I should ever see it or not, and in the sand too, which the first surge of the sea upon a high wind would have defaced entirely. All this seemed inconsistent with the thing itself, and with all notions we usually entertain of the subtlety of the devil.'

Style.-Pure, simple, clear, vigorous, colloquial, idiomatic. Rank.-Unrivalled in the invention and relation of incidents. 'Never was such a sense of the real before or since.' The grand secret of his art-if that may be called art which is nature itself-consists in an astonishing minuteness of details and an unequalled power of giving reality to the incidents which he relates. He deceives not the eye, but the mind, and that literally, as we have noticed. The preface to an old edition of Robinson

Crusoe says:

'The story is told . . . to the instruction of others by this example, and to justify and honor the wisdom of Providence. The editor believes the thing to be a just history of facts; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it.'

He sat in his closet, travelled round the world in idea, saw with the distinctness of natural vision, then narrated so plausibly as to deceive the most intelligent.

His fields of power were: national convulsions, by war, by pestilence, or by tempest; magic, ghost-seeing, witchcraft, and the occult sciences; thieves, rogues, vagabonds, swindlers, buccaneers, and pirates. The courage, the wonderful and romantic adventures, and the hairbreadth escapes of pirates seem to have had for him an infinite charm.

Character.—A poet, a novelist, and a polemic; born a writer, as other men are born generals and statesmen. Without the idea of beauty, he is good and religious, too good and religious to forget the distinctions between virtue and vice. Though his subjects are low, his aims are moral. In this respect, he is entitled to a much higher praise than is generally awarded him. His heroes and incidents are made the frequent occasion of inculcating the fundamental truths of religion, the being of God, the superintendency of Providence, the certainty of Heaven and Hell, the one to reward, the other to punish. Crusoe is De Foe,honest, open, confidential, laying his inmost thoughts and feelings before us; patient and invincible in difficulty, in disappointment, in toil; sanguine, combating, conquering.

Of his habits, little can now be told more than he confessed: 'God, I thank Thee I am not a drunkard, or a swearer, or a busybody, or idle, or revengeful; and though this be true, and I challenge all the world to prove the contrary,

I must own I see small satisfaction in the negatives of the common virtues; for though I have not been guilty of any of these vices, nor of many more, I have nothing to infer from thence but, Te Deum laudamus."

Influence. His moral teaching, as indicated above, is generally unexceptionable. Good and evil are carefully discriminated. Knowing life better than the soul, the course of the world better than the motives of men, his best drawn characters are less instructive and salutary than greater delicacy and profounder insight would have rendered them.

His writings, though they did not save him from want, gained him a renown that will descend the stream of time to the remotest generation of men.

SWIFT.

The most unhappy man on earth.—Archbishop King.

Biography.-Born in Dublin, in 1667, but of English parentage. Instructed by his nurse, at three he could spell, and at five could read any chapter in the Bible. Passed eight years in the school of Kilkenny, and at fifteen, poorly supported by the charity of an uncle, entered Dublin University. Odd, awkward, proud, and friendless, irregular and desultory as a student, he incurred in two years no less than seventy penalties, meditated An Account of the Kingdom of Absurdities, to show his disgust for the routine of scholastic training, and provoked the pitying smiles of the professors for his feeble brain. Failed to take his degree, on account of 'dulness and insufficiency' in logic. Presented himself for examination a second time, without having condescended to read logic. Refused to answer the questions propounded, desired to know what he was to learn from those books,' and was asked how he could expect to reason well without rules; retorted that he did reason without them, and that, so far as he had observed, rules taught men to wrangle rather than to reason. Obtained his degree at last by special favor, a term used in that university to denote want of merit.

At twenty one, left without subsistence, he was received into the house of Sir William Temple as secretary, at twenty pounds

a year and his board; dined at the second table, and smothered his rebellion. Studied eight hours a day to correct his former idleness, and ran up and down a hill every two hours to correct a giddiness he had contracted in Ireland. Wrote bad verses to flatter his master, hoped he was a poet, and perpetually hated Dryden, who said of them, 'Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.'

Ambitious of preferment, sick of hopes deferred, and galled by his servitude, he attempted independence, and took orders in the Irish church in 1694, at a hundred pounds a year, in a distant, secluded, and half civilized place. Found it a lower deep, to which the hell he had suffered seemed a heaven; was forced to accept Temple's cordial invitation to return, from which time the two appear to have lived in mutual confidence and esteem.

Upon Temple's death (1698), who had left him a legacy and his manuscripts, he edited the works of his patron, dedicated them to William III, to remind him of promised advancement, got nothing, and accepted the post of secretary to a nobleman; was circumvented, then promised the rich Deanery of Derry, saw it bestowed on somebody else, and fell back on the post of prebendary.'

