down, you may behold him still with a stern countenance, and aiming a blow at his adversaries."

Arbuthnot, too, saw that the end was come. Like Swift, he drew from it a lesson of proud and cynical humour. "I have an opportunity," he suggests to Swift,* "calmly and philosophically to consider that treasure of vileness and baseness that I always believe to be in the heart of man." He watches the burst of daylight on the wreck: the women cast from intrigue to tears: the schemes that had busied them scattered: their hopes at an end. For himself he had gained little and had little to lose. Such as it is, he is ready to give it up: "I have not seen anything as yet to make me recant a certain inconvenient opinion I have, that one cannot pay too dear for peace of mind." For the rest, "Fuimus Tories:" the Argives of Whigs will triumph, and his only regret is that Scriblerus may get morose and dull.

NOTE ON THE WAGSTAFFE VOLUME (p. 280).

One of the most bitter attacks on Steele, was that made in a Pamphlet on the Character of Richard St-le, Esq., by Toby, Abel's Kinsman. It was republished, in 1726, in a volume purporting to contain the miscellaneous works of Dr. William Wagstaffe, who had been Physician at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and who had died at Bath, the year before, at the age of 40. The volume begins with an account of Wagstaffe and his family, which seems, in the main, to be founded on fact. But the question remains, by whom were the works, collected in the volume, written? The hypothesis of the late Mr. Dilke, in his republished Papers of a Critic, is that they are mainly from the hand of Swift, with a few written by another hand, and inserted in order to mislead. Wagstaffe seems to have been a goodhumoured, somewhat careless, wit, whose pen may well have produced some stray pieces, although he never attained to any reputation, and, according to his professed biographer, never acknowledged his authorship. We have no authority for saying that he was a friend of Swift's + but

*Arbuthnot to Swift. Aug. 12, 1714.

The nearest tie I can find is Swift's friendship for Sir Charles Bernard, the Physician of St. Bartholomew's, whose daughter Wagstaffe

married. In the Journal, Swift speaks first of going to see the library of "poor Charles Bernard," which was to be sold and then of attending the sale, to little purpose.

Swift undoubtedly knew some who were Wagstaffe's friends: and the death of the little-known physician, and careless wit, may have given Swift the opportunity for which he wished. As Mr. Dilke points out, at the very time Swift and Pope were collecting their miscellanies and here seemed a favourable opportunity for turning off upon the obscure Wagstaffe, works which they did not desire to own.

The proof of Mr. Dilke's hypothesis, which is almost irresistible, rests on several grounds. Even by the admission of the writer of the biography, Wagstaffe could not correspond to the author of the Character of Steele. Wagstaffe, it is stated, "when he wrote it, did not even know Steele by sight." Yet, in the first paragraph, the Character refers to Steele's "short face" and almost every line shows it to have been the work of one who had a personal pique against Steele. The pieces in the volume all belong to the years when Swift was in London, and was defending the views they contain, between 1710 and 1714: Wagstaffe lived till 1725, and, with so facile a pen, produced nothing more! The collector asserts that Wagstaffe kept his anonymity strictly: yet within a year after Wagstaffe's death, this nameless editor is able to publish a volume, which ascribes a tolerably long list of works to him, with no hint of a doubt in any case.

But, further, the Character of Steele, at least, if nothing more in the volume, is filled with marks of Swift's style. Throughout the volume there are references, which seem to bespeak Swift's hand.* The author of Gulliveriana ascribes the Character to Swift: and in the Englishman, Steele refers, not obscurely, to Swift as its writer. The Character refers to those charges of Steele's ingratitude to the patrons who kept him in office, which Swift brings against him in his letter of 13th May, 1713. Even the relenting towards Steele which the biography expresses,† is not unlikely to have been dictated by some memory of former friendship, surviving in Swift, when their quarrel had been dead and buried for a dozen years.

Lastly, there is a curious point brought out by Mr. Dilke in regard to the letter from Dr. Andrew Tripe,‡ printed in the volume. That letter is

*The indications are slight separately, but almost convincing, in union. Amongst others, see p. 220, where the danger of Tory disunion is sketched in a few sentences amazingly like Swift: also p. 224, where there is a quotation from Swift's favourite, Rochefoucauld: p. 208, where there is a reference to the feeble answers to the Conduct of the Allies: p. 95, where Burnet and Ridpath are conjoined, exactly as Swift would have conjoined them and

p. 209, where Ormond, Oxford, and Bolingbroke, are sketched with just the colouring Swift would have employed.

†The Character, the preface says, does want some apology, for its treatment of a gentleman of known parts and abilities.

Its title runs: A Letter from the facetious Dr. Andrew Tripe, at Bath, to his loving brother, the profound Greshamite, shewing, &c.

occupied largely either with medical metaphors or details. It is entirely different from the letter from Dr. Andrew Tripe to Nestor Ironside, which was one of the Scriblerus Club productions, and is generally printed amongst Swift's works. But when Pope is endeavouring to shift off from his own or his confederates' shoulders, the authorship of the latter, he writes thus: "We are assured by another that he (i.e. Pope) wrote a pamphlet called Dr. Andrew Tripe, which proved to be one Dr. Wagstaffe's."+ Pope was here clearly endeavouring to turn his readers off the scent, by identifying the Scriblerian Dr. Andrew Tripe, with the medical treatise to the Greshamite, which may really have been written by Wagstaffe, and which had just been published in the so-called Wagstaffe volume, by his literary ally, Swift.

On the whole then we may take it that Wagstaffe, though he may have been an occasional scribbler, was neither the author of all the pieces in the volume, nor even (as Scott supposes) an "under spur-leather" to Swift: but that Swift was in the main responsible for the volume, and that the most important pieces in it are from his own hand.

Mr. Dilke mentions, in connexion with this disguise, the fact that Swift published his Polite Conversations under the name of Simon Wagstaff. But it is doubtful whether this is a confirmation of the former personation, and not rather the reverse. If a man called himself Simon Wagstaff in 1738, it is rather against than in favour of the theory that he published his tracts under the name of Dr. William Wagstaffe in 1726.

The surname was also used as a disguise by Oldisworth, in annotations which he published on the Tatler (nominally translated from the French), in 1711, under the name of Walter Wagstaff, Esq.

* Scott's 2nd Edition, IV., 279.

+ The Dunciad, quarto Edition of 1743. Testimonies of Authors, XXV.

CHAPTER XII.

SWIFT IN RETIREMENT.

1714 to 1720.

ETAT. 46-52.

Effect of the quiet time at Letcombe-Disgust with politics-Libels that pursued Swift's retirement-The spurious Essays-His position in Dublin and at Laracor-Troubles as Vicar and as Dean-The completed triumph of the Whigs-Swift to Oxford, on his fall-The fellowship of slavery-Parties in Ireland-Swift suspected of Jacobitism-The " "English Garrison" in Ireland-Toleration Act-Swift's view of it-Union against a common danger-His occupations-Literary schemes-Reviving interests-Vanessa -The relations between her and Swift-Cadenus and Vanessa-Vanessa at Celbridge-The letter to Stella-Vanessa's death-Her will, and Letters -Stella-The nature of her bond to Swift-Restraints imposed on itThe Marriage-What it meant to each.

THESE quiet weeks at Letcombe, after the storm and turmoil of political struggle, were of critical importance in Swift's life. At the end of the four years of ceaseless excitement, in which gratified ambition had been chequered by doubt and impatience, and occasional disgust, he had to balance the results of his life so far. Looking back on the early years of dependence and self-distrust: on the early pride and ambition: on the mistaken literary efforts that had preceded the first product of his full exuberance of genius in the Tale of a Tub, his was a strange experience. Scarcely had he discovered the richest vein of his genius, before he had found the dangers it was likely to involve. His boldness of speech had been misconstrued. The humour with which he set forth the ludicrous inconsistencies in all vulgar conceptions of the supernatural, had puzzled the timid and conventional thought of his time.

To restrain that humour, he had turned to what he might suppose the safest of all spheres, that of religious, social, and political essay-writing. He sought to make himself, above all, simple, clear, and logical in his method. Theory and speculation he set aside as fanciful and absurd. But in spite of himself, his humour would break out. With almost wayward exaggeration, he had thrown all his energies into the political struggle and now, when the crash came, he was left "a poor cast courtier," whose aims and ambitions seemed suddenly to have slipped from his grasp, and all that he had gained from the struggle was a contempt for the trickery of politics. Vexed with the imposture, he had carved out new literary schemes, and formed deep and lasting literary friendships. With this legacy from the past he had now to find new aims, and to achieve new influence.

66

Swift never sought to cover his retreat by any assumptions of philosophical indifference. To leave England was a grief to him to leave his friends, still more so. When I leave a country without probability of returning," he writes to Pope, "I think as seldom as I can of what I loved or esteemed in it, to avoid the desiderium which of all things makes life most uneasy." From a position of enormous influence he had now sunk into one which made it prudent for his friends to avoid him. Thus Addison conveys his fear, through Jervas, to Pope.* "He owns he was afraid," writes Jervas, " Dr. Swift might have carried you too far among the enemy during the heat of the animosity: but now all is safe, and you are escaped, even in his opinion."

Pope resented this expression of alarm: but others might not be so indifferent: and such suspicion no doubt aggravated Swift's lot. That was not made more bearable by the fact that he was pursued by the utmost bitterness of lampooners. One of their productions was The Hue and Cry after Dean Swift,| borrowing its title from a tract written in the interest of the

* Jervas to Pope, Aug. 20, 1714.