prime minister must see so much of the trickery and baseness of human nature.

No adequate life of this great statesman has ever been written; but there are good materials collected by Archdeacon Coxe in his Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole;' and every full history of the reigns of George I. and II. bears testimony to the political importance of the man, to his energy, ability, and success. His immediate successors lived upon the fragments of his system, which they had laboured to destroy. During his term of office the national prosperity made immense strides. The unhappy Savage, who had tasted of the minister's as well as of Queen Caroline's bounty, spoke truth, even in a panegyric, when he said—

“Now arts, and trade, and plenty glad the Isle.”

THE intellectual character of Swift, a singular combination of the robust and the fanciful, may be said to be half English, half Irish; and he may be considered to have been himself half an Englishman, half an Irishman. If he was actually born in Ireland, he was of English descent by both parents; and it so happened that all that portion of his life in which his mind and character must have been formed, extending from the earliest years of his infancy to middle age, was more or less equally divided between the two countries.

IIis father's was an English family of old respectability. The eldest branch had been long seated in Yorkshire; and one of its members, Barnam Swift, who passed under the name of Cavaliero Swift, and who is described as a man of wit and humour, had in 1627 been created by Charles I. Viscount of Carlingford in the Irish peerage. He died in 1642, leaving only a daughter, who is stated to have been married to the

notorious Robert Fielding, Esq., commonly called Beau Fielding, or the handsome Fielding. To a younger branch belonged the Reverend Thomas Swift, who died Rector of St. Andrew, Canterbury, in 1592, and was succeeded in his benefice by a son William, who afterwards became Rector of Harbledown, near Canterbury, and died in 1624. There is extant a published sermon by this William Swift, who was a divine of some reputation. His wife, Mary Philpott, was heiress to a considerable estate, the right of managing or at least of disposing of which, however, she is said to have retained in her own hands. It is affirmed, too, that she was a capricious, ill-natured, and passionate woman; and the tradition in the family was, that she had disinherited her only son for no greater crime than that of robbing an orchard when he was a boy. It is not so stated, but the orchard, we should suppose, must have been her own. At any rate it appears that all the inheritance that came to the share of this son, whose name was Thomas, was a small property in the parish of Goderich, in Herefordshire, which brought him about a hundred a year. What became of the rest of Mrs. Swift's estate we are not told; but the lady's picture, as well as that of her husband, is still preserved, or at least was in the possession of the family in the latter part of last century, and shows her, we are assured, to have had the look of a shrew. Thomas the son, adopting the profession of his father and his grandfather, became Vicar of Goderich, and also of Bridstow in the same county; suffered severely for his steady and ardent loyalty in the civil war, having been heavily fined, besides losing both his livings; and died in 1658. He married Elizabeth Dryden, of the family of the poet; and by her. he had ten sons and four daughters. Of the sons, Godwin, the eldest, studied at Gray's Inn, and was called to the bar; and, having married a relation of the Ormond family, went over to Ireland, and was appointed by the first duke, when lord-lieutenant, attorney-general of the palatinate of Tipperary. The second son, named Thomas, married the eldest daughter of Sir William Davenant, the poet,

and left a son Thomas, who became Rector of Puttenham in Surrey. Of the remaining sons of the Vicar of Goderich, Dryden, William, Jonathan, and Adam are stated to have all come over to Ireland and lived and died there. The only one of the four, however, who left any issue was Jonathan. He was the father of the Dean.

Of this Jonathan Swift the elder very little is known. He had, we are told, "some employments and agencies,” a "reputation for integrity," and "a tolerable good understanding;" and had married, we are not told when, a lady of a very ancient Leicestershire family, Mrs. Abigail Erick (the same name with Herrick or Heyrick), who, however, brought him no fortune. He appears to have come over to Ireland about the time of the death of his father in 1658. In Hilary Term, 1665, he was admitted an attorney and member of the King's Inns, Dublin, by the style of Jonathan Swift, Gentleman. On the 14th of November in the same year he petitioned their honours the Benchers for the office of steward of that Society, become void by the death of Thomas Wale; representing that he himself, his father, and their whole family, had been always very loyal and faithful to his majesty and his royal father, and had been very great sufferers upon that account; and that for the preceding six or seven years he had been much conversant about the said Inns, and was very well acquainted with the duty and employment belonging unto the steward thereof, he having assisted the said Thomas Wale in entering of the orders of their honours. He was accordingly admitted steward on the 26th of January, 1666. But he held his office little more than a year. The register of the King's Inns records the presentation at a council of the Benchers on the 15th of April, 1667, of "the humble petition of Abigail Swift, widow," showing that it had pleased God to take away her husband, the late steward of the Society, unexpectedly, and that, being left a disconsolate widow, she had this affliction added to her, that there was due to her from the several members of the Society, for commons and cost commons, about

six score pounds sterling, which she was noways able to get in without their honours' assistance; she therefore craved that her late husband's brother, William Swift, who had manifested himself very willing to assist her, but had been refused payment by various members upon pretence that he had no authority to receive the money, might be duly authorized and appointed to gather in what was due.

The widow was left with an infant daughter, said to have been born in 1666, and according to the common account, she was on the 30th of November, 1667, being St. Andrew's day, delivered of her celebrated son Jonathan, in a small house, now, or at least a few years ago, known as No. 7 in Hoey's Court, Dublin. Šir Walter Scott, in his Life of Swift, first published in 1814, states that the house was still pointed out by the inhabitants of that quarter; adding in a note-"The antiquity of its appearance seems to vindicate the truth of the tradition. In 1809 it was occupied by Mrs. Jackson, a dealer in earthenware." The fact of Swift having been born in Dublin on St. Andrew's day is also expressly asserted in the account entitled 'Anecdotes of the Family of Swift: a Fragment,' which was first published, we believe, by Dr. Hawkesworth in his edition of Swift's Works,' 1761, with the assertion that the original manuscript, in Swift's own hand, was lodged in the University Library of Dublin, and which has since been quoted and referred to by all Swift's biographers as drawn up by himself. If the manuscript be really in Swift's handwriting, there is an end of all dispute or doubt about the matter; in that case, if he did not actually draw up the account, he at least adopted it, which, so far as regards the authenticity of the facts, comes to the same thing. But if we were to decide by the internal evidence, we should be disposed to conclude that the paper was not written by Swift. It has not from beginning to end a trace of his style or manner; the relation which it gives of some things is such as would seem very unlikely to have proceeded from him; the expression in one passage, where a disorder which he contracted in his youth is stated to