married by the Bishop of Clogher in the garden of St. Patrick's Deanery. For if there be anything which is detachable from the network of tittle-tattle and conjecture encumbering a question already sufficiently perplexed in its origin, it 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 significant in the unmistakable sincerity of their utterance. 'We have been perfect friends these thirty-five years,' he tells Mr. Worrall, his vicar, speaking 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 recommend 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, referring to 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, begun while Stella was lying dead, and continued after her funeral, in a room in which he has taken refuge in order to escape seeing the light in the church, may be here copied. '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 con

junction 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, or was given to interruption, or 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 hard 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 preceding 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, in truth, he had invariably 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 outlines of 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 portrait at Ballinter, which forms the frontispiece to Wilde's invaluable 'Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life.' The photogravure of the Ballinter picture 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 original in some separate and accessible form.

AT TULLY'S HEAD.

THE 'HE 'Tully's Head' stood on the north side of Pall Mall. In those days what is now the Via Sacra of Clubland was little more than an unpaved roadway from St. James's Palace to Carlton House-the latter of which occupied the existing open space between the foot of Regent Street and the Duke of York's column. The precise position of Mr. Robert Dodsley's establishment was next the passage leading into King Street, at present known as Pall Mall Place, or, in other words, about halfway between the Old Smyrna Coffee-house (the site of Messrs. Harrison's) and the Old Star and Garter Tavern which preceded the more recent hostelry of that name. Judged by a latter-day standard, it is probable that the 'Tully's Head' was not very impressive externally. Indeed, a bookseller's shop in the Georgian era must have been something widely different from the attractive-looking resort to which we are accustomed in this age of plate glass and parti-coloured cloth bindings. Viewed through the bulged and clumsily-framed greenish panes, the homely calf