only when all hope of the old open-hearted confidence was gone forever, chiefly through his own fault, if partly through her jealous misconception of his relation to Vanessa, and that it was the sense of his own weakness, which admitted of no explanation tolerable to an injured woman, and entailed upon a brief folly all the consequences of guilt, that more than all else darkened his lonely decline with unavailing regrets and embittered it with remorseful self-contempt.  Nothing could be more galling to a proud man than the feeling that he had been betrayed by his vanity.  It is commonly assumed that pride is incompatible with its weaker congener.  But pride, after all, is nothing more than a stiffened and congealed vanity, and melts back to its original ductility when exposed to the milder temperature of female partiality.  Swift could not deny himself the flattery of Vanessa’s passion, and not to forbid was to encourage.  He could not bring himself to administer in time the only effectual remedy, by telling her that he was pledged to another woman.  When at last he did tell her it was too late; and he learned, like so many before and since, that the most dangerous of all fires to play with is that of love.  This was the extent of his crime, and it would have been none if there had been no such previous impediment.  This alone gives any meaning to what he says when Vanessa declared her love: 

  Cadenus felt within him rise
  Shame, disappointment, guilt, surprise.

[Footnote 1:  Most of the authorities conclude that Swift never married Stella.  A.M.]

Shame there might have been, but surely no guilt on any theory except that of an implicit engagement with Stella.  That there was something of the kind, more or less definite, and that it was of some ten years’ standing when the affair with Vanessa came to a crisis, we have no doubt.  When Tisdall offered her marriage in 1704, and Swift wrote to him “that if my fortunes and humor served me to think of that state, I should certainly, among all persons on earth, make your choice,” she accepted the implied terms and rejected her suitor, though otherwise not unacceptable to her.  She would wait.  It is true that Swift had not absolutely committed himself, but she had committed him by dismissing Tisdall.  Without assuming some such tacit understanding, his letters to her are unintelligible.  He repeatedly alludes to his absence from her as only tolerable because it was for her sake no less than his own, and the details of his petty economies would be merely vulgar except to her for whom their motive gave them a sweetness of humorous pathos.  The evidence of the marriage seems to be as conclusive as that of a secret can well be.  Dr. Delany, who ought to have been able to judge of its probability, and who had no conceivable motive of misstatement, was assured of it by one whose authority was Stella herself.  Mr. Monck-Berkeley had it from the widow of Bishop