The last humble boon that I crave, Is to shade me with cypress and yew; And when she looks down on my grave, Let her own that her shepherd was true. "Then to her new love let her go, And deck her in golden array, Be finest at every fine show, And frolic it all the long day; While Colin, forgotten and gone, No more shall be talked of, or seen, Unless when, beneath the pale moon, His ghost shall glide over the green." JONATHAN 1667-1745. SWIFT. SOME time between 1681 and '88, when he was a student in the University of Dublin -say about '85, his eighteenth year-Swift fell in love with a Miss Jane Waryng, (Varina,) the sister of one of his chums. She had a little fortune of one hundred pounds a year, but as Swift had no certain means of support, being entirely dependent on the bounty of an uncle, she declined to marry him, until something better should turn up for them. In 1688 or '89 he quitted the University and entered the service of Sir William Temple, as his amanuensis and reader, on a salary of twenty pounds a year. He ate humble pie in the Temple family, at Shene and Moor Park, for four or five years, and then returned to Ireland, and entered into holy orders. He remained in Ireland a little over a year, not at all pleased with the prospect before him, and resigning his living at Kilroot, in favour of a poor clergyman, returned to his servitude at Moor Park. He was now installed as preceptor to two young ladies-Miss Gifford, a niece of Sir William Temple, and Esther Johnson, afterwards celebrated as Stella. The parentage of Stella is a little dubious. By some she is said to have been the daughter of a merchant, who failed in business in London, and died in her infancy; by others, the daughter of Sir William's steward. Others again say that she was a natural daughter of Sir William. The year of her birth is uncertain. Swift makes her thirty-four, in a birth-day poem, for 1718-19, while in another, written for a similar occasion, six years later, she is fortythree. This difference of three years in her age, places her birth in 1681, or '84. I incline to the former year, which makes her about fifteen when she became the pupil of Swift. She could not have been older than that, if indeed she was so old, for he taught her, we are told, the commonest branches of learning. She does not appear to have been a very apt scholar, though her natural parts were good, but she had many things that made up for this deficiency in Swift's eyes. She was young and beautiful, with agreeable manners, and a heart easily impressed; and where these qualities are united in a woman, even though she is a dunce, which Stella was not, she seldom fails to charm. Add to this an admiration such as Stella felt for Swift's genius, and the love and awe with which he inspired her, and she becomes irresistible. Not that Stella was so with Swift, for his singular nature was not amenable to the laws which govern the masses of mankind; still, she had more influence over him than any human being except Jonathan Swift! She began by admiring him, she ended by loving him. And he loved her too, in his way, though he still kept up his correspondence with his early flame, Varina. He wrote Varina a lover-like letter in April, 1696, while he was teaching Stella to conjugate the verb Amo, and urged her to marry him. "I desire nothing of your fortune," he said; "you shall live where and with whom you please till my affairs are settled to your desire; and in the meantime I will push my advancement with all the eagerness and courage imaginable, and do not doubt to succeed." But as Stella advanced deeper in the grammar of love, his passion for Varina cooled. He resided at Moor Park, till the death of Sir William Temple in January, 1699. Sir William left him a small legacy, and a large amount of MSS. The publication of the latter took him to London, where he remained till the close of the year, on the look-out for a good berth in the church; but not finding one, he accepted an offer of Lord Berkeley to become his secretary and chaplain, and accompanied him to Ireland in that capacity. He arrived in Dublin in the beginning of 1700, and after a series of petty disappointments, which need not be related here, obtained the rectory of Agher, and the vicarage of Laracor and Rath-beggin, in the diocese of Meath. These livings, and the prebend of Dunlarin, which was soon after added to them, raised his income to about four hundred pounds a year-enough in all conscience to have justified him in marrying Varina. But a marriage with her did not enter into his calculations, as she was beginning to perceive. She wrote him a letter, and asked him if the change of his feelings towards her was not owing to the thoughts of a new mistress. "I declare," he answered, (May 4th, 1700,) "upon the word of a Christian and a gentleman, it is not: neither had I ever thoughts of being married to any other person but yourself.” He inquired if her health, which seems never to have been good, was improved, reminding her that her doctor had declared that marriage would endanger her life. "Are you in a condition to manage domestic affairs with an income of less (perhaps) than £300 a year? Have you such an inclination to my person and humour, as to comply with my desires and way of living, and endeavour to make us both as happy as you can? Will you be ready to engage in those methods I shall direct for the improvement of your mind, so as to make us entertaining company for each other, without being miserable, when we are neither visiting, nor visited?" Will the place where he is be more welcome than cities and courts without him? Will she? etc. If she can answer these questions in the affirmative, he concludes: "I shall be blessed to have you in my arms, without regarding whether your person be beautiful, or your fortune large. Cleanliness in the first, and competency in the other, is all I look for." Poor Varina! She had waited fifteen years only to be insulted at last! Whether Swift's conduct on this occasion was owing to a natural repugnance to marriage, or to the presence of Stella in Ireland, is a matter of conjecture; the latter reason seems to me the true one. Sir William Temple, I have omitted to mention, left Stella, at his death, a legacy of one thousand pounds. This was but a small sum in England, where interest was low and living expensive, but it was quite a fortune in Ireland, so she followed Swift thither, as he had invited her to do, accompanied by her Duenna, so to speak, an old lady named Dingley. They arrived in Ireland about the time that Swift wrote his last letter to Varina, and took a lodging at Trim, a small town near Laracor, a mile or so from Swift's vicarage. From this time till her death, some twenty odd years later, Stella was Swift's neighbour and companion. She saw him constantly during his residence at Laracor, and when he was absent, in England, or