daughter, and when informed that she was Mrs. Pilkington, he said, “What, that poor little child married! God help her, she is early inured to trouble." The next Sunday the Dean engaged Mr. Pilkington to preach for him at St. Patrick's church, when Mrs. Pilkington was struck by observing that Dr. Swift went through the whole service himself without once looking into a book. After church he was surrounded by poor people, and gave to all but one old woman with dirty hands, to whom he said that "though a beggar, water was not so scarce but that she might have washed them." He afterwards invited the Pilkingtons to supper, handed Mrs. Pilkington to the coach, and slipped into her hand the exact sum of money that she and her husband had given at the offertory in the morning, as well as the coach-hire.

The Rev. Thomas Pilkington was originally introduced by Dr. Delany to the notice of Dean Swift, and obtained a humble post in his cathedral. He had talent and vivacity, but was totally devoid of principle, and imposed upon Dr. Swift, who, on Pilkington's going to England, gave him a letter of recommendation to his old friend Barber, then Lord Mayor of London, who made Pilkington his chaplain. Swift also gave him introductions to Pope, Bolingbroke, and other friends. But Pilkington grew impudent and profligate, and Lord Bolingbroke and Lord Mayor Barber complained to Swift of the discredit that had been occasioned by his recommendation.

Mrs. Pilkington did not turn out much better than her husband: she was clever. For a short time she kept a pamphlet and print shop in Pall Mall; in 1746 we find her in a more lowly locality-in White Lion-street, Seven Dials, at the sign of the Dove, in "a pretty decent room" for which she paid three pounds a-year: here she advertised that she drew petitions and wrote letters "on any subject except the law."

SWIFT TO A FAVOURED FAIR CORRESPONDENT.

The Dean, in a playful letter to Mrs. Pendarves, dated 1734, writes:

A pernicious heresy prevails here [in Dublin] among the men, that it is the duty of your sex to be fools in every article except what is merely domestic; and to do the ladies justice, there are very few of thei without a good share of that heresy, except upon one article, that they have as little regard for family business as for the improvement of their minds !

:

I have had for some time a design to write against this heresy, but have now laid those thoughts aside, for fear of making both sexes my enemies however, if you will come over to my assistance, I will carry you about among our adversaries and dare them to produce one instance where your want of ignorance makes you affected, pretending, conceited, disdainful, endeavouring to speak like a scholar, with twenty more faults objected by themselves, their lovers, or their husbands. But I fear your case is desperate, for I know you never laugh at a jest before you understand it; and I much question whether you understand a fan, or have so good a fancy at silks as others; and your way of spelling would not be intelligible.

Nothing vexes me so much with relation to you, as that with all my disposition to find faults, I was never once able to fix upon anything that I could find amiss, although I watched you narrowly; for when I found we were to lose you soon, I kept my eyes and ears always upon you, in hopes that you would make some boutade. It is, you know, a French word, and signifies a sudden jerk from a horse's hiuder feet which you did not expect, because you thought him for some months a sober animal, and this has been my case with several ladies whom I chose for friends; in a week, a month, or a year, hardly one of them failed to give me a boutade; therefore, I command you will obey my orders, in coming over hither for one whole year; after which, upon the first boutade you make, I will give you my pass to be gone.

Next year, 1735, the Dean writes to the same lady, from Dublin:

I had some intention to go to Bath, but I had neither time nor leisure for such a journey; those times are past with me, and I am older by fourscore years since the first time I had the honour to see you. I got a giddiness by raw fruit when I was a lad in England, which I never could be wholly rid of, and it is now too late, so that I confine myself entirely to a domestic life. I am visited seldom, but visit much seldomer. I dine alone like a king, having few acquaintance, and those lessening daily. This town is not what you left it, and I impute the cause altogether to your absence.

It was impossible to answer your letter from Paradise-the old Grecians of Asia called every fine garden by that name; and, besides, when I consulted some friends, they conceived that, wherever you resided, that must needs be a paradise. Yet this was too general & direction if you were in a humour of rambling, unless the post-office had constant intelligence of your stages. With great submission I am sorry to find a lady make use of the word paradise, from which you turned us all out as well as yourselves; and pray tell me freely how many of your sex bring it along with them to their husband's houses? I was still at a loss where this Paradise* of yours might be, when Mrs. Donellan discovered the secret; she said it was a place (I forget in what shire)

"Paradise." Sir John Stanley's villa at North End was called "Paradise;" but there was another place where Mrs. Pendarves was staying with her mother, which was also called Paradise.

where K. Charles 1st in his troubles used to ride because he found good watering for his horse! If that be all, we have ten thousand such paradises in this kingdom, of which you may have your choice, as my bay mare is ready to depose.

It is either a very low way of thinking, or as great a failure of education in either sex, to imagine that any man increases in his critical faculty in proportion to his wit and learning; it falls out always directly to the contrary. A common carpenter will work more cheerfully for a gentleman skilled in his trade than for a conceited fool who knows nothing of it. I must despise a lady who takes me for a pedant, and you have made me half angry with so many lines in your letter which look like a kind of apology for writing to me. Besides, to say the truth, the ladies in general are extremely mended both in writing and reading since I was young; only it is to be hoped that, in proper time, gaming and dressing, with some other accomplishments, may reduce them to their native ignorance. A woman of quality, who had excellent good sense, was formerly my correspondent, but she scrawled and spelt like a Wapping wench, having been brought up in a Court at a time before reading was thought of any use to a female; and I know several others of very high quality with the same defect.

