answered in the poem of 'Cadenus and Vanessa,' designed to show her that his feeling for her was only that of friendship. He allowed her however to follow him to Ireland, and he even called upon her frequently in her home there. She at last wrote to Stella, demanding to know the true relationship existing between her and the Dean. Tradition says that Stella showed the letter to him; and that he, in a paroxysm of rage, rode post-haste to Vanessa's house, cast the letter at her feet, and departed without a word. However that may be, she died not long after,-presumably of a broken heart.

After Swift's return to Ireland, he wrote many pamphlets in the interests of the Irish people, thus making himself enormously popular with them. The condition of Ireland at that time was most deplorable: the industries had been destroyed by the act forbidding the importation of Irish cattle to England; the currency was disordered; famine threatened the land. The Drapier letters were written to discredit the English government by the accusation, proved false, of imposing a debased copper coinage on Ireland. In a well-known pamphlet he proposes that the children of the peasantry in Ireland should be fattened for the table, thus keeping down the population and supplying an article of nutritious food. It is this pamphlet which is so completely misunderstood by Thackeray in his 'English Humourists,' and which has led many to judge Swift as an inhuman monster. The humor of it is indeed terrible, but the cause of its being written was even more terrible. It was under such pleasantries that Swift hid his heart.

In 1726 Gulliver's Travels' - one of the greatest books of the century appeared. Only Swift could have written a nursery classic which is at the same time the most painful satire on human nature ever given to the world. In the monstrous conception of the Yahoos, there is an indication of something darker and more sinister than mere misanthropy.

In 1728 Stella died. The last barrier between him and that unknown horror that lurked in some shadowy region of his mighty intellect, was thus removed. After her death he declined visibly. The last years of his life were spent in madness and idiocy. He died in 1745, and was buried in St. Patrick's Cathedral.

No figure in the whole range of English men of letters is more striking than Swift's; no figure is less intelligible. Judgment of him must always contain an element of presumption. It is as little in place as judgment of a giant forest oak, twisted and wrenched by the lightning of Jove.

Alena Mane Sholl

SWIFT AND STELLA.

Photogravure from a painting by Margaret Dicksee.

"By his mother's advice he sought the patronage of his distant kinsman, Sir William Temple, the elegant dilettante of Moor Park. Between this courtier, whose intellect was as pruned and orderly as his own Dutch gardens, and the rough young Titan, forced by fate into the meek attitudes of the beneficiary, there could be little sympathy. Swift chafed under a life better suited to a dancing-master than to the future author of 'Gulliver.' The alleviations of his existence were his master's library, to which he had free access, and a little bright-eyed girl,-the housekeeper's daughter,— who loved him and was glad to be taught by him. This was Esther Johnson, or as she is better known, 'Stella.' The little life was thus early absorbed into the great life, whose limits, then and afterwards, were to be always beyond its comprehension, but never beyond its love. The child and the man went hand in hand from that hour into their eternity of sorrowful fame."