r
errands, but with the air of patronizing you, and after fighting your
battles masked in the street or the press, would have kept on his hat
before your wife and daughters in the drawing-room, content to take that
sort of pay for his tremendous services as a bravo.(30)

He says as much himself in one of his letters to Bolingbroke:--"All my
endeavours to distinguish myself were only for want of a great title and
fortune, that I might be used like a lord by those who have an opinion of
my parts; whether right or wrong is no great matter. And so the reputation
of wit and great learning does the office of a blue ribbon or a
coach-and-six."(31)

Could there be a greater candour? It is an outlaw, who says, "These are my
brains; with these I'll win titles and compete with fortune. These are my
bullets; these I'll turn into gold"; and he hears the sound of
coaches-and-six, takes the road like Macheath, and makes society stand and
deliver. They are all on their knees before him. Down go my lord bishop's
apron, and his grace's blue ribbon, and my lady's brocade petticoat in the
mud. He eases the one of a living, the other of a patent place, the third
of a little snug post about the Court, and gives them over to followers of
his own. The great prize has not come yet. The coach with the mitre and
crosier in it, which he intends to have for _his_ share, has been delayed
on the way from St. James's; and he waits and waits until nightfall, when
his runners come and tell him that the coach has taken a different road,
and escaped him. So he fires his pistols into the air with a curse, and
rides away into his own country.(32)

Swift's seems to me to be as good a name to point a moral or adorn a tale
of ambition, as any hero's that ever lived and failed. But we must
remember that the morality was lax--that other gentlemen besides himself
took the road in his day--that public society was in a strange disordered
condition, and the State was ravaged by other condottieri. The Boyne was
being fought and won, and lost--the bells rung in William's victory, in the
very same tone with which they would have pealed for James's. Men were
loose upon politics, and had to shift for themselves. They, as well as old
beliefs and institutions, had lost their moorings and gone adrift in the
storm. As in the South Sea Bubble almost everybody gambled; as in the
Railway mania--not many centuries ago--almost every one took his unlucky
share; a man of that tim