The Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's Part 8

Only on one topic, affecting himself during his long stay in London, is he in any degree reserved. Among the acquaintanceships he had formed was one with a Mrs. Vanhomrigh, a widowed lady of property, who had a family of several daughters. The eldest of these, Hester Vanhomrigh, was a girl of more than ordinary talent and accomplishments, and of enthusiastic and impetuous character; and, as Swift acquired the habit of dropping in upon the "Vans," as he called them, when he had no other dinner engagement, it was not long before he and Miss Vanhomrigh fell into the relationship of teacher and pupil. He taught her to think and to write verses; and, as among Swift's peculiarities of opinion, one was that he entertained what would even now be called very advanced notions as to the intellectual capabilities and rights of women, he found no more pleasant amus.e.m.e.nt, in the midst of his politics and other business, than that of superintending the growth of so hopeful a mind.

"His conduct might have made him styled A father, and the nymph his child: The innocent delight he took To see the virgin mind her book Was but the master's secret joy In school to hear the finest boy."

But, alas! Cupid got among the books.

"Vanessa, not in years a score, Dreams of a gown of forty-four; Imaginary charms can find In eyes with reading almost blind; She fancies music in his tongue, Nor farther looks, but thinks him young."

Nay, more: one of Swift's lessons to her had been that frankness, whether in man or women, was the chief of the virtues, and

"That common forms were not design'd Directors to a n.o.ble mind."

"Then," said the nymph,

"I'll let you see My actions with your rules agree; That I can vulgar forms despise, And have no secrets to disguise."

She told her love, and fairly argued it out with the startled tutor, discussing every element in the question, whether for or against--the disparity of their ages, her own five thousand guineas, their similarity of tastes, his views of ambition, the judgment the world would form of the match, and so on; and the end of it was that she reasoned so well that Swift could not but admit that there would be nothing after all so very incongruous in a marriage between him and Esther Vanhomrigh. So the matter rested, Swift gently resisting the impetuosity of the young woman, when it threatened to take him by storm, but not having the courage to adduce the real and conclusive argument--the existence on the other side of the channel of another and a dearer Esther. Stella, on her side, knew that Swift visited a family called the "Vans"; she divined that something was wrong; but that was all.

That Swift, the Mentor of ministers, their daily companion, at whose bidding they dispensed their patronage and their favour, should himself be suffered to remain a mere vicar of an Irish parish, was, of course, impossible. Vehement and even boisterous and overdone as was his zeal for his own independence--"If we let these great ministers pretend too much, there will be no governing them," was his maxim; and, in order to act up to it, he used to treat Dukes and Earls as if they were dogs--there were yet means of honourably acknowledging his services in a way to which he would have taken no exception. Nor can we doubt that Oxford and St. John, who were really and heartily his admirers, were anxious to promote him in some suitable manner. An English bishopric was certainly what he coveted, and what they would at once have given him. But, though the bishopric of Hereford fell vacant in 1712, there was, as Sir Walter Scott says, "a lion in the path." Queen Anne, honest dowdy woman,--her instinctive dislike of Swift strengthened by the private influence of the Archbishop of York, and that of the d.u.c.h.ess of Somerset, whose red hair Swift had lampooned--obstinately refused to make the author of the _Tale of a Tub_ a bishop. Even an English deanery could not be found for so questionable a Christian; and in 1713 Swift was obliged to accept, as the best thing he could get, the Deanery of St. Patrick's in his native city of Dublin. He hurried over to Ireland to be installed, and came back just in time to partake in the last struggles and dissensions of the Tory administration before Queen Anne's death. By his personal exertions with ministers, and his pamphlet ent.i.tled _Public Spirit of the Whigs_, he tried to buoy up the sinking Tory cause. But the Queen's death destroyed all; with George I. the Whigs came in again; the late Tory ministers were dispersed and disgraced, and Swift shared their fall. "Dean Swift," says Arbuthnot, "keeps up his n.o.ble spirit; and, though like a man knocked down, you may behold him still with a stern countenance, and aiming a blow at his adversaries." He returned, with rage and grief in his heart, to Ireland, a disgraced man, and in danger of arrest on account of his connexion with the late ministers. Even in Dublin he was insulted as he walked in the streets.

For twelve years--that is, from 1714 to 1726--Swift did not quit Ireland.

