of the tomb! And nothing warms or chills me-I know no joy or pain 'Tis well-full soon pass'd o'er me my lover's bridal-train. The young child's guardian angel stood in my grave to-night, 'Come forth once more,' he whispered, 'to shield thy son's birthright.' I felt the love within me kindle, and thrill, and glow, And through my soul's dim essence its subtle music flow! Though not of earth or heaven, poor disembodied wight! My love hath burst the barrier that shuts the dead from sight! Put up thy pen, good writer, and pray on bended knee, And horsemen riding madly, came swearing to the door; Nor merry trout streams gliding from woods that meet the morn; Not all his dewy pastures, nor goodly kine they feed, From the Dublin University Magazine. THE CLOSING YEARS OF DEAN SWIFT'S LIFE. "The Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life; with an Appendix, containing several of his Poems hitherto unpublished, and some remarks on Stella." By W. R. Wilde, M.R.I.A., F.R.C.S. 8vo. Dublin: Hodges & Smith, Grafton-st. 1849. The history of this volume is this:-Dr. Mackenzie, of Glasgow, writes to Mr. Wilde to learn whether there is any record of Swift's disease known, either to Mr. Wilde or to the readers of the Dublin Medical Journal, a work edited by Mr. Wilde. It occurred to Mr. Mackenzie that there might be something preserved on the subject either in the deanery or in Trinity College. The first part of Mr. Wilde's book is a reply to this question, and was originally published in Mr. Wilde's journal. Of the disease itself, Mr. Wilde gives us Swift's own description: THIS is a volume of no ordinary interest. | poems, found in the handwriting of Swift, To the medical inquirer it gives such details and some of which are probably of his comas can be now recovered of cerebral disease, position, in an interleaved copy of an old extending over a period of fifty-five years- almanac, lent to Mr. Wilde for the purposes the particular symptoms described by the of this essay sufferer himself-for the most part in confidential letters to intimate friends-that sufferer the most accurate observer of whatever came within his reach, of any man gifted with the same degree of genius that has ever used the English language as a medium of communication, and the man of all others who has, on most subjects, expressed himself with such distinctness, that we do not remember, in any case, a doubt as to the precise meaning of a sentence in his works, although those works are on subjects which actuate and influence the passions, and although he has often written in a dictatorial tone of authority, which of itself provokes Swift, writing to Mrs. Howard, in 1727, thus resistance, and therefore forces readers into describes the commencement of his complaint: something more than the unquestioning indo-About two hours before you were born' 'conselence in which we are satisfied to look over quently in 1690-'I got my giddiness by eating a most books. Mr. Wilde has given us Swift's hundred golden pippins at a time, at Richmond; and when you were four years and a quarter old, own account of Swift's distemper. But the bating two days, having made a fine seat, about interest of this volume is not to the medical twenty miles farther in Surrey, where I used to inquirer alone. The relation of intimate read-and, there I got my deafness; and these friendship in which Swift and Stella lived for two friends have visited me, one or other, every some five-and-twenty years, and the mystery year since, and being old acquaintance, have now thrown over it by a number of idle guesses thought fit to come together.' Overloading the which have found their way into the biogra- cold by sitting on a damp, exposed seat, were phies of Swift, have led Mr. Wilde to other inquiries, in themselves not unamusing. He of which, when once established, was likely to be very apt to produce both these complaints-neither has brought together, from obscure and for- easily removed from a system so nervous, and gotten sources, some of the explanations which with a temper so irritable, and a mind so exceswere given of parts of Swift's conduct, by per- sively active, as that of Swift's. From this period sons who had peculiar means of information as a disease, which, in all its symptoms and by its to some of the circumstances of the case. Mr. fatal termination, plainly appears to have been (in its commencement at least) cerebral congestion, Wilde has given us two portraits of Stella, set in, and exhibited itself in well-marked periodic neither of which had been before engraved; attacks which, year after year, increased in intenand the volume is closed by a number of sity and duration."