NOTE.
It was only proper and fitting that the citizens and freemen of the City of Dublin should express their sense of the high appreciation in which they held the writer of the "Drapier's Letters," and the man who had fought and was still fighting for an alleviation of the grievances under which their country suffered. The Dublin Corporation, in 1729, presented Swift with the freedom of the city, an honour rarely bestowed, and only on men in high position and power. To Swift the honour was welcome. It was a public act of justification of what he had done, and it came gratefully to the man who had at one time been abused and reviled by the people of the very city which was now honouring him. Furthermore, such a confirmation of his acts set the seal of public authority which was desirable, even if not necessary, to a man of Swift's temper. He could save himself much trouble by merely pointing to the gold box which was presented to him with the freedom. Even in this last moment, however, of public recognition, he was not allowed to receive it without a snarl from one of the crowd of the many slanderers who found it safer to backbite him. Lord Allen may have been wrong in his head, or ill-advised, or foolishly over-zealous, but his ill-tempered upbraiding of the Dublin Corporation for what he called their treasonable extravagance in thus honouring Swift, whom he deemed an enemy of the King, was the act of a fool. Swift was not the man to let the occasion slip by without advantage. In the substance of what he said to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of Dublin in accepting their gift, he replied to the charges made by Lord Allen, and also issued a special advertisement by way of defence against what the lord had thought fit to say.
Both these pieces are here reprinted; the first from a broadside in the British Museum, and the second from a manuscript copy in the Forster Collection at South Kensington.