That Swift ought, as soon as Hester disclosed her passion for him, at once to have broken off the intimacy, must be conceded; but how many men possessed of his kindness of heart would have had the courage to have acted otherwise than he did?  Swift seems, in fact, to have been constitutionally incapable of the passion of love, for he says, himself, that he had never met the woman he wished to marry.  His annual tributes to Stella on her birthdays express the strongest regard and esteem, but he “ne’er admitted love a guest,” and he had been so long used to this Platonic affection, that he had come to regard women as friends, but never as lovers.  Stella, on her part, had the same feeling, for she never expressed the least discontent at her position, or ever regarded Swift otherwise than as her tutor, her counsellor, her friend.  In her verses to him on his birthday, 1721, she says: 

Long be the day that gave you birth
Sacred to friendship, wit, and mirth;
Late dying may you cast a shred
Of your rich mantle o’er my head;
To bear with dignity my sorrow
One day alone, then die tomorrow.

Stella naturally expected to survive Swift, but it was not to be.  She died in the evening of the 28th January 1727-8; and on the same night he began the affecting piece, “On the Death of Mrs. Johnson.” (See “Prose Works,” vol. xi.)

With the death of Stella, Swift’s real happiness ended, and he became more and more possessed by the melancholy which too often accompanies the broadest humour, and which, in his case, was constitutional.  It was, no doubt, to relieve it, that he resorted to the composition of the doggerel verses, epigrams, riddles, and trifles exchanged betwixt himself and Sheridan, which induced Orrery’s remark that “Swift composing Riddles is Titian painting draught-boards;” on which Delany observes that “a Riddle may be as fine painting as any other in the world.  It requires as strong an imagination, as fine colouring, and as exact a proportion and keeping as any other historical painting”; and he instances “Pethox the Great,” and should also have alluded to the more learned example—­“Louisa to Strephon.”

On Orrery’s seventh Letter, Delany says that if some of the “coin is base,” it is the fine impression and polish which adds value to it, and cites the saying of another nobleman, that “there is indeed some stuff in it, but it is Swift’s stuff.”  It has been said that Swift has never taken a thought from any writer ancient or modern.  This is not literally true, but the instances are not many, and in my notes I have pointed out the lines snatched from Milton, Denham, Butler—­the last evidently a great favourite.

It seems necessary to state shortly the causes of Swift not having obtained higher preferment.  Besides that Queen Anne would never be reconciled to the author of the “Tale of a Tub”—­the true purport of which was so ill-understood by her—­he made an irreconcilable enemy of her friend, the Duchess of Somerset, by his lampoon entitled “The Windsor Prophecy.”  But Swift seldom allowed prudence to restrain his wit and humour, and admits of himself that he “had too much satire in his vein”; and that “a genius in the reverend gown must ever keep its owner down”; and says further: