quality that can possibly accomplish a human creature. Dear Jim, pardon me, I know not what I am saying; but believe me, that violent friendship is much more lasting than violent love." Swift's story is nearly told; for the sad end, which dragged itself through thirty years, began with his return to Ireland. Once again, when the fame of the M.B. Drapier Letters (1724), which attacked savagely the abortive scheme of Wood's halfpence, brought him into prominence, he returned to England, seeking preferment. Failing here, he went back to Ireland, — a "coal-pit," as he called it, "a wretched, dirty dog-hole and prison," "a place good enough to die in." On his trip to England, when he visited Pope at Twickenham, he took with him Gulliver's Travels, published the same year (1726). The first two parts, the visits to the Lilliputians and Brobdingnags, begun some years earlier, are fascinating to both old and young; even those who miss the satire delight in the ingenious narrative. Towards the end of the book, however, the satire, marking as it does Swift's declining intellect, grows savage and repulsive. "He becomes disgusting," says Leslie Stephen, "in the effort to express his disgust." In the Houyhnhnms, a kind of horses, social conditions far superior to those in England are discovered, and the Yahoos, their bestial servants, out-Caliban Caliban in hideous, half-human ferocity. Swift had long been disgusted with the pettiness and coarseness of English society; he had, moreover, long had a grudge against the English nation; and now, in his savage old age, his irony and brutal satire get the better of him. Yet Taine, after a review of the rottenness of English society during the reign of George I, concludes "that the Yahoo whom he depicted he had seen, and that the Yahoo, whether naked or riding in his carriage, is not beautiful." The death of Stella, in 1728, only aggravated Swift's despair and bitterness. The treatment of the Irish, moreover, had lashed him into madness; and the gravity with which he spoke was more terrible than the explosion would have been if he had burst out in mania. In 1729 he came out solemnly with A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country. And what was the Dean's Modest Proposal, made in such bitter gravity? Merely that five sixths of the Irish children should be fattened and eaten. "I rather recommend," he says calmly,"buying the children alive, than dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs." Truly an awful, inverted way of calling attention to the extreme poverty of Ireland. But with Swift the thing had got beyond expostulation; it had become a madman's jest. Fortunately he soon passed the vigor of these brutal expressions. Years before, he had prophesied, on seeing an old ash tree, "I shall die as that tree, from the top down." He continued to write considerably until 1738, and in some of his work, notably Polite Conversation and Directions to Servants, showed his old satiric power. But by 1738 the malady which had threatened him ever since his youth took strong hold of him. Not long after he developed fits of mania, during which it was difficult for his attendants to restrain him from tearing out a suffering eye. By 1740 he sank into a kind of torpor, broker only by occasional bursts of savageness or pettiness. Once he was heard to mutter, "I am what I am; I am what I am." And he is said to have written the following epigram while on a walk with his attend ants: "Behold a proof of Irish sense! Here Irish wit is seen! When nothing's left that's worth defense, Thus he lingered till the 19th of October, 1745, when, after a night of great pain, he died quietly at three in the afternoon. Most of his carefully saved fortune, £12,000, he left to found St. Patrick's Hospital for the insane an awful legacy for an insane man to comtemplate! Swift saw the Valley of the Shadow of Death while yet a long way off, and must needs ride alone down the strait road. On his grave is inscribed: "Ubi saeva indignatio Cor ulterius lacerare nequit." The character of the great Dean is altogether too complex to be summed up in a glib phrase. He was not a "bully," a "footpad," or a "Yahoo; " yet it would be presumptuous, on the other hand, to assert that his savage style was a quite necessary rebuke to his times. It is more fitting, in closing, to call attention to the chief elements, however conflicting, that composed so unhappy and so savage a nature. Whoever holds the most partial brief for Swift must admit that he early showed most of his weaker characteristics: false, insatiable pride, distrust of mankind, instinctive cynicism, and misanthropy. There is no doubt, on the other hand, of his genuine hatred of sham, his sincerity; Bolingbroke called his character "hypocrisy reversed." His savage style, moreover, at first a mannerism rather than a manner, was not the most character istic thing about him till he reached middle age. Then his loneliness, partly the result of his intellectual uncongeniality and superiority, partly the result of the circumstances of his life, developed in him a bitterness which towards the end passed all bounds of moderation. He did finally become a scourge, a mad jester upon life. Taine calls Swift the most unhappy genius in history. Certainly the melancholy of such men as Byron seems like childish pettishness beside the misery of Swift, a misery as great, as inevitable, as inexorable as classic Fate. "An immense genius," says Thackeray; "an awful downfall and ruin. So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling." And Taine concludes: "A philosopher against all philosophy, he created a realistic poem, a grave parody, deduced like geometry, absurd as a dream, credible as a law report, attractive as a tale, degrading as a dishclout placed like a crown on the head of a divinity. These were his miseries and his strength; we quit such a spectacle with a sad heart, but full of admiration; and we say that a palace is beautiful even when it is on fire. Artists will add: especially when it is on fire." JOSEPH ADDISON "It is no small thing to make morality fashionable. Addison did it, and it remained in fashion." These words by Taine sum up the greatness of Addison's genius. The task which was set before him was a delicate one; Swift, Steele, and Pope were all, for one or another reason, unqualified to perform it; and it was only through his own patience, his breadth of view, his quiet gentlemanliness, and his wit which left no sting that Addison was able to attain success. As a writer of poetry he rarely rises above the mediocrity of his contemporaries; but as an essayist on his own ground he is unsurpassed in any age; and as the most successful moralist, the man with an effective message to the people of his day, he towers above all. Joseph Addison, the eldest son of Lancelot Addison and Jane Gulston, was born May 1, 1672, at Milston, in Wiltshire. His father, at the time of Joseph's birth rector of Milston, was a man of experience and accomplishment. He had been chaplain in Dunkirk and Tangier, in 1675 was made a prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral, and in 1683 was awarded the Deanery of Lichfield. As a writer he had considerable contemporary reputation, especially for his works on Mohammedanism and Judaism. Thus young Joseph, perhaps as much as any English author of note, grew up in an atmosphere of refinement, scholarship, and piety. It has been pointed out, too, that his boyhood must have received a strong impres |