st have
lashed and growled and torn the household with his gibes and scorn! What
would the steward say about the pride of them Irish schollards--and this
one had got no great credit even at his Irish college, if the truth were
known--and what a contempt his Excellency's own gentleman must have had for
Parson Teague from Dublin. (The valets and chaplains were always at war.
It is hard to say which Swift thought the more contemptible.) And what
must have been the sadness, the sadness and terror, of the housekeeper's
little daughter with the curling black ringlets and the sweet smiling
face, when the secretary who teaches her to read and write, and whom she
loves and reverences above all things--above mother, above mild Dorothea,
above that tremendous Sir William in his square-toes and periwig,--when
_Mr. Swift_ comes down from his master with rage in his heart, and has not
a kind word even for little Hester Johnson?

Perhaps, for the Irish secretary, his Excellency's condescension was even
more cruel than his frowns. Sir William _would_ perpetually quote Latin
and the ancient classics a propos of his gardens and his Dutch statues and
_plates-bandes_, and talk about Epicurus and Diogenes Laertius, Julius
Caesar, Semiramis, and the gardens of the Hesperides, Maecenas, Strabo
describing Jericho, and the Assyrian kings. A propos of beans, he would
mention Pythagoras's precept to abstain from beans, and that this precept
probably meant that wise men should abstain from public affairs. _He_ is a
placid Epicurean; _he_ is a Pythagorean philosopher; _he_ is a wise
man--that is the deduction. Does not Swift think so? One can imagine the
downcast eyes lifted up for a moment, and the flash of scorn which they
emit. Swift's eyes were as azure as the heavens; Pope says nobly (as
everything Pope said and thought of his friend was good and noble), "His
eyes are as azure as the heavens, and have a charming archness in them."
And one person in that household, that pompous, stately, kindly Moor Park,
saw heaven nowhere else.

But the Temple amenities and solemnities did not agree with Swift. He was
half-killed with a surfeit of Shene pippins; and in a garden-seat which he
devised for himself at Moor Park, and where he devoured greedily the stock
of books within his reach, he caught a vertigo and deafness which punished
and tormented him through life. He could not bear the place or the
servitude. Even in that poem of courtly condolence, fro