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his information from headquarters, from Swift or from Stella; he was putting this and that together, and drawing an inference; and as he nowhere asserts that he had recovered or was in possession of any really direct evidence, Mr. Mason's conclusion, that even in the case of so familiar an intimate as Dr. Delaney the marriage was matter of opinion or conjecture only, seems to be justified.

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to be silenced by a ceremony, the secret | sively upon the allegation that a ceremony of which, during life and after death, was was performed in the garden of the deanto be jealously guarded? Was it per- ery in 1716; and if that allegation is not formed to satisfy Stella? But there is no somehow substantiated, the case for the proof that she was dissatisfied; she had marriage must break down. So that it is cheerfully acquiesced in, had loyally ac- really of no consequence to which of Lord cepted the relation as it stood. It could Orrery's statements Dr. Delaney's words not have been for the satisfaction of her apply. Second, the words "I am satisconscience; her conscience was in no way fied" are unequivocal, and clearly imply involved it was never asserted, even by that the writer was led to his conclusion bitterest partisans, that the connection by the evidence submitted to him; that was immoral. Can it be supposed that is to say, Dr. Delaney's was only infer for some reason or other (to prevent, for ential and circumstantial belief, not diinstance, any risk of subsequent miscon-rect knowledge. He had not received struction) it was done at the dean's desire? But if the story is true that it was the dean himself who insisted that the secret should never be published, what good did he expect it to effect? how could it avail, either directly or indirectly, to avert possible misconstructions? If a ceremony did take place, we are thus entitled to maintain that it was an utterly unreasonable and unaccountable act-opposed to all the probabilities of the case. Still, if it were proved by (let us say) an entry in a register, the marriage "lines," a letter from Stella, a letter from Swift, a certificate under the bishop's hands anything approaching either legal or moral proofwe might be bound to disregard the antecedent improbabilities. Nay, even if a friend like Dr. Delaney had said plainly that he had the information from Swift himself, then (subject to observation on the too frequent misunderstandings of verbal confidences) it might be reasonable to accept it. But the direct evidence does not amount even to this. It consists of a passage in Lord Orrery's "Remarks" (much that Lord Orrery said about Swift must be accepted with reserve), where, after stating in a loose, incidental way that Stella was Swift's concealed but undoubted wife, he goes on, "If my informations are right, she was married to Dr. Swift in the year 1716, by Dr. Ashe, then Bishop of Clogher." On this Dr. Delaney, in his "Observations," remarks, "Your lordship's account of the marriage is, I am satisfied, true." Mr. Monck Mason's contention that this is a statement of opinion or belief only, is vigorously combated by Mr. Craik. Mr. Craik argues that the words "I am satisfied" apply not to the fact of a marriage, which was "undoubted," but to the circumstances of the ceremony. Mr. Craik's argument does not appear to us to be successful. First, if the ceremony did not take place then, it did not take place at all. The belief in any ceremony rests exclu

Lord Orrery's "Remarks were published in 1752, seven years after Swift's death; and it was not till 1789 that the story received any further corroboration. In that year Mr. George Monck Berkeley asserted in his Literary Relics" that "Swift and Stella were married by the Bishop of Clogher, who himself related the circumstances to Bishop Berkeley, by whose relict the story was communicated to me." This bit of evidence certainly comes to us in a very circuitous and roundabout fashion. Mr. Berkeley was told by Bishop Berkeley's widow, who had it from her husband, who had it from Bishop Ashe. Any one familiar with the proceedings of courts of law knows that evidence of this kind is of no value whatever. The gossip is handed down from one to another, often in perfect good faith, yet he who builds upon it builds upon the sand. And when closely examined, it is seen that the narrative is in itself highly suspicious, and open to serioùs observation. The ceremony was cel ebrated in 1716; Berkeley was abroad at the time, and did not return till after Bishop Ashe's death, which took place in 1717. Mr. Craik insists that when it is stated that Bishop Ashe "related the circumstances to Bishop Berkeley," it is not implied that he did it "by word of mouth." But is there the least likelihood, from what we know of the bishop, that he would have been guilty of so grave an indiscretion? It cannot be doubted that he had been bound over to inviolable secrecy; and though such a secret might be incau

tiously betrayed or accidentally ooze out | riage took place, search the records of all during familiar talk, is it conceivable that a man of honor and prudence could have deliberately, and in cold blood, made it, within a few weeks or months, the subject of a letter to an absent friend?

