The story of the remaining seventeen years of Swift’s life—for, with all his maladies, bodily and mental, his strong frame withstood, for all that time of solitude and gloom, the wear of mortality—is perhaps better known than any other part of his biography. How his irritability and eccentricities and avarice grew upon him, so that his friends and servants had a hard task in humouring him, we learn from the traditions of others; how his memory began to fail, and other signs of breaking-up began to appear, we learn from himself;—
“See how the Dean begins to break!
Poor gentleman he droops apace;
You plainly find it in his face.
That old vertigo in his head
Will never leave him till he’s dead.
Besides, his memory decays;
He recollects not what he says;
He cannot call his friends to mind,
Forgets the place where last he dined,
Plies you with stories o’er and o’er;
He told them fifty times before.”
The fire of his genius, however, was not yet burnt out. Between 1729 and 1736 he continued to throw out satires and lampoons in profusion, referring to the men and topics of the day, and particularly to the political affairs of Ireland; and it was during this time that his Directions to Servants, his Polite Conversation, and other well-known facetiæ, first saw the light. From the year 1736, however, it was well known in Dublin that the Dean was no more what he had been, and that his recovery was not to be looked for. The rest will be best told in the words of Sir Walter Scott:—
“The last scene was now rapidly approaching, and the stage darkened ere the curtain fell. From 1736 onward the Dean’s fits of periodical giddiness and deafness had returned with violence; he could neither enjoy conversation nor amuse himself with writing, and an obstinate resolution which he had formed not to wear glasses prevented him from reading. The following dismal letter to Mrs. Whiteway [his cousin, and chief attendant in his last days] in 1740 is almost the last document which we possess of the celebrated Swift as a rational and reflecting being. It awfully foretells the catastrophe which shortly after took place.
‘I have been very miserable all night, and to-day extremely deaf and full of pain. I am so stupid and confounded that I cannot express the mortification I am under both in body and mind. All I can say is that I am not in torture, but I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know how your health is and your family. I hardly understand one word I write. I am sure my days will be very few; few and miserable they must be.
‘I am, for these few days,
‘Yours entirely,
‘J. Swift.’
‘If I do not blunder, it is Saturday, July 26th, 1740.’
“His understanding having totally failed soon after these melancholy expressions of grief and affection, his first state was that of violent and furious lunacy. His estate was put under the management of trustees, and his person confided to the care of Dr. Lyons, a respectable clergyman, curate to the Rev. Robert King, prebendary of Dunlavin, one of Swift’s executors. This gentleman discharged his melancholy task with great fidelity, being much and gratefully attached to the object of his care. From a state of outrageous frenzy, aggravated by severe bodily suffering, the illustrious Dean of St. Patrick’s sank into the situation of a helpless changeling. In the course of about three years he is only known to have spoken once or twice. At length, when this awful moral lesson had subsisted from 1743 until the 19th of October, 1745, it pleased God to release him from this calamitous situation. He died upon that day without a single pang, so gently that his attendants were scarce aware of the moment of his dissolution.”
Swift was seventy-eight years of age at the time of his death, having outlived all his contemporaries of the Queen Anne cluster of wits, with the exception of Bolingbroke, Ambrose Philips, and Cibber. Congreve had died in 1729; Steele in the same year; Defoe in 1731; Gay in 1732; Arbuthnot in 1735; Tickell in 1740; and Pope, who was Swift’s junior by twenty-one years, in 1744. Swift, therefore, is entitled in our literary histories to the place of patriarch as well as to that of chief among the Wits of Queen Anne’s reign; and he stands nearest to our own day of any of them whose writings we still read. As late as the year 1820 a person was alive who had seen Swift as he lay dead in the deanery before his burial, great crowds going to take their last look of him. “The coffin was open; he had on his head neither cap nor wig; there was not much hair on the front or very top, but it was long and thick behind, very white, and was like flax upon the pillow.” Such is the last glimpse we have of Swift on earth. Exactly ninety years afterwards the coffin was taken up from its resting-place in the aisle of the cathedral; and the skull of Swift, the white locks now all mouldered away from it, became an object of scientific curiosity. Phrenologically, it was a disappointment, the extreme lowness of the forehead striking everyone, and the so-called organs of wit, causality, and comparison being scarcely developed at all. There were peculiarities, however, in the shape of the interior, indicating larger capacity of brain than would have been inferred from the external aspect. Stella’s coffin was exhumed, and her skull examined at the same time. The examiners found the skull “a perfect model of symmetry and beauty.”