softness of his nature ought to have been chiefly evoked--where the want of tenderness, indeed, left him a naked and irreclaimable savage--is equally impossible. If we decline to pursue the contradictory series further, it is in pity to the reader, not for want of materials at command. There is, in truth, no end to such materials. Swift was born in the year 1667. His father, who was steward to the Society of the King's Inn, Dublin, died before his birth and left his widow penniless. The child, named Jonathan after his father, was brought up on charity. The obligation due to an uncle was one that Swift would never forget, or remember without inexcusable indignation. Because he had not been left to starve by his relatives, or because his uncle would not do more than he could, Swift conceived an eternal dislike to all who bore his name and a haughty contempt for all who partook of his nature. He struggled into active life and presented himself to his fellow-men in the temper of a foe. At the age of fourteen he was admitted into Trinity College, Dublin, and four years afterward as _a special grace_--for his acquisitions apparently failed to earn the distinction--the degree of Bachelor of Arts was conferred upon him. In 1688, the year in which the war broke out in Ireland, Swift, in his twenty-first year, and without a sixpence in his pocket, left college. Fortunately for him, the wife of Sir William Temple was related to his mother, and upon her application to that statesman the friendless youth was provided with a home. He took up his abode with Sir William in England, and for the space of two years labored hard at his own improvement and for the amusement of his patron. How far Swift succeeded in winning the good opinion of Sir William may be learnt from the fact that when King William honored Moor Park with his presence he was permitted to take part in the interviews, and that when Sir William was unable to visit the King his _protégé_ was commissioned to wait upon His Majesty, and to speak on the patron's authority and behalf. The lad's future promised better things than his beginning. He resolved to go into the church, since preferment stared him in the face. In 1692 he proceeded to Oxford, where he obtained his Master's degree, and in 1694, quarreling with Sir William Temple, who coldly offered him a situation worth £100 a year, he quitted his patron in disgust and went at once to Ireland to take holy orders. He was ordained, and almost immediately afterward received the living of Kilroot in the diocese of Connor, the value of the living being about equal to that of the appointment offered by Sir William Temple.