had plainly not generosity or sufficient sense of | William. William offered to make him Captain 66 66 Sir, "What, sir, justice to forbear-a strong feeling of kindliness of Horse, showed him how to cut asparagus after was growing up between Temple and Swift. A the Dutch fashion, and how to eat it too, of which short visit to Ireland was made by Swift for the Scott tells a good story. Alderman George Faulksake of health; but he soon returned. In some ner, the Dublin bookseller, dining one day in comtwo years afterwards, on being offered a place in pany with Dr. Leland the historian, the converthe Rolls in Ireland by Temple, he told him of sation turned on Swift. Faulkner told of having his wish to enter the church, and that this offer of once dined with Swift. Asparagus was one of £120 a year, in a different way of life, satisfied the dishes. The dean helped his guest, who him that his going into the church arose from called shortly to be helped a second time. other motives than the mere desire of obtaining a first finish what is on your plate.' livelihood. He went to Ireland-was ordained- eat my stalks?" Aye, sir; King William alobtained a small living. He had, however, be- ways ate the stalks!" And, Mr. Faulkner," come necessary to Temple's existence; and in rejoined the historian, (who was himself remarka1695, returned to Moorpark, where he resided till bly proud and very pompous,) "what, were you Sir William's death in January, 1698, or-as we blockhead enough to obey him?" "Yes, doctor; write-1699. and if you had dined with Dean Swift tête-à-tête, faith you would have been obliged to eat your stalks too!" William, it would seem, gave Swift hopes of church preferment; as in a letter to his uncle, William Swift, he writes, "I am not to take orders till the king gives me a prebend." The business of the future biographer of Swift will be very much that of blotting out some of the pleasant stories told without anything of sufficient authority. Sheridan, and after him Scott, have given an account of Swift's resigning his first preferment when he was meditating a return to Temple's. On Temple's death Swift employed himself in "His resolution," says Sir Walter, "appears editing Sir William's works. They were dutito have been determined by a circumstance highly fully dedicated to the king; but with Temple's characteristic of his exalted benevolence. In an life, Swift's chances of any promotion through excursion from his habitation, he met a clergyman, that interest were at an end, and Swift returned to with whom he formed an acquaintance, which Ireland as chaplain to Lord Berkely, one of the proved him to be learned, modest, well-principled, lords-justices of Ireland. In some short time we the father of eight children, and a curate at the find him holding church preferments to the amount rate of forty pounds a year. Without explaining of nearly £300 a year, and residing at Laracor, his purpose, Swift borrowed this gentleman's where it is probable that the happiest years of his black mare, having no horse of his own, rode to life were past. Swift had scarcely been settled at Dublin, resigned the prebend of Kilroot, and ob- Laracor when he prevailed "on Esther Johnson tained a grant of it for this new friend." The (Stella) and another lady, to draw what money great novelist proceeds to tell of the surprise and they had into Ireland, a great part of their fortune delight of the old clergyman-nay, begins to deal being in annuities upon funds. Money was then in the picturesque. "The poor clergyman, at ten per cent. in Ireland, and all the necessaries of Swift's departure, pressed upon him the black life at half the price." "The adventure," says mare, which he did not choose to hurt him by re- Swift, "looked so like a frolic, the censure held for fusing; and thus, mounted, for the first time, on a some time, as if there were a secret history in such horse of his own, with four score pounds in his a removal, which, however, soon blew off by her purse, Swift again embarked for England, and re- excellent conduct." In a letter from one of Swift's sumed his situation at Moorpark as Sir William relatives, he asks an acquaintance, "whether JonTemple's confidential secretary." Ah, Sir Wal- athan be married? or whether he has been able to ter! these stories of romantic clergymen, and be- resist the charms of both those gentlewomen that nevolent chief governors, thus disposing of livings, marched quite from Moorpark to Dublin, (as they were as little true in Swift's day as in our own. would have marched to the north or anywhere The clergyman, in favor of whom Swift resigned, else,) with full resolution to engage him?" There could scarcely have been so old and so venerable a can be no doubt that there was some want of wiscurate as the story would give us to imagine; dom in Swift's invitation to these ladies. It gave for we find him corresponding with Swift full rise to much idle gossip, in spite of Swift's prethirty-five years afterwards. He was not indigent, cautions to guard against