rapidity, making a whirring sound like distant thunder; there are sometimes 200 in a single chimney; if by chance the nest be loosened by rains and fall, the young cling to the sides of the chimney with their sharp claws; the scratching and rumbling have a very strange sound at night, and many a traveller in thinly settled regions, unaccustomed to these nocturnal disturbances, has been terrified by supposed unearthly noises in the chimney. They do not alight on trees or on the ground.-In the genus collocalia (Gray) the bill is very small, wings very long, tail moderate and nearly even, and tarsi naked. The esculent swift or swallow (C. esculenta, Gray) is the principal maker of the celebrated nests so highly esteemed by the Chinese as articles of food; these consist of a mucilaginous substance secreted by the greatly developed salivary glands, more or less mixed with fragments of grass and similar materials, and are attached to the surface of rocks in almost inaccessible caves in the islands of the East Indies; the older writers supposed the nests to be made of sea weeds macerated in and rejected from the stomach. These nests are built by 3 or 4 species, and are collected in large quantities, forming an important article of commerce in China; for an account of the mode of collecting, value of the product, and uses to which the nests are put, see BIRDS' NESTS, EDIBLE. The eggs are 2 in this genus. There are many other species of swifts, both in the old world and the new.

SWIFT, JONATHAN, dean of St. Patrick's, a British author, born in Dublin, Nov. 30, 1667, died there, Oct. 19, 1745. He was of purely English descent; his father, Jonathan Swift, emigrated from Herefordshire, and dying in embarrassed circumstances before the birth of his son, left his family dependent upon his brother Godwin. The son's career at Trinity college, Dublin, which he entered in his 15th year, was obscure and unhappy, the logic of the schoolmen, then the beginning and end of the curriculum at Dublin, being distasteful to him, and his pecuniary circumstances such as to prevent him from associating on an equal footing with those he considered his equals. His neglect of the ordinary college studies resulted in his failure at his first application to obtain his bachelor's degree, which was at length conferred upon him in Feb. 1685, speciali gratia. This disgrace, however, seems to have aroused in him no other feelings than contempt and resentment; and during his subsequent residence at the university he showed himself so indifferent to academic rules and discipline as to incur within two years no fewer than 70 penalties and censures, beside being compelled to crave public pardon of the junior dean, Dr. Owen Lloyd. In 1688 he left Dublin on a visit to his mother, who was then living in Leicester, England, dependent on the bounty of her relations, one of whom was the wife of Sir William Temple; and a few months later he entered the family of that statesman in the

capacity of private secretary. Abandoning his former careless and idle habits, he now employed his leisure hours in study, and from daily intercourse with his patron acquired a familiarity with public affairs which gave to his subsequent political pamphlets a very different character from those produced by mere men of letters. But to one who like Swift was at heart the most haughty, despotic, and sensitive of men, the position of secretary, with a salary of £20, was a heavy price to pay for the advantages he derived; and in after years he alluded with bitterness to the humiliations he endured under the roof of Sir William Temple, whom he was in the habit of addressing with the obsequiousness of a lacquey or a beggar, and a sharp word or cold look from whom sufficed to make him miserable for days. Much of the acerbity which subsequently characterized his intercourse with people of every degree may doubtless be ascribed to this enforced subserviency, aptly likened by Macaulay to the tameness with which a caged tiger submits to the keeper who brings him food. At Moor Park, Temple's seat in Surrey, Swift had frequent opportunities of seeing William III., who was in the habit of consulting the retired statesman on public matters; and on one occasion he was deputed by his patron to persuade the king to consent to the bill for triennial parliaments. The latter failed to be convinced by the arguments of the Irish secretary, of whose intellectual endowments he could have formed no flattering estimate, if his offer to make him captain of a troop of horse may be considered a criterion. In 1692 Swift took his master's degree at Oxford, and two years later, finding Temple unwilling to make any definite provision for him, he renounced his employment and left Moor Park in a pique, intending to take orders in Ireland and look for preferment from some other source. His mortification may be conceived when he discovered that a certificate from Sir William was necessary to enable him to obtain orders; and the letter in which he solicits it, praying that "Heaven would one day allow him the opportunity of leaving his acknowledgments at the feet" of his offended patron, is a curious illustration of the readiness with which he could humiliate himself for the purpose of furthering his own interests. In Oct. 1694, he was ordained, and soon after received the prebend of Kilroot, in the diocese of Connor; but a few months served to weary him of the life of a rural incumbent, and having received a kind letter from Sir William Temple, who felt the want of his services, he gladly returned to his old position and to the elegant retirement and literary resources of Moor Park. He was thenceforth treated with more consideration, and upon the death of Sir William in 1698 received a legacy, coupled with the task of editing his posthumous works, which were published in London in 1699, with a memoir of Temple and a dedication to the king. Although

