The Marlboroughs, who had been living on the Continent since their disgrace, came back after this new change. The duke’s entry into London “in great state, attended by hundreds of gentlemen on horseback and some of the nobility in their coaches” a few days after, is reported by one of the chroniclers of the time. The duchess followed him soon after, and whether her temper and disposition had so far mended as to allow him to enjoy the peace he had so often longed for by the side of her he loved, he had at least a tranquil evening-time among his friends and dependents, and the grandchildren who were to be his heirs—for only one of his own children survived at his death. Duchess Sarah lived long after him.
BISHOP GILBERT BURNET.
ENGRAVED BY R. A. MULLER, FROM MEZZOTINT IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM BY JOHN SMITH, AFTER THE PAINTING BY JOHN RILEY.
She was sixty-two when he died, but, nevertheless, in spite of temper and every other failing, was still charming enough to be sought in marriage by two distinguished suitors—one of them that proud Duke of Somerset whose first wife had supplanted her at court. She answered this potentate in the only way consistent with the dignity of a woman of her age and circumstances; but added, with a noble pride which sat well upon her, that had she been but half her age, not the emperor of the world should ever have filled the place sacred to great Marlborough. It is a pity we could not leave her here in the glow of this proud tenderness and constancy. She was capable of that and many other noble things, but not of holding her tongue, of withdrawing into the background, or accepting in other ways the natural change from maturity to age. Her restless energies, however, had some legitimate outlet. She finished Blenheim, and she wrote innumerable explanations and memoranda, which finally shaped themselves into that “Account of the Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough from her first Coming to Court,” which is one of the most interesting of all mémoires pour servir. This was published in her eighty-second year, and it is curious to think of the vivacious and unsubdued spirit which could throw itself back so completely out of the calm of age into the conflicts and the very atmosphere of what had passed thirty years before. And she did her best to prepare for a great life of Marlborough which should set him right with the world. But her time was not always so innocently employed, and it is to be feared that she wrangled to the end of her life. The “Characters” of her contemporaries which she left behind are full of spite and malice. There was no peace in her soul. A characteristic little story is told of her in an illness. “Last year she had lain a great while ill without speaking; her physicians said she must be blistered or she would die. She called out, ‘I won’t be blistered and I won’t die!’ and apparently for the moment kept her word.” She lived long enough to be impaled by Pope in verses which an involuntary admiration for this daring, dauntless, impassioned woman makes us reluctant to quote. She survived almost her entire generation, and was capable of living a hundred years more had nature permitted. She was eighty-four when she succumbed at last, in the year 1744, thirty years after the death of the queen.
Chapter III
THE AUTHOR OF “GULLIVER”
THERE are few figures in history, and still fewer in literature, which have occupied so great a place in the world’s attention, or which retain so strong a hold upon its interest, as that of Jonathan Swift, dean of St. Patrick’s. It is considerably more than a century since he died, old and mad and miserable: a man who had never been satisfied with life, or felt his fate equal to his deserts; who disowned and hated (even when he served it) the country of his birth, and with fierce and bitter passion denounced human nature itself, and left a sting in almost every individual whom he loved; a man whose preferment and home were far from the center of public affairs, and who had no hereditary claim on the attention of England. Yet when the English reader, or he who in the farthest corner of the New World has the same right to English literature as that which the subjects of Queen Victoria hold,—as the American does—from the subjects of Queen Anne,—reads the title at the head of this page, neither the one nor the other will have any difficulty in distinguishing among all the ecclesiastical dignitaries of that age who it is that stands conspicuous as the dean. Not in royal Westminster or Windsor is this man to be found; not the ruler of any great cathedral in the rich English midlands where tradition and wealth and an almost Catholic supremacy united to make the great official of the church as important as any official of the state—but far from those influences, half as far as America is now from the center of English society and the sources of power, one of a nation which the most obstinate conservative of to-day will not hesitate to allow was then deeply wronged and cruelly misgoverned by England, many and anxious as have been her efforts since to make amends. Yet among the many strange examples of that far more than republican power (not always most evident in republics) by which a man of native force and genius, however humble, finds his way to the head of affairs and impresses his individuality upon his age, when thousands born to better fortunes are swept away as nobodies, Swift is one of the most remarkable. His origin, though noted by himself, not without a certain pride, as from a family of gentry not unknown in their district, was in his own person almost as lowly and poor as it was possible to be. The posthumous son of a poor official in the Dublin law-courts, owing his education to the kindness, or perhaps less the kindness than the family pride, of an uncle, Swift entered the world as a hanger-on, waiting what fortune and a patron might do for him, a position scarcely comprehensible to young Englishmen nowadays, though then the natural method of advancement. Such a young man in the present day would betake himself to his books, with the practical aim of an examination before him, and the hope of immediate admission through that gate to the public service and all its chances. It is amusing to speculate what the difference might have been had Jonathan Swift, coming raw with his degree from Trinity College, Dublin, shouldered his robust way to the head of an examination list, and thus making himself at a stroke independent of patronage, gone out to reign and rule and distribute justice in India, or pushed himself upward among the gentlemanly mediocrities of a public office. One asks would he have found that method more successful, and endured the desk and the routine of his office, and
“got on” with the head of his department, better than he endured the monotony and subjection, the possible slights and spurns of Sir William Temple’s household, which he entered, half servant, half equal, the poor relation, the secretary and companion of that fastidious philosopher? The question may be cut short by the almost certainty that Swift could not have gained his promotion in any such way; but his age had not learned the habit of utilizing education, and he was one of the idle youths of fame. “He was stopped of his degree,” he himself writes in his autobiographical notes, “for dullness and insufficiency, and at last hardly admitted in a manner little to his credit, which is called in that college speciali gratia.” Recent biographers have striven to prove that this really meant nothing to Swift’s discredit, but it is to be supposed that in such a matter he is himself the best authority.