The “Conversation” appeared very late in Swift’s life, and he himself derived no pecuniary benefit from it. He had, with that almost careless generosity which distinguished him side by side with an odd kind of parsimony, given the manuscript to a not particularly reputable _protégée_ of his, Mrs. Barber, about 1736, and its first edition—a copy of which, presented to me by my friend Mr. Austin Dobson no small number of years ago, is here reproduced—bears date 1738, and was published in London by Motte and Bathurst. The composition, however, dates, as is known to a practical certainty, many years earlier. It is beyond any reasonable doubt identical with the “Essay on Conversation” which Swift noted as written or planned in 1708-10. The _nom de guerre_ on the title-page and to the introduction is Simon Wagstaff, one of the literary family of Staffs fathered by Swift and Steele in “Tatler” times. The manners are evidently those of Queen Anne’s day, and the whole chronology of the introduction (which, it will be seen, has all Swift’s mock carefulness and exactitude) is adjusted to the first decade of the eighteenth century. A hundred years later Scott (whose own evident relish for the “Conversation” struggled somewhat with a desire to apologise for its coarseness to the decencies even of his own day), hazarded the opinion that the abundance of proverbial expressions must be set down to the Dean’s own fancy, not to actual truth of reporting. It is always with great diffidence that I venture to differ with Sir Walter; but I think he was wrong here. One piece of indirect evidence—the extreme energy with which Chesterfield, at no very distant date from the publication, but after a lapse of fully a generation from the probable composition of the dialogues, inveighs against this very practice—would seem to be sufficient to establish its authenticity. For polite society, where its principles are not, as they generally are, pretty constant, is never so bitter as against those practices which were the mode and are now _démodés_.