vassal whom they had secured. He seems to have thought of himself that he was a sort of third consul, an unofficial sharer of their power. This extraordinary episode in the life of a man of Swift’s profession, and so little likely to come to such promotion, lasted three years; and the history of it is not less remarkable than the fact. It was a period of the greatest intellectual [Illustration: DELANY’S HOUSE AT DELVILLE, WHERE SWIFT STAYED. DRAWN BY HARRY FENN. ENGRAVED BY C. A. POWELL.] activity and brilliancy in Swift’s career, and besides his hard political work in the “Examiner” and elsewhere, he flung from him, amid the exhilarating appreciation of the great world and his patrons, a number of the best of his lighter productions. But nothing that he ever wrote can be compared to the letters in which the story of this period is told, since nowhere else do we find the charm of humanity, which is more great and attractive even than genius. As if the rule of paradox was to prevail in his life as well as in his wit, this cynic, misanthrope, and satirist, ignoring love and every softer thought, exhibits himself once to us in an abandon and melting of the heart such as common men are as little capable of as they are of his fierce laughter and bitter jests. If it is the true man whom we see in these unpremeditated and careless pages, written before he got up of a morning, or in the evening when he came home from his entertainments, with the chairmen still wrangling over their sixpences outside, how different is that man from the other who storms and laughs and mocks humanity, and sees through all its miserable pretenses without a thought of pardon or excuse! The “Journal” letters addressed to the ladies in Dublin, Madam P. P. T. and Madam Elderby, the two women who shared his every thought, now so well known as the “Journal to Stella,” are, of all Swift’s works, the only productions that touch the heart. They are not to be numbered among his “works” at all: publication of any kind never seems to have occurred to him, while writing: they are as frank as Pepy’s[spelling per original], and far more simple and true. They are English history and London life, and the eighteenth century, with its mannerisms and quaintness, all in one; and beyond and above every circumstance, they are Swift as he was in his deepest soul,--not as he appeared to men,--a human being full of tenderness, full of fun and innocent humor, full of genius and individual nature, but, above all, of true affection, the warmest domestic love. Passion is not in those delightful pages; but the endearing playfulness, the absolute freedom of self-revelation, the tender intimacy and confidence of members of the same family, whose interests and subjects of thought and talk and merry jests and delusions are one. They describe every day--nay, hour--of his life, every little expedition, all the ups and downs of his occupations