Mr. Forster brings down his biography no farther than the early part of 1710, so that we have no means of judging what his opinion would be of the conduct of Swift during the three years that preceded the death of Queen Anne.  But he has told us what he thinks of his relations with Esther Johnson; and it is in them, as it seems to us, that we are to seek the key to the greater part of what looks most enigmatical in his conduct.  At first sight, it seems altogether unworthy of a man of Swift’s genius to waste so much of it and so many of the best years of his life in a sordid struggle after preferment in the church—­a career in which such selfish ambitions look most out of place.  How much better to have stayed quietly at Laracor and written immortal works!  Very good:  only that was not Swift’s way of looking at the matter, who had little appetite for literary fame, and all of whose immortal progeny were begotten of the moment’s overmastering impulse, were thrown nameless upon the world by their father, and survived only in virtue of the vigor they had drawn from his stalwart loins.  But how if Swift’s worldly aspirations, and the intrigues they involved him in, were not altogether selfish?  How if he was seeking advancement, in part at least, for another, and that other a woman who had sacrificed for him not only her chances of domestic happiness, but her good name? to whom he was bound by gratitude? and the hope of repairing whose good fame by making her his own was so passionate in that intense nature as to justify any and every expedient, and make the patronage of those whom he felt to be his inferiors endurable by the proudest of men?  We believe that this was the truth, and that the woman was Stella.  No doubt there were other motives.  Coming to manhood with a haughtiness of temper that was almost savage, he had forced himself to endure the hourly humiliation of what could not have been, however Mr. Forster may argue to the contrary, much above domestic servitude.  This experience deepened in him the prevailing passions of his life, first for independence and next for consideration, the only ones which could, and in the end perhaps did, obscure the memory and hope of Stella.  That he should have longed for London with a persistency that submitted to many a rebuff and overlived continual disappointment will seem childish only to those who do not consider that it was a longing for life.  It was there only that his mind could be quickened by the society and spur of equals.  In Dublin he felt it dying daily of the inanition of inferior company.  His was not a nature, if there be any such, that could endure the solitude of supremacy without impair, and he foreboded with reason a Tiberian old age.