At last, just before the fall of Harley, preferment was found for the champion who had served him so well. It was the last that Swift would have chosen for himself--a kind of dignified banishment and exile from all he loved best. There was a question between the deanery of St. Patrick’s and that of Windsor, he himself says. Had he gone to the royal borough, what a curious change might have come to all his after life! Would Stella, one wonders, have found a red-roofed house under the cloister walls? and the dean lived, perhaps, to get the confidence of Queen Caroline, a queen worth pleasing? and looked upon the world with azure eyes softened by prosperity from the storied slopes, and worn his ribbon of the Garter with a proud inflation of the bosom which had always sighed for greatness? How many differences, how much softening, expanding, almost elevation, might not the kind hand of Fortune work in such great but troubled natures were it allowed to smooth and caress the roughness away! When the issue of the conflict between Harley and Bolingbroke became too evident to be doubted, Swift showed the softer side of his character in a very unexpected way. He ran away from the catastrophe like a nervous woman, hiding himself in a country parsonage till the blow should be struck and the calamity be overpast, a very curious piece of moral timidity or nervous over-sensitiveness, for which we are entirely unprepared. It was less extraordinary that he should write to offer himself to Harley as a companion in his solitude when the minister was fairly ousted, although even then Bolingbroke was bidding eagerly for his services. But whether Swift would have accepted these offers, or would have carried his evidently genuine attachment to Harley so far as permanently to withdraw with him from public life, was never known. For the victory of St. John was short indeed. “The Earl of Oxford was removed on Tuesday, the Queen died on Sunday. What a world is this, and how does Fortune banter us!” writes Bolingbroke. It was such a stroke of the irony of fate as Swift himself might have invented, and St. John applauded with the laughter of the philosopher. There was an end of political power for both, and the triumph and greatness of Swift’s reflected glory was over without hope of renewal.