provoked all his brothers of the quill round, none of them will enter into controversy with him. This fellow, who had excellent natural parts, but wanted a small foundation of learning, is a lively instance of those wits, who, as an ingenious author says, 'will endure but one skimming.' The Observator was almost in the same condition; but since our party struggles have run so high, he is much mended for the better; which is imputed to the charitable assistance of some outlying friends. These two authors might, however, have flourished some time longer, had not the controversy been taken up by much abler hands. The Examiner is a paper which all men, who speak without prejudice, allow to be well written. Though his subject will admit of no greater variety, he is continually placing it in so many different lights, and endeavouring to inculcate the same thing by so many beautiful changes of expression, that men who are concerned in no party may read him with pleasure. His way of assuming the question in debate is extremely artful; and his letter to Crassus is, I think, a masterpiece. As these papers are supposed to have been written by several different hands, the critics will tell you that they can discern a difference in their styles and beauties, and pretend to observe, that the first Examiners abound chiefly in wit, the last in humour. Soon after their first appearance, came out a paper, from the other side, called the Whig Examiner, written with so much fire and in so excellent a style, as put the Tories in no small pain for their favourite hero. Every one cried Bickerstaff must be the author; and people were the more confirmed in this opinion upon its being so soon laid down, which seemed to show that it was only written to bind the Examiners to their good behaviour, and was never designed to be a weekly paper. The Examiners, therefore, have no one to combat with at present, but their friend the Medley; the author of which paper, though he seems to be a man of good sense, and expresses it luckily enough now and then, is, I think, for the most part, perfectly a stranger to fine writing. I presume I need not tell you, that the Examiner carries much the more sale, as it is supposed to be written by the direction and under the eye of some great persons who sit at the helm of affairs, and is consequently looked on as a sort of public notice which way they are steering us. The reputed author is Dr. Swift, with the assistance sometimes of Dr. Atterbury and Mr. Prior.... Before

...

I proceed further in the account of our weekly papers, it will be necessary to inform you that, at the beginning of the winter, to the infinite surprise of all men, Mr. Steele flung up his Tatler; and, instead of Isaac Bickerstaff, subscribed himself Richard Steele to the last of those papers, after a handsome compliment to the town for their kind acceptance of his endeavours to divert them.... The expiration of Bickerstaff's lucubrations was attended with much the same consequences as the death of Meliboeus's ox in Virgil; as the latter engendered swarms of bees, the former immediately produced whole swarms of little satirical scribblers. . . . One cause for the laying down the Tatler was want of matter; and, indeed, this was the prevailing opinion in town, when we were surprised all at once by a paper called the Spectator, which was promised to be continued every day, and was written in so excellent a style, with so nice a judgment, and such a noble profusion of wit and humour, that it was not difficult to determine it could come from no other hands than those that had penned the lucubrations. . . . The Spectator, whom we regard as our shelter from that cloud of false wit and impertinence which was breaking in upon us, is in every one's hand and a constant topic for our morning conversation at tea tables and coffee-houses. We had at first, indeed, no manner of notion how a diurnal paper could be continued in the spirit and style of our present Spectators; but, to our no small surprise, we find them still rising upon us, and can only wonder from whence so prodigious a run of wit and learning can proceed; since some of our best judges seem to think that they have hitherto in general outshone even the Squire's first Tatlers."

Page 173. Two great men: Marlborough and Godolphin came into office as Tories, and became Whigs on the war policy. Whigs and Tories professed to hold much the same views on the main questions of constitutional thecry: except the extreme nonresistance Tories, whom Swift ignores.

Page 174. Half-a-dozen others. Swift probably means that, accepting the term Whig as it was used at the Revolution, when it meant a supporter of constitutionalism, the name might be applied to most of the Tories who came into office in 1710; for they accepted the Revolution, supported the Act of Settlement, and discountenanced the theory of kingship by divine right. Like the Whigs they (nominally at least) considered that Anne

reigned by a parliamentary title. Among the ministers was the Duke of Shrewsbury, Lord High Treasurer, who had always been a prominent Whig.

Page 175. The Pretender. The Revolution of 1688 had been carried out with great unanimity. The bulk of the nation acquiesced in the step which got rid of a Roman Catholic sovereign, who was anxious to change the religion of the English people by French aid. But the Revolution brought over a foreign dynasty, and threw the administration into the hands of a faction which seemed to represent only one, and that not the most important, interest in the state. A reaction soon took place; a formidable Jacobite party numbering many of the High Churchmen was in existence throughout William III.'s reign. With the accession of Anne the Jacobite cause gained rather than lost. James II. was now dead, and his son, the Pretender, might claim exemption from the guilt of his father's sins. No one now thought of dethroning the reigning sovereign; comparatively few were ready to risk much to bring back the Stuarts; but at the same time very many people in England would have gladly acquiesced in the succession of James Edward on the death of Anne. This the Tory leaders knew, and some of them were engaged in constant intercourse with St. Germains, with the more or less definite object of proclaiming the Prince on the Queen's death. In fact the whole of the active Tory party was tainted with the suspicion of Jacobitism; and the suspicion was a strong card in the hands of their rivals. For the hatred to foreigners and Papists was as keen as ever among the country gentlemen and landed proprietors on whom the Tory leaders relied. This Swift knew, and he was extremely anxious to disclaim the imputation of favouring the Pretender. In his case the disclaimer was doubtless sincere. It is probable that to the end he was not made fully acquainted with the measures by which Bolingbroke was preparing for a restoration of the Stuarts.

