A CASE SUBMITTED BY DEAN SWIFT TO MR. LINDSAY, COUNSELLOR AT LAW.[172]

A. B. agent for J. S. comes to desire J. S. to sign an assignment of a lease in order to be registered for the security of 38l. J. S. asks A. B. to show him the lease A. B. says he left it at home.  J. S. asks the said A. B. how many years of the lease are unexpired? what rent the tenant pays, and how much below the rack value? and what number of acres there are upon the farm?  To each of which questions the agent A. B. answers categorically, that he cannot tell, and that he did not think J. would ask him such questions.  The said A. B. was asked how he came two years after the lease was assigned, and not sooner, to have it registered.  A. B. answers, that he could not sue till the assignment.

Query, Whether the said agent A. B. made any one answer like a man of business?

AN

EXAMINATION

OF

CERTAIN ABUSES, CORRUPTIONS, AND ENORMITIES

IN THE CITY OF DUBLIN.

     NOTE.

Like many of Swift’s satirical writings the title of this tract is no indication to its subject-matter.  Whatever “abuses, corruptions and enormities” may have been rife in the city of Dublin in Swift’s time, the pamphlet which follows certainly throws no light on them.  It is in no sense a social document.  But it is a very amusing and excellent piece of jeering at the fancied apprehensions that were rife about the Pretender, the “disaffected” people, and the Jacobites.  It is aimed at the Whigs, who were continually using the party cries of “No Popery,” “Jacobitism,” and the other cognate expressions to distress their political opponents.  At the same time, these cries had their effects, and created a great deal of mischief.  The Roman Catholics, in particular, were cruelly treated because of the anxiety for the Protestant succession, and among the lower tradesmen, for whom such cries would be of serious meaning, a petty persecution against their Roman Catholic fellow-tradesmen continually prevailed.  Monck Mason draws attention to some curious instances. (See his “History of St. Patrick’s Cathedral,” p. 399, note y.)

In the “Journals of the Irish House of Commons” (vol. ii., p. 77) is the record of a petition presented in the year 1695, by the Protestant porters of the city of Dublin, against one Darby Ryan, “a papist and notoriously disaffected.”  This Ryan was complained of for employing those of his own persuasion and affection to carry a cargo of coals he had bought, to his own customers.  The petitioners complained that they, Protestants, were “debased and hindered from their small trade and gains.”  Another set of petitioners was the drivers of hackney coaches.  They complained that, “before the late trouble, they got a livelihood by driving