Complete. From Longman’s Magazine, 1893.

A DIM light was burning in the back room of a first floor in Bury Street, St. James’s. The apartment it illumined was not a spacious one; and the furniture, adequate rather than luxurious, had that indefinable lack of physiognomy which only lodging-house furniture seems to acquire. There was no fireplace; but in the adjoining parlor, partly visible through the open door, the last embers were dying in a grate from which the larger pieces of coal had been lifted away and carefully ranged in order on the hobs. Across the heavy, high-backed chairs in the bedroom lay various neatly-folded garments, one of which was the black gown with pudding sleeves usually worn in public by the eighteenth-century clergyman, while at the bottom of the bed hung a clerical-looking periwig. In the bed itself, and leaning toward a tall wax candle at his side (which, from a faint smell of burnt woolen still lingering about the chamber, must have recently come into contact with the now tucked-back bed curtain) was a gentleman of forty or thereabouts, writing in a very small hand upon a very large sheet of paper, folded, for greater convenience, into one long horizontal slip. He had dark, fierce-looking eyebrows; a slightly aquiline nose; full-lidded and rather prominent clear blue eyes; a firmly-cut, handsome mouth; and a wide, massive forehead, the extent of which for the moment was abnormally exaggerated by the fact that, in the energy of composition, the fur-lined cap he had substituted for his wig had been slightly tilted backward. As his task proceeded his expression altered from time to time, now growing grave and stern, now inexpressibly soft and tender. Occasionally, the look almost passed into a kind of grimace, resembling nothing so much as the imitative motion of the lips which one makes in speaking to a pet bird. He continued writing until in the distance the step of the watchman, first pausing deliberately, then passing slowly forward for a few paces, was heard in the street below. “Past twelve o’clock!” came a wheezy cry at the window. “P-a-a-a-a-ast twelve o’clock!” followed the writer, dragging out his letters so as to produce the speaker’s drawl. After this he rapidly set down a string of words in what looked like some unknown tongue, ending off with a trail of seeming hieroglyphics. “Nite, noun, deelest sollahs. Nite dee litt MD, Pdfr’s MD. Rove Pdfr, poo Pdfr, MD MD MD TW TW TW. Lele Lele Lele Lele michar MD.” Then, tucking his paper under his pillow, he popped out the guttering candle, and, turning round upon his side with a smile of exceeding sweetness, settled himself to sleep.

  The personage thus depicted was Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Divinity, Vicar of Laracor by Trim, in the diocese of Meath, in the kingdom of Ireland, and Prebendary of Dunlaven in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He had not been long in London, having but recently come over at the suggestion of Dr. William King, Archbishop of Dublin, to endeavor to obtain for the Irish clergy the remission (already conceded to their English brethren) of the first fruits payable to the crown; and he was writing off, or up, his daily records of his doings to Mrs. Rebecca Dingley and Mrs. Esther Johnson, two maiden ladies, who, in his absence from the Irish capital, were temporarily occupying his lodgings in Capel Street. At this date he must have been looking his best, for he had just been sitting to Pope’s friend, Charles Jervas, who, having painted him two years earlier, had found him grown so much fatter and better for his sojourn in Ireland that he had volunteered to retouch the portrait. He had given it “quite another turn,” Swift tells his correspondents, “and now approves it entirely.” Nearly twenty years later Alderman Barber presented this very picture to the Bodleian, where it is still to be seen; and it is, besides, familiar to the collector in George Vertue’s fine engraving. But even more interesting than the similitude of Swift in the fullness of his ungrateful ambition are the letters we have seen him writing. With one exception, those of them which were printed, and garbled, by his fatuous namesake, Mrs. Whiteway’s son-in-law, are destroyed or lost; but all the latter portion, again, with the exception of one, which Hawkesworth, a more conscientious, though by no means an irreproachable editor, gave to the world in 1766, are preserved in the MSS. Department of the British Museum, having fortunately been consigned in the same year, by their confederated publishers, to the safe-keeping of that institution.

