Her only fault was that she could not bear the lightest touch of blame.  Her wit and sense, her loving care in illness—­to which he owed that fact that he was alive to say it—­made her the “best pattern of true friends.”  She replied, in lines written on Swift’s birthday in 1721, that she was his pupil and humble friend.  He had trained her judgment and refined her fancy and taste:—­

     “You taught how I might youth prolong
      By knowing what was right and wrong;
      How from my heart to bring supplies
      Of lustre to my fading eyes;
      How soon a beauteous mind repairs
      The loss of changed or falling hairs;
      How wit and virtue from within
      Send out a smoothness o’er the skin
      Your lectures could my fancy fix,
      And I can please at thirty-six.”

In 1723 Vanessa is said to have written to Stella or to Swift—­there are discrepancies in the versions given by Sheridan and Lord Orrery, both of whom are unreliable—­asking whether the report that they were married was true.  Swift, we are told, rode to Celbridge, threw down Vanessa’s letter in a great rage, and left without speaking a word.[9] Vanessa, whose health had been failing for some time, died shortly afterwards, having cancelled a will in Swift’s favour.  She left “Cadenus and Vanessa” for publication, and when someone said that she must have been a remarkable woman to inspire such a poem, Stella replied that it was well known that the Dean could write finely upon a broomstick.

Soon after this tragedy Swift became engrossed in the Irish agitation which led to the publication of the Drapier’s Letters, and in 1726 he paid a long-deferred visit to London, taking with him the manuscript of Gulliver’s Travels.  While in England he was harassed by bad news of Stella, who had been in continued ill-health for some years.  His letters to friends in Dublin show how greatly he suffered.  To the Rev. John Worrall he wrote, in a letter which he begged him to burn, “What you tell me of Mrs. Johnson I have long expected with great oppression and heaviness of heart.  We have been perfect friends these thirty-five years.  Upon my advice they both came to Ireland, and have been ever since my constant companions; and the remainder of my life will be a very melancholy scene, when one of them is gone, whom I most esteemed, upon the score of every good quality that can possibly recommend a human creature.”  He would not for the world be present at her death:  “I should be a trouble to her, and a torment to myself.”  If Stella came to Dublin, he begged that she might be lodged in some airy, healthy part, and not in the Deanery, where too it would be improper for her to die.  “There is not a greater folly,” he thinks, “than to contract too great and intimate a friendship, which must always leave the survivor miserable.”  To Dr. Stopford he wrote in similar terms of the “younger of the two” “oldest and dearest friends I have in the world.”