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This is really the whole evidence of the slightest relevancy that has been recovered, the loose gossip of Sheridan (of whom it will be recollected Dr. Johnson said, "Why, sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we see him now. Such an excess of stupidity, sir, is not in nature") being very naturally poohpoohed by the biographers in general, and even by Mr. Craik. On the other hand, all those who were closely connected with Swift and Stella in their latter years Dr. Lyon, Mrs. Dingley, Mrs. Brent, Mrs. Ridgeway, and others- deny that any ceremony took place; and almost the last writing which Stella subscribed opens with the significant words, "I, Esther Johnson, of the city of Dublin, spinster." It is maintained, indeed, that these words are of no consequence, seeing that she had bound herself not to disclose that she was a married woman. Still there is this to be said, that if she was married, the introduction of the word "spinster" was a quite unnecessary falsehood, the testatrix being quite sufficiently described "Esther Johnson, of the city of Dublin." And when we consider that this can have been only one (though the last) of a long succession of humiliating embarrassments, the question again suggests itself with irresistible force, Why should they have loaded their lives with such a burden of deceit? Where are we to look for the motive that will in any measure account for it? Upon the whole, it seems to us almost inevitable that some such story as Lord Orrery's (however unfounded) should have got abroad. The relations of Swift to Stella were certainly exceptional, and not easily intelligible to the outside world; yet Stella's character was irreproachable, and calumny itself did not venture to assail her. What more natural than that the surmise of a secret

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union should have been entertained by many, should have been whispered about among their friends even during Swift's life, and should after his death have gradually assumed substance and shape?

After all is said, a certain amount of mystery and ambiguity must attach to the connection, as to much else in the dean's life. He survived Stella for nearly twenty years; yet those who assert that a mar

these years in vain for any avowal, however slight. "Only a woman's hair," scrawled on the envelope in which a tress of the raven-black hair was preserved, affords a slender cue to conjecture, and is as enigmatical as the rest. Only a woman's hair, only the remembrance of the irrevocable past, only the joy, the sorrow, the devotion of a lifetime, only that nothing more.

Pudor et Justitiæ soror

Incorrupta Fides, nudaque Veritas.* Whatever interpretation each of us may be disposed to give them, we shall all admit that there must have been something transcendent in the genius and the despair which could invest these four quite commonplace words with an immortality of passion.†

And this, the most vivid of the dean's many vivid sayings, leads us, in conclusion, to add a word or two on Swift's literary faculty. These, however; must be very brief; and were it not that a vigorous effort has been recently made to show that, judged by his writings, Swift was not a great, but "essentially a small, and in some respects a bad man," might at this time of day have been altogether dispensed with. For there is "finality" in literature, if not in politics. The writer who undertakes to demonstrate that Homer, and Virgil, and Dante, and Shakespeare, and Rabelais, and Swift were essentially small men, cannot be treated seriously. To say that he is airing a paradox is to put it very mildly; and indeed, the offence might properly be described in much sharper language. A scientific writer who in the year 1883 attacks the law of gravitation is guilty of a scientific impertinence which all scientific men whose time is of value are entitled to resent. Swift's position in letters is equally assured, and as little matter for argument.

"Honor, truth, liberality, good-nature, and modesty were the virtues she chiefly possessed and most valued her presence to offend in the least word against modesty in her acquaintance. It was not safe nor prudent in She was the most disinterested mortal I ever knew o

heard of." (The character of Mrs. Johnson by Swift.) † Since this article was in type, an acute writer in the Pall Mall Gazette has arrived, by a somewhat similar course of reasoning, at a verdict of "Not by attaching a certain amount of credit to what we have He is prevented from going a step further

proven."

called Stella's death-bed declaration. That story appears to us, as to Mr. Craik, intrinsically incredible: but we need not discuss it here. The real issue, when divested of all irrelevances, comes to this,―There being no direct evidence of any weight on either side, which reconciled with the undisputed facts, with the character view is most natural, most explanatory, most easily of Swift on the one hand and of Stella on the other?