  They still bear, in many cases, the little seal (a classic female head) with which, after addressing them in laboriously legible fashion, “To Mrs. Dingley, at Mr. Curry’s House, over against the Ram in Capel Street, Dublin, Ireland,” Swift was wont to fasten up his periodical dispatches. Several of them are written on quarto paper with faint gilding at the edges,—the “pretty small gilt sheet” to which he somewhere refers; but the majority are on a wide folio page crowded from top to bottom with an extremely minute and often abbreviated script, which must have tried other eyes besides those of Esther Johnson. “I looked over a bit of my last letter,” he says himself on one occasion, “and could hardly read it”; elsewhere, in one of the letters now lost, he counts up no fewer than one hundred and ninety-nine lines; and in another of those that remain, taken at a venture, there are on the first side sixty-nine lines, making, in the type of Scot’s edition, rather more than five octavo pages. As for the “little language” which produced the facial contortions above referred to (“When I am writing in our language I make up my mouth, just as if I were speaking”), it has been sadly mutilated by Hawkesworth’s relentless pen. Many of the passages which he struck through were, with great ingenuity, restored by the late John Forster, from whom, in the little picture at the beginning of this paper, we borrowed a few of those recovered hieroglyphics. But the bulk of their “huge babyisms” and “dear diminutives” are almost too intimate and particular for the rude publicities of type. Dans ce ravissant opéra qu’on appelle l’amour, says Victor Hugo, le libretto n’est presque rien; and if for amour we read amitié, the aphorism, it must be admitted, is not untrue of Swift’s famous “special code” to Stella.

  There can, however, be no doubt of the pleasure with which Swift’s communications must have been welcomed by the two ladies at Capel Street, not occupied, as was the writer, with the ceaseless bustle of an unusually busy world, but restricted to such minor dissipations as a little horse exercise, or a quiet game of ombre at Dean Sterne’s, to the modest accompaniment of claret and oranges. Swift’s unique and wonderful command of his mother tongue has never been shown to such advantage as in these familiar records, bristling with proverbs and folklore, invented ad hoc, with puns good and bad, with humor, irony, common sense, and playfulness. One can imagine with what eagerness the large sheet must have been unfolded, and read—not all at once, but in easy stages—by Mrs. Dingley to the impatient Mrs. Johnson, for whom it was primarily intended, but whose eyes were too weak to read it. Yet to the modern student, the “Journal to Stella,” taken as a whole, scarcely achieves the success which its peculiar attributes lead one to anticipate. It remains, as must always be remembered, strictly a journal with a journal’s defects. There is a lack of connected interest; there is also a superfluity of detail. Regarded in the light of a historical picture, it is like Hogarth’s “March to Fuichley”: the crowd in the foreground obscures the central action. It treats, indeed, of a stirring and momentous time, for power was changing hands. The Whigs had given place to the Tories; adroit Mrs. Masham had supplanted “Mrs. Freeman”; the great Captain himself was falling with a crash. Abroad, the long Continental war was dwindling to its close; at home, the treaty of Utrecht was preparing. Of all this, however, one rather overhears than hears. In Swift’s gallery there are no portraits à la Cameron with sweeping robes; at best they are but thumb-nail sketches. Nowhere have we such a finished full length as that of Bolingbroke in the “Inquiry into the Behavior of the Ministry”; nowhere a scathing satire like the “Verres” kitcat of Wharton in the seventeenth Examiner. Nor are there anywhere accounts of occurrences which loom much larger than the stabbing of Harley by Guiscard, or the duel of Hamilton and Mohun. Not the less does the canvas swarm with figures, many of whom bear famous names. Now it is Anna Augusta herself, driving red-faced to hounds in her one-horse chaise, or yawning behind her fan sticks at a tedious reception; now it is that “pure trifler” Harley, dawdling and temporizing as he does in Prior:—

