months after the death of his father, who had come to practise there as a lawyer. 'The boy went to school at Kilkenny, and afterwards to Trinity College, Dublin, where he got a degree with difficulty, and was wild, and witty, and poor. In 1688, by the recommendation of his mother, Swift was received into the family of Sir William Temple, who had known Mrs. Swift in Ireland. He left his patron in 1693, and the next year took orders in Dublin. But he threw up the small Irish preferment which he got, and returned to Temple, in whose family he remained until Sir William's death in 1699. His hopes of advancement in England failing, Swift returned to Ireland, and took the living of Laracor. Hither he invited Hester Johnson,[1] Temple's
- ↑ "Miss Hetty" she was called in the family—where her face, and her dress, and Sir William's treatment of her—all made the real fact about her birth plain enough. Sir William left her a thousand pounds.
grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Swift, Vicar of Goodrich, in Herefordshire, suffered for his loyalty in Charles I.'s time. That gentleman married Elizabeth Dryden, a member of the family of the poet. Sir Walter Scott gives, with his characteristic minuteness in such points, the exact relationship between these famous men. Swift was "the son of Dryden's second cousin." Swift, too, was the enemy of Dryden's reputation, Witness the "Battle of the Books:"—"The difference was greatest among the horse," says he of the moderns, "where every private trooper pretended to the command, from Tasso and Milton to Dryden and Withers." And in "Poetry, a Rhapsody," he advises the poetaster to—
"Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet," was the phrase of Dryden to his kinsman, which remained alive in a memory tenacious of such matters.
