ance of wealth existed-where every inci- | dent calculated to awaken ambition was presented to his mind. His residence at Laracor was interrupted by frequent visits to London, by his feeling his importance to political parties. Through his letters, and especially in his letters to the ladies at Laracor, there are frequent sighs for reposethere are frequent expressions of indifference to the pursuits in which he is engaged; but every page exhibits feverish and restless ambition. There are one or two passages in which he speaks of at last perhaps obtaining a competency-one at least, in which he contemplates such provision for himself as chiefly valuable for the sake of the ladies to whom he is writing; for the letters, though now called the Journal to Stella, were addressed to her and to Mrs. Dingley jointly; yet the feeling throughout is that of an affectionate brother rather than a lover, and now and then it is that of a condescending master, enacting good-natured equality of manner with the show and reality of courtesy to persons admittedly inferior in rank and station. There was in his letters much fondness, rather as indulging a mood of his own mind, however, than from any great consideration of the objects; and there was in these communications to his womankind at Laracor a total absence of reserve, as there was a total absence of respect. The ladies to whom he each day wrote of the manner in which he actually bullied Harley and Bolingbroke, he had remembered as servants at Sheen and Moorpark. They, too, had seen Swift, and the pain" he was compelled to endure "when," to use his own words, "Sir William Temple used to look cold and out of humor for three or four days, and I used to suspect a thousand reasons.' There was at this time, and indeed throughout life, in Swift's mind, a galling sense of social inferiority of condition; and he thought to vindicate his proper place in society by overbearing and intolerable manners. Of this there are a hundred instances; and it was something to Swift to have auditors, such as Stella and Mrs. Dingley, who would be not unlikely to sympathize with him in the tone of feeling which dictated such strange conduct-conduct in which we cannot but see-be it disguised and dignified with what names men please the commencement of insanity. We think Swift's was essentially the mind and spirit of an independent man; but we think the necessity which he felt of forever acting independence, lest it should be de

66

nied, or a contrary feeling imputed, forever placed him in a false position. "I called," he says, "at Mr. Secretary's, to see what the dailed him on Sunday. I made him a very proper speech-told him I observed he was much out of temper; that I did not expect he would tell me the cause, but would be glad to see he was better; and one thing I warned him of, never to appear cold to me, for I would not be treated like a school-boy; that I had felt too much of that in my life already, (meaning Sir William Temple ;) that I expected every great minister, who honored me with his acquaintance, if he heard or saw anything to my disadvantage, would let me know in plain words, and not put me in pain to guess by the change or coldness of his countenance or behaviour; for it was what I would hardly bear from a crowned head, and no subject's favor was worth it; and that I designed to let my Lord Keeper and Mr. Harley know the same thing, and that they might use me accordingly." This was acting dignity. We speak not of the feeling, in which Swift was probably right, but of the way in which it was exhibitedin which Swift was so assuredly wrong, that a true account of such an interview could scarcely have been communicated to any persons but people in precisely the position of Swift's female correspondents. We do not think there is any very distinct evidence that Stella anticipated marriage with Swift; though, of course, if such an intention be ascribed to the parties to this correspondence, it will color the whole of it, and thus one mistake give rise to a hundred.

Whatever the relation was, that subsisted between Swift and Stella, it was not such as prevented him from forming other acquaintances of the fair sex. There are in his correspondence several exceedingly graceful letters from him to many ladies of high rank, which show him playing like a moth round the flame which yet he took care not to approach too near; and from them, too, there are letters enough to show "how high he stood in the estimation of those by whom it is almost every man's ambition to be distinguished." Among his acquaintances was the widow of a Dutch merchant, who had made money in Ireland in William's days, and laid it out in the purchase of forfeited estates there. This business of dealing in estates, which other men continued to think their own, notwithstanding any title that a successful revolution gave, has never been attended with as comfort

able an enjoyment of rents and revenues as ought to be wished for the sake of the peace of society; and the Van Homrighs, with the name of considerable property, appear to have been, during their first intimacy with Swift, in considerable pecuniary embarrassment. We think it not easy to read the letters between Swift and the eldest of the daughters of Mrs. Van Homrigh without believing that, in this case, the Dean's heart was seriously affected; there can be no doubt the lady's was. From the time of his intimacy with the Van Homrighs the journal to Stella assumes a different tone, and becomes a mere diary, in which the class of playful topics which he at first dwelt on, are no longer subjects of his thought; the "little language," as he called the playful style in which he at first wrote, no longer engages or amuses us. Many of the letters read like so many paragraphs from his history of the four last years of Queen Anne. Meanwhile the love affair with Vanessa-so he chose to call Hesther Van Homrigh-thrived apace. The adventure lasted him full twenty years or more. Mother, and brother, and sister died; and the young lady was alone in the world, and came over to Ireland to war with doctors and proctors, and all the devilry of the Ecclesiastical Courts; and when this was done, to undergo all the torments of continued litigation in the courts of common law. Poor Miss Van Homrigh! the single acknowledged comfort to which she could look was the hope of a visit from the Dean; but the Dean feared the scandal of Dublin, and provoked the scandal which he feared by the character of mystery which he gave to his visits.

"If you write to me," he says, "let some other direct it; and I beg you will write nothing that is particular, but what may be seen; letters may be opened, and inconveniences may happen. If you are in Ireland while I am there, I shall see you very seldom. It is not a place for my freedom; but where everything is known in a week, and magnified a hundred degrees." When Swift went to Laracor, after his installation as Dean, he writes to Vanessa: "At my first coming, I thought I should have died with discontent, and was horribly melancholy while they were installing me; but it begins to wear off, and change to dullness." A year after, when the quarrels between Bolingbroke and Harley drove Swift from court, his first letter from Letcombe is to her. Her delight at the poem of Cadenus and Vanessa, though it would seem it con

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tained much calculated to repress her hopes of bringing the amorous Dean to the actual point of matrimony, was unbounded. He promised her, in one of his letters, a second poem; and it is a thousand pities that it was not worked out. In a letter of a later date, when Vanessa was actually fixed on her estate at Celbridge, he writes to her: "God send you through your law and your reference; and remember that riches are nine parts of ten of all that is good in life, and health is the tenth; drinking coffee comes long after, and yet it is the eleventh; but without the two former you cannot drink it right." "The best maxim I know in life is, to drink your coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it." In a letter, July 5th, 1721, he says: "Soyez assurée, que jamais personne du monde a été aimée, honorée, estimée, adorée, par votre ami que vous. I have drank no coffee since I left you, nor intend till I see you again; there is none worth drinking but yours, if I may myself be the judge." We suspect that in this business of the coffee more is meant than at first appears. There is throughout this correspondence with Vanessa an effort to give a character of coldness to parts of each letter, as if there was a fear of the letters falling into other hands. We suspect, too, that to this fear we owe it that the strongest expression of passion on Swift's part is expressed in French. Swift had suggested to Vanessa, in one of the letters, to use something of a cipher; and, we suspect, the whole meaning of the letters is not to be seen on the surface. In the letter which we have last quoted is another passage about coffee, in which it is just possible that Vanessa's conscience suggested a meaning that did not enter into the Dean's thoughts: "Without health, you will lose all desire of drinking your coffee, and become so low as to have no spirits."

It is impossible to read these letters and not think that Vanessa was quite justified in thinking she had won this ardent admirer. Still the word marriage was not mentioned. Is it not probable that, as has been suggested by some of his biographers, Swift was conscious of hereditary disease which he feared to transmit? To us it is quite beyond the range of our powers of belief to imagine, that at the time Swift wrote these letters, he had actually been married to Stella; and it must be remembered that these letters were not in the hands of the biographers, who

one after another, have spoken of the marriage. A scene of great violence is stated to have occurred, when Swift rode to Celbridge, and threw upon Vanessa's table a letter containing one from herself to Stella. Of this story, there is no proof whatever; and if such a letter had existed, there is no reason why it should not have been preserved with the rest which have been published from a transcript made from a copy preserved by one of her executors. It is intimated by Mr. Mason in his "History and Antiquities of St. Patrick's," that more of these letters exist between Swift and Vanessa than came to Sir Walter Scott's hands. If so, they would furnish an interesting addition to any future impression of Mr. Wilde's book.

Our business through this article has been, to our great regret, destroying romance after romance; we shrink from a communication which yet must be made, which may account for the occasional warmth of some of Vanessa's letters-nay, perhaps, justify, in the opinion of some of our readers, the coldness which came over the heart of the Dean. There is a passage in Crabbe's Tales of the Hall, in which the Old Bachelor tells the stories of his own Varinas, Stellas, Vanessas, and Celias—and the casualties which saved him from marriage. All danger appeared to be over; he had come to a grave time of life; had done with novel-reading, and given himself to the study of serious romance; he

What demon in his spite

To love and man could my frail mind excite,

Her will was made in

In Hawkesworth's Life of Swift, we find him quoting the authority of Delany, and in his words telling us, that Vanessa "like Ariadne devoted herself to Bacchus." Whether from this cause, or from excessive love, she got fever and died. a sober interval-she left her property to Mr. Marshal, an Irish judge, a relative of hers, and to Bishop Berkeley. Swift's name did not occur in it. It is said, that she directed her executors, on her death-bed, to publish the poem of Cadenus and Vanessa, and the correspondence between her and Swift. The poem was printed to Swift's great annoyance. Berkeley saw no good in printing the letters, and destroyed the originals. Marshal, the other executor, preserved a copy.

We do not believe that Swift was married to Stella, or contemplated marriage with her at any time. The period assigned for his marriage, is the year 1716. They are said to have been married in the garden of the deanery, by St. George Ashe, Bishop of Clogher. Mr. Monck Berkeley states, that St. George Ashe communicated the fact to Bishop Berkeley-from whose widow he, Monck Berkeley, heard it. "The Bishop of Clogher," says Mr. Mason, "never could have had any communication with Berkeley upon the subject, for the former died in the year 1717, and the latter was at that time in Italy, where he had resided for several previous years." But Dr. Madden it seems, told the same story to Dr. Johnson. That

right?

no doubt. How far Madden's having told it to Johnson adds to the probability of its being true, must depend on Madden's own opportunities of information, of which we are. told nothing; judging of Madden by some well-meant pamphlets of his on Irish affairs, we should regard him as an insufficient witness even of things coming within his own observation, which this could not; Johnson twice mentions the marriage in his Life of Swift. "Poor Stella," he says, "as Dr.

On this part of Swift's history, we think Mr. Mason's examination of the evidence as to the supposed marriage between Swift and Stella, absolutely decisive, and it is really very curious that at such a distance of time, there should be the means of disproving such a story. Monck Berkeley's proof is dissipated at once, by showing the impossibility of a communication between Ashe and Bishop Berkeley. Sir Walter tells us, "immediately subsequent to the ceremony, Swift's state of mind appears to have been dreadful. Delany, (as I have learned from a friend of his relict,) being pressed to give an account of this strange union, said that about the time it took place, he observed Swift to be extremely gloomy and agitated, so much so that he went to Archbishop King to mention his apprehensions. On entering the library, Swift rushed out with a countenance of distraction, and passed him without speaking. He found the Archbishop in tears, and upon asking the reason, he said, 'you have just met the most unhappy man on earth; but on the subject of his wretchedness, you must never ask a question.' Mason's diligence disposes of this story altogether. The ceremony is stated to have been in the year 1716. Swift was absent from Dublin, as the Chapter books of St. Patrick's Cathedral prove, till the July of that year-before that month therefore the ceremony could not have occurred, and the Archbishop (as appears from Swift's correspondence,) was in England from June 1716 to May of the following year. As to the story of the relationship of brother and sister, between Swift and Stella, it is only necessary to say, that 66 'Swift's parents resided in Ireland, from before 1665, until his birth in 1667, and that Temple was residing as ambassador in Holland, from April 1666 till January 1668." We think, when a report of Swift's marriage was once circulated, that the mystery attached to it was likely to prevent an idle story from dying

if not his wife, yet the mother of "a boy, that dined at the deanery on Sundays, and was permitted to amuse himself in the dean

This was Mr. Monck Berkeley's story, "on the authority of Richard Brennan, the servant in whose arms Swift breathed his last." The readers of Scott's Life of Swift, or of Sheridan's, who theorizes in the same way with Scott on the causes why Swift did not marry, will see that gradually the story which all these old women-the Delanies, the Monck Berkeleys, and their relicts-are evoked for the purpose of vouching, has, like the chameleon when dragged into light, actually changed color.

Our own conviction is, that Swift was never married. Our impression is, that disappointment at his sister's marriage led him to favor the kind of establishment which Stella and Mrs. Dingley formed in his neighborhood. We almost think Stella's verses to Swift, at a late period of her life, are inconsistent with her having any thoughts.of the kind; and that such jealousy as she might entertain of the Dean's at any time marrying, if such existed, would not be very unlike the misgiving with which a sister or a niece would be likely to think of a step which, under any circumstances, must be accompanied with very doubtful results as to happiness, and which must, to a certain extent, disturb all previous relations. If Swift ever contemplated marriage, as far as either Stella or Vanessa was concerned, we think Vanessa was plainly his object.

