ical education. His rise
was extraordinary, because his talents little exceeded mediocrity. But he
was a courtier, and an intriguant. He was the son of a schoolmaster at
Colchester.

Swift, though of English extraction, was born in Ireland. From some
memoranda of my grandfather's, I learn, that he did not speak of his
residence with Sir William Temple at Moore Park, in Surrey, without spleen.
He seemed to retain a sort of unwilling awe of Sir William; but not to
have loved him. Sir William was a ceremonious courtier: Swift's early
habits were somewhat rude and slovenly. Swift had genius, as Gulliver's
travels prove; but there is no genius in his poetry. He was both proud and
vain. His ancestor was the rector of a small living in Kent; his father an
attorney. When I was quartered at Canterbury, I saw the monument for one
of his ancestors, preserved out of the old church at St. Andrew's and
replaced in the new one. The arms sculptured on it are totally different
from what Swift erroneously supposes the family to have borne: this
ancestor was minister of that parish--not a prebendary, as Swift
represents. Miss Vanhomrigg was cousin of my grandfather, who considered
that Swift had used her very cruelly.

I often met the late Monsieur Etienne Dumont, of Geneva, the friend and
commentator of old Jeremy Bentham, at Romilly's house in London, in 1789.
He was a man of astonishing talents, sagacity, acuteness, and clearness of
head. What part he had in the brilliant effusions of Mirabeau, and in the
French Revolution, may be seen by his posthumous work, just published at
Paris, entitled _Souvenirs de Mirabeau_. He was a short, thick man, of
coarse features, blear eyed, and slovenly in his dress; but of mild
manners, hospitable, an excellent story-teller, and much beloved. I think
he had been at one time librarian to old Lord Lansdowne. He died at Milan,
in 1829, aged about 70. The French cannot contain their rage at the
exposure that he was the spirit who moved their brilliant Mirabeau.

I was once talking to Anna Maria Porter about him, when she expressed her
astonishment at the admiration I bestowed on him! She said, "I thought you
was a Whig, and an aristocrat! how can you commend a revolutionary
radical?" I answered, "You mistake his character, he is not a radical in
the sense you mean! he considers Tom Paine's Rights of Man to be
mischievous nonsense!" I could not convince her: but I made my peace with
her by praising, wit