scandalous day; yet was the Duchess still beautiful; still did she surpass the four most noted toasts of the times, her lovely daughters; still, and even to a late age, did she retain the freshness and vigour of youth-hair unchanged, complexion, spirits, activity, and a sparkling wit, to which the utmost candour gave an indescribable charm.*

* See Cibber's Apology. Lady M. Wortley Montague, preface.

CHAPTER X.

Anecdotes of Swift and Addison-Publication of the Examiner-Charge brought in the Examiner against the Duchess.

Ir augured ill for the Whig party when men of letters, who were not attached to any faction, took up their position, at this juncture, under the Tory banners. Amongst these, the most obnoxious was the Dean of St. Patrick's, whose intimacy with the leaders of both parties rendered the choice which he meant to take still a problem. In one of his letters, he declared, that the best intelligence he got of public affairs was from the ladies; Mr. Addison, his friend, being nine times more secret to him than to anybody else, because he had the happiness of being thought his friend.

Addison was right: for Swift's friendship, at this period more especially, conferred no credit

on any public man. Like that changeable reptile, the chameleon, he appeared of one colour in the morning, of another in the afternoon. Disappointed in the preceding year by Lord Halifax, who had written to him that he and Addison had entered into a confederacy never to "give over the pursuit, nor to cease reminding those who could serve him," till his worth was placed in that light in which it ought to shine, Swift was now seriously undertaking to devote his great powers to that cause which prospered best, retaining still the friendship of Addison, and enjoying a free admittance into the houses of Halifax and Somers.

It was in January, 1710, that the first invitation of Bolingbroke to Swift to dine with him, had foreboded no good to the party whose weakened fortresses such generals in literature were to attack. Swift's answer, with his wonted assumed independence and freedom, that "if the Queen gave his lordship a dukedom and the garter honours, and the Treasury just at the end of them, he would regard him no more than he would a groat,"-meant no more than that he intended to accept the invitation, and all the good things that might follow this token of favour.

It was in this year that a series of attacks on the former ministry was concerted between Bo

lingbroke, Swift, Atterbury, and Prior, in defence of the Tory party. They were published weekly, but were of short continuance, under the name of the "Examiner." The essays contained nothing but political matter, very circumstantially and forcibly placed before the reader, and carried on with a subdued, but bitter irony, perhaps better calculated to influence the public mind than those bursts of indignant eloquence which startle the passions, and do not always convince the understanding.

Addison, writing to Swift at this period, declares, after expressing his wish again to eat a dish of beans and bacon in the best company in the world, (meaning his friend,) that he is forced to give himself airs of a punctual correspondence with Swift at St. James's coffee-house, to those friends of Swift who have a mind to pay their court to the then Irish secretary:* yet Swift at that very time had satirised Lord Wharton, Addison's patron, in terms so outrageous as to meet with the reprobation of the learned and moderate Dr. King, Archbishop of Dublin.

Such a paper as the "Examiner" had been, in the opinion of Swift, long required, to enlighten the public mind, and to disabuse the ignorant of those errors into which they had fallen respecting

Swift's Letters, xiii. p. 47.

the late ministry; and, accordingly, one of its most elaborate papers is occupied in discussing the charge of ingratitude, made against the Queen and her advisers, for dismissing the Duke of Marlborough from his employments.

After a long enumeration of the benefits which had been conferred on the Duke, and stating, in a manner unparalleled for ingenuity and eloquence, the unexampled rewards and privileges he had received, he follows the attack upon the Duke by another, still more insidious, on the Duchess.*

"A lady of my acquaintance appropriated twenty-six pounds a year out of her allowance for certain uses which the lady received, or was to pay to the lady or her order, as was called for. But after eight years, it appeared upon the strictest calculation that the woman had paid but four pounds a year, and sunk two-and-twenty pounds for her own pocket; 'tis but supposing twenty-six pounds instead of twenty-six thousand, and by that you may judge what the pretensions of modern merit are, where it happens to be its own paymaster.

From this hateful insinuation the Duchess amply cleared herself, in her Justification. Doubtless Swift was indebted to the female politicians who gave him such good information, for the dark * Examiner, No. xvii.