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 Pope's friend, Charles Jervas, who had painted him two years earlier, found him grown so much fatter and better for his sojourn in Ireland, that he volunteered to retouch the portrait. He has 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 fulness of his ungratified 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 exception of one), which Hawkesworth, a more scientious, 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

con

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 despatches. 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 epistles 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 Scott's edition, rather more than five octavo pages. As for the

1 In his 'Letter to a Young Clergyman,' he hints at the cause of this, when he warns his correspondent against writing his sermons in too small a hand, 'from a habit of saving time and paper . . . . acquired at the university.'

'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 was speaking'), it has been sadly mutilated by Hawkesworth's editorial pen. Many of the passages which he struck through were, with great ingenuity, restored by the late John Forster, from whom, at the beginning of this paper, we borrowed a few of those recovered hieroglyphs. But the bulk of their huge babyisms' and 'dear diminutives' are almost too intimate and particular for the rude publicities of type. ravissant opéra qu'on appelle l'amour,' says Victor Hugo, 'le libretto n'est presque rien'; and if for 'amour' we read 'amitié,' the adapted aphorism is not untrue of Swift's famous special code to Stella.

Dans ce

There can, however, be no question as to the pleasure with which Swift's communications must have been welcomed by the two ladies at Capel Street, not occupied, as was the writer of them, 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, with the modest refreshment of claret and toasted oranges. Swift's unique and wonderful command of his mother tongue has

never been shown to such advantage as in these familiar records, abounding in proverbs and folklore invented ad hoc,-in puns good and bad, —in humour, 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 decipher it. Yet, for the modern student, the 'Journal to Stella,' taken as a whole, scarcely achieves the success which its peculiar attributes would lead one to anticipate. It remains, as must always be remembered, strictly a journal, with a journal's defects. There is a deficiency of connected interest; there is also a predominance of detail. Regarded in the light of an historical picture, it is like Hogarth's 'March to Finchley': the crowd in the foreground obscures the central action. It treats, indeed, of a stirring and a momentous time, for power was changing hands. The Whigs had given place to the Tories; adroit Mrs. Masham had supplanted imperious 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 pre

paring. But of all these things, one rather overhears than hears. In Swift's gallery there are no portraits à la Clarendon with sweeping robes; at best there are but thumb-nail sketches. Nowhere have we such a finished full-length as that of Bolingbroke in the 'Inquiry into the Behaviour of the Ministry'; nowhere a scathing satire like the 'Verres' kitcat of Wharton in the seventeenth Examiner.' C Nor are there anywhere accounts of occurrences which loom much larger than the stabbing of Harley by Guiscard or the duel of Hamilton with 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 fansticks at a tedious reception; now it is that 'pure trifler' Harley, dawdling and temporizing,—

'Yea,' quoth the ERLE, but not to-day,'

or spelling out the inn signs on the road to London. 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; it is poor Mrs. St. John, on her way to the Bath, beseeching Swift to watch over her illustrious husband, who (like Stella !) is not to be