Moor Park, and had found no easy roadway to independence in the country of his education. Hardly had the second residence begun, before he found Temple ready to assist him by giving him the means of rising a step in the academic scale. His Dublin career had been cut short before he had attained the master's degree. But now he found means, with Temple's help, of becoming a graduate of Oxford. Of his residence there, and even how long it continued, we know little; but it cannot have been long. On the 23rd of May, 1692, he obtained the necessary certificate of his bachelor's degree from Trinity College on the 14th of June, he was admitted on the same footing at Oxford: and on the 5th of July, he became a Master of Arts.* He was now no longer a waif and stray in the battle of life, but renewed his services to Temple with a position in the land of his choice which he prized more than any which could have been given him in the land of his birth and education. "He had been obliged," he says of his Oxford experiences, "in a few weeks to strangers more than in seven years to Dublin College." We have his own account of his new position in Sir William Temple's household in terms that are too clear to admit of dispute, or to be based on imperfect recollection: "growing into some confidence,” as he distinctly tells us, “he was often trusted with affairs of great importance." * Swift belonged to Hart Hall, which afterwards developed into Hartford, or Hertford, College. The College was dissolved in 1805, but the name has been revived for Magdalen Hall, as now reconstituted. CHAPTER II. SWIFT'S FIRST YEARS OF MANHOOD, AND THEIR LESSONS. 1692-1696. ÆTAT. 24-28. The second residence with Temple-The influence of Oxford on Swift-His first literary efforts-The Pindarics-Ode to Archbishop Sancroft—To Sir William Temple-Swift and the Athenian Society-John Dunton-Dryden's criticism of Swift's early attempts-The Address to William III.— Swift as adviser of the king-What he learnt at Court-Swift's Ode to Congreve-On Sir W. Temple's Recovery-Desire for independence-His mental state and his experiences so far-His choice of a career-Ordination-An awkward application-Prebendary of Kilroot-The Irish Church in 1694-His life and companions at Kilroot-Varina-Growing irksomeness of his surroundings-Return to England, and what he brought with him. WITH this second residence in Temple's house there opens for Swift a wider horizon. Step by step he is being drawn into that arena of busy life which now attracted and again repelled him, for which his impetuous spirit of command so far fitted him, at the same time that his intolerance of convention and discipline prevented his hoping for the success in it that smaller men might make sure of. Coming as it did when his mind was still unsettled, this new and larger opportunity of watching the inner movements of great affairs, fascinated Swift's imagination. At the quiet house amidst the Surrey wastes of heather he saw the coming and going of the men who were making the history of Europe, could observe their moods, and could measure their capacity. From this early glimpse he may first have acquired what he retained through life, and what so much fed his cynical humour, the sense of the marvellous contrast between the smallness of the men and the vastness of the stake that was in their hands. From the first we see two tendencies at work in him. On the one hand the fixed lines of political opinion, the intricacies of political tactics, the abnegation of individual independence which a public life implied, repelled him on the other, the prospect of power and influence, the excitement of stirring scenes, inspired him with a longing for the fray. The question must even thus early have occurred to him whether he would seek an entry into this arena, or strive by literature to obtain the social distinction which he confesses was what he desired to achieve. As yet he was all unsettled. Already, so he tells us, he had, during one period of enforced idleness, "writ and burnt and writ again, upon all manner of subjects, more than perhaps any man in England." The struggles of early authorship frequently leave behind them an undue impression of their magnitude: but we may well take it that Swift's ineffective industry in these early days was laborious enough. Short as it was, his stay at Oxford, coming early in this second visit, was not without its permanent effect. The Oxford that had given refuge to Cowley, that had expelled Locke, that had passed the famous Passive Obedience decree, was still imbued with the same spirit, and had not shifted her bearings amidst the storms of the revolution. With her political attitude Oxford had a special literary taste of her own, as well. The coterie of Christ Church was just then maintaining a somewhat unequal fight against the ponderous broadsides of Bentley, and already its leaning to the Tories was as clearly marked as that of its opponents to the Whigs. Its scholarship was not indeed profound, and was frequently worse than superficial; but it might, with some reason, claim the merit of elegance. Neither the political nor the literary tone of Oxford could be without effect on Swift. Oxford had been gracious to him; and the kindness shewn him there did much to arouse that underlying sympathy for Tory politics *Swift to the Rev. John Kendall, Feb. 11, 1693. which Swift shewed long before he quitted openly the ranks of the Whigs, in which his early connexion with Temple had naturally placed him. It was at Oxford that Swift is said to have made his first literary effort, in a translation or paraphrase after the current fashion of the day, from one of Horace's odes.* It contains nothing beyond the ordinary trite moralities usual in a college exercise but it is worth noticing, perhaps, that, without its being required to represent anything in the original, he makes the poet speak of himself, with the sarcastic reference that such a phrase would naturally imply, as one "unskilled in sneaking arts." Other efforts accompanied, or followed shortly after this. Swift was caught by a current absurdity of taste. The popu larity of Cowley, a popularity so great that even one so widely divergent from him as Milton, named him along with Spenser and Shakespeare as one of the three lights of English poetry, had not waned now after he had lain in his grave for more than twenty years. And strange to say, for the moment, it was not Cowley's more simple pieces which were remembered, but the more extravagant flights which he had attempted in his Pindarics. By a curious freak of judgment he had deemed that the most stately and dignified form of English poetry was a disjointed imitation of that style of Greek poetry, the merits of which are of all others the most difficult for a modern reader to appreciate. But Cowley and his contemporaries not only compelled themselves to appreciate, but trained themselves to imitate. The result was only a travesty of Pindar, that failed to stir one chord of real poetry. But the fashion spread. As Dr. Johnson says, "all the boys and girls caught the pleasing fancy, and they who could do nothing else could write like Pindar." Swift was caught by the fashion, which The 18th Ode of the 2nd Book: "Non ebur neque aureum Mea renidet in domo lacunar," &c. was then so prevalent in Oxford, that even a Latin poem had been written in accordance with what was believed to be Pindar's chaotic contempt for scansion. Swift's attempt is said to have been suggested by Sir William Temple and his wife and his efforts in this kind, if they have little literary merit, at least show us something of his intellectual growth. His Pindarics include an address to Archbishop Sancroft, on his refusal of the oaths in 1689: another to Sir William Temple; and lastly one to the Athenian Society; all of which give evidence of wide reading, introduced with an amplitude of allusion that makes their meaning often hard to decipher. But, for all that, they are not without interest. Their form is the pedantic one borrowed from Cowley's school: but, here and there, they have a force that implies rather a reminiscence of Dryden's muse. The ode to Sancroft, addressed to him when he was founding that sect of the Non-jurors, which Swift's maturer wisdom condemned, shows us how high Swift placed that insistance on the Church's privileges which afterwards broke his own alliance with the Whigs. Sancroft's selfinflicted martyrdom might be condemned by the School of politicians amongst whom Swift now moved: it might, at a later day, seem even to him over-strained; but it nevertheless commanded from him the tribute of admiration due to honesty and principle. Obscure and disordered as it is, the Ode has an occasional literary interest from points of likeness or contrast to his later work. The conceit which represents Sancroft's virtue as brightening even the gloom of popular condemnation, as the evening rays of the sun shine through a cloud, has something strangely unlike Swift's later manner. "Why should the Sun, alas! be proud To lodge behind a golden cloud? Though fringed with evening gold the cloud appears so gay, But there is something, on the other hand, of his later touch in the simplicity of lines like these: |