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"A Tale of a Tub," "Gulliver's Travels," | nance to the man, his admiration of the the argument against abolishing Chris- magnificent faculty of the satirist is emtianity, the verses on poetry and on his phatic and unstinted. Under that plain own death, are among the imperishable garb and ungainly deportment were conpossessions of the world. The entry has cealed, he tells us, some of the choicest been duly recorded in the National Reg-gifts that have ever been bestowed on the ister, and cannot now be impeached. children of men, rare powers of obserAnd "the clash of the country" is not in vation; brilliant wit; grotesque invention; this case a mere vague general impres- humor of the most austere flavor, yet exsion, but is instructed by the evidence of quisitely delicious; eloquence singularly the most skilful experts. To take the pure, manly, and perspicuous.* We need most recent. Scott, Macaulay, Froude, not multiply authorities. It must now be and Leslie Stephen each in his own conceded, for all practical purposes, that department have acknowledged the su- the consent of the learned world to Swift's premacy of Swift. Scott regards him as intellectual pre-eminence has been delib the painter of character, Macaulay as the erately and finally given. literary artist, Froude as the politician, Leslie Stephen as the moralist and the philosopher. Scott has pointed out that Lemuel Gulliver the traveller, Isaac Bickerstaff the astrologer, the Frenchman who writes the new Journey to Paris, Mrs. Harris, Mary the cookmaid, the grave projector who proposes a plan for relieving the poor by eating their children, and the vehement Whig politician who remonstrates against the enormities of the Dublin signs, are all persons as distinct from each other as from the dean himself, and in all their surroundings absolutely true to the life.* Mr. Froude remarks that Swift, who was in the best and noblest sense an Irish patriot, poured out tract after tract denouncing Irish misgovernment, each of them composed with supreme literary power, a just and burning indignation showing through the most finished irony. "In these tracts, in colors which will never fade, lies the picture of Ireland, as England, half in ignorance, half in wilful despair of her amendment, had willed that she should be." Mr. Leslie Stephen, after admitting that Swift is the keenest satirist as well as the acutest critic in the English language, adds that his imagination was fervid enough to give such forcible utterance to his feelings as has scarcely been rivalled in our literature. Lord Macaulay's testimony is even more valuable. Macaulay disliked Swift with his habitual energy of dislike. It must be confessed that the complex characters where heroism and weakness are subtly interwoven Bacon, Dryden, Swift - did not lend themselves readily to the manipulation of that brilliant master. § Yet in spite of his repug

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It is asserted by the same critic that Swift's reputation has been gained "by a less degree of effort than that of almost any other writer," his writings, in point of length, being altogether insignificant. To this curious complaint we might be content to reply in Mr. Leslie Stephen's words: "A modern journalist who could prove that he had written as little in six months would deserve a testimonial." An age of which Mr. Gladstone is the prophet is tender to, if not vain of, verbosity; but the great books of the world are not to be measured by their size. Hume's "Essay on Miracles," which may be said to have revolutionized the whole course of modern thought, is compressed into some twenty pages. "A Tale of a Tub" is shorter than a Budget speech which will be forgotten to-morrow: but then - how far-reaching is the argument; the interest - how world-wide; the scorn -how consummate! Brief as Swift is, he makes it abundantly clear, before he is done, that there are no limits to his capacity. He has looked all round our globe as from another star. It is true that with the most lucid intelligence he united the most lurid scorn. Though he saw them as from a remote planet, he hated the pigmies- the little odious vermin with the intensity of a next-door neighbor. Yet this keenness of feeling. was in a measure perhaps the secret of his power, it gave that amazing air of reality to his narrative which makes us feel, when we return from Brobdingnag, that human beings are ridiculously and

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of exquisite urbanity and a charming style, Addison, both as man and writer, has been prodigiously overrated by Macaulay. The others had sounded depths which his plummet could not reach, had scaled heights on which he had never adventured. This, to be sure, may have been his attraction for Macaulay, to whom the difficult subtleties of the imagination and the ardent aspirations of the spiritual life were enigmatical and antipathetic, a riddle and a byword.

