toast of the Kit Cat Club, for whom Swift had an old friendship and with whom he had concluded a whimsical treaty of alliance, died in poverty and distress, he was deeply affected. "She was the most beautiful person of the age she lived in, of great honour and virtue, infinite sweetness and generosity of temper, and true good sense. I never was more afflicted at any death."

Swift shared his pleasures as well as his sorrows with his women friends. Instead of the coffee-houses which he frequented in earlier days, he loved to spend his evenings in ladies' society. "I dined with Lady Betty Germain," he writes to Stella, "and there was the young Earl of Berkeley and his fine lady. . . Lady Berkeley after dinner clapped my hat on another lady's head, and she in roguery put it on the rails. I minded them not, but in two minutes they called me to the window, and Lady Carteret showed me my hat out of her window, five doors off, where I was forced to walk to it, and pay her and old Lady Weymouth a visit, with some more beldames; then I went and drank coffee and made one or two puns with Lord Pembroke.... Then I sat an hour with Lady Betty Butler at tea," etc. Swift vastly enjoyed this pleasant fooling (in high society), and cultivated his lady friends with much assiduity. Obviously they were not afraid of him, but took his lectures and scoldings in good part. He loved to play the mentor to women and improve their minds, in the character of a society father confessor; and it was a miracle that in so dangerous an office he only once met with disaster. He had, it must be allowed, a fatal fondness for walking over thin ice; but he also enjoyed a remarkable immunity from immersion.

There is nothing very unusual, however, in Swift's social relations with women: it is only when we touch upon his two close intimacies that we encounter some of the debatable problems of biography. We refer, of course, to the old, old story of Stella and Vanessa. As a general rule there is no reason why the public should concern itself about the private relations of a great man, and to a sensitive mind there is a certain sense of indelicacy about the investigation. In the case of Swift, however, we are released from such conscientious scruples, inasmuch as the materials have long been public property, and part of them were published during his lifetime. The publication of the Journal to Stella and of the correspondence with Miss Vanhomrigh, together with Swift's own autobiography of a passion, Cadenus and Vanessa, leaves one no option but to seek a solution of these mysteries. The Journal to Stella is, next (even if next) to Pepys' Diary, the most minute and intimate record of the daily life of a public man that exists. Obviously written without a thought of publication, it has all the sincerity which is Swift's especial virtue. As Mr. Leslie Stephen has well said "In reading the Journal to Stella we may fancy ourselves waiting in a parliamentary lobby during an excited debate. One of the chief actors hurries out at intervals; pours out a kind of hasty bulletin; tells of some thrilling incident, or indicates some threatening symptom; more frequently he seeks to relieve his anxieties by indulging in a little personal gossip, and only interjects such comments upon politics as can be compressed into a hasty ejaculation, often, as may be supposed, of an imprecatory kind. Yet he unconsciously betrays his hopes and fears; he is fresh from the thick

of the fight, and we perceive that his nerves are still quivering and that his phrases are glowing with the ardour of the struggle."1

That is one aspect of the Journal: the other is the curiously sympathetic association it reveals between this imperious statesman and a simple woman of thirty, still beautiful indeed 2 and of considerable parts, but wholly unacquainted with the great world in which he moved, of no birth or position, and as far as one can judge, of a somewhat practical and matterof-fact disposition. Swift had known Esther Johnson when she was a little child at Moor Park, where he was acting as secretary to Sir William Temple. She became his pupil, his pet, his playmate. He delighted in developing her mind and leading her to scholarly tastes. As she grew up, the friendship took firmer root. "Stella," as he called her, became his closest companion, the confidante of his most secret thoughts and hopes, and the dearest friend he had in all the world. In the midst of his London distractions and engagements, his strenuous political work, the constant demands of ministers and calls of society, he never forgets the woman who waits at Dublin for his tidings. Every day, late at night after an evening with my lord treasurer, or propped up in bed in the early morning, he writes his gossiping journal; tells

1 LESLIE STEPHEN: Swift, pp. 81-2.

2 Portraits of Stella and Vanessa, by unknown painters, are in the possession of Mr. G. Villiers Briscoe of Bellinter, co. Meath. That of Stella belonged formerly to Charles Ford, whom she and Swift often visited. Both portraits are somewhat conventional, but in point of beauty Stella is incomparably · superior to Vanessa, who appears rather hard-featured. Stella was dark, with raven hair, while Vanessa was fair with light eyes. The portraits are well reproduced in Mr. G. P. MORIARTY'S Dean Swift (1893).

her everything he has been doing; where he dined, and what he ate and drank; the last news in politics, meetings with ministers and wits; the state of his health and the physic he took for it; the swim he had in the river off Chelsea, and how he lost his night-cap diving; the misadventures of his incorrigible man Patrick-in short, every minute detail he can recall of the twenty-four hours, diversified with many execrable puns and doggerel verses. All this he writes exactly as though he were talking to her; interrupting serious matters with playful ridicule of her handwriting or spelling, or her accounts of Dublin society; or again with tender enquiries about her health and her delicate eyesight; using frequently the "little language" which some staid critics have thought unworthy of so great a man. It is, of course, precisely the great man who can venture to unbend, and there is really nothing but what is natural and beautiful in Swift's delight in recalling the half-articulate baby-talk which he and Stella exchanged when she was his child pet at Moor Park twenty odd years before-the one bright spot in the gloomy and desolate dawn of his manhood. "Must loo mimitate Pdfr, pay? Iss, and so la shall. And so leles fol ee rettle. Dood mollow." It is just what a child would say who mixes up l's and r's, and can only half articulate. Swift's loving recollection of it, in the busiest moments of his life, is singularly touching.

The question which has perplexed biographer after biographer is, Why with all this affection did not Swift marry Stella? Granted that his means forbade it when he drew but £230 a year from his Irish livings, surely he could afford a wife when in 1714 he became dean of St. Patrick's. There is of course

a legend that he did marry her in 1716, though it is not pretended that the marriage, if it took place, was anything more than a formal ceremony. As a matter of fact there is not a tittle of positive evidence for the marriage worth print and paper.1 Who places the slightest faith in so unscrupulous and self-contradictory a gossip-monger as Orrery? Or who will be convinced because Monck-Berkeley says that the widow of Bishop Berkeley told him that her husband told her that the Bishop of Clogher told him, etc.? And this crops up three-quarters of a century after the alleged ceremony! There is clearly no case to go to the jury. On the other hand everything we know about Swift and Stella points to the opposite conclusion. In 1704 Swift distinctly told a suitor for Stella's hand that he had no intention of marrying her. He writes her birthday odes, with such lines

as these

"With friendship and esteem possessed
I ne'er admitted love a guest."

When he expects hourly to hear of her death, he writes to a common friend-"Believe me, that violent friendship is much more lasting and engaging than violent love." On the very night of Stella's death, in the pathetic pages written in the first agony of an unquenchable grief, he terms her "the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with." This was no moment for maintaining the hypocrisy of a useless fiction, in a document, too, intended only for his own

1 The "evidence" has been ably discussed, and laughed out of court, in an article in Blackwood's Magazine for March 1883, and by MR. CHURTON COLLINS in his Jonathan Swift, pp. 147-156 (1893).