excellent example of a plain style. The bulk of his voluminous works is political. It was at the age of fifty-eight that he commenced a new career of authorship as a writer of fiction, and among other works of that class produced the History of the Plague, from which the following extract is taken. His narrative style has the same merits, after its kind, as his political style.

The Plague of London.

INDEED, the poor people were to be pitied in one particular thing, in which they had little or no relief, and which I desire to mention with a serious awe and reflection, which, perhaps, every one that reads this may not relish; namely, that whereas Death now began not, as we may say, to hover over every one's head only, but to look into their houses, and chambers, and stare in their faces; though there might be some stupidity, and dulness of the mind, and there was so, a great deal; yet, there was a great deal of just alarm, sounded in the very inmost soul, if I may so say, of others. Many consciences were awakened; many hard hearts melted into tears; and many a penitent confession was made of crimes long concealed. It would have wounded the soul of any Christian to have heard the dying groans of many a despairing creature; and none durst come near to comfort them. Many a robbery, many a murder, was then confessed aloud, and nobody surviving to record the accounts of it. People might be heard, even in the streets as we passed along, calling upon God for mercy, and saying, 'I have been a thief,—I have been an adulterer,—I have been a murderer,'-and the like; and none durst stop to make the least inquiry into such things, or to administer comfort to the poor creatures, that in the

anguish both of soul and body thus cried out. Some of the ministers did visit the sick at first, and for a little while, but it was not to be done; it would have been present death to have gone into some houses. The very buryers of the dead, who were the most hardened creatures in town, were sometimes beaten back, and so terrified, that they durst not go into the houses where whole families were swept away together, and where the circumstances were more particularly horrible, as some were; but this was, indeed, at the first heat of the distemper.

Time inured them to it all; and they ventured everywhere afterwards, without hesitation, as I shall have occasion to mention at large hereafter.

I am supposing now the Plague to be begun, as I have said, and that the magistrates began to take the condition. of the people into their serious consideration. What they did as to the regulation of inhabitants, and of infected families, I shall speak to by itself; but as to the affair of health, it is proper to mention it here, that having seen the foolish humour of the people in running after quacks, and mountebanks, wizards, and fortune-tellers, (which they did as above, even to madness,) the Lord Mayor, a very sober and religious gentleman, appointed physicians and surgeons for relief of the poor; I mean, the diseased poor; and, in particular, ordered the College of Physicians to publish directions for cheap remedies for the poor, in all circumstances of the distemper. This, indeed, was one of the most charitable and judicious things that could be done at that time; for this drove the people from haunting the doors of every disperser of bills, and from taking down blindly, and without consideration, poison for physic, and death instead of life.

This direction of the physicians was done by a con

sultation of the whole College; and, as it was particularly calculated for the use of the poor, and for cheap medicines, it was made public, so that everybody might see it; and copies were given gratis to all that desired it. But as it is public, and to be seen on all occasions, I need not give the reader of this the trouble of it.

I shall not be supposed to lessen the authority or capacity of the physicians when I say that the violence of the distemper, when it came to its extremity, was like the Fire the next year. The Fire which consumed what the Plague could not touch, defied all the application of remedies; the fire-engines were broken, the buckets thrown away, and the power of man was baffled and brought to an end: so the Plague defied all medicines; the very physicians were seized with it, with their preservatives in their mouths; and men went about prescribing to others, and telling them what to do, till the tokens were upon them, and they dropped down dead; destroyed by that very enemy they directed others to oppose. This was the case of several physicians, even some of them the most eminent, and of several of the most skilful surgeons. Abundance of quacks too died, who had the folly to trust to their own medicines, which they must needs be conscious to themselves, were good for nothing; and who rather ought, like other sorts of thieves, to have ran away, sensible of their guilt, from the justice that they could not but expect should punish them, as they knew they had deserved.

Not that it is any derogation from the labour, or application of the physicians, to say they fell in the common calamity nor is it so intended by me; it rather is to their praise, that they ventured their lives so far as even to lose them in the service of mankind. They endeavoured to do good, and to save the lives of others; but we were not to

expect that the physicians could stop God's judgments, or prevent a distemper evidently armed from Heaven, from executing the errand it was sent about.

Doubtless, the physicians assisted many by their skill, and by their prudence and applications, to the saving of their lives, and restoring their health; but it is not lessening their character, or their skill, to say, they could not cure those that had the tokens upon them, or those who were mortally infected before the physicians were sent for, as was frequently the case.

XXIV.

JONATHAN SWIFT.

1667-1745.

JONATHAN SWIFT, born in 1667, and the son of an English gentleman settled in Ireland, began life as secretary to Sir William Temple (1689-1699). After that statesman's death, he obtained some small preferment in Ireland; but in 1710 came back to England, and for some years supported Harley and Bolingbroke, the heads of the Tory party, by a series of political pamphlets. With the accession of George I, the Tory Ministry was irretrievably ruined, and Swift was compelled to return to Ireland, to his Deanery of St. Patrick, the only reward he had received for his services. The rest of his life was spent in what he regarded as banishment, and was further embittered by his unfortunate relations with two ladies, Esther Johnson (Stella) and Hester Vanhomrigh (Vanessa), to the former of whom he was at last privately married. Later in life, disease of the brain came on, and he died mad in 1745.

There is no greater master of satire than Swift. He thought clearly, wrote a singularly pure English, and could make every sentence an epigram, without impairing the continuous flow of his argument. Two of his best-known works have an allegorical character. The Tale of a Tub is directed against religious sects, and was written with such licence of illustration, that Queen Anne would never permit the author to obtain the preferment he coveted in England. In Gulliver's Travels, the satire is rather against abuses of Government, and the pleasant vices of society. In the latter part of this, as in several of his minor pieces, he is at times very coarse. This fault grew upon him in later life, perhaps partly in connection with a diseased brain, and