mad. As we understand him, it seems to us that Swift's was an eminently
majestic spirit, moved by the tenderest of human sympathies, and capable
of ennobling love--a creature born to rule and to command, but with all
the noble qualities which go to make a ruler loved. It happened that
circumstances placed him early in his career into poverty and servitude.
He extricated himself from both in time; but his liberation was due to
an assertion of his best powers, and not to a dissimulation of them. Had
he been less honest, he might have risen to a position of great power,
but it would have been at the price of those very qualities which made
him the great man he was. That assertion cost him his natural vocation,
and Swift lived on to rage in the narrow confines of a Dublin Deanery
House. He might have flourished as the greatest of English statesmen--he
became instead a monster, a master-scourger of men, pitiless to them as
they had been blind to him. But monster and master-scourger as he proved
himself, he always took the side of the oppressed as against the
oppressor. The impulse which sent him abroad collecting guineas for
"poor Harrison" was the same impulse which moved him in his study at the
Deanery to write as "M.B. Drapier." On this latter occasion, however, he
also had an opportunity to lay bare the secret springs of oppression, an
opportunity which he was not the man to let go by.

No doubt Swift was not quite disinterested in the motives which prompted
him to enter the political arena for the second time. He hated the
Walpole Ministry in power; he resented his exile in a country whose
people he despised; and he scorned the men who, while they feared him,
had yet had the power to prevent his advancement. But, allowing for
these personal incentives, there was in Swift such a large sympathy for
the degraded condition of the Irish people, such a tender solicitude for
their best welfare, and such a deep-seated zeal for their betterment,
that, in measuring to him his share in the title of patriot, we cannot
but admit that what we may call his public spirit far outweighed his
private spleen. Above all things Swift loved liberty, integrity,
sincerity and justice; and if it be that it was his love for these,
rather than his love for the country, which inspired him to patriotic
efforts, who shall say that he does not still deserve well of us. If a
patriot be a man who nobly teaches a people to become aware of its
highest fu