-pp. 8, 9. stomach in the manner described, and catching While living in the country, and with his mind comparatively at ease, he made but few complaints. It is probable that his disease. gave him but little trouble while at Laracor; but whether it did or not, we have little opportunity of any knowledge, as few of his letters are dated from his parsonage. He had not formed at that time his acquaintanceships and friendships with the great persons, in passages of his letters to whom we find these occasional notices of his health; and Stella and Mrs. Dingley were living in his immediate vicinity, so that there are no letters to them of that date. Swift was a shrewd observer of human nature, and dwelling on his deafness and giddiness to those who suffered from similar ailments, seems to have been a piece of skillful flattery. We have not time to look over the correspondence for the purpose of proving this; but the reader, who turns to his letters to Mrs. Howard, will find instances illustrative of what we mean. To Swift's deafness was of the left ear. wards the close of life, at one time his left eye was fearfully affected. "About six weeks ago, in one night's time, his left eye swelled as large as an egg, and the left Mr. Nichols thought would mortify. * * * Five persons could scarce hold him for a week from tearing out his eyes." This is Mrs. Whiteway's language, who adds "He is now free from torture; his eye almost well," thus showing that but one eye suffered. In many passages, where he speaks of tottering, we find nothing to fix the fact of whether the one side was affected more than the other; but this, too, is established by a passage which Mr. Wilde quotes from the journal to Stella-" My left hund is very weak and trembles, but my right side has not been touched." It seems plain then that there was a paralysis of the left side. It would seem, from several passages, that Swift took too much wine and that he poisoned himself with snuff-" By Docter Radcliffe's advice, he left off bohea tea, which he had observed to disagree with him frequently before." We suspect, therefore, that in this luxury he had indulged too much. In the journal to Stella, we find the following entry "I have no fits of giddiness, but only some little disorders towards it, and I walk as much as I can. Lady Kerry is just as I am, only a deal worse. I dined to day at Lord Shelburn's, where she is, and we con ailments, which makes us very fond of each other." In another note in the same journal, we find this—“ Did I ever tell you that the Lord Treasurer hears ill with the left ear, just as I do? He always turns the right, and his servants whisper to him in that only. Mr. Wilde does not think there is any I dare not tell him that I am so too, for fear evidence of Swift's being subject to epileptic that he should think that I counterfeited to fits, as is stated by many of his biographers. make my court." In one of Swift's letters to The mistake, if it be such, he thinks, arises Archbishop King, we find him saying "I from the frequent recurrence in his letters of have been so extremely ill with an old disor-"fits of giddiness," &c. The language is der in my head, that I was unable to write to your grace. And in a letter of King's to him, inadvertently quoted by Mr. Wilde as a letter from Swift to King, we find King complaining, in Swift's temper, of very much the same symptoms as Swift is perpetually describing. In the journal to Stella, we find Swift again recurring to the effect of cordiality being created by identity of suffering "I was this morning with poor Lady Kerry, who is much worse in her head than I. She sends me bottles of her bitter, and we are so fond of one another, because our ailments are the same. Do you know that Madam Stell? Have not I seen you conning ailments with Joe's wife and some others, sirrah?" Mr. Wilde must have looked back almost with envy on the golden harvest of blighted ears that presented itself to the physicians of that auspicious time. equivocal, and we think there is something to be said for the interpretation put upon it by non-medical readers. Take this sentence, for instance-"I dined to-day with the secretary, and found my head very much out of order, but no absolute fit; and I have not been well all this day. It has shook me a little.' We wish we had room for extracts from this most interesting volume. It is really a wonderful thing to see, after an interval of a century, a scientific man inferring the true character of a disease, that baffled the eminent men of Swift's day: "In answer to a recommendation of Mr. Pulteney's on the subject of physicians, the Dean in his answer of the 7th of March, 1737, writes: 'I have esteemed many of them as learned and ingenious men; but I never received the least benefit from their advice or prescriptions. And poor Dr. Arbuthnot was the only man of the faculty * who seemed to understand my case, but could not remedy it. But to conquer five physicians, all eminent in their way, was a victory that Alexander and Cæsar could never pretend to. I desire that my prescription of living may be published (which you design to follow,) for the benefit of mankind; which, however, I do not value a rush, nor the animal itself, as it now acts; neither will I ever value myself as a Philanthropus, because it is now a creature (taking a vast majority) that I hate more than a toad, a viper, a wasp, a stork, a fox, or any other that you