Like his own Gulliver among the Liliputians, the gigantic figure of Swift dominates his age. There is no man in history whose character and life is a more fascinating study, or whose personality awakens such powerful and varied emotions. We are awed by the splendour of the intellectual achievement which created and peopled a new world in the travels of _Gulliver_, which dominated from Laracor Parsonage the counsels of statesmen and the fortunes of governments, and which could, in the _Drapier’s Letters_, fan the imagination of a people to the white heat of revolutionary action. We turn to his private life and read his letters, and awe gives place to pity, not far removed from affection, for the proud heart, sore with all unutterable and measureless desires, and of gentlest tenderness to a simple girl. Too proud to be vain; too conscious of the vanities of the things of ambition to be ambitious; too constant and open a friend to care for the friendships of the shallow or conceited--in short, too consummate master of the world to care for the things of the world, like Alexander, despair took hold on him because the inexorable limits of time and space left him without a sphere worthy the exercise of the power he felt within him. There was something more than misanthropy in the man to whom the gentle Addison, in sending a copy of his _Travels in Italy_, could write:--“To Jonathan Swift, the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age, this work is presented by his most humble servant, the author.” [Illustration: (bust of Dean Swift)] There was little in the eighteenth century of spiritual fervour or moral enthusiasm. The mental fashion of the times was a cynical rationalism, of no depth, because unsupported by any genuine desire for truth. Swift, while he hated the shallowness of the prevailing mood of mind, caught the contagion, and could not altogether shake himself free from its effects, but became in his far more honest and more terrible cynicism profoundly contemptuous of the cynics. Stella’s smile alone, like a ray of light, ever broke the leaden grey of the sky over his head. When that star faded, there was nothing left for which to live, “the long day’s work was done,” and death was a friend leading to a rest-- “Ubi saeva indignatio Cor ulterius lacerare nequit.” Swift--in name ecclesiastic, in reality statesman and leader of men--marks the transition period from churchmen to poets, orators, and men of letters, in the remarkable grouping of the great names among the graduates of Dublin. Boswell records Johnson’s estimate of three of the “Irish clergy” of whom I have spoken. “Swift,” said he, “was a man of great parts, and the instrument of much good to his country; Berkeley was a profound scholar, as well as a man of fine imagination; but Ussher,” he said, “was the great luminary of the Irish Church, and a greater no Church could boast of--at least in modern times.”