The little parish of Laracor, north of Dublin, came to Swift shortly after his return to Ireland as chaplain to Lord Berkeley. “Here he had a glebe and a horse, and became domesticated,” so far as it was possible for the man to be domesticated anywhere.
Swift’s fluctuations between Ireland and London have been the subject of much comment and criticism. He had by no means settled down to the “jog-trot duties” of a small Irish vicar. Swift, the churchman, the litterateur, and the politician were much one and the same thing; and, in spite of his indiscretions, he did good service, though, to be sure, his sincerity was doubted. A story is told, of the occasion when he was urged for Bishop of Hereford, that the Archbishop of York stated to his queen “that inquiries should first be made as to whether the man is really a Christian.” He did not achieve the office, but was reconciled with the less influential deanery of St. Patrick’s at Dublin.
Swift was born in Dublin at a house in Hoey’s Court, now (?) disappeared, in 1667. He died in 1745, and is buried, not among the literary giants at Westminster, but in St. Patrick’s at Dublin, the venue of his deanship.
Swift as a satirist was unassailable in his time, and his literary reputation in general is without doubt—by reason of its versatility—greater than many a more prolific writer.
The first announcement of this master, at once comic and caustic, was the “Tale of a Tub” and “The Battle of the Books,” when followed in rapid review various political and social tracts, the inimitable “Gulliver” (1727) and the “Polite Conversation.” “Cadenus and Vanessa” appeared without the author’s consent soon after the death of its heroine, Miss Hester Vanhomrigh, in 1723; but the “Diary to Stella,” the lady whom he afterward married, did not appear until long after the author’s death.
Swift’s literary reputation—“at the head of the English prose-writers”—has been best summed up by his friend Pope in six short lines:
“...Whatever title please thine ear,
Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff or Gulliver!
Whether you choose Cervantes’ serious air,
Or laugh and shake in Rabelais’ easy chair,
Or praise the court, or magnify mankind,
Or thy grieved country’s copper chains unbind.”
As the river Liffey, which flows through Dublin, joins the Irish Sea, it expands into a noble bay, which is guarded on the one side by the Hill of Howth, and on the other by Killiney Hill, near Kingstown.
Dublin has long been famous for the manufacture of poplin, dear to the hearts of the ladies. For many years the manufacture had declined, but a recent stimulus appears to have been given it. It was about the year 1780 that the trade first assumed a degree of importance in Dublin, though it had been introduced by the French Huguenots in the reign of William III. From that period till the Union in 1800, it had been gradually increasing in extent; but suddenly declined after the transference of the Irish Parliament to London; and Irishmen are fain to link the two events together as cause and effect.
As the author has had occasion to say before, Ireland is not the saddened, sodden, blighted land that the calamity howlers and pessimists in general would have us believe.