injury to the character of for he had an estate in lands in the county of An- either of the ladies. During his frequent absences trim, and was connected with some of the leading in London they resided at the glebe; on the eve people there. It so happens, too, that there is a of his return, they retired to their own lodgings record of the births of his children, the oldest of in the neighboring town. Swift never saw either whom was not born for a year after the date of of them except in the presence of a third person. this pathetic story. Swift's successor in the pre- The world will not allow people to be happy in bend of Kilroot was the Rev. John Winder; and their own way; and Swift and his female friends the facts we have stated, we find in Mr. Mason's had to pass through the same ordeal that in an Cathedral Antiquities of St. Patrick's. after generation tortured Cowper and Mrs. Unwin. The people of the place did not understand it— Swift was to marry her-then he had married her During Swift's earlier residence with Temple, he had formed a personal acquaintance with King -then he would marry her but for some mystery | away in marriage to at least one Leicestershire connected with their birth, which precluded the belle. Little did the villagers know the spirit possibility of marriage-then the fact of marriage with which they had to deal; little did they know had taken place, but on the very day of the mar-how their very talk was breaking the charm which riage came a mysterious revelation, whispered in perhaps it was endeavoring to fasten and bind more the ear by Archbishop King, believed by Dr. De- close on this most affectionate and generous of lany and some other old women, and now preached human hearts, but one that of all things was most on the housetop by Dr. Wilde. The strange sure to resent any effort to constrain its freedom. communication that Stella and Swift were actual- The report was poison to Swift's mind. “Though ly brother and sister, both being children of Sir the people," he adds, "is a lying sort of a beast, William Temple, was, it would seem, made to (and I think in Leicester above all parts that I them by Mrs. Dingley, (the lady who had accom- ever was in,) yet they seldom talk without some panied Stella from England,) immediately after glimpse of a reason, which I declare (so unpardontheir marriage. Such is the strange story ingen-ably jealous I am) to be a sufficient cause for me iously enough put together from some half dozen to hate any woman further than a bare acquaintabsurd reports, every one of them capable, even at ance." We can easily see from this how little this distance of time, of absolute disproof; but likely any of those ladies who took a fancy to there being a predetermination to make a romance marrying Swift were to effect their purpose by out of this Swift and Stella story-the mock mar- bringing the opinion of others to bear upon his riage and all its mysterious incidents were got up mind in a matter of this kind. The Leicestershire in the style adapted to the readers of a century | lady marries an innkeeper, and her children apago. In Swift's relations with the ladies, we pear on the stage claiming and receiving kindthink there was throughout great absurdity, and with all his knowledge of the world, much ignorance of the true character and dispositions of the female mind. There are on record against him four love stories; and a letter of his with respect to the first, gives, we think, the key to all. So early as the year 1692, his mother feared or fancied that some marriage engagement existed between him and a young Leicestershire woman, and the report was the subject of a letter from Swift to one of his friends. He says "The very ordinary observations I made with going half a mile beyond the university, have taught me experience enough not to think of marriage till I settle my fortune in the world, and even then, itself, I am so hard to please that I suppose I shall put it off to the other world. There is something in me which must be employed, and when I am alone, turns all, for want of practice, into speculation and thought, insomuch, that these seven weeks I have been here, (i. e. Temple's Moorpark) I have writ and burnt, and writ again, on all manner of subjects, more perhaps than any man in England. I have been told in Ireland that my mind was like a conjured spirit, that would do mischief if I did not give it employment. It is this humor that makes me busy, when I am in company, to turn all that way; and since it commonly ends in talk, whether it be love or common conversation, it is all alike. This is so common, that I could remember twenty women in my life to whom I have behaved just the same way; and, I profess, without any other design than that of entertaining myself when very idle, or when something goes amiss in my affairs."you," he says to her, "in a condition to manage The gayety, then, and liveliness of his manners— the cheerful excitement which distinguished the lonely student, when accident threw him out