will please to add."p. 40. in Swift's case. him she was 66 Nothing can be more affecting than the exhibition of gradual decay and deterioration of the instruments by which the mind acts. Insanity, in the proper sense of the word, Mr. Wilde does not regard as having existed There was the weakness of old age, and the childishness that accompanies it. He would, at times, utter incoherent words and syllables. "But," says Mr. Deane Swift, writing to Lord Orrery, "he never yet, as far as I could hear, talked nonsense, or said a foolish thing." There was a long period, we believe of more than a year, in which he was wholly silent, with but one or two recorded interruptions. A negligent servant girl blew out a candle in his chamber, and the smell offended him; she was told by a nasty slut." A servant man was breaking a large, stubborn coal, and he told him, "That's a stone, you blackguard." On another occasion, not finding words to express something he wished, he exhibited much uneasiness, and said, "I am a fool." When insanity is spoken of, it is not possible to be very accurate, and we suppose that in denying the existence of insanity in this case, Mr. Wilde does not, in reality mean very much more than Hawkesworth had long ago expressed. "Some intervals of sensibility and reason, after his madness, seemed to prove that his disorder, whatever it was, had not destroyed, but only suspended, the powers of his mind." The question is, after all, but one of language. Mr. Wilde has shown, almost to demonstration, that Swift's was organic disease of the brain; and many writers--we believe, among others, Dr. Conolly -would say that in this consisted insanity, calling mere functional disease "mental de "We know of at least eight medical men who attended Swift at different times, viz. Sir Patrick Dun, Drs. Arbuthnot, Radcliffe, Cockburn, Helsham, and Gratten, and Surgeons Nichols and Whiteway." We doubt the fact of Swift's having been attended by Sir Patrick Dun; and do not know on what authority Mr. Wilde's statement of the fact rests. rangement." In Swift's life and conduct— in his caprice--in his violent passions--in his oddities-even in his vindictive patriotism-in his misanthropy, whether it be regarded as a pretence or a reality-in the morbid delight with which he dwells on disgusting images, we see very distinct traces of incipient disease. We exclude from our consideration, in coming to this conclusion, the language of his epitaph in St. Patrick's Cathedral, breathing resentment--" Hic depositum est corpus Jonathan Swift, ubi særa indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit." We exclude the strange humor exhibited in the half-serious bequests in his will. We exclude a hundred well-authenticated extravagancies of conduct, some of them accompanied with circumstances which could not but be felt as intolerably insulting to his best friends, because all these things are consistent with states of mind, which no one calls by the name of insanity except in metaphorical language, but when conduct, unintelligible on any ordinary principle, exists, and when we the brain, we think it is hypercriticism in Mr. have the additional fact of organic disease of Wilde to fall out with the application of the term insanity, to a case so circumstanced. is an account of the examination of the head An interesting part of Mr. Wilde's book of Swift, in 1835, by Surgeons Houston and Hamilton. About the middle of the last century, frequent floods of the Poddle river, and the insufficiency of sewers to carry the superabundant water, occasioned much injury to St. Patrick's Cathedral.* One of the last acts of the Dean was an effort to off remedy this; and when he directed that he should be buried in Ireland, he requested that his body should be deposited in any dry "It is remarkable, part of the cathedral. says Mr. Wilde, "that the continuance of damp and inundations, in the year 1835, was the cause of his remains being disturbed." of this journal to follow Dr. Wilde in his It would be altogether out of the province account of the details of the examination. Dr. Houston, describing the head, saysindications of previous chronic disease. "The bones cannot be regarded as free from There are certainly no marks of caries or of fungous growth on any part of the head, but the condition of the cerebral surface of the whole frontal region, is evidently of a character indicating the presence, during lifetime, of diseased action in the adjacent membranes of the brain." Some doubt was for * Mason's "History of St. Patrick's." a while entertained of the remains examined by Dr. Houston being those of Swift at all. The phrenologists did not like the head; it did not accord with any of the then theories; but that the head was Swift's, there could be no doubt. Among other proofs is this, that it exhibited the marks of a post mortem examination made immediately after his death: "What the exact recent appearances were we have not been enabled to discover. If they were known to, they have not been handed down by any of Swift's