VARIOUS PAMPHLETS.—­His Argument Against the Abolition of Christianity, Dr. Johnson calls “a very happy and judicious irony.”  In 1710 he wrote a paper, at the request of the Irish primate, petitioning the queen to remit the first-fruits and twentieth parts to the Irish clergy.  In 1712, ten days before the meeting of parliament, he published his Conduct of the Allies, which, exposing the greed of Marlborough, persuaded the nation to make peace.  A supplement to this is found in Reflections on the Barrier Treaty, in which he shows how little English interests had been consulted in that negotiation.

His pamphlet on The Public Spirit of the Whigs, in answer to Steele’s Crisis, was so terrible a bomb-shell thrown into the camp of his former friends, and so insulting to the Scotch, that L300 were offered by the queen, at the instance of the Scotch lords, for the discovery of the author; but without success.

At last his versatile and powerful pen obtained some measure of reward:  in 1713 he was made Dean of St. Patrick’s, in Dublin, with a stipend of L700 per annum.  This was his greatest and last preferment.

On the accession of George I., in the following year, he paid his court, but was received with something more than coldness.  He withdrew to his deanery in Dublin, and, in the words of Johnson, “commenced Irishman for life, and was to contrive how he might be best accommodated in a country where he considered himself as in a state of exile.”  After some misunderstanding between himself and his Irish fellow-citizens, he espoused their cause so warmly that he became the most popular man in Ireland.  In 1721 he could write to Pope, “I neither know the names nor the number of the family which now reigneth, further than the prayer-book informeth me.”  His letters, signed M.  B. Drapier, on Irish manufactures, and especially those in opposition to Wood’s monopoly of copper coinage, in 1724, wrought upon the people, producing such a spirit of resistance that the project of a debased coinage failed; and so influential did Swift become, that he was able to say to the Archbishop of Dublin, “Had I raised my finger, the mob would have torn you to pieces.”  This popularity was increased by the fact that a reward of L300 was offered by Lord Carteret and the privy council for the discovery of the authorship of the fourth letter; but although it was commonly known that Swift was the author, proof could not be obtained.  Carteret, the Lord Lieutenant, afterwards said, “When people ask me how I governed Ireland, I said that I pleased Doctor Swift.”

Thus far Swift’s literary labors are manifest history:  we come now to consider that great work, Gulliver’s Travels,—­the most successful of its kind ever written,—­in which, with all the charm of fiction in plot, incident, and description, he pictures the great men and the political parties of the day.