There is a letter of Swift's to Martha Blount, in which he invites her to accompany Pope to Ireland, which, though written after Stella's death, suggests the kind of relation in which Swift had contemplated living with her. "Since I can never live in England, my greatest happiness would be to have you and Mr. Pope condemned, during my life, to live in Ireland; he at the Deanery, and you, for reputation's sake, just at next door; and I will give you eight dinners a-week, and a whole half-dozen of pint bottles of good French wine at your lodgings-a thing you could never expect to arrive at-and every

year a suit of fourteen-penny stuff that should not be worn out at the right side; and a chair costs but sixpence a job; and you shall have Catholicity as much as you please, and the Catholic Dean of St. Patrick's, as old again as I, for your confessor."

It is a grievous thing that Swift did not marry. But till a very late period of his life, Swift was too poor to venture on the expenses, which, to a man of his conventional rank, as Dean of St. Patrick's, must have been the unavoidable consequence. He received the deanery burthened with a debt of not less than a thousand pounds. A conviction that his miserable state of health arose from hereditary disease may have been the real cause, why a man, who was very fond of female society, shrank from this union, when pecuniary difficulties no longer formed an obstacle. Nothing can be more miserable than the account of his cheerless days. Open his letters anywhere, and you find the same melancholy aspect of things. He becomes inhuman, because he has in truth no home. He writes to Pope in 1715, "I live in the corner of a vast unfurnished house. My family consists of a steward, a groom, a helper in the stable, a footman, and an old maid, who are all at board wages; and when I do not dine abroad, or make an entertainment, (which last is very rare,) I eat a mutton pie, and drink half a pint of wine. My amusements are defending my small dominions against the Archbishop, and endeavoring to reduce my rebellious choir. Perditur haec inter misero lux." Pope had said in one of his letters-" My friendships are increased by new ones, yet no part of the warmth I felt for the old is diminished." Listen to Swift's reply: "They to whom I would give the first places in my friendship are not in the way. I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennnyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow-prisoners if I were condemned to jail. I can likewise tolerate knaves much better than fools, because their knavery does me no hurt in the commerce I have with them. * I would describe to you my way of living, if any method could be called so in this country. I choose my companions among those of least consequence, and most compliance. I read the most trifling books I can find; and whenever I write, it is upon the most trifling subjects; but riding, walking, and sleeping take up eighteen of the twenty-four hours. I procrastinate more than I did twenty years ago, and have

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no.

On one occasion when he left Pope's house without explanation, we have a letter from Dublin: "Two sick friends never did well together. Such an office is fitted for servants and humble companions, to whom it is wholly indifferent whether we give them trouble or The case would be quite different if you were with me. You could refuse to see anybody; and here is a large house, where we need not bear each other if we were both sick. I have a race of orderly, elderly people of both sexes at command, who are of no consequence, and have gifts proper for attending us; who can bawl when I am deaf, and tread softly when I am only giddy, and would sleep." In another letter to Pope, he says "I reckon that a man, subject like us to bodily infirmities, should only occasionally converse with great people, notwithstanding all their good qualities, easinesses, and kindnesses. There is another race which I prefer before them, as beef and mutton for constant diet before partridges. I mean a middle kind, with the understanding and fortune, who are perfectly easy, never impertinent, complying in everything, ready to do a hundred little offices that you and I may often want, who dine and sit with me five times for once I go with them, and whom I can tell without offense I am otherwise engaged at present." Again-"I have not the love, or hardly the civility, of any one man in power or station; and I can boast that I neither visit nor am acquainted with any lord, temporal or spiritual, in the whole kingdom. * What hath sunk my spirits more than even years and sickness is reflecting on the most execrable corruptions that run through every branch of public management." Again, "My frequent old disorder, and the scene where I am, and the humor I am in, and some other reasons which time has shown, and will show more if I live, have lowered my small talents with a vengeance, and cooled my disposition to put them in use. I want only to be rich, for I am hard to be pleased; and, for want of riches, people grow every day less solicitous to please me. Therefore I keep humble company, who are happy to come where they can get a bottle of wine without paying for it. I give my vicar a supper, and his wife a shilling to play with

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