however attained, is so well secured, and where the Administration is at least so gentle : it is impossible they could choose any other constitution without changing to their loss.

Fidelity to a present establishment is indeed the principal means to defend it from a foreign enemy, but without other qualifications will not prevent corruptions from within, and states are more often ruined by these than the other.

To conclude: whether the proposals I have offered toward a reformation be such as are most prudent and convenient, may probably be a question; but it is none at all whether some reformation be absolutely necessary, because the nature of things is such, that if abuses be not remedied they will certainly increase, nor ever stop till they end in the subversion of a commonwealth. As there must always of necessity be some corruptions, so in a well-instituted state the executive power will be always contending against them by reducing things (as Machiavel speaks) to their first principles, never letting abuses grow inveterate, or multiply so far that it will be hard to find remedies, and perhaps impossible to apply them. As he that would keep his house in repair must attend every little breach or flaw and supply it immediately, else time alone will bring all to ruin, how much more the common accidents of storm and rain! He must live in perpetual danger of his house falling about his ears, and will find it cheaper to throw it quite down and build it again from the ground, perhaps upon a new foundation, or at least in a new form, which may neither be so safe nor so convenient as the old.

PART II.

FROM THE AGE OF FORTY-SIX TO DEATH.

(1713-1745.)

THE

INTRODUCTION.

He was

66

Pdfr,"

Poor dear".

HE first letters of Swift's Journal to Stella, which will be found in the Appendix to this volume, were written in the year 1710. They show the old affectionate and playful ways of speech, begun with the child and continued in association with the closest ties that bound Swift to this world. sometimes "Podefar" or "FR," which means something; "Fellow," "Foolish Rogue," or what you will. She was "Ppt," which may stand for Pretty Pet," or for "Poppet," or for some other pet phrase that could be so contracted. "M.D." meant 66 My dear," or "My dears," when sometimes applied to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley.

The first publication of any of these letters was by Dr. Hawkesworth in 1766, in a continuation of his edition of Swift's works published ten years before. That continuation included the last twenty-five letters of the Journal to Stella. In 1768 Mr. Deane Swift published in three volumes more of Swift's letters, including the Journal to Stella from its opening in 1710 to the 9th February 1712. Both editors took liberties, Deane Swift more freely than Hawkesworth; and as only the first letter of the series he printed is now to be found in the original, we can only conjecturally restore the "Pdfr" and "Ppt," which he transformed into "Presto" and "Stella," though those were names not used by Swift in 1710. In a few cases I have allowed the word "Stella"

to remain in the text, but it is always Deane Swift who has given it in place of something else that Jonathan Swift had written. How close we come to Swift himself in these letters of private personal diary! The power of a childlike tenderness within the proud, strong man is to be inferred sometimes from his writing for the world,-without it where would have been the playfulness that made "Gulliver," with all its scorn for the corruption of society, a book pleasant to children?-but the childlike tenderness is all to be found in his writing to the woman who brought light into his life.

In one of these first letters to Stella, Swift records his removal to Bury Street, and an occasional dinner with his neighbour, Mrs. Vanhomrigh, who lived five doors off. She was the widow of Bartholomew Vanhomrigh, a merchant of Amsterdam, who settled in Dublin in the reign of Charles the Second, and was Commissary of the Stores when King William III. was with his army in Ireland. He was made afterwards a Commissioner of the Revenue, and died in 1703, eighteen years after his marriage to a lady born in Dublin of English parents. He left to his family—a widow, with two sons and two daughters-sixteen thousand pounds. The family must have been of weakly constitution. The two sons died, one after the other, within six years after their father. Mrs. Vanhomrigh and her two daughters came to England in 1709. In London the widow lived beyond her income, using some part of the money in trust for her children, until her own death in 1714.

