It does not appear that Swift had literary ambition, as commonly reckoned. That _Tale of a Tub_ lay by him six or seven years before it came to print. He wrote for Steele’s _Tatler_, and for the _Spectator_--not with any understanding that his name was to appear, or that he was to be spoken admiringly of. Many of his best things were addressed to friends or acquaintances, and never saw the light through any instigation or privity of his own. When there was some purpose to effect--some wrong to lash--some puppet to knock down--some tow-head to set on fire--some public drowsiness to wake--he rushed into print with a vengeance. Was it benevolence that provoked him to this? was it public spirit? Who can tell? I think there were many times when he thought as much; but I believe that never a man more often deceived himself than did Swift; and that over and over he mistook the incentives of his own fiery and smarting spirit for the leadings of an angel of light. When we think of the infrequency and awkwardness of travel in that day, we are not a little amazed to find him going back and forth as he did from Ireland to London. The journey was not, as now, a mere skip over to Holyhead, and then a five hours’ whirl to town, but a long, uncertain sail in some lugger of a vessel--blown as the winds blew--till a landing was made at Bristol or Swansea; and then the four to seven days of coaching (as the roads might be) through Bath to London. Sometimes it is some interest of the poor Irish Church that takes him over, for which we must give him due credit; but oftener it is his own unrest. His energies and his unsatisfied mind starve if not roused and bolstered and chafed by contact with minds as keen and hard, from which will come the fiery disputation that he loves. Great cities, where great interests are astir and great schemes fomenting, are magnets whose drawing power such intellects cannot resist. He is in London five or six months in 1701, six or eight the next year, six or eight the next, and so on. _Swift’s Politics._