Constrained to reside in a country which he detested, and longing for the promotion that would enable him to return to England, near the centre of literary and political activity, he launched into politics, advocated Whig principles, received fine promises from party leaders, and was neglected. In 1710, lured by false hopes till his patience was exhausted, and insulted without redress, he abandoned the Whigs, who were now to be driven from office, joined the Tories, levelled at his former friends the blasting lightning of his satire, was feared as a powerful and unscrupulous pamphleteer, became the familiar associate and adviser of the rich and titled, stretched out his hands for an English bishopric, and received,-what he professed to regard as an honorable exile,-only the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin; for though favored by the ministers of state, by the Queen and High Church dignitaries, whose party he had espoused, he was

In the county of Meath, northwest of Dublin. While here, he appointed the reading of prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays. On the first Wednesday, after the bell had ceased ringing for some time, finding that the congregation consisted only of himself and his clerk, Roger, he began: 'Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me in sundry places,' etc.; and then proceeded regularly through the whole service.

disliked as an uncertain friend and a doubtful Christian.

He had

been the author of a religious lampoon (Tale of a Tub) that was fatal to his eminence in the church. To Ireland he repaired in bitterness of spirit. There he was exiled by the return of the Whigs to power under George I; and there he was confined, contrary to his expectations, by their continued supremacy under George II. Isolated, even pelted by the populace in the streets, stung by the designations of renegade, traitor, and atheist, conscious of superiority and soured by the feeling of his own impotence, he vented his pent-up rage in torturing, crushing satires against theologians, statesmen, courtiers, society. In 1724, by delivering Ireland from a fraudulent and oppressive measure, from being an object of hatred he became an object of idolatry; and the popularity he thus acquired, he was diligent to keep, by continuing attention to the public, and by various modes of beneficence. But power almost despotic could not reconcile him to himself or his environment, and in 1728 he writes:

'I find myself disposed every year, or rather every month, to be more angry and revengeful; and my rage is so ignoble that it descends even to resent the folly and baseness of the enslaved people among whom I live.'

Sometimes wished to visit England, but the fire was burning low, and he seems to have had a presentiment that he never would. Tells Pope he hopes once more to see him; 'but if not,' he says, 'we must part as all human beings have parted.'

Subject to giddiness from his youth, the attacks grew more frequent with advancing age. He desisted from study. Deafness came on, making conversation difficult. Having vowed never to wear spectacles, he was unable to read.

Memory left him, reason deserted him,' and he became first a maniac, then an idiot. After a year of total silence, his housekeeper, on the 30th of November, told him that the usual bonfires and illuminations were preparing to celebrate his birthday. An interval of reason flashed its light across his midnight sky, and he answered, 'It is all folly; they had better let it alone.' Sunk again into a silent idiocy, he expired in the ensuing October, 1744. When his will was opened, it was found that he had left

I remember as I and others were taking with Swift an evening walk, about a mile out of Dublin, he stopped short; we passed on; but perceiving he did not follow us, I went back and found him fixed as a statue; and earnestly gazing upwards at a noble tree, which, in its upper branches, was much withered and decayed. Pointing at it, he said, 'I shall be like that tree; I shall die at the top.'-Dr. Young.

his fortune to build an asylum for idiots and madmen. His morning rose in clouds, and his evening went down in eclipse.

Loves. Never was genius more fatal in its influence, nor friendship more blighting, nor unprosperous love more widely famed. While a student in the university, he formed an attachment to Jane Warying, sister of his college companion, and poetically termed 'Varina.' In a letter of April, 1696, Swift complains of her formality and coldness, tells her that he has resolved to die as he has lived-all hers. She signifies, at last, her desire to consummate their union; but the vision that had made the morning and the evening varied enchantments, was passing. A second letter of May, 1700, is written in the altered tone of one who is anxious to escape from a connection which he regrets ever to have formed. Time had perhaps estranged him by its unequal development of their characters, and the superior charms of another had begun to weave their spell around the 'lover's heart.

In Temple's family, he met a very pretty, dark-eyed, modest young girl of fifteen, a waiting-maid,- Esther Johnson. Seventeen years her senior, he became her instructor; found pleasure in cultivating her talents; became her companion and friend, though he could little have thought how closely and tragically their fortunes and their fame were hereafter to be united. She loved and reverenced him only; and he immortalized her as 'Stella,' or 'Star that dwelt apart.' To reconcile himself to an obscure retirement, he invited her with her friend Mrs. Dingley to reside in Ireland. They lived in the parsonage when he was away, and when he returned, removed to a lodging, or to the house of a near clergyman. From London, during the period of his political struggles (1710-1713), he wrote to her twice a day, a journal of his daily life, familiarly, playfully, and endearingly; records, for her gratification, his slightest actions; tells where he goes, where he dines, whom he meets, what he spends.

His letters are his last occupation at night, and his first in the morning:

'I can not go to bed without a word to them (Stella and Mrs. Dingley); I can not put out my candle till I bid them good night.'

He had met in London yet another girl, eighteen, beautiful, rich, lively, graceful, and fond of books, a merchant's daughter,