This widow, with two daughters, was visited by persons of fashion. Swift, who called them "the Vans," often looked in, and he concerned himself with friendly help towards the education of the elder daughter, Hester Vanhomrigh, whom he called Vanessa. The early deaths of all the members of the family bear witness to a weakliness of constitution. The relation of Hester Vanhomrigh to Swift was that of a poor girl who might be liable, through green sickness, to try her teeth on cinders and slate-pencil, and who not only fell ridiculously "in love" with her elderly friend, but was unhealthy enough to tell him that she had done So. The situation was for Swift, embarrassing in those days of a

too formal politeness. He put his reasoning with her, and his expression of regret and astonishment, into a poem of "Cadenus" (Decanus, the Dean) "and Vanessa," which speaks clearly enough to any one who reads it without prejudice, and allows fairly for the ceremony of days when a contemptuous No could be expressed clearly enough to rebuff a Duke in the beautiful language of Yes. "Cadenus and Vanessa" was a sugar-coated pill, in which the unbiassed reader will not fail to find the pill where to poor, sickly Hester Vanhomrigh there was nothing apparent but the surface sugar. Swift, no doubt, might have dealt more wisely with his problem, but even in our days of plainer speaking a kind-hearted man would find the problem difficult.

Swift was then leaving for Dublin. The death of Queen Anne and the succession of George I. brought the Whigs back into power, and put an end to his concern with English politics. He went to his Deanery at St. Patrick's, where he soon made his activity felt in Irish questions.

Mrs. Vanhomrigh died in 1714, and left her daughters jointexecutors. Her debts caused them embarrassment, and some needless fears of arrest. Therefore in 1715 they crossed over to Ireland, and lived quietly at Cellbridge, in Marley Abbey, on the Liffey, about ten miles from Dublin. Swift at first visited them, but in 1716, finding Hester's attachment to him uncomfortably obtrusive, he kept away from her, and humoured her only with letters, in which he laboured to give returns that would please her without assent to her delusion, upon which he directly entreated that she "would not make herself or him unhappy by imaginations." He tried also in vain to get her married to one of two possible husbands.

In the same year, 1716, Esther Johnson was privately married to Swift in the garden of the Deanery, by Dr. Ashe, then Bishop of Clogher. The marriage was regarded as beyond question by Lord Orrery, and by Swift's friend, Dr. Delany. It was told by Stella to Swift's friend, Dr. Sheridan. It is affirmed as a fact by George Monck Berkeley, who said in an "Inquiry into the Life of Swift," that he had learnt it directly from the widow of Bishop

Berkeley, to whom it had been told by Swift himself. But Esther Johnson kept the secret from the world, and she bequeathed her property as a single woman, signing her will with her maiden name. For the marriage was not meant for marriage in the sight of man, though many a pure womanly thought may have caused Esther Johnson, who was religious, and was full of works of charity, to wish that her devotion to Jonathan Swift should be . consecrated before God. But how could this consecration have been other than most private, if the motive for Swift's avoidance of full marriage was that which I have already suggested. He and Stella, though as much together as they could be, though she took often the wife's place at the head of his table, lived in Dublin on opposite sides of the Liffey. If the world knew that they were married, what would the world say? It is sufficiently proud now of what it calls its pessimism, in discussions of life and character. It was then miserably critical in the bad way of censure. "Why do not the Dean and Mrs. Swift live together like other married couples ?" The true answer being given, the remark would be, "Oh, indeed! dread of transmitting his insanity to children? A pretty fellow to set up as counsellor to ME!" Swift was compelled to keep his own sad counsel. But within that bound why might not Stella feel that she had looked straight to God for His blessing on her self-devoting love. Alas for the rarity of Christian charity, when a deep human sore like this attracts chiefly the blow-flies of scandalous opinion!

Hester Vanhomrigh's sister died in Ireland, leaving her the one survivor of the short-lived family. Swift's wish to be kind to her in her desolation caused him then to visit her again. To please her he revised in 1719 "Cadenus and Vanessa," which then took the precise form in which it now appears. But the unhealthy craze then gained such mastery over Hester Vanhomrigh, that in 1720 she wrote a jealous letter to Esther Johnson, asking her whether she was Swift's wife. Esther Johnson gave the letter to Swift, who at once rode with it to Marley Abbey, angrily laid it down before Hester Vanhomrigh, and left her without a word. He never again saw her or wrote to her. She had long tried his