out success, to bring about a reconciliation
between Bolingbroke and Harley; and, finding his efforts ineffectual,
and seeing that troubled times were near at hand, he has quietly
withdrawn to Berkshire. Before leaving London he wrote the letter to
Lord Peterborough containing the remarkable words with which we have
opened this volume. It is curious that Swift himself afterwards
ascribed to Harley the saying about the Queen's health and the heedless
{36} behavior of statesmen. In his "Enquiry into the Behaviour of the
Queen's Last Ministry," dated June, 1715, he tells us that "about
Christmas, 1713," the Treasurer said to him "whenever anything ails the
Queen these people are out of their wits; and yet they are so
thoughtless that as soon as she is well they act as if she were
immortal." To which Swift adds the following significant comment: "I
had sufficient reason, both before and since, to allow his observation
to be true, and that some share of it might with justice be applied to
himself." It was at the house of a clergyman at Upper Letcomb, near
Wantage, in Berkshire, that Swift stayed for some time before returning
to his Irish home. From Letcomb the reader will perhaps note with some
painful interest that Swift wrote to Miss Esther Vanhomrigh, whom all
generations will know as Vanessa, a letter, in which he describes his
somewhat melancholy mode of life just then, tells her "this is the
first syllable I have wrote to anybody since you saw me," and adds that
"if this place were ten times worse, nothing shall make me return to
town while things are in the situation I left them."

[Sidenote: 1714--Addison]

Swift, in his heart, trusted neither Bolingbroke nor Harley. It seems
clear that Lady Masham was under the impression that she had Swift as
her accomplice in the intrigue which finally turned Harley out of
office. She writes to him while he is at Letcomb a letter which could
not have been written if she were not in that full conviction; and he
does not reply until the whole week's crisis is past and a new
condition of things arisen; and in the reply he commits himself to
nothing. If he distrusted Bolingbroke he could not help admiring him.
Bolingbroke was the only man then near the court whose genius must not
have been rebuked by Swift. But Swift must, for all his lavish praises
of Harley, have sometimes secretly despised the hesitating,
time-serving statesman, with whom indecision was a substitute for