It augured ill for the Whig party when men of letters, who were not attached to any faction, took up their position, at this juncture, under the Tory banners. Amongst these, the most obnoxious was the Dean of St. Patrick’s, whose intimacy with the leaders of both parties rendered the choice which he meant to take still a problem. In one of his letters, he declared, that the best intelligence he got of public affairs was from the ladies; Mr. Addison, his friend, being nine times more secret to him than to anybody else, because he had the happiness of being thought his friend. Addison was right: for Swift’s friendship, at this period more especially, conferred no credit on any public man. Like that changeable reptile, the chameleon, he appeared of one colour in the morning, of another in the afternoon. Disappointed in the preceding year by Lord Halifax, who had written to him that he and Addison had entered into a confederacy never to “give over the pursuit, nor to cease reminding those who could serve him,” till his worth was placed in that light in which it ought to shine, Swift was now seriously undertaking to devote his great powers to that cause which prospered best, retaining still the friendship of Addison, and enjoying a free admittance into the houses of Halifax and Somers. It was in January, 1710, that the first invitation of Bolingbroke to Swift to dine with him, had foreboded no good to the party whose weakened fortresses such generals in literature were to attack. Swift’s answer, with his wonted assumed independence and freedom, that “if the Queen gave his lordship a dukedom and the garter honours, and the Treasury just at the end of them, he would regard him no more than he would a groat,”—meant no more than that he intended to accept the invitation, and all the good things that might follow this token of favour. It was in this year that a series of attacks on the former ministry was concerted between Bolingbroke, Swift, Atterbury, and Prior, in defence of the Tory party. They were published weekly, but were of short continuance, under the name of the “Examiner.” The essays contained nothing but political matter, very circumstantially and forcibly placed before the reader, and carried on with a subdued, but bitter irony, perhaps better calculated to influence the public mind than those bursts of indignant eloquence which startle the passions, and do not always convince the understanding.