At his first coming, as he tells us in one of his letters, he was "horribly melancholy;" but the melancholy began to wear off; and, having made up his mind to his exile in the country of his detestation, he fell gradually into the routine of his duties as Dean. How he boarded in a private family in the town, stipulating for leave to invite his friends to dinner at so much a head, and only having two evenings a week at the deanery for larger receptions; how he brought Stella and Mrs. Dingley from Laracor, and settled them in lodgings on the other side of the Liffey, keeping up the same precautions in his intercourse with them as before, but devolving the management of his receptions at the deanery upon Stella, who did all the honours of the house; how he had his own way in all cathedral business, and had always a few clergymen and others in his train, who toadied him, and took part in the facetious horse-play of which he was fond; how gradually his physiognomy became known to the citizens, and his eccentricities familiar to them, till the "Dean" became the lion of Dublin, and everybody turned to look at him as he walked in the streets; how, among the Dean's other oddities, he was popularly charged with stinginess in his entertainments and a sharp look-out after the wine; how sometimes he would fly off from town, and take refuge in some country-seat of a friendly Irish n.o.bleman; how all this while he was reading books of all kinds, writing notes and jottings, and corresponding with Pope, Gay, Prior, Arbuthnot, Oxford, Bolingbroke, and other literary and political friends in London or abroad: these are matters in the recollection of all who have read any of the biographies of Swift. It is also known that it was during this period that the Stella-and-Vanessa imbroglio reached its highest degree of entanglement. Scarcely had the Dean located Stella and Mrs. Dingley in their lodging in Dublin when, as he had feared, the impetuous Vanessa crossed the Channel to be near him too. Her mother's death, and the fact that she and her younger sister had a small property in Ireland, were pretext enough. A sc.r.a.p or two from surviving letters will tell the sequel, and will suggest the state of the relations at this time between Swift and this unhappy and certainly very extraordinary, woman:--

_Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh: London, Aug. 12, 1714._ "I had your letter last post, and before you can send me another I shall set out for Ireland. * * * If you are in Ireland when 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. These are rigorous laws that must be pa.s.sed through; but it is probable we may meet in London in winter; or, if not, leave all to fate."

_Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Dublin, 1714_ (_some time after August_).

"You once had a maxim, which was to act what was right, and not mind what the world would say. I wish you would keep to it now. Pray, what can be wrong in seeing and advising an unhappy young woman? I cannot imagine. You cannot but know that your frowns make my life unsupportable. You have taught me to distinguish, and then you leave me miserable."

_Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Dublin, 1714._ "You bid me be easy, and you would see me as often as you could. You had better have said as often as you could get the better of your inclinations so much, or as often as you remembered there was such a one in the world. If you continue to treat me as you do, you will not be made uneasy by me long. It is impossible to describe what I have suffered since I saw you last. I am sure I could have bore the rack much better than those killing, killing words of yours. Sometimes I have resolved to die without seeing you more; but those resolves, to your misfortune, did not last long; for there is something in human nature that prompts one to find relief in this world. I must give way to it, and beg you'd see me, and speak kindly to me; for I am sure you'd not condemn any one to suffer what I have done, could you but know it. The reason I write to you is because I cannot tell it to you should I see you.

For, when I begin to complain, then you are angry; and there is something in your looks so awful that it strikes me dumb."

