nd imprisoned him in the
Tower. The charge against him was one of corruption, a charge easily
made in those days against any minister, and which, if high moral
principles were to prevail, might probably have been as easily
sustained as it was made. Walpole, however, was not worse than his
contemporaries; nor, even if he had been, would the contemporaries have
been inclined to treat his offences very seriously so long as they were
not inspired to act against him by partisan motives. At the end of the
session he was released, and now, in the closing days of Anne's reign,
all eyes turned to him as a rising man and a certain bulwark of the new
dynasty.

[Sidenote: 1714--The Dean of St. Patrick's]

It would be impossible not to regard Jonathan Swift as one of the
politicians, one of the statesmen, of this age. {35} Swift was a
politician in the highest sense, although he had seen little of the one
great political arena in which the battles of English parties were
fought out. He has left it on record that he never heard either
Bolingbroke or Harley speak in Parliament or anywhere in public. He
was at this time about forty-seven years of age, and had not yet
reached his highest point in politics or in literature. The "Tale of a
Tub" had been written, but not "Gulliver's Travels;" the tract on "The
Conduct of the Allies," but not the "Drapier's Letters." Even at this
time he was a power in political life; his was an influence with which
statesmen and even sovereigns had to reckon. No pen ever served a
cause better than his had served, and was yet to serve, the interests
of the Tory party. He was probably the greatest English pamphleteer at
a time when the pamphlet had to do all the work of the leading article
and most of the work of the platform. His churchmen's gown sat
uneasily on him; he was like one of the fighting bishops of the Middle
Ages, with whom armor was the more congenial wear. He had a fierce and
domineering temper, and indeed out of his strangely bright blue eyes
there was already beginning to shine only too ominously the wild light
of that _saeva indignatio_ which the inscription drawn up by his own
hand for his tomb described as lacerating his heart. The ominous light
at last broke out into the fire of insanity. We shall meet Swift
again; just now we only stop to note him as a political influence. At
this time he is Dean of St. Patrick's in Ireland; he has been lately in
London trying, and with