"Mr. Dennis is quite justified in his boast of now first giving us a complete and trustworthy text [of 'Gulliver's Travels']."--_Manchester Guardian._
"The number of useless reprints of Gulliver, based on Hawkesworth's untrustworthy edition, and mostly expurgated besides, is so great that we owe double thanks to Mr. Dennis, since he has not shirked the trouble of collating the five earliest editions, and has given us again at last--as far as is possible in the present case--the complete and authentic text of the original."--PROF. MAX FÖRSTER in _Anglia_.
"An ideal text of 'Gulliver's Travels.'"--_Literary World._
"The best and most scholarly edition of 'Gulliver's Travels.'"--_University Correspondent._
_From an engraving by Andrew Miller after the painting by Francis Bindon in the Deanery of St. Patrick's Dublin._]
LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS 1905 CHISWICK PRESS. CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
Swift took up his permanent residence in the Irish capital in 1714. The Harley Administration had fallen never to rise again. Harley himself was a prisoner in the Tower, and Bolingbroke a voluntary exile in France, and an open adherent of the Pretender. Swift came to Dublin to be met by the jeers of the populace, the suspicion of the government officials, and the polite indifference of his clerical colleagues. He had time enough now in which to reflect and employ his brain powers. For several years he kept himself altogether to his duties as Dean of the Cathedral of St. Patrick's, only venturing his pen in letters to dear friends in England--to Pope, Atterbury, Lady Howard. His private relations with Miss Hester Vanhomrigh came to a climax, also, during this period, and his peculiar intimacy with "Stella" Johnson took the definite shape in which we now know it.
He found himself in debt to his predecessor, Sterne, for a large and comfortless house and for the cost of his own installation into his office. The money he was to have received (£1,000) to defray these expenses, from the last administration, was now, on its fall, kept back from him. Swift had these encumbrances to pay off and he had his Chapter to see to. He did both in characteristic fashion. By dint of almost penurious saving he accomplished the former and the latter he managed autocratically and with good sense. His connection with Oxford and Bolingbroke had been of too intimate a nature for those in power to ignore him. Indeed, his own letters to Knightley Chetwode[1] show us that he was in great fear of arrest. But there is now no doubt that the treasonable relations between Harley and St. John and the Pretender were a great surprise to Swift when they were discovered. He himself had always been an ardent supporter of the Protestant succession, and his writings during his later period in Ireland constantly emphasize this attitude of his--almost too much so.