elsewhere, she and Mrs. Dingley occupied the vicarage till his return. In 1701, he went to England and engaged in political life. He was a great man in politics—a tower of strength to his friends, a terror to his enemies, and not undistinguished in literature. He knew all the wits and writers of the time, Congreve, Addison, and Steele, and took his place among them unquestioned, especially after the publication of "THE TALE OF A TUB" in 1704. We get glimpses of his intimacy with them, and the life that he led in London, in his “JOURNAL TO STELLA." This Journal, which was written in the form of letters and dispatched to Ireland to Stella, is full of what Swift called his "Little Language," an enigmatical style of writing invented by himself for Stella. She figures in it as M. D., while he is Presto, and P. D. F. R. It begins-"THE JOURNAL," not the Little Language-in September, 1710, and ends in June, 1713. Between these dates a new influence was at work in his life. I allude to Vanessa-Esther Vanhomrigh. She was the daughter of Mr. Bartholomew Vanhomrigh, a Dutch merchant, who had been commissary of stores for King William during the Irish civil wars, and afterwards Muster-Master-General (whatever that may have been), and commissioner of revenue. He died in Vanessa's childhood, leaving an estate of sixteen thousand pounds, and his widow settled in London with her four children, the eldest of whom, Vanessa, was about nineteen when Swift first met her. An entry in the "JOURNAL TO STELLA”—the earliest I believe on the subject-fixes October 30th, 1710, as the day of their meeting: at any rate, Swift dined with her mother on that day, and we have no reason to think that she was absent. The family resided within five doors of Swift's lodgings, which were in Bury street, St. James's, and he was frequently their guest, as may be seen in his "JOURNAL." He mentioned them to Stella carelessly, as acquaintances he had recently made, but she seemed to have her suspicions that one, at least, was something more. She remembered, perhaps, her own experience at Moor Park, and, knowing the strange nature of Swift, trembled for the consequences of his intimacy with Vanessa, who was eight or ten years her junior. A great deal has been written about Vanessa and her passion for Swift, but most of it is mere conjecture; we know nothing of the matter beyond what Swift tells us in "CADENUS AND VANESSA." This poem, which was written at Windsor in the spring of 1713, is a history of the affair, as far as it had then gone. Vanessa began by reading the books of Swift, who seems to have directed her studies and pursuits, and ended, like Stella before her, by loving him. It was some time before he perceived her love, and when he did it was with pain. "Cadenus felt within him rise Shame, disappointment, guilt, surprise." He endeavoured to reason her out of her folly, and she endeavoured to reason him into it, and succeeded, so much did her preference flatter his vanity. He could not promise to return her passion-his age and dignity forbade that "But friendship, in its greatest height, A constant, rational delight, On virtue's basis fixed to last When love's allurements long are past, Such is Swift's history of the affair, and, making allowance for its being in verse, I have no doubt but it is the true one. Vanessa threw herself in his way, and he was not man enough to resist her. It might have been difficult to shake her off, (I should judge it was,) still, he could have done so, I think, had he tried. At any rate he could have told her of his relations with Stella, and told Stella of her relations with him; but he did neither. He seldom mentioned Vanessa in his "JOURNAL TO STELLA," and never, as far as I can learn, mentioned Stella to Vanessa. I cannot understand his duplicity, nor do I believe he understood it himself. It was madness. In the summer of 1713 he returned to Ireland, the Dean of St. Patrick's. His first care, after taking possession of the Deanery, was to provide for Stella and Mrs. Dingley, whom he probably found in Dublin on his arrival. He secured lodgings for them upon Ormond's Quay, on the other side of the Liffy, and fell back into his old relations with Stella. How he contrived to attach her to him, as he did so many years, is a mystery. He does not appear to have held out to her the prospect of a marriage with him; on the contrary, he at one time favoured her marriage with another. This was in 1705 or '6, when one of his clerical friends, the Rev. Dr. Tisdall, made her an offer of his hand. She consulted with Swift, and refused him. He was not quite satisfied with Swift's conduct on that occasion, and wrote him to that effect, but Swift assured him that he had not stood in his light. If he had thought of marriage himself, he would certainly have made his choice, never having seen any person whose conversation he valued like Stella's; this was the utmost he had given way to. If he spoke the truth, of which there is some doubt, Stella was indeed infatuated. They lived apart in Dublin, as they had done at Laracor, and never saw each other, except in the presence of a third person, which person was generally Mrs. Dingley. But to return to Vanessa. Her mother and two brothers died in 1713, and left her and her sister the remainder of the Vanhomrigh property, a portion of which was in Ireland. This, and her love for Swift, determined her to remove thither. He protested, but to no purpose. She would come. She arrived in Dublin in the summer or autumn of 1714, and immediately began to weave her toils. She made Swift visit her, which, to do him justice, he was loth to do, and reproached him with his neglect and indifference. He temporized, as was his wont. The presence of her rival, and the unsettled state of Swift's affections, preyed upon Stella, and her health began to decline. He saw it, and asked his friend, Dr. Ashe, the Bishop of Clogher, to inquire the cause of her melancholy. The answer was what he might have expected: "Her sensibility to his late indifference, and to the discredit which her character had sustained from the dubious and mysterious connection between them." There was but one remedy, the Bishop thought-Marriage. Swift said he had formed two resolutions in regard to matrimony: one, not to marry till he possessed a sufficient fortune, the other, that it should be at a time which gave him a reasonable prospect of seeing his children settled in life. Neither condition had been fulfilled. He had not acquired a competent fortune, and he was nearly fifty. He would marry Stella, however, if she would consent to keep it secret, and to live apart from him, as she was then doing. She consented, and they were privately married by the Bishop, in 1716, in the garden of the Deanery. It was not a merry thing with Swift, that marriage, whatever it may have been with Stella, for he became dejected and |