  “Yea, quoth the Erie, but not to-day,” or spelling out the inn signs between Kew and London; now it is Peterborough, “the ramblingest lying rogue on earth,” talking deep politics at a barber’s preparatory to starting for the world’s end with the morrow; now it is Mrs. St. John, on her way to the Bath, beseeching Swift to watch over her illustrious husband, who (like Stella!) is not to be governed, and will certainly make himself ill between business and Burgundy. Many others pass and repass—Congreve (quantum mutatus!) a broken man, but cheerful, though “almost blind with cataracts growing on his eyes”; Prior with hollow cheeks, sitting solemnly at the Smyrna, receiving visits of ceremony, or walking in the park to make himself fat, or disappearing mysteriously on diplomatic expeditions to Paris; grave Addison rehearsing “Cato,” and sometimes un-Catonically fuddled; Steele bustling over Tatlers and Spectators, and “governed by his wife most abominably, as bad as Marlborough”; “pastoral Phillips” (with his red stockings), just arrived from Denmark; clever, kindly Dr. Arbuthnot, “the queen’s favorite physician,” meditating new “bites” for the maids of honor, or fresh chapters in “John Bull”; young Mr. Berkeley of Kilkenny with his “Dialogues against Atheism” in his pocket, and burning “to make acquaintance with men of merit”; Atterbury, finessing for his Christ Church deanery. Then there are the great ladies—Mrs. Masham, who has a red nose, but is Swift’s friend; Lady Somerset, the “Carrots of the Wind or Prophecy,” who has red hair, and is his enemy; sensible and spirited Lady Betty Germaine; the Duchess of Grafton (in a fontange of the last reign); Newton’s niece, pretty Mrs. Barton; good-tempered Lady Harley; hapless Mrs. Ann Long; and a host of others. And among them all, “unhasting, unresting,” filling the scene like Coquelin in “L’Etourdi,” comes and goes the figure of “Parson Swift” himself, now striding full blown down St. James’s Street in his cassock, gown, and three-guinea periwig; now riding through Windsor Forest in a borrowed suit of “light camlet, faced with red velvet, and silver buttons.” Sometimes he is feasting royally at Oznida’s or the Thatched House with the society of “Brothers”; sometimes dining moderately in the city with Barber, his printer, or Will Pate, the “learned woolen draper”; sometimes scurvily at a blind tavern “upon gill ale, bad broth, and three chops of mutton.” You may follow him wherever he goes, whether it be to Greenwich with the Dean of Carlisle, or to Hampton with “Lord Treasurer,” or to hear the nightingales at Vaux Hall with my Lady Kerry. He tells you when he buys books at Bateman’s in Little Britain, or spectacles for Stella on Ludgate Hill, or Brazil tobacco, which Mrs. Dingley will rasp into snuff, at Charles Lillie the perfumer’s in Beaufort Buildings. He sets down everything—his maladies (very specifically), his misadventures, economies, extravagances, dreams, disappointments—his votum, timor, ira, voluptas. The timor is chiefly for those dogs the Mohocks (“Who has not trembled at the Mohock’s name?”) the ira, to a considerable extent, for that most exasperating of retainers, his manservant Patrick.

  It has been said that the “Journal to Stella” contains no finished character sketches; but so many entries are involved by the peccadillos of Patrick, that after a time he begins, from sheer force of reappearance, to assume the lineaments of a personage. At first he is merely a wheedling, good-looking Irish boy—an obvious “Teaguelander,” as Sir Thomas Mansel calls him. He makes his début in the third letter, with the remark that “the rabble here [i.e., in London] are much more inquisitive in politics than in Ireland,” an utterance having all the air of a philosophic reflection. Being, however, endowed with fine natural aptitudes, he is speedily demoralized by those rakes, the London footmen. “Patrick is drunk about three times a week,” says the next record, “and I bear it, and he has got the better of me; but one of these days I will positively turn him off to the wide world, when none of you are by to intercede for him,” from which we must infer that Patrick was, or had been, a favorite with the ladies at Dublin. He has another vice in Swift’s eyes: he is extravagant. Coals cost twelve pence a week, yet he piles up the fires so recklessly that his economical master has laboriously to pick them to pieces again. Still, he has a good heart, for he buys a linnet for Mrs. Dingley, at a personal sacrifice of sixpence, and in direct opposition to his master’s advice. “I laid before him the greatness of the sum, and the rashness of the attempt; showed how impossible it would be to carry him safe over the salt sea; but he would not take my counsel, and he will repent it.” A month later the unhappy bird is still alive, though grown very wild. It lives in a closet, where it makes a terrible litter, “But I say nothing; I am as tame as a clout.” This restraint is the more notable in that Patrick himself has been for ten days out of favor. “I talk dry and cross to him, and have called him ‘friend’ three or four times.” Then, having been drunk again, he is all but discharged, and Mrs. Vanhomrigh (a near neighbor) has to make the peace. He is certainly trying; he loses keys, forgets messages, locks up clothes at critical moments, and so forth. But he is accustomed to Swift’s ways, and the next we hear of him is that, “intolerable rascal” though he be, he is going to have a livery which will cost four pounds, and that he has offered to pay for the lace on his hat out of his own wages. Yet his behavior is still so bad that his master is afraid to give him his new clothes, though he has not the heart to withhold them. “I wish MD were here to entreat for him—just here at the bed’s side.” Then there is a vivid little study of Swift bathing in the Thames at Chelsea, with Patrick on guard—of course, quite perfunctorily—to prevent his master being disturbed by boats. “That puppy, Patrick, standing ashore, would let them come within a yard or two, and then call sneakingly to them.” After this he takes to the study of Congreve, goes to the play, fights in his cups with another gentleman, by whom he is dragged along the floor upon his face, “which looked for a week after as if he had the leprosy; and,” adds the diarist, grimly, “I was glad enough to see it.” Later on he enrages his master so much by keeping him waiting, that Swift is provoked into giving him “two or three swinging cuffs on the ear,” spraining his own thumb thereby, though Arbuthnot thinks it may be gout. “He [Patrick] was plaguily afraid and humbled.” That he was more frightened than repentant, the sequel shows. “I gave him half a crown for his Christmas box, on condition he would be good,” says Swift, whose forbearance is certainly extraordinary, “and he came home drunk at midnight.” Worse than this, he sometimes never comes home at all. At last arrives the inevitable hour when he is “turned off to the wide world,” and he never seems to have succeeded in coaxing himself back again. Yet one fancies that Swift must have secretly regretted his loss; and it would, no doubt, have been edifying to hear Patrick upon his master.