many biographers. We have made diligent search among the newspapers and periodicals of the day, but have not been able to discover anything further than that which is already known, viz., that his head was opened after death, when it was found that his brain was 'loaded with water.' To this may be added the traditions of old Brennan, his servant, who according to Dr. Houston, on the authority of Mr. Maguire, boasted, that he himself had been present at the operation, and that he even held the basin in which the brain was placed after its removal from the skull. He told, moreover, that there was brain mixed with water to such an amount as to fill the basin, and by their quantity to call forth expressions of astonishment from the medical gentlemen engaged in the examination."" -pp. 60, 61. "In its great length, in the antero-posterior diameter, its low anterior development, prominent frontal sinuses, comparative lowness at the vertex, projecting nasal bones, and large posterior projection, it resembles, in a most extraordinary manner, those skulls of the so-called Celtic aborigines of Northern Europe, of which we have elsewhere given a description, and which are found in the early tumuli of this people throughout Ireland."-p. 62. The way in which Mr. Wilde, from concurring pieces of evidence, has elicited some of the details of this remarkable case, can scarcely be exhibited without quoting his own language. The following passage remarkably exemplifies his sagacity: "After the Dean's death, and subsequently to the post mortem examination, a plaster mask was taken from his face, and from this a bust was made, which is now in the museum of the University, and which, notwithstanding its possessing much of the cadaverous appearance, is, we are strongly inclined to believe, the best likeness of Swift-during, at least, the last few years of his life-now in existence. The annexed engraving accurately and faithfully represents a profile view of the right side of this bust, the history of which it is here necessary to relate. This old bust, which has remained in the museum of Trinity College from a period beyond the memory of livbust of Swift; but as there was no positive proof ing man, has been generally believed to be the of its being so, it has been passed over by all his biographers, except Scott and Monck Mason, the former of whom thus describes it: In the museum of Trinity College, Dublin, there is a dark plaster bust or cast of Dean Swift. It is an impression taken from the mask applied to the face after death. The expression of countenance is mouth (the left) horribly contorted downwards, as most unequivocally maniacal, and one side of the if convulsed by pain.' He further adds: 'It is engraved for Mr. Barrett's essay;' but if it was, it never appeared, and has never before been published either with or without Barrett's essay.* Sir Walter has greatly exaggerated the amount of contortion which the face exhibits; on the contrary, the expression is remarkably placid, but there is an evident drag in the left side of the mouth, exhibiting a paralysis of the facial muscles of the right side, which, we have reason to believe, existed for some years previous to his death, for we find the same appearance (though much glossed over by the artist,) together with a shown in a very admirable marble bust of Swift, greater fullness, or plumpness, of the right cheek, (probably the last ever taken,) in the possession of Mr. Watkins, the picture-dealer, of this city. Here, then, we have another and a very important and well-marked feature in this very interesting case, brought to light above a hundred years after death. But before we proceed with the evidence adduced by the bust, it becomes necessary to prove its identity, which, until now, could not be done satisfactorily. Upon the back of this cast, and running nearly from ear to ear, we find two lines of writing, greatly defaced, and a part of the upper and middle lines completely obliterated.f This much, however, can still be read: Dean Swift, taken off his of his burial, and the f than the other in nature. 666 the night one side larger Opened before. The mould is in pieces.' "Still this proof was inconclusive; but a deep indention running nearly parallel with the brow, "In Nicholl's edition of Sheridan's Life and Writings of Swift, we find a full-face portrait of the Dean, said to have been taken the night after his death. It was this, perhaps, led Sir Walter into the error we have alluded to. Mr. M. Mason supposed, but without adducing any evidence to support his assertion, that the engraving in Sheridan's Life of Swift was taken from this bust. We are inclined to believe Mr. Nicholl's statement that the engraving was made from a picture taken after death." "We are indebted to Mr. Ball, the able director of the museum of the University, for permission to publish this drawing which was made by Mr. G. Du Noyer, and cut by Mr. Hanlon." "The original mask remained in the museum, T. C. D., till within a few years ago, when it was accidentally destroyed." |