I write plain, I do not know how, but we are not alone, all the world can see us.  A bad scrawl is so snug; it looks like PMD.”  Again:  “I do not like women so much as I did.  MD, you must know, are not women.”  “God Almighty preserve you both and make us happy together.”  “I say Amen with all my heart and vitals, that we may never be asunder ten days together while poor Presto lives.”  “Farewell, dearest beloved MD, and love poor, poor Presto, who has not had one happy day since he left you, as hope saved.”

With them—­with her—­he hid himself in the world, at Court, at the bar of St. James’s coffee-house, whither he went on the Irish mail-day, and was “in pain except he saw MD’s little handwriting.”  He hid with them in the long labours of these exquisite letters every night and morning.  If no letter came, he comforted himself with thinking that “he had it yet to be happy with.”  And the world has agreed to hide under its own manifold and lachrymose blunders the grace and singularity—­the distinction—­of this sweet romance.  “Little, sequestered pleasure-house”—­it seemed as though “the many could not miss it,” but not even the few have found it.

It is part of the scheme of the sympathetic historian that Stella should be the victim of hope deferred, watching for letters from Swift.  But day and night Presto complains of the scantiness of MD’s little letters; he waits upon “her” will:  “I shall make a sort of journal, and when it is full I will send it whether MD writes or not; and so that will be pretty.”  “Naughty girls that will not write to a body!” “I wish you were whipped for forgetting to send.  Go, be far enough, negligent baggages.”  “You, Mistress Stella, shall write your share, and then comes Dingley altogether, and then Stella a little crumb at the end; and then conclude with something handsome and genteel, as ’your most humble cumdumble.’” But Scott and Macaulay and Thackeray are all exceedingly sorry for Stella.

Swift is most charming when he is feigning to complain of his task:  “Here is such a stir and bustle with this little MD of ours; I must be writing every night; O Lord, O Lord!” “I must go write idle things, and twittle twattle.”  “These saucy jades take up so much of my time with writing to them in the morning.”  Is it not a stealthy wrong done upon Mrs. Dingley that she should be stripped of all these ornaments to her name and memory?  When Swift tells a woman in a letter that there he is “writing in bed, like a tiger,” she should go gay in the eyes of all generations.

They will not let Stella go gay, because of sentiment; and they will not let Mrs. Dingley go gay, because of sentiment for Stella.  Marry come up!  Why did not the historians assign all the tender passages (taken very seriously) to Stella, and let Dingley have the jokes, then?  That would have been no ill share for Dingley.  But no, forsooth, Dingley is allowed nothing.