Here a gap intervenes, which record fills up with but an indication here and there. Swift saw Vanessa, sometimes with that "something awful in his looks which struck her dumb," sometimes with words of perplexed kindness; he persuaded her to go out, to read, to amuse herself; he introduced clergymen to her--one of them afterwards Archbishop of Cashel--as suitors for her hand; he induced her to leave Dublin, and go to her property at Selbridge, about twelve miles from Dublin, where now and then he went to visit her, where she used to plant laurels against every time of his coming, and where "Vanessa's bower," in which she and the Dean used to sit, with books and writing materials before them, during those happy visits, was long an object of interest to tourists; he wrote kindly letters to her, some in French, praising her talents, her conversation, and her writing, and saying that he found in her "_tout ce que la nature a donne un mortel, l'honneur, la vertu, le bon sens, l'esprit, la douceur, l'agrment et la fermet d'me_." All did not suffice; and one has to fancy, during those long years, the restless beatings, on the one hand, of that impa.s.sioned woman's heart, now lying as cold undistinguishable ashes in some Irish grave, and, on the other hand, the distraction, and anger, and daily terror, of the man she clung to. For, somehow or other, there _was_ an element of terror mingled with the affair. What it was is beyond easy scrutiny, though possibly the data exist if they were well sifted. The ordinary story is that some time in the midst of those entanglements with Vanessa, and in consequence of their effects on the rival-relationship--Stella having been brought almost to death's door by the anxieties caused her by Vanessa's proximity, and by her own equivocal position in society--the form of marriage was gone through by Swift and Stella, and they became legally husband and wife, although with an engagement that the matter should remain secret, and that there should be no change in their manner of living. The year 1716, when Swift was forty-nine years of age, and Stella thirty-two, is a.s.signed as the date of this event; and the ceremony is said to have been performed in the garden of the deanery by the Bishop of Clogher. But more mystery remains. "Immediately subsequent to the ceremony," says Sir Walter Scott, "Swift's state of mind appears to have been dreadful. Delany (as I have learned from a friend of his widow) said that about the time it was supposed to have taken 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 pa.s.sed 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.'" What are we to make of this? Nay more, what are we to make of it when we find that the alleged marriage of Swift with Stella, with which Scott connects the story, is after all denied by some as resting on no sufficient evidence: even Dr. Delany, though he believed in the marriage, and supposed it to have taken place about the time of this remarkable interview with the archbishop, having no certain information on the subject? If we a.s.sume a secret marriage with Stella, indeed, the subsequent portion of the Vanessa story becomes more explicable. On this a.s.sumption we are to imagine Swift continuing his letters to Vanessa, and his occasional visits to her at Selbridge on the old footing, for some years after the marriage, with the undivulged secret ever in his mind, increasing tenfold his former awkwardness in encountering her presence. And so we come to the year 1720, when, as the following sc.r.a.ps will show, a new paroxysm on the part of Vanessa brought on a new crisis in their relations.

_Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Selbridge, 1720._ "Believe me, it is with the utmost regret that I now write to you, because I know your good-nature such that you cannot see any human creature miserable without being sensibly touched. Yet what can I do? I must either unload my heart, and tell you all its griefs, or sink under the inexpressible distress I now suffer by your prodigious neglect of me.

It is now ten long weeks since I saw you, and in all that time I have never received but one letter from you, and a little note with an excuse. Oh, have you forgot me? You endeavour by severities to force me from you. Nor can I blame you; for, with the utmost distress and confusion, I behold myself the cause of uneasy reflections to you.

Yet I cannot comfort you, but here declare that it is not in the power of art, time, or accident, to lessen the inexpressible pa.s.sion I have for ----. Put my pa.s.sion under the utmost restraint, send me as distant from you as the earth will allow; yet you cannot banish those charming ideas which will ever stick by me whilst I have the use of memory. Nor is the love I bear you only seated in my soul; for there is not a single atom of my frame that is not blended with it.

Therefore do not flatter yourself that separation will ever change my sentiments; for I find myself unquiet in the midst of silence, and my heart is at once pierced with sorrow and love. For Heaven's sake, tell me what has caused this prodigious change in you which I have found of late."

_Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Dublin, 1720._ * * "I believe you thought I only rallied when I told you the other night that I would pester you with letters. Once more I advise you, if you have any regard for your quiet, to alter your behaviour quickly; for I do a.s.sure you I have too much spirit to sit down contented with this treatment.

Because I love frankness extremely, I here tell you now that I have determined to try all manner of human arts to reclaim you; and, if all these fail, I am resolved to have recourse to the black one, which, it is said, never does. Now see what inconveniency you will bring both yourself and me unto * *. When I undertake a thing, I don't love to do it by halves."

_Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh: Dublin, 1720._ "If you write as you do, I shall come the seldomer on purpose to be pleased with your letters, which I never look into without wondering how a brat that cannot read can possibly write so well. * * Raillery apart, I think it inconvenient, for a hundred reasons, that I should make your house a sort of constant dwelling-place. I will certainly come as often as I conveniently can; but my health and the perpetual run of ill weather hinder me from going out in the morning, and my afternoons are taken up I know not how; so that I am in rebellion with a hundred people besides yourself for not seeing them. For the rest, you need make use of no other black art besides your ink. It is a pity your eyes are not black, or I would have said the same; but you are a white witch, and can do no mischief."

_Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh: Dublin, 1720._ "I received your letter when some company was with me on Sat.u.r.day night, and it put me in such confusion that I could not tell what to do. This morning a woman who does business for me told me she heard I was in love with one, naming you, and twenty particulars; that little master ---- and I visited you, and that the Archbishop did so; and that you had abundance of wit, &c. I ever feared the tattle of this nasty town, and told you so; and that was the reason why I said to you long ago that I would see you seldom when you were in Ireland; and I must beg you to be easy, if, for some time, I visit you seldomer, and not in so particular a manner."

_Miss Vanhomrigh to Swift: Selbridge, 1720._ * * "Solitude is unsupportable to a mind which is not easy. I have worn out my days in sighing and my nights in watching and thinking of ----, who thinks not of me. How many letters shall I send you before I receive an answer? * * Oh that I could hope to see you here, or that I could go to you! I was born with violent pa.s.sions, which terminate all in one--that inexpressible pa.s.sion I have for you. * * Surely you cannot possibly be so taken up but you might command a moment to write to me and force your inclinations to so great a charity. I firmly believe, if I could know your thoughts (which no human creature is capable of guessing at, because never anyone living thought like you), I should find you had often in a rage wished me religious, hoping then I should have paid my devotions to Heaven. But that would not spare you; for, were I an enthusiast, still you'd be the deity I should worship. What marks are there of a deity but what you are to be known by? You are present everywhere; your dear image is always before my eyes. Sometimes you strike me with that prodigious awe I tremble with fear; at other times a charming compa.s.sion shines through your countenance, which revives my soul. Is it not more reasonable to adore a radiant form one has seen than one only described?"

_Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh: Dublin, October 15, 1720._ "All the morning I am plagued with impertinent visits, below any man of sense or honour to endure, if it were any way avoidable. Afternoons and evenings are spent abroad in walking to keep off and avoid spleen as far as I can; so that, when I am not so good a correspondent as I could wish, you are not to quarrel and be governor, but to impute it to my situation, and to conclude infallibly that I have the same respect and kindness for you I ever professed to have."

_Swift to Miss Vanhomrigh: Gaullstoun, July 5, 1721._ * * "Settle your affairs, and quit this scoundrel-island, and things will be as you desire. I can say no more, being called away. _Mais soyez a.s.sure que jamais personne au monde n'a t aime, honore, estime, adore par votre ami que vous._"

Vanessa did not quit the "scoundrel-island;" but, on the contrary, remained in it, unmanageable as ever. In 1722, about a year after the date of the last sc.r.a.p, the catastrophe came. In a wild fit Vanessa, as the story is, took the bold step of writing to Stella, insisting on an explanation of the nature of Swift's engagements to her; Stella placed the letter in Swift's hands; and Swift, in a paroxysm of fury, rode instantly to Selbridge, saw Vanessa without speaking, laid a letter on her table, and rode off again. The letter was Vanessa's death-warrant. Within a few weeks she was dead, having previously revoked a will in which she had bequeathed all her fortune to Swift.

Whatever may have been the purport of Vanessa's communication to Stella, it produced no change in Swift's relations to the latter. The pale pensive face of Hester Johnson, with her "fine dark eyes" and hair "black as a raven," was still to be seen on reception-evenings at the deanery, where also she and Mrs. Dingley would sometimes take up their abode when Swift was suffering from one of his attacks of vertigo and required to be nursed. Nay, during those very years in which, as we have just seen, Swift was attending to the movements to and fro of the more imperious Vanessa in the background, and a.s.suaging her pa.s.sion by visits and letters, and praises of her powers, and professions of his admiration of her beyond all her s.e.x, he was all the while keeping up the same affectionate style of intercourse as ever with the more gentle Stella, whose happier lot it was to be stationed in the centre of his domestic circle, and addressing to her, in a less forced manner, praises singularly like those he addressed to her rival. Thus, every year, on Stella's birth-day, he wrote a little poem in honour of the occasion. Take the one for 1718, beginning thus:--

"Stella this day is thirty-four (We sha'n't dispute a year or more): However, Stella, be not troubled; Although thy size and years be doubled Since first I saw thee at sixteen, The brightest virgin on the green, So little is thy form declined, Made up so largely in thy mind."

