little in it that could be called political apostasy. Every man was more or less for his own hand, and the balance of popular feeling fluctuated between war and peace: between pride and the glory of England on the one hand, and horror of the sacrifices and misery involved in the long-continued, never-ending campaigns of Marlborough on the other--almost as much as Queen Anne wavered between the influence of the imperious duchess and the obsequious Abigail. There was no shame to Swift at such a moment in the sudden revolution he made. The man who felt himself of sufficient importance to make this threat seems to have possessed already, notwithstanding the neglect of the Whig lords, the rank of his intellect rather than of his external position, and this not entirely because of the anonymous productions which were more or less known to be his. The “Tale of a Tub,” written while he was still an inmate of Moor Park, had by this time been before the world six years. It was published along with the “Battle of the Books” in 1704, and caused great excitement and sensation among politicians, wits, and critics. But the careless contempt of fame which mingled in him with so fierce a hunger for it kept it long a matter of doubt whether the immense reputation of these works belonged to him or not; and it would appear that his own personality, the size and rude splendor of his individual character, had at least as much to do with his position as the doubtful glory of an anonymous publication. The vicar of Laracor was not sufficiently important to be chosen as the representative of the Irish Church--but Jonathan Swift was; and though the bishops schemed against him in his absence when he seemed to have failed, no one seems to have ventured to suggest that he was too humble a person to hold that representative post. The book which dazzled English society and set all the wits talking was by no means the kind of book to support ecclesiastical dignity. It was indeed by way of being a vindication of the superiority of the Anglican Church over Rome on the one hand, and the dissenters on the other; but the tremendous raid against false pretenses, hypocrisy, and falsehood which is its real scope, was executed with such a riot and madness of laughter, and unscrupulous derision of everything that came in the satirist’s way, as had scarcely been known in English speech before. The mockery was at once brilliant and careless, dashed about hither and thither in a sort of giant’s play, full of the coarsest metaphors, the finest wit, indignation, ridicule, fun, almost too wild and reckless to be called cynical, though penetrated with the profoundest cynicism and disbelief of any good. The power which still lives and asserts itself in those strange and often detestable pages, must strike even the [Illustration: SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. ENGRAVED BY R. A. MULLER, FROM AN ENGRAVING IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM, AFTER A PAINTING BY SIR PETER LELY.]