a promise of a prebend of Westminster or Canterbury had been held out to Swift, his claims, unsupported by the influence of Temple, were overlooked, and he was obliged to content himself with the position of chaplain and secretary to Lord Berkeley, one of the lords justices of Ireland, whom in 1699 he accompanied to Dublin. A person named Bush succeeded in supplanting him in the office of secretary, and subsequently in securing the presentation to the rich deanery of Derry, which Berkeley had promised to Swift; whereupon the latter, exclaiming: "God confound you both for a couple of scoundrels!" threw up his chaplaincy in a rage. As some sort of compensation for this disappointment, Berkeley gave him the vicarage of Laracor and several other livings, amounting altogether to nearly £400 a year. In 1700 Swift entered upon the discharge of his parochial duties at Laracor; and about the same time Esther Johnson, with whom he had contracted a tender friendship while they were both dependants of Sir William Temple, came at his invitation, accompanied by Mrs. Dingley, a friend, to reside in the neighborhood. At Moor Park Miss Johnson had passed for the daughter of Sir William's steward; but her personal resemblance to Sir William himself and a variety of other concurring circumstances have rendered it tolerably certain that she was his illegitimate offspring. Younger by 15 years than Swift, who appears to have assisted in her education, she gave him from their earliest acquaintance a love which never wavered in its warmth or constancy; and as the "Stella" of his poems and familiar letters, her name is inseparably associated with his own in a sad and mysterious history. During his previous residence in Ireland Swift had become enamored of a Miss Jane Waryng, the sister of an old college friend; but his offer of marriage was declined by her on considerations of health. Subsequently the lady herself, whom Swift addressed as Varina, reopened negotiations, and received from her former admirer a letter of acceptance, containing such unreasonable and insulting conditions, that further intercourse or correspondence was cut short. Swift's conduct as a parish priest was creditable to himself and his calling; and, though laboring in behalf of an establishment which had neither the respect nor the affection of the people, and with every inducement to neglect his duties, he held regularly three services a week, the average attendance at which rarely exceeded half a score of persons, and in his sermons, characterized by himself as "pamphlets," he preached the doctrines of his church to the best of his ability. In 1701 he made the first of a number of annual visits to England, and published anonymously in London his "Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the Nobles and Commons of Athens and Rome," vindicating the conduct of the whig leaders, Somers, Halifax, Harley, and Portland, in respect to the partition treaty, and which was

generally attributed to Somers himself or Burnet. He avowed the authorship in the succeeding year, and was immediately admitted into the society of the statesmen he had defended, and into that of Addison, Steele, Arbuthnot, and others of the leading wits of the time. With this period commences Swift's career as an author, although he did not engage actively in writing political pamphlets, his most numerous and in many respects most characteristic performances, until several years later. Some trifles in prose and verse written for the amusement of his friends had already shown him to possess a choice and original vein of humor, but he had signally failed in a series of "Pindaric Odes," his only serious effort in the higher walks of poetry, which called forth from Dryden, who was his kinsman, the remark: "Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet." In 1704 appeared his "Battle of the Books," written at Moor Park in 1697, in support of Sir William Temple's views in the controversy respecting the relative merits of ancient and modern learning. This was succeeded by the "Tale of a Tub," a wild and witty satire upon the Roman Catho lics and dissenters, with an occasional allusion to the errors of the church of England, the high church party of which it was his object to exalt. This work had also been completed in manuscript several years previous, and is in every respect one of Swift's most perfect and labored efforts; but it proved an insurmountable obstacle to his hopes of high preferment. After an interval of several years he published in 1708 his "Argument against the Abolition of Christianity," a masterpiece of grave irony; "Sentiments of a Church of England Man in respect to Religion and Government;" the humorous attacks on Partridge the almanac maker, entitled "Predictions for 1708 by Isaac Bickerstaff;" and "Letters on the Sacramental Test," in which he enunciated views on the relaxation of the restrictions upon the dissenters very different from those entertained by the whigs, and which may partially explain his subsequent abandonment of that party. In 1709 he published the only work to which he ever attached his name, "A Project for the Advancement of Religion," dedicated to Lady Berkeley. About this time some efforts were made by Swift's political friends, who began at length to appreciate the value of his services, to secure his preferment; and among other plans proposed was one to make him bishop of Virginia, with a general authority over all the clergy in the American colonies. The public scandal which the appointment of the author of the "Tale of a Tub" to this office would have created probably operated against him on this as on other occasions, and he received nothing beyond the flatteries of men in office and abundant invitations to dinner; while his friend Addison, who had done no more for the whigs than himself, was loaded with solid benefits. Smarting under a sense of neglect, and incensed by the cold reception which Godolphin accorded to

