and on his return to Ireland his marriage to her is now generally believed to have taken place, though they never lived together.  Now also took place also his final rupture with Miss Van Homrigh (Vanessa), who had been in love with him, with whom he had maintained a lengthened correspondence, and to whom he addressed his poem, Cadenus and Vanessa (1726).  Though he disliked the Irish and considered residence in Ireland as banishment, he interested himself in Irish affairs, and attained extraordinary popularity by his Drapier’s Letters, directed against the introduction of “Wood’s halfpence.”  In 1726 he visited England and joined with Pope and Arbuthnot in publishing Miscellanies (1727).  In the same year, 1726, he pub. Gulliver’s Travels, his most widely and permanently popular work.  His last visit to England was paid in 1727 and in the following year “Stella,” the only being, probably, whom he really loved, d. Though he had a circle of friends in Dublin, and was, owing to his championing the people in their grievances, a popular idol, the shadows were darkening around him.  The fears of insanity by which he had been all his life haunted, and which may account for and perhaps partly excuse some of the least justifiable portions of his conduct, pressed more and more upon him.  He became increasingly morose and savage in his misanthropy, and though he had a rally in which he produced some of his most brilliant, work—­the Rhapsody on Poetry, Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, and; the Modest Proposal (a horrible but masterly piece of irony)—­he gradually sank into almost total loss of his facilities, and d. on October 19, 1745.

The character of S. is one of the gloomiest and least attractive among English writers.  Intensely proud, he suffered bitterly in youth and early manhood from the humiliations of poverty and dependence, which preyed upon a mind in which the seeds of insanity were latent until it became dominated by a ferocious misanthropy.  As a writer he is our greatest master of grave irony, and while he presents the most humorous ideas, the severity of his own countenance never relaxes.  The Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels are the greatest satires in the English language, although the concluding part of the latter is a savage and almost insane attack upon the whole human race.  His history is a tragedy darkening into catastrophe, and as Thackeray has said, “So great a man he seems that thinking of him is like thinking of an Empire falling.”

S. was tall and powerfully made.  His eyes, blue and flashing under excitement, were the most remarkable part of his appearance.