him, unless Varina had been melted by the sacrifice he would have made for her, to be the most desirable thing in the world.
Macaulay, and after him Thackeray and many less distinguished writers, still persistently represent this part of Swift’s life as one of unmitigated hardship and suffering. The brilliant historian so much scorns the guidance of facts as to say that the humble student “made love to a pretty waiting-maid who was the chief ornament of the servant’s hall,” by way of explaining the strange yet tender story which has been more deeply discussed than any great national event, and which has made the name of Stella known to every reader.
Hester Johnson was a child of seven when young Swift, “the humble student,” went first to Moor Park. She was only fifteen when he returned, no longer as a sort of educated man of all work, but on the entreaty of the patron who had felt the want of his company so much as to forget all grievances. He was not now a humble student, Temple’s satellite and servant, but his friend and coadjutor, fully versed in all his secrets, and most likely already chosen as the guardian of his fame and the executor of his purposes and wishes; therefore it is not possible that Macaulay’s reckless picturesque description could apply to either time. Such an easy picture, however, has more effect upon the general imagination than the outcries of all the biographers, and the many researches made to show that Swift was not a sort of literary lackey, nor Stella an Abigail, but that he had learned to prize the advantages of his home there during his absence from it, and that during the latter part of his life at Moor Park at least his position was as good as that of a dependent can ever be.
Sir William Temple died, as Swift records affectionately, on the morning of January 27, 1699, “and with him all that was good and amiable among men.” He died, however, leaving the young man who had spent so many years of his life under his wing, scarcely better for that long subjection. Swift had a legacy of £100 for his trouble in editing his patron’s memoirs, and he got the profits of those memoirs, amounting, Mr. Forster calculates, to no less than £600—no inconsiderable present; but no one of the many appointments which were then open to the retainers of the great, and especially to a young man of letters, had come in Swift’s way. He himself, it is said, “still believed in the royal pledge for the first prebend that should fall vacant in Westminster or Canterbury,” but this was a hope which had accompanied him ever since he explained constitutional law to King William six years before, and could not be very lively after this long interval.
Thus Swift’s life came to a sudden and complete break. The great household, with its easy and uneasy jumble of patrons and dependents, fell asunder and ceased to be. The younger members of the family were jealous of the last bequest, which put the fame of their distinguished relative into the hands of a stranger, and did their best to set Swift down in his proper place, and to proclaim how much he was the creature of their uncle’s bounty. In the breaking up which followed, there were many curious partings and conjunctions. Why Hester Johnson, to whom Sir William had bequeathed a little independence, should have left her mother’s care and joined her fortunes to those of Mrs. Dingley instead, remains unexplained, unless indeed it was Mrs. Johnson’s second marriage which was the cause, or perhaps some vexation on the part of Lady Giffard—with whom the girl’s mother remained, notwithstanding her marriage—at the liberality of her brother to the child brought up in his house. Mrs. Johnson had other daughters, one of whom Swift saw, and describes favorably, years after. Perhaps Mrs. Dingley and the girl whom he had taught and petted from her childhood had taken Swift’s side in the Giffard-Temple difference, and so got on uneasy terms with the rest of the household, always faithful to my lady. At all events, at the breaking up Hester with her little fortune separated herself from the connection generally, and with her elder friend made an independent new beginning, as Swift also had to do. The fact seems of no particular importance, except that it afforded a reason for Swift’s interference in her affairs, and threw them into a combination which lasted all their lives.
Swift was thirty-one, too old to be beginning his career, yet young enough to turn with eager zest to the unknown, when this catastrophe occurred. Sir William Temple’s secretary and literary executor must have known, one would suppose, many people who could have helped him to promotion, but it would seem as if a kind of irresistible fate impelled him back to his native country, though he did not love it, and forced him to be an Irishman in spite of himself. The only post that came in his way was a chaplaincy, conjoined with a secretaryship, in the suite of the Earl of Berkeley, newly appointed one of the lords justices in Ireland, and just then entering upon his duties. Swift accepted the position in hopes that he should be continued as Lord Berkeley’s secretary, and possibly go with him afterward to more stirring scenes and a larger life, but this expectation was not carried out. Neither was his application—which seems at the moment a somewhat bold one—for the deanery of Derry successful, and all the preferment he succeeded in getting was another Irish living, with a better stipend and in a more favorable position than Kilroot: the parish of Laracor, within twenty miles of Dublin, which, conjoined with a prebend in St. Patrick’s and other small additions, brought him in £200 a year; a small promotion, indeed, yet not a bad income for the place and time. And he was naturally, as Lord Berkeley’s chaplain, in the midst of the finest company that Ireland could boast, one of a court more extended than Sir William Temple’s, yet of a similar description, and affording greater scope for his hitherto undeveloped social qualities. Satire more sportive than mere scorn, yet sometimes savage enough; an elephantine fun, which pleased the age; the puns and quibs in which the men emulated one another; the merry rhymes that pleased the ladies,—seem suddenly to have burst forth in him, throwing an unexpected gleam upon his new sphere.
Swift was always popular with women. He treated them roughly on many occasions, with an arrogance that grew with age, but evidently possessed that charm—a quality by itself and not dependent upon any laws of amiability—which attracts one sex to the other. Lady Berkeley, whom he describes as a woman of “the most easy conversation joined with the truest piety,” and her young daughters were charming and lively companions with whom the chaplain soon found himself at home. And notwithstanding his disappointment with respect to the preferment which Lord Berkeley might have procured for him and did not, it would seem that this period of hanging on at the little Irish court was amusing at least. The lively little picture of the inferior members of a great household which Swift made for the entertainment of the drawing-rooms on the occasion when Mrs. Frances Harris lost her purse, is one of the most vivid and amusing possible.
His stay in Ireland at this period lasted about two years, during which he paid repeated visits to his living at Laracor, and made trial of existence there also. The parsonage was in a ruinous condition; the church a miserable barn; the congregation numbered about twenty persons. Many are the tales of the new parson’s arrival there like a thunder-storm, frightening the humble curate and his wife with the arrogant roughness of manner which they, like many others, found afterward covered a great deal of genuine practical kindness. His mode of traveling, his sarcastic rhymes about the places at which he paused on the journey, the careless swing of imperious good and ill