In Swift’s case the silence is full of echoes; that is to say, his letters repeat the phrases of Stella’s and Dingley’s, to play with them, flout them, and toss them back against the two silenced voices.  He never lets the word of these two women fall to the ground; and when they have but blundered with it, and aimed it wide, and sent it weakly, he will catch it, and play you twenty delicate and expert juggling pranks with it as he sends it back into their innocent faces.  So we have something of MD’s letters in the “journal,” and this in the only form in which we desire them, to tell the truth; for when Swift gravely saves us some specimens of Stella’s wit, after her death, as she spoke them, and not as he mimicked them, they make a sorry show.

In many correspondences, where one voice remains and the other is gone, the retort is enough for two.  It is as when, the other day, the half of a pretty quarrel between nurse and child came down from an upper floor to the ears of a mother who decided that she need not interfere.  The voice of the undaunted child it was that was audible alone, and it replied, “I’m not; you are”; and anon, “I’ll tell yours.”  Nothing was really missing there.

But Steele’s letters to Prue, his wife, are no such simple matter.  The turn we shall give them depends upon the unheard tone whereto they reply.  And there is room for conjecture.  It has pleased the more modern of the many spirits of banter to supply Prue’s eternal silence with the voice of a scold.  It is painful to me to complain of Thackeray; but see what a figure he makes of Prue in “Esmond.”  It is, says the nineteenth-century humourist, in defence against the pursuit of a jealous, exacting, neglected, or evaded wife that poor Dick Steele sends those little notes of excuse:  “Dearest Being on earth, pardon me if you do not see me till eleven o’clock, having met a schoolfellow from India”; “My dear, dear wife, I write to let you know I do not come home to dinner, being obliged to attend some business abroad, of which I shall give you an account (when I see you in the evening), as becomes your dutiful and obedient husband”; “Dear Prue, I cannot come home to dinner.  I languish for your welfare”; “I stay here in order to get Tonson to discount a bill for me, and shall dine with him to that end”; and so forth.  Once only does Steele really afford the recent humourist the suggestion that is apparently always so welcome.  It is when he writes that he is invited to supper to Mr. Boyle’s, and adds:  “Dear Prue, do not send after me, for I shall be ridiculous.”  But even this is to be read not ungracefully by a well-graced reader.  Prue was young and unused to the world.  Her husband, by the way, had been already married; and his greater age makes his constant deference all the more charming.