and growing into confidence with his employer, “was often trusted with matters of great importance.”  The story—­afterwards improved upon by Lord Macaulay—­that Swift received only 20 pounds and his board, and was not allowed to sit at table with his master, is wholly untrustworthy.  Within three years of their first intercourse, Temple had introduced his secretary to William the Third, and sent him to London to urge the King to consent to a bill for triennial Parliaments.

When Swift took up his residence at Moor Park he found there a little girl of eight, daughter of a merchant named Edward Johnson, who had died young.  Swift says that Esther Johnson was born on March 18, 1681; in the parish register of Richmond,[1] which shows that she was baptized on March 20, 1680-81, her name is given as Hester; but she signed her will “Esther,” the name by which she was always known.  Swift says, “Her father was a younger brother of a good family in Nottinghamshire, her mother of a lower degree; and indeed she had little to boast in her birth.”  Mrs. Johnson had two children, Esther and Ann, and lived at Moor Park as companion to Lady Giffard, Temple’s widowed sister.  Another member of the household, afterwards to be Esther’s constant companion, was Rebecca Dingley, a relative of the Temple family.[2] She was a year or two older than Swift.

The lonely young man of twenty-two was both playfellow and teacher of the delicate child of eight.  How he taught her to write has been charmingly brought before us in the painting exhibited by Miss Dicksee at the Royal Academy a few years ago; he advised her what books to read, and instructed her, as he says, “in the principles of honour and virtue, from which she never swerved in any one action or moment of her life.”

By 1694 Swift had grown tired of his position, and finding that Temple, who valued his services, was slow in finding him preferment, he left Moor Park in order to carry out his resolve to go into the Church.  He was ordained, and obtained the prebend of Kilroot, near Belfast, where he carried on a flirtation with a Miss Waring, whom he called Varina.  But in May 1696 Temple made proposals which induced Swift to return to Moor Park, where he was employed in preparing Temple’s memoirs and correspondence for publication, and in supporting the side taken by Temple in the Letters of Phalaris controversy by writing The Battle of the Books, which was, however, not published until 1704.  On his return to Temple’s house, Swift found his old playmate grown from a sickly child into a girl of fifteen, in perfect health.  She came, he says, to be “looked upon as one of the most beautiful, graceful, and agreeable young women in London, only a little too fat.  Her hair was blacker than a raven, and every feature of her face in perfection.”