of the reserved and stately circle of the Temples, or removed him from his books into the company of any lively young woman, was construed by village gossips into love, and Swift, like any one who is fool enough to listen to such chatter, was given nesses from Swift. The next of these ladies, whom the preservation of Swift's letters introduces to our notice, was Miss Waryng. In the year 1696 there is a letter from Swift of the most ardent love-an earnest, almost irresistible proposal of marriage-at least it seems strange how it could be resisted. Resisted, however, it was till 1700, when Swift, whose proposal was made while he still was with Sir William Temple, but who had now become Vicar of Laracor, and had some other church preferment, found the lady very anxious to learn what he was about. There is certainly a marked difference in the tone of the letter answering what may be called the lady's proposal, from that in which his own was conveyed some four years before. Without suggesting that, in an interval of four years, other objects might have interrupted any thought of Jane Waryng-for thus the second letter is addressed-the first was to Varina, a more romantic sound; without saying that about two years before Jane's inquisitorial letter, we find Swift mentioning letters to a certain Eliza—perhaps his Leicestershire love—perhaps an intermediate flame-certainly not Jane Waryng herself, as Mr. Mason, with less than his usual shrewdness, conjectures-we do think that a proposal such as Swift's, refused or treated slightingly by a young lady, might have tried the temper of a man less likely to be offended than Swift; and in the second letter, we cannot read any other purpose than that of exhibiting truly the cold and stern realities of life to a young woman who was trifling with her own peace of mind and his. "Are domestic affairs with an income of less (perhaps) than £300 a year? Have you such an inclination to my person and humor, as to comply with my desires and way of living, and endeavor to make us both as happy as you can ? Will you be ready to engage in these methods I shall direct you, to the improvement of your mind, so as to make us entertaining company for each other, without being miserable, when we are neither vis- been. agree in thinking it incomparably his best work. Nothing that he afterwards wrote flowed forth with such absolue freedom and fulness of power;-the satire, coarse and vehement throughout, was throughout effective. The church was actually offended at being so saved from dangers that were far from imaginary; and we fancy that to this indecorous defence, and the scandal it occasioned, we owe the passage in Gulliver's Travels, where Gulliver is banished from court for his bold and unpremeditated mode of extinguishing a conflagration which threatened to destroy the capital of Liliput. Whatever service was done by this romance, which almost equals Rabelais in humor as well as in other points of character, it in all probability lost Swift a bishopric. Johnson thought the book too good for him. Warton, following Johnson's track, says that Swift nowhere acknowledged or claimed it. Johnson never seriously expressed an opinion that it was not Swift's, though something of the kind no doubt was said by him in comparing it with those works of Swift that were more purely political. Here imagination was vigorously at work, and it would almost seem for the mere indulgence of its own capricious pleasure. Warton is wrong in saying that Swift did not claim this work. His letters to his booksellers remain, directing corrections for a new edition, and expressing extreme annoyance at the impertinence of a cousin of his, who affected to have had some share in the work. It must be remembered, when we think of the relation of friendship which Swift sought to establish between himself and the English ladies whom he had imported to the neighborhood of his vicarage, that his only sister had, by a very strange and imprudent marriage, disturbed all his plans of life. When Esther Johnson and Mrs. Dingley came to his neighborhood, we think that a rash experiment was made of trying how far a perma'nent friendship could go on between persons of different sexes-excluding the thought of love. The relation contemplated by the parties was of fraternal affection; and, considering the entire circumstances of all, especially the great difference of years between Swift and Stella, and his having known and loved her as an elder brother from her early childhood, we believe that passion was not at first awakened at all—that the thought of their probable marriage was first suggested by third persons; and how such suggestion of third per- A remarkable coincidence has been pointed out sons was likely to affect Swift's mind, after the by Professor Porson between a passage in Gullievent of the Leicestershire amour, our readers will ver's Travels and one in The Tale of a Tub, which be able to judge. At any rate, the nature of would be enough to fix the authorship of both, as Swift's