Stella would reciprocate these compliments by verses on the Dean's birth-day; and one is struck with the similarity of her acknowledgments of what the Dean had taught her and done for her to those of Vanessa. Thus, in 1721,--

"When men began to call me fair, You interposed your timely care; You early taught me to despise The ogling of a c.o.xcomb's eyes; Show'd where my judgment was misplaced, Refined my fancy and my taste.

You taught how I might youth prolong By knowing what was right and wrong; How from my heart to bring supplies Of l.u.s.tre to my fading eyes; How soon a beauteous mind repairs The loss of changed or falling hairs; How wit and virtue from within Send out a smoothness o'er the skin: Your lectures could my fancy fix, And I can please at thirty-six."

The death of Vanessa in 1722 left Swift from that time entirely Stella's.

How she got over the Vanessa affair in her own mind, when the full extent of the facts became known to her, can only be guessed. When some one alluded to the fact that Swift had written beautifully about Vanessa, she is reported to have said "That doesn't signify, for we all know the Dean could write beautifully about a broomstick." "A woman, a true woman!" is Mr. Thackeray's characteristic comment.

To the world's end those who take interest in Swift's life will range themselves either on the side of Stella or on that of Vanessa. Mr.

Thackeray prefers Stella, but admits that, in doing so, though the majority of men may be on his side, he will have most women against him.

Which way Swift's _heart_ inclined him it is not difficult to see. Stella was the main influence of his life; the intimacy with Vanessa was but an episode. And yet, when he speaks of the two women as a critic, there is a curious equality in his appreciation of them. Of Stella he used to say that her wit and judgment were such that "she never failed to say the best thing that was said wherever she was in company;" and one of his epistolary compliments to Vanessa is that he had "always remarked that, neither in general nor in particular conversation, had any word ever escaped her lips that could by possibility have been better." Some little differences in his preceptorial treatment of them may be discerned--as when he finds it necessary to admonish poor Stella for her incorrigibly bad spelling, no such admonition, apparently, being required for Vanessa; or when, in praising Stella, he dwells chiefly on her honour and gentle kindliness, whereas in praising Vanessa he dwells chiefly on her genius and force of mind. But it is distinctly on record that his regard for both was founded on his belief that in respect of intellect and culture both were above the majority of their s.e.x. And here it may be repeated that, not only from the evidence afforded by the whole story of Swift's relations to these two women, but also from the evidence of distinct doctrinal pa.s.sages scattered through his works, it appears that those who in the present day maintain the co-equality of the two s.e.xes, and the right of women to as full and varied an education, and as free a social use of their powers, as is allowed to men, may claim Swift as a pioneer in their cause. Both Stella and Vanessa have left their testimony that from the very first Swift took care to indoctrinate them with peculiar views on this subject; and both thank him for having done so. Stella even goes further, and almost urges Swift to do on the great scale what he had done for her individually:--

"O turn your precepts into laws; Redeem the woman's ruin'd cause; Retrieve lost empire to our s.e.x, That men may bow their rebel necks."

This fact that Swift had a _theory_ on the subject of the proper mode of treating and educating women, which theory was in antagonism to the ideas of his time, explains much both in his conduct as a man and in his habits as a writer.

For the first six years of his exile in Ireland after the death of Queen Anne, Swift had published nothing of any consequence, and had kept aloof from politics, except when they were brought to his door by local quarrels. In 1720, however, he again flashed forth as a political luminary, in a character that could hardly have been antic.i.p.ated--that of an Irish patriot. Taking up the cause of the "scoundrel-island," to which he belonged by birth, if not by affection, and to which fate had consigned him in spite of all his efforts, he made that cause his own. Virtually saying to his old Whig enemies, then in power on the other side of the water, "Yes, I am an Irishman, and I will show you what an Irishman is,"

he const.i.tuted himself the representative of the island, and hurled it, with all its pent-up ma.s.s of rage and wrongs, against Walpole and his administration. First, in revenge for the commercial wrongs of Ireland came his _Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufactures, utterly Rejecting and Renouncing Everything Wearable that comes from England_; then, amidst the uproar and danger excited by this proposal, other and other defiances in the same tone; and lastly, in 1723, on the occasion of the royal patent to poor William Wood to supply Ireland, without her own consent, with a hundred and eight thousand pounds' worth of copper half-pence of English manufacture, the unparalleled _Drapier's Letters_, which blasted the character of the coppers and a.s.serted the nationality of Ireland. All Ireland, Catholic as well as Protestant, blessed the Dean of St. Patrick's; a.s.sociations were formed for the defence of his person; and, had Walpole and his Whigs succeeded in bringing him to trial, it would have been at the expense of an Irish rebellion. From that time till his death Swift was the true King of Ireland; only when O'Connell arose did the heart of the nation yield equal veneration to any single chief; and even at this day the grateful Irish, forgetting his gibes against them, and forgetting his continual habit of distinguishing between the Irish population as a whole and the English and Protestant part of it to which he belonged himself, cherish his memory with loving enthusiasm, and speak of him as the "great Irishman." Among the phases of Swift's life this of his having been an Irish patriot and agitator deserves to be particularly remembered.

