Whether Mrs. Howard laid this letter before the Queen, as the dean evidently intended her to do, or spoke to the Queen on the subject, is not known; in any case Swift would have done better to have written directly to the Queen herself, or if that were impossible, to have chosen some more congenial channel of communication than Mrs. Howard. The Queen was jealous of her influence, and Mrs. Clayton, who disliked Swift, had been taught to think that ecclesiastical recommendations were especially within her province. For Mrs. Howard to have asked the Queen for the meanest curacy for one of her favourites would have been resented. So it came about that after Swift had waited a few years longer, heart-sick with deferred hope, he turned on Mrs. Howard as well as her mistress, though in the former case he was not only ungrateful but unjust, for the poor lady had not the power, though she had the will, to help him. But Swift in his Irish exile could not be expected to know the true inwardness of affairs at Court. “As for Mrs. Howard and her mistress,” he wrote, “I have nothing to say but that they have neither memory nor manners, else I should have had some mark of the former from the latter, which I was promised about two years ago; but since I made them a present it would be mean to remind them.” He was extremely sensitive to slights, and he resented the Queen’s forgetfulness about the medal almost as much as the fact that she omitted him from her list of preferments. Years after, in a poem which he wrote on his own death, the old grievance of the medals crops up again:-- From Dublin soon to London spread, ’Tis told at Court “the Dean is dead,” And Lady Suffolk in the spleen Runs laughing up to tell the Queen. The Queen, so gracious, mild and good, Cries: “Is he gone? ’tis time he should. He’s dead, you say--then let him rot; I am glad the medals were forgot. I promised him, I own; but when? I only was the princess then; And now the consort of a King, You know, ’tis quite another thing.” Swift never forgave the Queen’s neglect, and for years, until her death, Caroline was the subject of his sharpest satirical attacks. But his satire failed to move her, any more than his presents and compliments had done. The great dean was left to drag out the remainder of his days in Ireland, embittered by disappointment and darkened by despair. Probably Walpole interposed his veto also. It was felt that such a firebrand was safer in Ireland, and his presence in England might seriously embarrass the Government. No doubt there was something to be said from that point of view. But the way in which those in authority neglected this great genius, until baffled ambition drove him to drink and madness, will ever remain one of the most tragic pages in the history of literature.