affection was soon tested. A friend of he observes, on the same person. Gulliver's Trav his, Mr. Tisdal, proposed for Stella. Swift, re- els—“ On each side of the gate was a small wingarded as the guardian of Stella, was consulted; dow, not above six inches from the ground; into and his letter approving of the match is preserved. that, on the left side, the king's smiths conveyed Stella-from whatever cause, and causes are sug-fourscore and eleven chains, like those that hang gested quite adequate, and altogether unconnected to a lady's watch in Europe, and almost as large, with Swift-refused Tisdal; and Tisdal everywhere circulated the report that he was rejected because Swift wanted to marry her. While the ladies were thinking too much of Swift, he was thinking too little of the ladies. He was busy in cabinets and courts. He was thinking of changes of ministry, and his whole heart was in his task. Tories called him whig, and whigs a tory. He himself, in all probability, was right when he said he was a whig in state politics-a tory in church matters. In joining Harley's administration, there can be but little doubt that his first strong motive was resentment against the former ministry, by whom he regarded himself as neglected. The love of mischief, we think, too, mingled with the feeling; and the exultation which accompanies every exertion of power made him seize every opportunity which public affairs presented of bringing his peculiar talents into play. They were glorious days, when, in the full exuberance of fun, "The Tale of a Tub"-Swift's first work-forced unwilling smiles from the gravest churchmen. With Johnson, we which were locked to my left leg with six-andthirty padlocks." Compare with this, Tale of a Tub-Introduction-"Fourscore and eleven pamphlets have I writ under three reigns, and for the service of thirty-six factions." Whatever these numbers may mean, however arbitrarily or accidentally they may have first occurred, the repetition could not have been accidental, and may have been designed, like a private mark, to enable Swift to prove his property in either work, should he ever be disposed to throw off the mask, and claim them as his own. Swift had never shaped to his own imagination a home in any proper sense of the word. From his wretched collegerooms he had passed to Temple's, where all the appearance of wealth existed—where every incident 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 repose-there are frequent expressions of indiffer This was acting dignity. We speak not of the feeling, in which Swift was probably right, but of the way in which it was exhibited-in 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 comfortable 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 ence to the pursuits in which he is engaged; but accordingly." every page exhibits feverish and restless ambition. There are one or two passages in which he speaks of at last perhaps obtaining a competence, 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 goodnatured 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 dic-considerable pecuniary embarrassment. We think tated 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 for ever acting independence, lest it should be denied, or a contrary feeling imputed, forever placed him in a false position. "I called," he says, “at Mr. Secre-on are no longer subjects of his thought; the "littary'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 behavior; 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 : 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 tle language," which 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 Hester 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 torment 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. | 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 made from a copy preserved by one of her execu- If so, "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 any 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 install-rest which have been published from a transcript ing me; but it begins to wear off, and change to dulness." 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 contained much calculated to repress her hopes of bringing the amorous dean to the actual point of matrimony, was unbounded. Our business through this article has been, to He promised her, in one of his letters, a second our great regret, destroying romance after ropoem; and it is a thousand pities that it was not mance; we shrink from a communication which worked out. In a letter of a later date, when Va-yet must be made, which may account for the ocnessa was actually fixed on her estate at Cel-casional warmth of some of Vanessa's letters-nay, bridge, 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 5, 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 perhaps justify, in the opinion of some of our A thin, tall, upright, serious, slender maid, What demon in his spite And lead me curious on against all sense of right? I went, I saw-shall I describe the hoard |