I believe, madam, I am mistaken, and think myself to be in your company, where I could never be weary; no, it is otherwise, for in such a case I would rather choose to be your silent hearer and looker-on. But whether you may not be tired for the three minutes past is a different question; the surest way is to put an end to the debate by concluding by assuring you that I am, with the truest respect and esteem, &c., JONATH. SWIFT.*

SWIFT AND RABELAIS.

Swift was a great admirer of Rabelais; and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went so far as to say that "Swift had stolen all his humour from Cervantes and Rabelais."

Among the Dean's books, sold by auction, 1745, was an edition of Rabelais' works, with remarks and annotations in his own hand. This, could it be recovered, would be a work of no little interest, considering that the germ, both of the Tale of a Tub, and of Gulliver's Travels, may be traced in the works of the French Lucian. Swift was not, indeed, under the necessity of disguising his allegory with the buffoonery and mysticism affected by Rabelais; but the sudden and wide digressive excursions, the strain of extraordinary reading and uncouth learning which is assumed, together with the general style of the whole fable, are indisputably derived from the humorous philosopher of Chinon. A strange passage which Quevedo has put into the mouth of a *Selected from the Autobiography and Correspondence of Mrs. Delany, edited by Lady Llanover, vol. i. 1861.

drunken bully, may, in the opinion of Mr. Theophilus Swift, have suggested the noted ridicule on Transubstantiation.

Pope and Swift differed much in their estimate of Rabelais. Pope tells us: "Dr. Swift was a great reader and admirer of Rabelais; and used sometimes to scold me for not liking him enough. Indeed, there are so many things in his works in which I could not see any manner of meaning driven at, that I never could read him over with any patience." Again he says: "Rabelais has written some sensible pieces, which the world did not regard at all. 'I will write something [says he] that they shall take notice of!' and so sat down to writing nonsense. Everybody allows that there are several things without any manner of meaning in his Pantagruel. Dr. Swift likes it much, and thinks there are more good things in it than I do."

Swift is characterized by Coleridge, as the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. Can anything beat his remark on King William's motto (Recepit, non rapicet), "that the receiver was as bad as the thief?"

Swift could laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair; though it was still, as. Coleridge has remarked, "the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place."

Voltaire (Lettres sur les Anglais, Let. 22,) says: "M. Swift est Rabelais dans son bon sens, et vivant en bonne compagnie. Il n'a pas à la vérité, la gaité du premier, mais il a toute la finesse, la raison, le choix, le bon goût qui manguent à notre curé de Meudon. Ses vers sont d'un goût singulier, et presque inimitable; la bonne plaisanterie est son partage en vers et en prose; mais pour le bien entendre il faut faire un petit voyage dans son pays."

LOVE OF TEASING-IRONY.

The Dean was fond of pranks which bordered on childish sports. It will hardly be believed that he sometimes, by way of exercise, used to chase the Grattans, and other accommodating friends, through the large apartments of the Deanery, and up and down stairs, driving them like horses, with his whip in his hand, till he had accomplished his usual quantity of exercise. It is said that there was an old gentleman, a Scot, or of Scottish extraction, settled in the north of Ireland, whom he used to tease with some story of the dirt and poverty of his country, till the old man, between jest and earnest, started

up with his cane uplifted, when Swift, in great seeming terror, would run away to hide himself.

In 1733, the Dean composed his celebrated Rhapsody, in which the ironical praises which he bestowed on the monarch, queen, and royal family, were taken in such good part, that he assured Dr. King he received a message of thanks. "The Rhapsody," says the Doctor, "might have continued to Swift the favour it had acquired him, if Lord Harvey had not undeceived Queen Caroline, and taken some pains to teach her the use and power of the irony."

There was found among Swift's papers a bitter epigram which he himself had written, with this characteristic endorsement:"A wicked treasonable libel. I wish I knew the author, that I might hang him."

But the inimitable piece of irony by which Swift, in one of his tracts on Ireland, proposes to relieve the distresses of the poor, by converting their children into food for the rich, has never been equalled in any age or country. The grave, formal, and business-like mode in which the calculations are given; the projector's protestation of absolute disinterest in the success of his plan; the economy with which he proposes the middling class should use this new species of food; and the magnificence which he attaches to the idea of a well-grown fat yearling child roasted whole, for a lord-mayor's feast; the style of a projector, and the terms of the shambles, so coolly and yet carefully preserved from beginning to end; render it one of the most extraordinary pieces of humour in our language. A foreign author was so much imposed upon by the gravity of the style, that he quoted it as an instance of the extreme distress of Ireland, which appeared to equal that of Jerusalem in its last siege, since a dignitary of the church was reduced to propose, as the only mode cf alleviating the general misery, the horrid resource of feeding upon the children of the poor.

Mrs. Pilkington relates that she saw Swift cut the leaves out of a handsomely bound book of poems, and put them into the chimney-grate, saying, he would give them what they wanted greatly-fire-and that she was employed by him to paste into the cover the letters of his friends. Now, among Dr. Lyons' papers, there are actually the folio boards of a book which has suffered this operation, and in the inside, a list, in Swift's hand, of the letters which had been pasted in to supply the original contents.