=5. The New Morality.= The immorality of the Restoration, which had been almost entirely a Court phenomenon and was largely the reaction against extreme Puritanism, soon spent itself. The natural process of time was hastened by opinion in high quarters. William III was a severe moralist, and Anne, his successor, was of the same character. Thus we soon see a new tone in the writing of the time, and a new attitude to life and morals. Addison, in an early number of _The Spectator_, puts the new fashion in his own admirable way: “I shall endeavour to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.” Another development of the same spirit is seen in the revised opinion of women, who are treated with new respect and dignity. Much coarseness is still to be felt, especially in satirical writing, in which Swift, for instance, can be quite vile; but the general upward tendency is undoubtedly there. JONATHAN SWIFT (1667–1745) =1. His Life.= Swift was born in Dublin, and, though both his parents were English, his connection with Ireland was to be maintained more or less closely till the day he died. His father dying before Jonathan’s birth, the boy was thrown upon the charity of an uncle, who paid for his education in Ireland. He seems to have been very wretched both at his school at Kilkenny and at Trinity College, Dublin, where his experiences went to confirm in him that savage melancholia that was to endure all his life. Much of this distemper was due to purely physical causes, for he suffered from an affection of the ear that ultimately touched his brain and caused insanity. In 1686, at the age of nineteen, he left Trinity College (it is said in disgrace), and in 1689 entered the household of his famous kinsman Sir William Temple, under whose encouragement he took holy orders, and on the death of Temple in 1699 obtained other secretarial and ecclesiastical appointments. His real chance came in 1710, when the Tories overthrew the Marlborough faction and came into office. To them Swift devoted the gigantic powers of his pen, became a political star of some magnitude, and, after the manner of the time, hoped for substantial rewards. He might have become a bishop, but it is said that Queen Anne objected to the vigor of his early writings; and in the wreck of the Tory party in 1715 all he could save was the Deanery of St. Patrick’s, in Dublin. An embittered man, he spent the last thirty years of his life in gloom, and largely in retirement. He was involved in obscure but not dishonorable philanderings with Esther Johnson (Stella) and Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa), whose names figure prominently in his personal writings. His last years were passed in silence and lunacy, and he expired (in Johnson’s words) “a driveller and a show.”