In this position Swift seems to have led an uncomfortable life, ranking somewhere between the family and the upper servants.  Sir William Temple was disposed to be kind, but found it difficult to converse with him on account of his moroseness and other peculiarities.  At Shene he met King William III., who talked with him, and offered him a captaincy in the army.  This Swift declined, knowing his unfitness for the post, and doubtless feeling the promptings of a higher ambition.  It was also at Shene that he met a young girl, whose history was thenceforth to be mingled with his in sadness and sorrow, during their lives.  This was Esther Johnson, the daughter of Temple’s housekeeper, and surmised, at a later day, to be the natural daughter of Temple himself.  When the young secretary first met her, she was fourteen years of age, very clever and beautiful; and they fell in love with each other.

We cannot dwell at length upon the events of his life.  His versatile pen was prolific of poetry, sentimental and satirical; of political allegories of great potency, of fiction erected of impossible materials, and yet so creating and peopling a world of fancy as to illude the reader into temporary belief in its truth.

POEMS.—­His poems are rather sententious than harmonious.  His power, however, was great; he managed verse as an engine, and had an entire mastery over rhyme, which masters so many would-be poets.  His Odes are classically constructed, but massive and cumbrous.  His satirical poems are eminently historical, ranging over and attacking almost every topic, political, religious, and social.  Among the most characteristic of his miscellaneous verses are Epigrams and Epistles, Clever Tom Pinch Going to be Hanged, Advice to Grub Street Writers, Helter-Skelter, The Puppet Show, and similar odd pieces, frequently scurrilous, bitter, and lewd in expression.  The writer of English history consults these as he does the penny ballads, lampoons, and caricatures of the day,—­to discern the animus of parties and the methods of hostile factions.

But it is in his inimitable prose writings that Swift is of most value to the historical student.  Against all comers he stood the Goliath of pamphleteers in the reign of Queen Anne, and there arose no David who could slay him.

THE TALE OF A TUB.—­While an unappreciated student at the university, he had sketched a satirical piece, which he finished and published in 1704, under the title of The Tale of a Tub.  As a tub is thrown overboard at sea to divert a whale, so this is supposed to be a sop cast out to the Leviathan of Hobbes, to prevent it from injuring the vessel of state.  The story is a satire aimed against the Roman Catholics on the one hand, and the Presbyterians on the other, in order that he may exalt the Church of England as, in his judgment, free from the errors of both, and a just and happy medium between the two extremes.  His own opinion of its merits is well