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"so," he

that all scribblers should be passed by in silence; adds, "let Gildon and Philips rest in peace." The friendly monitor soon afterwards made his appearance in England, and took up his abode at Twickenham. Swift's reputation had been greatly extended by his defence of the liberties of Ireland- -as his defeat of the scheme of Wood's copper coinage was considered-and he brought with him the manuscript of Gulliver's Travels. How cordially he was received by Pope, by Gay, Arbuthnot, and Bolingbroke, may be readily conceived. To his powerful understanding and strong will they yielded involuntary submission. He was the Coryphæus of the party, the successful champion of Ireland, and the chief of English wits. Swift valued literature only as a means of promoting his own advancement, or carrving such objects as he strongly desired. He was not, like Pope, all author. He wanted literature to do for him what a great fortune or a title would have done. He wished, he said, to be used like a lord, so that the reputation of wit or learning might do the office of a blue riband, or a coach. and six horses. On this occasion he visited Walpole—not disinclined apparently to share in Ministerial favour—but his ostensible object was to represent the affairs of Ireland to the great minister in a true light. He was politely received, and the Princess Caroline saw him at Leicesterhouse, but his schemes evaporated in mere courtly phrases. He retired more than ever disgusted with courts and ministers of state; and his visit to England was abruptly terminated by the illness of Stella, in consequence of which he hurried back to Ireland. He had been about four months-from April to August-with Pope at Twickenham. During this time, Gulliver had been finally completed for the press, and two volumes of Miscellanies, containing pieces in prose and verse, by Swift, Pope, Gay, and Arbuthnot, were projected and considerably advanced. Beggars' Opera was also made ready for representation, so that this autumn was a memorable one in the wits' calendar. Swift had been only a few weeks gone, when a serious acci

Gay's

dent happened to his host at Twickenham. The poet had been dining with Bolingbroke, at Dawley, and late at night the peer sent his friend home in a stately fashion, in a coach and six. A small bridge, about a mile from Pope's residence, was broken down, and the postilion taking the water, the coach came in contact with the trunk of a tree, and was overturned. Before the coachman could get to Pope's assistance, the water had reached the knots of his periwig. The glass was broken, and he was rescued, but not until he had received a severe wound on his right hand, which for

some time disqualified him for writing. Voltaire, who was then on a visit at Dawley, sent his condolences in an English epistle, stating that the water into which Pope fell was "not Hippocrene's water, otherwise it would have respected. him!" "Is it possible," he added, "that those fingers which have written the Rape of the Lock, and the Criticism, which have dressed Homer so becomingly in an English

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coat, should have been so barbarously treated ?" Pope disliked the French wit, having, it is said, found out he was a spy, and Voltaire having, on one occasion, talked so grossly at Twickenham as to drive Mrs. Pope from the table. Voltaire, however, was a favourite with George' I. and the Princess Caroline, which helped to fill his subscriptions for the Henriade, and to make his fortune, but which proved no recommendation at Twickenham.

Among the Homer MSS. in the British Museum is a small undated and unsigned note, in the handwriting of Martha Blount, referring to this accident :-" We shall be at home all Friday, and expect you soon after dinner. Your dangers on the water that night I can imagine from what George told us. Your wine is come safe." always sparing of words.

Martha was

Gulliver's Travels made the winter of 1726 famous. It was published about the 1st of November, and sold with such rapidity, that the whole impression was exhausted in a week, and the work promised, as Arbuthnot said, to have as great a run as John Bunyan. Pope went to London on purpose to see how it would be received by statesmen and commoners, and to observe its effects was, he says, his diversion for a fortnight. He had a peculiar interest in the work, if the report adopted by Sir Walter Scott in his Life of Swift be correct, namely, that Swift made him a donation of the copyright, and that he sold it for £300.5 The secret of the authorship was, of course, known to the Pope circle, but

