epped out of a sedan chair in the Poultry, whither he had come
with a tipsy Irish servant parading before him, who announced him,
bawling out his Reverence's name, whilst his master below was as yet
haggling with the chairman. I disliked this Mr. Swift, and heard many a
story about him, of his conduct to men, and his words to women. He could
flatter the great as much as he could bully the weak; and Mr. Esmond,
being younger and hotter in that day than now, was determined, should he
ever meet this dragon, not to run away from his teeth and his fire.

Men have all sorts of motives which carry them onwards in life, and are
driven into acts of desperation, or it may be of distinction, from a
hundred different causes. There was one comrade of Esmond's, an honest
little Irish lieutenant of Handyside's, who owed so much money to a camp
sutler, that he began to make love to the man's daughter, intending to
pay his debt that way; and at the battle of Malplaquet, flying away from
the debt and lady too, he rushed so desperately on the French lines,
that he got his company; and came a captain out of the action, and had
to marry the sutler's daughter after all, who brought him his cancelled
debt to her father as poor Roger's fortune. To run out of the reach of
bill and marriage, he ran on the enemy's pikes; and as these did not
kill him he was thrown back upon t'other horn of his dilemma. Our great
Duke at the same battle was fighting, not the French, but the Tories in
England; and risking his life and the army's, not for his country but
for his pay and places; and for fear of his wife at home, that only
being in life whom he dreaded. I have asked about men in my own company,
(new drafts of poor country boys were perpetually coming over to us
during the wars, and brought from the ploughshare to the sword,) and
found that a half of them under the flags were driven thither on account
of a woman: one fellow was jilted by his mistress and took the shilling
in despair; another jilted the girl, and fled from her and the parish
to the tents where the law could not disturb him. Why go on
particularizing? What can the sons of Adam and Eve expect, but to
continue in that course of love and trouble their father and mother set
out on? Oh, my grandson! I am drawing nigh to the end of that period of
my history, when I was acquainted with the great world of England and
Europe; my years are past the Hebrew poet's limit, and I say unto thee,
all my t