so indelibly
upon the course of Irish politics. Swift's part in this Stygian pool of
the eighteenth century is rather a difficult one to explain. He was not
in any sense an Irish champion, indeed, objected to being called an
Irishman at all, and regarded his life in Ireland as one of all but
unendurable banishment. He was a vehement High Churchman, and looked
upon the existing penal proscription under which the Catholics lay as
not merely desirable, but indispensable. At the same time it would be
quite untrue to suppose, as is sometimes done, that he merely made a
cat's-paw of Irish politics in order to bring himself back into public
notice. He was a man of intense and even passionate sense of justice,
and the state of affairs in the Ireland of his day, the tyranny and
political dishonesty which stalked in high places, the degradation and
steadily-increasing misery in which the mass of the people were sunk,
were enough to lash far less scathing powers of sarcasm than he
possessed to their highest possible pitch of expression.

[Illustration: DEAN SWIFT. (_From an engraving by Fourdinier after
Jervis_.)]

The cause that drew forth the famous Drapier letters--why Swift chose to
spell the word _draper_ with an _i_ no one has ever explained--appears
at first sight hardly worthy of the occasion. Ireland wanted a copper
coinage, and Walpole, who was then the Prime Minister, had given a
patent for the purpose to a person called Wood, part of the profits of
which patent were to go to the Duchess of Kendal, the king's mistress.
There seems no reason to think that the pennies produced by Wood were in
any way inferior to the existing English ones, and Sir Isaac Newton--who
was at the time Master of the Mint--declared that, if anything, they
were rather better. The real wrong, the real insult, was that the patent
was granted by the Minister without reference to the Lord-Lieutenant, to
the Irish Parliament, or to any single human being in Ireland. It was a
proof the more of that total indifference with which the interests of
Ireland were regarded, and it was upon this score that Swift's wrath
exploded like a bomb.

The line he chose to take was to attack the patent, not as a monstrous
job--which undoubtedly it was--but from the point of view of the value
of the pennies. Assuming the character of a tradesman, he adjured all
classes of the community, down to the very beggars, not to be induced to
accept them. Assured them that for