“This was a person of my own rearing and instructing from childhood, who excelled in every good quality that can possibly accomplish a human creature. . . .  I know not what I am saying; but believe me that violent friendship is much more lasting and as much engaging as violent love.”  To Dr. Sheridan he said, “I look upon this to be the greatest event that can ever happen to me; but all my preparation will not suffice to make me bear it like a philosopher nor altogether like a Christian.  There hath been the most intimate friendship between us from our childhood, and the greatest merit on her side that ever was in one human creature towards another."[10] Pope alludes in a letter to Sheridan to the illness of Swift’s “particular friend,” but with the exception of another reference by Pope, and of a curiously flippant remark by Bolingbroke, the subject is nowhere mentioned in Swift’s correspondence with his literary and fashionable friends in London.

Swift crossed to Ireland in August, fearing the worst; but Stella rallied, and in the spring of 1727 he returned to London.  In August, however, there came alarming news, when Swift was himself suffering from giddiness and deafness.  To Dr. Sheridan he wrote that the last act of life was always a tragedy at best:  “it is a bitter aggravation to have one’s best friend go before one.”  Life was indifferent to him; if he recovered from his disorder it would only be to feel the loss of “that person for whose sake only life was worth preserving.  I brought both those friends over that we might be happy together as long as God should please; the knot is broken, and the remaining person you know has ill answered the end; and the other, who is now to be lost, is all that was valuable.”  To Worrall he again wrote (in Latin) that Stella ought not to be lodged at the Deanery; he had enemies who would place a bad interpretation upon it if she died there.

Swift left London for Dublin in September; he was detained some days at Holyhead by stress of weather, and in the private journal which he kept during that time he speaks of the suspense he was in about his “dearest friend."[11] In December Stella made a will—­signed “Esther Johnson, spinster”—­disposing of her property in the manner Swift had suggested.  Her allusions to Swift are incompatible with any such feeling of resentment as is suggested by Sheridan.  She died on January 28, 1728.  Swift could not bear to be present, but on the night of her death he began to write his very interesting Character of Mrs. Johnson, from which passages have already been quoted.  He there calls her “the truest, most virtuous and valuable friend that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with.”  Combined with excellent gifts of the mind, “she had a gracefulness, somewhat more than human, in every motion, word, and action.  Never was so happy a conjunction of civility, freedom, easiness, and sincerity.”  Everyone treated her with marked