  There is one person, however, for fuller details respecting whom one would willingly surrender the entire “Patrickead,” and that is the lady in whose interest the journal was written, since Mrs. Rebecca Dingley, notwithstanding the many conventional references to her, does no more than play the mute and self-denying part of propriety. But of Esther Johnson (as she signs herself) we get in reality little beyond the fact that her health was at this time already a source of anxiety to her friends. The journal is full of injunctions to her to take exercise, especially horse exercise, and not to attempt to read “Pdfr’s” “ugly, small hand,” but to let Dingley read it to her. “Preserve your eyes, if you be wise,” says a distich manufactured for the occasion, nor is she to write until she is “mighty, mighty, mighty, mighty, mighty well,” in her sight and is sure it will not do her the least hurt. “Or come, I will tell you what; you, Mistress Ppt, shall write your share at five or six sittings, one sitting a day; and then comes DD altogether, and then Ppt a little crumb towards the end, to let us see she remembers Pdfr; and then conclude with something handsome and genteel, as ‘your most humble cumdumble,’ or etc.” A favorite subject of raillery is Mrs. Johnson’s spelling, which was not her strong point, though she was not nearly so bad as Lady Wentworth. “‘Rediculous,’ madame? I suppose you mean ridiculous. Let me have no more of that; it is the author of the ‘Atlantis’s’ spelling. I have mended it in your letter.” Elsewhere there are lists of her lapses; bussiness for business, immagin, merrit, phamphlets, etc. But the letters seldom end without their playful greeting to his “dearest Sirrahs,” his “dear foolish Rogues,” his “pretty, saucy MD,” and the like. As his mood changes in its intensity, they change also. “Farewell, my dearest lives and delights; I love you better than ever, if possible…. God Almighty bless you ever, and make us happy together. I pray for this twice every day, and I hope God will hear my poor, hearty prayers.” In another place it is: “God send poor Ppt her health, and keep MD happy. Farewell, and love Pdfr, who loves MD above all things ten million of times.” And again: “Farewell, dearest rogues; I am never happy but when I think or write of MD. I have enough of courts and ministers, and wish I were at Laracor.” It is to Laracor, with its holly and its cherry trees, and the willow walk he had planted by the canal he had made, and Stella riding past with Joe “to the Hill of Bree, and round by Scurlock’s Town,” that he turns regretfully when the perfidies of those in power have vexed his soul, with the conviction that for all they “call him nothing but Jonathan,” he “can serve everybody but himself.” “If I had not a spirit naturally cheerful,” he says in his second year of residence, “I should be very much discontented at a thousand things. Pray God preserve MD’s health, and Pdfr’s, and that I may live far from the envy and discontent that attends those who are thought to have more favor at court than they really possess. Love Pdfr, who loves MD above all things.” And then the letter winds off into those cryptic epistolary caresses of which a specimen has been already quoted.

