The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume 1 | Page 4

my sight;
But instead of new
plays,
Dull Bacon's Essays,
And pore every day on
That nasty
Pantheon.
As a contrast to his imperiousness, there is an affectionate simplicity in
the fancy names he used to bestow upon his female friends. Sir William
Temple's wife, Dorothea, became Dorinda; Esther Johnson, Stella;
Hester Vanhomrigh, Vanessa; Lady Winchelsea, Ardelia; while to
Lady Acheson he gave the nicknames of Skinnybonia, Snipe, and Lean.
But all was taken by them in good part; for his rather dictatorial ways
were softened by the fascinating geniality and humour which he knew
so well how to employ when he used to "deafen them with puns and

rhyme."
Into the vexed question of the relations between Swift and Stella I do
not purpose to enter further than to record my conviction that she was
never more to him than "the dearest friend that ever man had." The
suggestion of a concealed marriage is so inconsistent with their whole
conduct to each other from first to last, that if there had been such a
marriage, instead of Swift having been, as he was, a man of _intense
sincerity_, he must be held to have been a most consummate hypocrite.
In my opinion, Churton Collins settled this question in his essays on
Swift, first published in the "Quarterly Review," 1881 and 1882. Swift's
relation with Vanessa is the saddest episode in his life. The story is
amply told in his poem, "Cadenus and Vanessa," and in the letters
which passed between them: how the pupil became infatuated with her
tutor; how the tutor endeavoured to dispel her passion, but in vain, by
reason; and how, at last, she died from love for the man who was
unable to give love in return. That Swift ought, as soon as Hester
disclosed her passion for him, at once to have broken off the intimacy,
must be conceded; but how many men possessed of his kindness of
heart would have had the courage to have acted otherwise than he did?
Swift seems, in fact, to have been constitutionally incapable of the
passion of love, for he says, himself, that he had never met the woman
he wished to marry. His annual tributes to Stella on her birthdays
express the strongest regard and esteem, but he "ne'er admitted love a
guest," and he had been so long used to this Platonic affection, that he
had come to regard women as friends, but never as lovers. Stella, on
her part, had the same feeling, for she never expressed the least
discontent at her position, or ever regarded Swift otherwise than as her
tutor, her counsellor, her friend. In her verses to him on his birthday,
1721, she says:
Long be the day that gave you birth
Sacred to friendship, wit, and
mirth;
Late dying may you cast a shred
Of your rich mantle o'er my
head;
To bear with dignity my sorrow
One day alone, then die
tomorrow.
Stella naturally expected to survive Swift, but it was not to be. She died

in the evening of the 28th January 1727-8; and on the same night he
began the affecting piece, "On the Death of Mrs. Johnson." (See "Prose
Works," vol. xi.)
With the death of Stella, Swift's real happiness ended, and he became
more and more possessed by the melancholy which too often
accompanies the broadest humour, and which, in his case, was
constitutional. It was, no doubt, to relieve it, that he resorted to the
composition of the doggerel verses, epigrams, riddles, and trifles
exchanged betwixt himself and Sheridan, which induced Orrery's
remark that "Swift composing Riddles is Titian painting
draught-boards;" on which Delany observes that "a Riddle may be as
fine painting as any other in the world. It requires as strong an
imagination, as fine colouring, and as exact a proportion and keeping as
any other historical painting"; and he instances "Pethox the Great," and
should also have alluded to the more learned example--"Louisa to
Strephon."
On Orrery's seventh Letter, Delany says that if some of the "coin is
base," it is the fine impression and polish which adds value to it, and
cites the saying of another nobleman, that "there is indeed some stuff in
it, but it is Swift's stuff." It has been said that Swift has never taken a
thought from any writer ancient or modern. This is not literally true, but
the instances are not many, and in my notes I have pointed out the lines
snatched from Milton, Denham, Butler--the last evidently a great
favourite.
It seems necessary to state shortly the causes of Swift not having
obtained higher preferment. Besides that Queen Anne would never be
reconciled to the author of the "Tale of a Tub"--the true purport of
which was so ill-understood by her--he made an irreconcilable enemy
of her friend, the Duchess of Somerset, by