The year 1710 was an important one in the life of Swift. In that year he came over to London, resolved in his own mind to have a settlement of accounts with the Whigs, or to break with them for ever. The Irish ecclesiastical business of the tenths and first-fruits was still his pretext, but he had many other arrears to introduce into the account. Accordingly, after some civil skirmishing with Somers, Halifax, and his other old friends, then just turned out of office, he openly transferred his allegiance to the new Tory administration of Harley and Bolingbroke. The 4th of October, not quite a month after his arrival in London, was the date of his first interview with Harley; and from that day forward till the dissolution of Harley's administration by the death of Queen Anne, in 1714, Swift's relations with Harley, St. John, and the other ministers, were more those of an intimate friend and adviser than a literary dependent. How he dined almost daily with Harley or St. John; how he bullied them, and made them beg his pardon when by chance they offended him--either, as Harley once did, by offering him a fifty-pound note, or, as St. John once did, by appearing cold and abstracted when Swift was his guest at dinner; how he obtained from them not only the settlement of the Irish business, but almost everything else he asked; how he used his influence to prevent Steele, Addison, Congreve, Rowe, and his other Whig literary friends, from suffering loss of office by the change in the state of politics, at the same time growing cooler in his private intercourse with Addison and poor Dick, and tending more to young Tory writers, such as Pope and Parnell; how, with Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, Harley, and St. John, he formed the famous club of the _Scriblerus_ brotherhood, for the satire of literary absurdities; how he wrote squibs, pamphlets, and lampoons innumerable for the Tories and against the Whigs, and at one time actually edited a Tory paper called the _Examiner_: all this is to be gathered, in most interesting detail, from his epistolary journal to Stella, in which he punctually kept her informed of all his doings during his long three years of absence. The following is a description of him at the height of his Court influence during this season of triumph, from the Whiggish, and therefore somewhat adverse, pen of Bishop Kennet:--