In the year 1726 Swift, then in his sixtieth year, and in the full flush of his new popularity as the champion of Irish nationality, visited England for the first time since Queen Anne's death. Once there, he was loth to return; and a considerable portion of the years 1726 and 1727 was spent by him in or near London. This was the time of the publication of _Gulliver's Travels_, which had been written some years before, and also of some _Miscellanies_, which were edited for him by Pope. It was at Pope's villa at Twickenham that most of his time was spent; and it was there and at this time that the long friendship between Swift and Pope ripened into that extreme and affectionate intimacy which they both lived to acknowledge. Gay, Arbuthnot, and Bolingbroke, now returned from exile, joined Pope in welcoming their friend. Addison had been dead several years. Prior was dead, and also Vanbrugh and Parnell. Steele was yet alive; but between him and Swift there was no longer any tie. Political and aristocratic acquaintances, old and new, there were in abundance, all anxious once again to have Swift among them to fight their battles. Old George I. had not long to live, and the Tories were trying again to come into power in the train of the Prince of Wales. There were even chances of an arrangement with Walpole, with possibilities, in that or in some other way, that Swift should not die a mere Irish dean. These prospects were but temporary. The old King died; and, contrary to expectation, George II.

retained Walpole and his Whig colleagues. In October, 1727, Swift left England for the last time. He returned to Dublin just in time to watch over the death-bed of Stella, who expired, after a lingering illness, in January, 1728. Swift was then in his sixty-second year.

The story of the remaining seventeen years of Swift's life--for, with all his maladies, bodily and mental, his strong frame withstood, for all that time of solitude and gloom, the wear of mortality--is perhaps better known than any other part of his biography. How his irritability and eccentricities and avarice grew upon him, so that his friends and servants had a hard task in humouring him, we learn from the traditions of others; how his memory began to fail, and other signs of breaking-up began to appear, we learn from himself;--

"See how the Dean begins to break!

Poor gentleman he droops apace; You plainly find it in his face.

That old vertigo in his head Will never leave him till he's dead.

Besides, his memory decays; He recollects not what he says; He cannot call his friends to mind, Forgets the place where last he dined, Plies you with stories o'er and o'er; He told them fifty times before."

The fire of his genius, however, was not yet burnt out. Between 1729 and 1736 he continued to throw out satires and lampoons in profusion, referring to the men and topics of the day, and particularly to the political affairs of Ireland; and it was during this time that his _Directions to Servants_, his _Polite Conversation_, and other well-known faceti, first saw the light. From the year 1736, however, it was well known in Dublin that the Dean was no more what he had been, and that his recovery was not to be looked for. The rest will be best told in the words of Sir Walter Scott:--

"The last scene was now rapidly approaching, and the stage darkened ere the curtain fell. From 1736 onward the Dean's fits of periodical giddiness and deafness had returned with violence; he could neither enjoy conversation nor amuse himself with writing, and an obstinate resolution which he had formed not to wear gla.s.ses prevented him from reading. The following dismal letter to Mrs. Whiteway [his cousin, and chief attendant in his last days] in 1740 is almost the last doc.u.ment which we possess of the celebrated Swift as a rational and reflecting being. It awfully foretells the catastrophe which shortly after took place.

'I have been very miserable all night, and to-day extremely deaf and full of pain. I am so stupid and confounded that I cannot express the mortification I am under both in body and mind. All I can say is that I am not in torture, but I daily and hourly expect it. Pray let me know how your health is and your family.

I hardly understand one word I write. I am sure my days will be very few; few and miserable they must be.

'I am, for these few days, 'Yours entirely, 'J. SWIFT.'

'If I do not blunder, it is Sat.u.r.day, July 26th, 1740.'