ABSTRACT
Following the practice of choosing the ‘middling kind’ for society, Swift passed his brief summer holiday with a genial prebendary of the cathedral, the Rev. John Towers, who had recently obtained, from the dean and chapter, the attractive living of St Luke’s, Dublin. Towers’s country rectory, St Patrick’s, Powerscourt, co. Wicklow, lay in a picturesque, hilly setting about eight miles from the capital. 1 Swift went there in August 1731 and returned in September to his deanery. He took with him two important manuscripts, later published as Polite Conversation and Directions to Servants. ‘I retired hither for the public good,’ he told Gay,
having two great works in hand, one to reduce the whole politeness, wit, humour and style of England into a short system for the use of all persons of quality, and particularly the maids of honour: The other is of almost equal importance; I may call it the whole duty of servants, in about twenty several stations, from the steward and waiting woman down to the scullion and pantry boy. 2
