In 1724 Swift, who hated the English Government if he did not love Ireland, wrote the famous "Drapier's Letters" against a job in copper currency, and gained high popularity.
In 1726 he gave to the world the most famous of his books, "Gulliver's Travels," in which his gift of narrative, his amazing power of being truthful in the minutest details of the most extravagant imaginations, his misanthropy, his irony, and his delight in unsavoury things, are all carried to the highest perfection. In 1729 came the "Modest Proposal" for eating Irish children; in 1738 his "Polite Conversation" and "Directions to Servants," with the same merit of humour, and the same inveterate fault.
In visits to London (1726, 1727) Swift had enjoyed the society of his old friends and comrades in letters; and hoped there, perhaps, to find a Fountain of Youth. He felt himself slipping into the vice of hoarding; and rusting in a second-rate society. Bolingbroke had been allowed to return from exile; the banished King had found him worthless as a statesman: he had said his worst against the banished King; nobody wanted Bolingbroke and nobody was afraid of him. He played the philosopher, and Swift did not believe in his affectation of philosophy. Arbuthnot, Swift loved, Pope he had always admired; and he tried to protect Gay from his own reckless improvidence. He ridiculed, in "Gulliver," the proofs brought against Atterbury as a Jacobite agent: if Swift was not convinced by the evidence he must have shut his eyes very hard.
In January, 1728, Stella died: Swift tried to fill the gap in his life by activity in Irish politics. His disease, apparently some malady of the ear which gradually affected the brain, became more unendurable, but he had still to write some of his most powerful satires in verse. Then his memory began to fail, and he drifted slowly into the half-unconscious dotage of his last five years, dying on 19 October, 1745, unconscious, probably, of the meteoric adventure of Prince Charles.
The failure of his party, of his political ambition, and measureless hopes of greatness, gave Swift the retirement and the leisure to produce his greatest works. If fortune had "bantered us" as Bolingbroke said, he turned and bantered Fate and mankind. In the long array of his volumes, so seldom opened, are many brief flights, in verse and prose, which are full of entertainment, of wild fancy, orderly and gravely presented; and there is the "Journal to Stella," with its infinite tenderness of affection; and the Letters, the confidences of the wits from romantic Charles Wogan, who rescued from prison the bride of a King, and died as Governor of the appropriate province of La Mancha, to those of Pope and Arbuthnot and Gay. The works of Swift are a library in themselves.
De Foe.
"One man in his time plays many parts," and no man played more parts than Daniel Foe or De Foe. The son of a butcher in St. Giles's, born in 1661, he received at a Nonconformist school an education that was a sufficient basis for literary undertakings, but not tending to such "classical" flights as led young University men to profitable sinecures under Government. He is said to have been out under Monmouth in 1685. He betook himself to commerce of various kinds, thus acquiring little or no money (in 1692 he "broke," like Mr. Badman), but a competent knowledge of the currents of trade, and the courses of financial speculation, exhibited in his "Essay on Projects," projects, educational and social as well as financial (1698). In 1701 his "True Born Englishman," showing in the interest of William III that the English are a mixed race, was successful.
In 1702 his famous "Shortest Way with the Dissenters" was discovered to be, not a candid plea for the Church of England, but an irritating parody of High Church pretensions, nearly as serious as Swift's apology for cannibalism. De Foe was pilloried, but not pelted, and imprisoned for his waggery; was released, probably through the agency of Harley, Lord Oxford, the wavering and enigmatic "Dragon" of Swift's correspondence; and while editing and indeed writing a weekly "Review," the precursor in its social columns of Steele's "Tatler," De Foe served Harley in divers subterranean ways. In Scotland, in the autumn of 1706, he acted as Harley's spy and newsagent: his letters to Harley contain an admirable picture of the struggles for and against the Union of Scotland and England, and of De Foe's own versatile, acute and daring character. He made himself "all things to all men," could talk to each citizen as a member of his own trade, explained all the economic conditions of the country, understood, and did not revere, the Kirk, and the preachers; and, by securing the services of that lively and humorous rogue and sham-fanatic, Ker of Kersland, broke up an unholy alliance between the extreme "Cameronians" and the Jacobite gentry and clansmen of Perthshire and Angus. They had intended to break up the Parliament; but the wild Whigs did not keep tryst.
It is plain that Harley treated De Foe very ill, and that, like most spies, he was underpaid. Still he was working for a cause which he had at heart; as he was later, when, to all appearance, playing the part of journalist in the Tory or even Jacobite interest under Government.
The needy De Foe was a man of dark corners, an absolute "Johannes Factotum". Swift called him "a grave, sententious, dogmatical rogue". He professed that he received assistance from "The Divine Spirit".