But if anyone thinks this argument paradoxical, there are plenty more. The conversation of the immortal eight corresponds exactly to that of the comedies of the time, and the times just earlier, which were written by the finest gentlemen. It meets us, of course less brilliantly put, in the “Wentworth Papers” and other documents of the time; and its very faults are exactly those which Steele and Addison, like their predecessors of the other sex in the Hotel Rambouillet sixty or seventy years earlier, were, just when these dialogues were written, setting themselves to correct. We know, of course, that Swift moved in a world of middle and even not always upper middle class society, as well as in the great world; and that, perhaps, at the date of the actual composition of this piece, he had not reached his fullest familiarity with the latter. But I have myself very little doubt that the dialogues express and were fully justified by the conversation he had actually heard among the less decorous visitors at Temple’s solemn board, in the livelier household of Lord Berkeley, in the circles of Ormond and Pembroke, and during his first initiation after 1707 in London society proper. How far he may have subsequently polished and altered the thing it is impossible to say; that he had done so to some extent is obvious from such simple matters as the use of the word “king” instead of “queen,” from the allusions to the “Craftsman,” and others. I doubt whether the picture became substantially false till far into the reign of George II., if it even became so then.