Jonathan’s nurse was also an Englishwoman, and when he was about a year old she was called home to England to a dying friend.  She saw that she must go to her friend, but she loved her baby-charge so much that she could not bear to part from him.  He had been a sickly child, often ill, but that seemed only to make him dearer to her.  She held him in her arms thinking how empty they would fell without their dear burden.  She kissed him, jealous at the thought that he might learn to know and love another nurse, and she felt that she could not part with him.  Making up her mind that she would not, she wrapped him up warmly and slipped quietly from the house carrying the baby in her arms.  She then ran quickly to the boat, crept on board, and was well out on the Irish Sea before it was discovered that she had stolen little Jonathan from his mother.  Mrs. Swift was poor, Jonathan was not strong so the fond and daring nurse was allowed by the mother to keep her little charge until he was nearly four.  Thus for three years little Jonathan lived with his nurse at Whitehaven, growing strong and brown in the sea air.  She looked after him lovingly, and besides feeding and clothing him, taught him so well that Swift tells us himself, though it seems a little hard to believe, that he could spell and could read any chapter in the Bible before he was three.

After Jonathan’s return to Ireland his uncle, Godwin Swift, seems to have taken charge of him, and when he was six to have sent him to a good school.  His mother, meanwhile, went home to her own people in England, and although mother and son loved each other they were little together all through life.  At fourteen Godwin Swift sent his nephew from school to Trinity College, Dublin.  But Swift was by this time old enough to know that he was living on the charity of his uncle and the knowledge was bitter to his proud spirit.  Instead of spurring him on the knowledge weighed him down.  He became gloomy, idle, and wild.  He afterwards said he was a dunce at college and “was stopped of his degree for dulness and insufficiency.”  But although at first the examiners refused to pass him, he was later, for some reason, given a special degree, granted by favor rather than gained by desert “in a manner little to his credit,” says bitter Swift.  Jonathan gave his uncle neither love nor thanks for his schooling.  “He gave me the education of a dog,” was how he spoke of it years after.  Yet he had been sent to the best school in Ireland and to college later.  But perhaps it was not so much the gift as the manner of giving which Swift scorned.  We cannot tell.