History of Engiand, vol. iv., p. 360.

not buried), and that he need not think to persuade the world that he was still alive. The futility of human testimony upon the plainest matter of fact has never been more ludicrously, yet vividly exposed.

The grave conduct of an absurd proposition is of course one of the most striking characteristics of Swift's style; but the unaffected simplicity and stolid uncon

unaccountably small. Swift was a great | astrologer that logically he was dead (if master of the idiomatic — one of the greatest; but his intellectual lucidity was not less noticeable than his verbal. His eye was indeed too keen, too penetrating: he did not see through shams and plausibilities only; he saw through the essential decencies of life as well. Thus he spoke with appalling plainness of many things which nature has wisely hidden; and he became at times in consequence outra-sciousness with which he looks the reader geously coarse. in the face when relating the most astonishing fictions, is, it seems to us, an even higher reach of his art. It is quite impossible to doubt the good faith of the narrator; and when we are told that "the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbors at Redriff, when any one

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Swift, it is said, never laughed; but when he unbent himself intellectually, he was, we think, at his best. The serious biographer complains of the rough horseplay of his humor of his weakness for puns and practical jokes. The puns, however, were often very fair; and the humorous perception that could meet Wil-affirmed a thing, that it was as true as if liam's favorite Recepit non rapuit, with the apt retort, "The receiver is as bad as the thief". or could apply on the instant to the lady whose mantua had swept down a Cremona fiddle, Mantua, va misera nimium vicina Cremona !— must have been nimble and adroit. Even the practical joking was good in its way. The dearly beloved Roger is probably apocryphal, borrowed from some older jestbook; but the praying and fasting story, as told by Sir Walter, is certainly very comical, and seems to be authentic. Mr. Bickerstaff's controversy with Partridge the almanack-maker is, however, Swift's highest achievement in this line. His mirth (when not moody and ferocious) was of the gayest kind-the freest and finest play of the mind. It is not mere trifling; there is strenuous logic as well as deft wit: so that even Partridge has his serious side. Whately's "Historic Doubts regarding Napoleon Buona parte "are now nearly forgotten; but they suggest to us what may have been in Swift's mind when he assured the unlucky

Scott's Life of Swift, p. 381. The whole note is worth quoting, as containing some characteristic details of manner, etc. "There is another well-attested anec dote, communicated by the late Mr. William Waller of Allanstown, near Kells, to Mr. Theophilus Swift. Mr. Waller, while a youth, was riding near his father's house, when he met a gentleman on horseback reading. A little surprised, he asked the servant, who followed him at some distance, where they came from. From the Black Lion,' answered the man. And where are you going?' "To heaven I believe,' rejoined the servant, for my master's praying and I am fasting. On further inquiry it proved that the dean, who was then going to Laracor, had rebuked the man for presenting him in the morning with dirty boots. "Were they clean,' answered the fellow, they would soon be dirty again.' And if you eat your breakfast,' retorted the dean, you will be hungry again, so you shall proceed without it,' which circumstance gave rise to the man's bon-mot."

Mr. Gulliver had spoken it," we are not surprised at the seaman who swore that he knew Mr. Gulliver very well, but that he lived at Wapping, not at Rotherhite. How admirable is the parenthetical, “being little for her age," in the account of Glumdalclitch, "She was very good-natured, and not above forty feet high, being little for her age; or the description of the queen's dwarf, "Nothing angered and mortified me so much as the queen's dwarf, who being of the lowest stature that was ever in that country (for I verily think he was not full thirty feet high), became so insolent at seeing a creature so much beneath him, that he would always affect to swagger and look big as he passed by me in the queen's ante-chamber"! One cannot believe that Swift was so unutterably miserable when he was engaged on "Gulliver," or that he wrote his "travels " - the earlier voyages at least — not to amuse the world, but to vex it. This consummate artist was a great satirist as well as a great storyteller; but it is the art of the delightful story-teller, not of the wicked satirist, that makes Gulliver immortal.