Page 176. Supposed father. It was in many quarters believed that the Pretender, James Edward, who was born in June, 1688, was only a suppositious child of James II. and Mary of Modena.

Piece of secret history, &c. Referring probably to Marlborough's and Godolphin's trafficking with James II. after the Revolution, and in particular their betrayal of the intended

expedition to Brest in 1694, to him. The affair was probably known to Harley.

Page 176, 28 seq. The title of Anne depended on the Bill of Rights (1 Will. and Mary, s. 2, cap. 2), which declares "that William and Mary, Prince and Princess of Orange, be, and be declared, King and Queen of England, France, and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging . . . and after their deceases the said crown and royal dignity of the said kingdoms and dominions to be to the heirs of the body of the said Princess [Mary]; and for default of such issue to the Princess Anne of Denmark and the heirs of her body."

Page 177. Supreme power. A reminiscence of Hobbes, whose doctrine of the supremacy of the sovereign power in a state had no small influence upon the Tory theory of Government.

That settlement, &c. The reference is to the Bill of Rights, Art. VIII. "Thereunto the said Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, do, in the name of all the people aforesaid, most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs, and posterities, for ever." The words are repeated in the Act of Settlement, 1700 (12 and 13 Will. iii.).

Page 178. The Conduct of the Allies. The War of the Spanish Succession was ostensibly entered upon (May, 1702) by England, the Netherlands, the Emperor, and the German Princes, in order to set aside the will of Charles II. of Spain, by which the whole of the Spanish dominions had been left to Philip of Anjou, the grandson of Louis XIV. of France. It was rightly felt that if the resources of both the French and Spanish monarchies were at the disposal of the House of Bourbon, England, Holland, and the minor German princes would no longer be safe from the ambition of the French king. Hence it was that William III.and Marlborough strove to bring the Protestant states to support the counter-claim of the Austrian Archduke Charles on the Spanish crown. So far, though Swift would not allow it, the Whigs might urge that they were pursuing a policy necessary alike to Europe and to England. But the victories of Marlborough and Eugene in Flanders and Germany, and the financial exhaustion of his country, reduced Louis XIV. to the greatest distress. In 1706, and again in 1709, he made overtures of peace on terms which should have satisfied the legitimate desires of the allies. He would have consented to give the Dutch the "barrier" fortresses of the frontier, including even Lille and

Tournay, and to allow the claims of the Archduke to Spain and her colonial possessions, only reserving for his grandson the Italian dominions of the Spanish monarchy. But by this time the Whig interest in England had become identified with the war policy. To have made peace might have concentrated public attention or home politics, and especially on church matters, in which their rivals were the popular party. Louis' offers were rejected, contrary to the advice of Marlborough himself. In 1710 Louis was in such straits that he made even more favourable proposals. Besides giving up territory to the Dutch, the Empire, the Duke of Savoy, and to the English (in North America) he consented to surrender the whole Spanish monarchy to the Archduke Charles. But the English ministry, as if determined to drive him to desperation, imposed on him the intolerably humiliating condition that he should join with the allies in expelling his grandson Philip from Spain. To this Louis would not consent, and the conferences were broken off. After 1710 then, at any rate, Swift might fairly claim that every justification or excuse for the war was over. Further in the autumn of 1711 the Emperor Joseph II. died, and the Archduke Charles succeeded to the imperial dominions. This put an entirely different aspect on the matter. Had the allies succeeded in forcing Louis to submit, and driving Philip V. from Spain, the Spanish and Austrian territories would have been united under one ruler, and the monarchy of Charles V. would have been restored. Swift might well urge that it was useless to spend English blood and treasure to limit the growth of the House of Bourbon, when the only result would be to aggrandise enormously the House of Hapsburg.

Page 185. Swift was perfectly right in thinking that the Spanish Bourbons would speedily forget their French origin. Within ten years from the date of this pamphlet England and France are found in alliance against Spain.

PROPOSAL FOR CORRECTING THE ENGLISH

TONGUE.

Page 193. Swift's ideas of ethnology and the history of language are not to be implicitly accepted.

Page 196. Your lordship cite. It is curious to find Swift, a