his repeated applications for an increased endowment of the Irish clergy, he wavered for a while between whigs and tories, and finally, in Oct. 1710, went over to the latter, by whom he was received with open arms. Harley and St. John became his warm friends, and in the exultation of the moment he wrote to Stella in Ireland: "I stand with the new people ten times better than ever I did with the old, and forty times more caressed." Swift immediately entered the arena of political controversy, and the "Examiner," a weekly paper established by St. John and others in the interest of the ministry, was for more than half a year the vehicle for bitter attacks from his pen upon prominent whig statesmen. His powerful pamphlet on the "Conduct of the Allies," published in Nov. 1711, and which had a considerable influence in bringing the war to a close, raised his reputation to the highest pitch, and he found himself courted by men of rank and station, and in a position to confer substantial favors upon deserving persons, which he is known to have done in a number of instances. But he himself, while dictating, as Dr. Johnson has observed, the political opinions of the English nation, remained unrewarded; and the efforts of Harley and St. John, now become Lords Oxford and Bolingbroke, aided by Mrs. Masham, were unavailing to procure him a bishopric, the queen, under the advice of Archbishop Sharp and other prelates, positively refusing him any high preferment. Upon the failure of an application in his behalf for the vacant see of Hereford, through the opposition of the duchess of Somerset, whom he had lampooned, Swift threatened to withdraw his support from the ministry, but was pacified by his appointment, in Feb. 1713, to the deanery of St. Patrick's cathedral, Dublin, the income of which amounted to £700. Returning to Ireland, after an absence of nearly 3 years, he had scarcely got settled in his deanery when he was summoned back to England to reconcile the difficulties between Oxford and Boling broke, which threatened to break up the cabinet. About this time he wrote his "Public Spirit of the Whigs," which reflected so bitterly upon the Scottish nation and nobility that the latter in a body presented a complaint to the queen. In June, 1714, appeared his "Free Thoughts on the State of Public Affairs;" and upon the dismissal of Oxford a few weeks later he gave a noble proof of the strength of his friendship by declining the flattering overtures of Bolingbroke, in order to be of service to the disgraced minister. The death of the queen immediately after this event and the overthrow of the tories sent Swift back to Ireland, where he remained during the next 12 years. Ever since the arrival of Stella in Ireland his relations with her had been of the most intimate and affectionate character. They saw each other daily when at home, corresponded regularly when apart, and during his frequent absences she superintended his house

hold, indifferent apparently to the scandal which her equivocal position provoked. Soon after his formal adhesion to the tories Swift had become intimate in London in the family of a Mrs. Vanhomrigh, whose eldest daughter, Esther, a spirited, intelligent, and accomplished girl, kindly noticed and occasionally directed by him in her studies, conceived so violent a passion for her tutor as to be induced to propose marriage to him. The offer was declined, but, whether from real interest in Miss Vanhomrigh (who under the name of Vanessa has gained a celebrity as sad and romantic as that of her companion in misfortune, Stella), or from gratified vanity, he neglected to discourage her advances. Upon the death of her mother, Vanessa removed in 1714 to Ireland to be near Swift, who thus found himself involved in a pitiable dilemma, with two women equally devoted to him, and neither of whom he was willing to marry, notwithstanding he had protested to Stella that he "loved her better than his life a thousand million of times." Vanessa, ignorant of Swift's relations with Stella, and absorbed in her own passion, endured his coldness or reproaches without a murmur, in the hope of one day becoming his wife; but to Stella, who had waited patiently for more than 15 years to have this justice done her, the idea of being replaced in Swift's affections by a rival was intolerable, and at her solicitation he is said to have finally consented to a private marriage with her, which took place in the garden of the deanery in 1716. At his express stipulation, however, the matter was kept secret; and as the relations of the parties remained unchanged, and they were never known to meet but in the presence of a third person, it was at the best but a nominal union, and throughout her life his wife commonly passed for his mistress. In 1717 Vanessa retired with her sister to Marley abbey near Celbridge, and for several years lived in deep seclusion. During the illness of her sister in 1720 Swift renewed his visits, each of which Vanessa commemorated by planting a laurel in the garden where they met; but at length, tormented by suspicion and impatience, she wrote to Stella to ascertain the nature of her connection with Swift. The latter, getting possession of the letter, rode directly to Marley abbey, flung it upon the table before Vanessa with a frown which struck her dumb with terror, and instantly departed. The unhappy woman survived this shock but a few weeks, and Swift, overcome by shame and remorse, retired for two months to solitude in the south of Ireland. After her death appeared his poem entitled "Cadenus and Vanessa," describing the manner in which Swift (personified as Cadenus, an anagram of Decanus, the dean) received the early advances of Miss Vanhomrigh. Five years later Stella herself dropped into the grave, without any public recognition of her marriage, and with her departed what Thackeray calls "the good angel of his life; when