e them all subscribe, 'for,' says he, 'the
author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for
him.'"[17] The other magnates of the faction joined with Swift in
befriending him. In those heated times a Roman Catholic who had won over
one party to his interests, by proclaiming his jacobite bias in verse,
would naturally have fallen under the ban of their opponents; but his
standing sponsor for the whig play, and the relations he maintained with
whig authors, kept the whigs from renouncing him. To his art in
attracting notice to his poetry through his politics, and in combining
the suffrages of embittered political antagonists, he owed the
unexampled success of the Homer subscription, which secured his
pecuniary independence. He had served both masters by turns, though in
unequal degrees, and then unreasonably complained to Caryll that some
people called him a whig, and others called him a tory.[18] He
disclaimed being either. He talked of his abhorrence of party violence,
and propounded his principles in dark unmeaning generalities from which
nothing can be gathered, except that he wished to avoid being held
responsible for any opinions whatever. He did not take up the position
that a purely literary undertaking was independent of politics. The
moment the tory cause declined he pleaded his neutrality, and seemed to
imagine that he could claim the support of all parties on the ground
that he adhered to none. The less wary patron who bespoke Windsor Forest
had to suffer for his jacobite zeal. He was arrested on Sept. 21, 1715,
and remained in the Tower till Feb. 8, 1717. Bolingbroke and Oxford were
impeached, and the selfish bargain they had brought about by
dishonourable means, that they might prolong their rule, annihilated
their power for ever.

"A person," says Warton, "of no small rank has informed me, that Mr.
Addison was inexpressibly chagrined at the noble conclusion of Windsor
Forest, both as a politician and as a poet,--as a politician, because it
so highly celebrated that treaty of peace which he deemed so pernicious
to the liberties of Europe; and as a poet, because he was deeply
conscious that his own Campaign, that gazette in rhyme, contained no
strokes of such genuine and sublime poetry."[19] This is one of those
plausible imputations which enemies propagate on the evidence of their
own suspicions, and which therefore require to be substantiated by
unexceptionable testimony. Warton had nothing