  Upon Stella’s reputed rival, and Swift’s relations with her, the scope of this paper dispenses us from dwelling. Indeed, though Swift’s visits to Miss Vanhomrigh’s mother are repeatedly referred to, Esther Vanhomrigh herself (from motives which the reader will no doubt interpret according to his personal predilections in the famous Vanessa-frage) is mentioned but twice or thrice in the entire journal, and then not by name. But we are of those who hold with Mr. Henry Craik that, whatever the relations in question may have been, they never seriously affected or even materially interrupted Swift’s lifelong attachment to the lady to whom a year or two later, he was or was not (according as we elect to side with Sir Walter Scott or Mr. Forster) married by the Bishop of Clogher in the garden of Sir Patrick’s Deanery. For one thing which is detachable from the network of tittle-tattle and conjecture encumbering a question already sufficiently perplexed in its origin is that Swift’s expressions of esteem and admiration for Stella are as emphatic at the end as at the beginning. Some of those in the journal have already been reproduced. But his letters during her last lingering illness, and a phrase in the Holyhead diary of 1727, are, if anything, even more poignant in the sincerity of their utterance. “We have been perfect friends these thirty-five years,” he tells Mr. Worrall, his vicar, of Mrs. Johnson; and he goes on to describe her as one whom he “most esteemed upon the score of every good quality that can possibly commend a human creature…. Ever since I left you my heart has been so sunk that I have not been the same man, nor ever shall be again, but drag on a wretched life, till it shall please God to call me away.” To another correspondent, speaking of Stella’s then hourly-expected death, he says, “as I value life very little, so the poor casual remains of it, after such a loss, would be a burden that I beg God Almighty to enable me to bear; and I think there is not a greater folly than that of entering into too strict and particular a friendship, with the loss of which a man must be absolutely miserable…. Besides, this was a person of my own rearing and instructing from childhood, who excelled in every good quality that can possibly accomplish a human creature.” The date of this letter is July, 1726; but it was not until the beginning of 1728 that the blow came which deprived him of his “dearest friend.” Then, on a Sunday in January, at eleven at night, he sits down to compile that (in the circumstances) extraordinary “character” of “the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with.” A few passages from this strange finis to a strange story began while Stella was lying dead, and continued after her funeral (in a room to which he had not moved in order to avoid the sight of the light in the church), may be copied here. “Never,” he says, “was any of her sex born with better gifts of the mind, or who more improved them by reading and conversation…. Her advice was always the best, and with the greatest freedom, mixed with the greatest decency. She had a gracefulness somewhat more than human in every motion, word, and action. Never was so happy a conjunction of civility, freedom, easiness, and sincerity…. She never mistook the understanding of others; nor ever said a severe word, but where a much severer was deserved…. She never had the least absence of mind in conversation, nor was given to interruption, nor appeared eager to put in her word, by waiting impatiently till another had done. She spoke in a most agreeable voice, in the plainest words, never hesitating, except out of modesty before new faces, where she was somewhat reserved; nor among her nearest friends, ever spoke much at a time…. Although her knowledge from books and company was much more extensive than usually falls to the share of her sex, yet she was so far from making a parade of it that her female visitants, on their first acquaintance, who expected to discover it by what they call words and deep discourse, would be sometimes disappointed, and say they found she was like other women. But wise men, through all her modesty, whatever they discoursed on, could easily observe that she understood them very well, by the judgment shown in her observations as well as in her questions.”

  In the foregoing retrospect, as in the final birthday poems to Stella, Swift, it will be gathered, dwells upon the intellectual rather than the physical charms of this celebrated woman. To her mental qualities, indeed, he had always given the foremost place. But time, in 1728, had long since silvered those locks once “blacker than a raven,” while years of failing health had sadly altered the perfect figure, and dimmed the lustre of the beautiful eyes. What she had been is not quite easy for a modern admirer to realize from the dubious Delville medallion, or the inadequate engraving by Engleheart of the picture at Ballinter, which forms the frontispiece to Sir William Wilde’s deeply interesting “Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life.” The more accurate photogravure of the latter given in Mr. Gerald Moriarty’s recent book is much more satisfactory, and so markedly to Esther Johnson’s advantage as to suggest the further reproduction of the portrait in some separate and accessible form.