and they paid him with this cheap coin for the service they took of him.  He writ their lampoons, fought their enemies, flogged and bullied in their service, and it must be owned with a consummate skill and fierceness.  ’Tis said he hath lost his intellect now, and forgotten his wrongs and his rage against mankind.  I have always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of that age.  I have read his books (who doth not know them?) here in our calm woods, and imagine a giant to myself as I think of him, a lonely fallen Prometheus, groaning as the vulture tears him.  Prometheus I saw, but when first I ever had any words with him, the giant stepped out of a sedan chair in the Poultry, whither he had come with a tipsy Irish servant parading before him, who announced him, bawling out his Reverence’s name, whilst his master below was as yet haggling with the chairman.  I disliked this Mr. Swift, and heard many a story about him, of his conduct to men, and his words to women.  He could flatter the great as much as he could bully the weak; and Mr. Esmond, being younger and hotter in that day than now, was determined, should he ever meet this dragon, not to run away from his teeth and his fire.

Men have all sorts of motives which carry them onwards in life, and are driven into acts of desperation, or it may be of distinction, from a hundred different causes.  There was one comrade of Esmond’s, an honest little Irish lieutenant of Handyside’s, who owed so much money to a camp sutler, that he began to make love to the man’s daughter, intending to pay his debt that way; and at the battle of Malplaquet, flying away from the debt and lady too, he rushed so desperately on the French lines, that he got his company; and came a captain out of the action, and had to marry the sutler’s daughter after all, who brought him his cancelled debt to her father as poor Roger’s fortune.  To run out of the reach of bill and marriage, he ran on the enemy’s pikes; and as these did not kill him he was thrown back upon t’other horn of his dilemma.  Our great Duke at the same battle was fighting, not the French, but the Tories in England; and risking his life and the army’s, not for his country but for his pay and places; and for fear of his wife at home, that only being in life whom he dreaded.  I have asked about men in my own company, (new drafts of poor country boys were perpetually coming over to us during the wars, and brought from the ploughshare to the sword,) and found that a half of them under the flags were driven thither on account of a woman:  one fellow was jilted by his mistress and took the shilling in despair; another jilted the girl, and fled from her and the parish to the tents where the law could not disturb him.  Why go on particularizing?  What can the sons of Adam and Eve expect, but to continue in that course of love and trouble their father and mother set out on?  Oh, my grandson!  I am drawing nigh to the end of that period of my history,