produce a popular and collected edition of the prose works of Swift.... So far as one may judge from a first instalment, the present edition seems to fulfil the requirements of popularity and accuracy as well as could be desired.... The edition promises to be one of the most valuable and welcome items in those classic 'Libraries' which have done so much to bring good literature, in worthy form, within the reach of the British public."—Glasgow Herald.

"We are indebted to the proprietors of the Bohn Libraries for various literary enterprises, but it is questionable indeed if they have issued lately a work more acceptable, or likely to become more popular, than 'The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift.' No better edition of it could be desired. Mr. Temple Scott is editing the volumes with the greatest care."—Belfast News Letter.

"No more welcome reprint has appeared for some time past than the new edition, complete and exact so far as it was possible to make it, of Swift's 'Journal to Stella.'"—Morning Post.

"By far the most satisfactory text yet printed of the wonderful 'Journal to Stella.'"—Newcastle Daily Chronicle.

"The 'Journal to Stella' has long stood in need of editing, far more than any other of Swift's works. It abounds in references to persons great and small, to political and social 'occurrents,' to ephemeral publications; and to identify and explain all these demands an editor steeped in the history, literature, broadsides and press news of the time of the Harley administration. Mr. Ryland's present edition will satisfy all but the few who dream of an ideal."—Athenæum.

"The immortal 'Journal to Stella,' one of the works most indispensable to a knowledge of the life and literature of the early part of the eighteenth century. We know of no shape in which the Journal is published so convenient for perusal as this. The notes are short and serviceable, and there is a full index."—Notes and Queries.

"At last we have a well-printed, carefully edited text of Swift's famous Journal in a single, handy, and cheap volume. The present edition will, we hope, encourage many timid souls, who have been awed by the formidable array of Scott, Sheridan, or Hawkesworth's editions, to make the acquaintance of the most interesting, charming, and tender journal that ever man kept for a woman's eye."—St. James's Gazette.

"Mr. Dennis is quite justified in his boast of now first giving us a complete and trustworthy text [of 'Gulliver's Travels']."—Manchester Guardian.

"The number of useless reprints of Gulliver, based on Hawkesworth's untrustworthy edition, and mostly expurgated besides, is so great that we owe double thanks to Mr. Dennis, since he has not shirked the trouble of collating the five earliest editions, and has given us again at last—as far as is possible in the present case—the complete and authentic text of the original."—Prof. Max Förster in Anglia.

"An ideal text of 'Gulliver's Travels.'"—Literary World.

"The best and most scholarly edition of 'Gulliver's Travels.'"—University Correspondent.

Jonathan Swift
From an engraving by Andrew Miller after the painting
by Francis Bindon in the Deanery of St. Patrick's Dublin.

INTRODUCTION

Swift took up his permanent residence in the Irish capital in 1714. The Harley Administration had fallen never to rise again. Harley himself was a prisoner in the Tower, and Bolingbroke a voluntary exile in France, and an open adherent of the Pretender. Swift came to Dublin to be met by the jeers of the populace, the suspicion of the government officials, and the polite indifference of his clerical colleagues. He had time enough now in which to reflect and employ his brain powers. For several years he kept himself altogether to his duties as Dean of the Cathedral of St. Patrick's, only venturing his pen in letters to dear friends in England—to Pope, Atterbury, Lady Howard. His private relations with Miss Hester Vanhomrigh came to a climax, also, during this period, and his peculiar intimacy with "Stella" Johnson took the definite shape in which we now know it.

He found himself in debt to his predecessor, Sterne, for a large and comfortless house and for the cost of his own installation into his office. The money he was to have received (£1,000) to defray these expenses, from the last administration, was now, on its fall, kept back from him. Swift had these encumbrances to pay off and he had his Chapter to see to. He did both in characteristic fashion. By dint of almost penurious saving he accomplished the former and the latter he managed autocratically and with good sense. His connection with Oxford and Bolingbroke had been of too intimate a nature for those in power to ignore him. Indeed, his own letters to Knightley Chetwode[1] show us that he was in great fear of arrest. But there is now no doubt that the treasonable relations between Harley and St. John and the Pretender were a great surprise to Swift when they were discovered. He himself had always been an ardent supporter of the Protestant succession, and his writings during his later period in Ireland constantly emphasize this attitude of his—almost too much so.

The condition of Ireland as Swift found it in 1714, and as he had known of it even before that time, was of a kind to rouse a temper like his to quick and indignant expression. Even as early as the spring of 1716 we find him unable to restrain himself, and in his letter to Atterbury of April 18th we catch the spirit which, four years later, showed itself in "The Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures" and the "Drapier's Letters," and culminated in 1729 in the terrible "Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to their Parents." To Atterbury he wrote:

"I congratulate with England for joining with us here in the fellowship of slavery. It is not so terrible a thing as you imagine: we have long lived under it: and whenever you are disposed to know how to behave yourself in your new condition, you need go no further than me for a director. But, because we are resolved to go beyond you, we have transmitted a bill to England, to be returned here, giving the Government and six of the Council power for three years to imprison whom they please for three months, without any trial or examination: and I expect to be among the first of those upon whom this law will be executed."

Writing to Archdeacon Walls (May 5th, 1715)[2] of the people in power, he said:

"They shall be deceived as far as my power reaches, and shall not find me altogether so great a cully as they would willingly make me."

At that time England was beginning to initiate a new method for what it called the proper government of Ireland. Hitherto it had tried the plan of setting one party in the country against another; but now a new party was called into being, known as the "English party." This party had nothing to do with the Irish national spirit, and any man, no matter how capable, who held by such a national spirit, was to be set aside. There was to be no Irish party or parties as such—there was to be only the English party governing Ireland in the