Swift's verse, like his prose, was mainly remarkable for its resolute homeliness; but when the scorn or the indignation or the pity becomes intense, it sometimes attains, as we have seen, a very high level indeed. "The Jolly Beggars" of Burns is scarcely superior in idiomatic pith and picturesqueness to the opening stanzas of the "Rhapsody on Poetry:"

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Not empire to the rising sun,
By valor, conduct, fortune won;
Not highest wisdom in debates
For framing laws to govern States;

Not skill in sciences profound
So large to grasp the circle round,
Such heavenly influence require
As how to strike the muses' lyre.
Not beggar's brat on bulk begot;
Not bastard of a pedlar Scot;
Not boy brought up to cleaning shoes,
The spawn of Bridewell or the stews;
Not infants dropt, the spurious pledges
Of gipsies litt'ring under hedges,
Are so disqualified by fate

there was not very much going on of any description, and still less which they could take any share in, being, as they were, poor and unable to make any effective response to the civilities shown to them. The family consisted of three persons the mother, who was a widow with one son; the son himself, who was a young man of three or four and twenty; and a distant cousin of Mrs. Methven's, who lived with her, having no other home. It was not a very happy household. The mother had a limited income and an anxious temper; the son a somewhat volatile and indolent disposition, and no ambition at all as to his future, nor anxiety as to what was going to happen to him in life. This, as may be supposed, was enough to introduce many uneasy elements into their joint existence; and the third of the party, Miss Merivale, was not of the class of the peacemakers to whom Scripture allots a special blessing. She had no amiable glamor in her eyes, but saw her friends' imperfections with a clearness of sight which is little conducive to that happy progress of affairs which is called 'getting on." The Methvens were sufficiently proud to keep their difficulties out of the public eye, but on very many occasions, unfortunately, it had become very

To rise in Church, or law, or State, As he whom Phoebus in his ire Hath blasted with poetic fire. Yet the impeachment of Swift as the writer has, after all, a basis of fact. His influence was largely personal. He was greater than his books. It is easy to take up one of his pamphlets now, and criticise the style, which is sometimes loose and slovenly, at our leisure. But it did its work. It struck home. That, after all, is the true standard by which the dean should be judged. He was a ruler of men, and he knew how to rule. If he had been bred to politics, if he had occupied a recognized place, not in the Church, but in the House of Commons, he would have been one of our greatest statesmen. The sheer personal ascendancy of his character was as marked in political as in private life. Friend and foe alike admitted that his influence, when fairly explain to themselves that they did not "get erted, was irresistible. He was one of those potent elemental forces which occasionally appear in the world, and which, when happily circumstanced when not chained as Prometheus was, or tortured as Swift was revolutionize society. The unfriendly Johnson, as we have seen, was forced to confess that for several years Swift formed the political opinions of the English nation; and Carteret frankly admitted that he had succeeded in govern

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ing Ireland because he pleased Dr. Swift. "Dr. Swift had commanded him," said Lord Rivers, "and he durst not refuse it." And Lord Bathurst remarked, that by an hour's work in his study an Irish parson had often "made three kingdoms drunk at once." We cannot be induced to believe by any criticism, however trenchant, that the man who could do all this was not only "bad" but "small."

From Macmillan's Magazine.
THE WIZARD'S SON.

CHAPTER I.

THE Methvens occupied a little house in the outskirts of a little town where

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on." It was not any want of love. Mrs.
Methven was herself aware, and her
friends were in the constant habit of say-
ing, that she had sacrificed everything for
Walter. Injudicious friends are fond of
making such statements, by way, it is to
and gratitude of the child to the parent:
be supposed, of increasing the devotion
but the result is, unfortunately, very often
the exact contrary of what is desired
for no one likes to have his duty in this
respect pointed out to him, and whatever
good people may think, it is not in itself
an agreeable thought that "sacrifices"
have been made for one, and an obliga-
tion placed upon one's shoulders from the
beginning of time, independent of any
wish or claim upon the part of the person
served. The makers of sacrifices have
seldom the reward which surrounding
spectators, and in many cases themselves,
think their due. Mrs. Methven herself
would probably have been at a loss to
name what were the special sacrifices she
had made for Walter. She had remained
a widow, but that she would have been
eager to add was no sacrifice. She had
pinched herself more or less to find the
means for his education, which had been
of what is supposed in England to be the

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