5 In a letter to Pulteney, 12th May, 1735, the Dean says, 66 I never got a farthing for anything I writ except once about eight years ago, and that by Mr. Pope's prudent management for me. This probably alludes to Gulliver's Travels, for which Pope certainly obtained from the bookseller 300l. There may, however, be some question, whether this sum was not left at Pope's disposal as well as that which he got for the Miscellanies (1507), and which Swift abandoned to him.-(Scott's Life of Swift.) Motte, the publisher of the Miscellanies, in a letter to Swift, says, "I am a stranger to what part of the copy money he (Pope) received, but you, who know better, are a competent judge whether he deserved it."

in their letters they affected ignorance of it. Pope says the publisher received the copy, he knew not from whence nor from whom, dropped at his house in the dark from a hackney coach; and by computing the time, he found it was after Swift left England, so he suspended his judgment. Gay writes to the same effect; and Swift kept up the humour by alluding to a book sent to him called Gulliver's Travels. "A bishop here," he adds, " said that book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it." Arbuthnot writes him-"Lord Scarborough, who is no inventor of stories, told us that he fell in company with a master of a ship, who told him that he was very well acquainted with Gulliver, but that the printer had mistaken; that he lived in Wapping, and not in Rotherhithe. I lent the book to an old gentleman, who went immediately to his map, to search for Lilliput." It is obvious how much all this must have amused and gratified the Dean and his friends in connection with the unexampled sale of the volume.

In 1727 Gay's "Beggars' Opera" was produced, and its success was as great as that of Gulliver. Swift suggested the idea of a Newgate Pastoral, and he is believed to have contributed two of the songs. Pope is said to have also assisted; but he informed Spence, that though he and Swift now and then gave Gay, as he carried it on, a word of correction or advice, it was wholly of his own writing. Neither of them thought it would succeed, so uncertain are all such prognostications!

The health of Stella being partially restored, Swift visited England again in April of this year. His fame now stood higher than it had done in the previous autumn, and he was welcomed at Leicester House, and in all the circles of his friends, with increased delight and enthusiasm. He still clung to the expectation of obtaining some church preferment in England, and fresh hopes were kindled on the death of the king, when a change of ministry was expected. Walpole, however, was again in the ascendent, and Swift lingered on for some months with small chance of

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his wishes being realised. He resided, as before, with Pope, and the result of their joint efforts appeared by the publication, in June, of two volumes of the Miscellanies. A third volume was published in the following March. The Preface is dated from Twickenham, May 27, and is signed by Swift and Pope, whose initials also appear in a cipher on the title-page. The preface is evidently of Pope's composition, and the following reason is assigned for the publication.

'Having both of us been extremely ill treated by some booksellers, especially one Edmund Curll, it was our opinion that the best method we could take for justifying ourselves would be to publish whatever loose papers in prose and verse we have formerly written; not only such as have already stolen into the world very much to our regret, and perhaps very little to our credit, but such as in any probability hereafter may run the same fate; having been obtained from us by the importunity and divulged by the indiscretion of friends, although restrained by promises which few of them are ever known to observe, and often think they make us a compliment in breaking.

Regret is then expressed that their raillery, though ever so tender, or their resentment, though ever so just, should have been indulged with regard to Sir John Vanbrugh, "who was a man of wit and of humour, and Mr. Addison, whose name deserves all respect from every lover of learning." It is then affirmed that the cabinets of the sick and the closets of the dead had been broken open and ransacked to publish their private letters, a statement certainly unsupported by proof, and which seems to have been hazarded with a view of preparing for some subsequent publication of letters. Parnell, Garth, Rowe, Addison, and Craggs had died, but their friends and executors made no complaints of such indignities, which if perpetrated, must have awakened the liveliest indignation, and led to instant inquiry. To the Miscellanies Swift was the largest contributor, and his ironical and satirical treatises, with his poetical trifles, thus collected and presented in a compendious shape, must have formed the chief attraction of