“London, July 25th, 1711.
“I was this afternoon with Mr. Secretary at his office, and helped to hinder a man of his pardon, who is condemned for a rape. The under-secretary was willing to save him; but I told the secretary he could not pardon him without a favourable report from the judge; besides he was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue, and deserved hanging for something else, and so he shall swing.”
Swift was by no means inclined to forget such considerations; and his English birth makes its mark, strikingly enough, every now and then in his writings. Thus in a letter to Pope (Scott's Swift, vol. xix, p. 97), he says:—
“We have had your volume of letters.... Some of those who highly value you, and a few who knew you personally, are grieved to find you make no distinction between the English gentry of this kingdom, and the savage old Irish (who are only the vulgar, and some gentlemen who live in the Irish parts of the kingdom); but the English colonies, who are three parts in four, are much more civilized than many counties in England, and speak better English, and are much better bred.”
And again, in the fourth Drapier's Letter, we have the following:—
“A short paper, printed at Bristol, and reprinted here, reports Mr. Wood to say ‘that he wonders at the impudence and insolence of the Irish, in refusing his coin.’ When, by the way, it is the true English people of Ireland who refuse it, although we take it for granted that the Irish will do so too whenever they are asked.”—Scott's Swift, vol. iv, p. 143.
He goes further, in a good-humoured satirical paper, On Barbarous Denominations in Ireland, where (after abusing, as he was wont, the Scotch cadence, as well as expression), he advances to the “Irish brogue”, and speaking of the “censure” which it brings down, says:—
“And what is yet worse, it is too well known that the bad consequence of this opinion affects those among us who are not the least liable to such reproaches farther than the misfortune of being born in Ireland, although of English parents, and whose education has been chiefly in that kingdom.”—Ibid. vol. vii, p. 149.
But, indeed, if we are to make anything of Race at all, we must call that man an Englishman whose father comes from an old Yorkshire family, and his mother from an old Leicestershire one!
“The style of his conversation was very much of a piece with that of his writings, concise and clear and strong. Being one day at a sheriff's feast, who amongst other toasts called out to him, ‘Mr. Dean. The trade of Ireland!’ he answered quick: ‘Sir, I drink no memories!’